What is a ‘university’?

Professor Tan Sri Dato' Dzulkifli Abdul Razak
My View - The Sun Daily
October 4, 2016

TEN years ago, one of the largest university gatherings – the World University President Summit – was held in Bangkok.

It was attended by more than 1,500 participants, 245 of whom were university presidents, vice-chancellors and rectors from 85 countries.

They came to a historic agreement on what is a university an it was proclaimed in the Bangkok Declaration on Higher Education: Diversity and Harmonisation.

It declares: "Universities must strive to be above politics and business interests and serve their societies and communities by providing a voice and space in which to cultivate rational, mutual and moderate dialogues that will shape intellectual, cultural and economic development on a shared basis within and across boundaries and nations."

I have kept close to this declaration because "university" has been too many "things" to too many people.

Consequently, the sanctity of a university and thus knowledge is often under threat from vested interests.

This has resulted in diminishing confidence in educational ecosystems when it is made vulnerable with no coherence in the understanding of its definition. Or otherwise it runs contrary to the universal ethos of education by threatening academic freedom and institutional autonomy in particular.

According to the Unesco-based International Association of Universities (IAU), the principle of institutional autonomy can be defined as the necessary degree of independence from external interference that the university requires for its internal organisation and governance, the internal distribution of financial resources and the generation of income from non-public sources, the recruitment of staff, the setting of conditions of study and the freedom to teach and do research.

The principle of academic freedom, on the other hand, is defined by IAU as the freedom for scholars, teachers and students to pursue scholarly activities within a framework determined by them. This is to enable services to be rendered "by providing a voice and space in which to cultivate rational, mutual and moderate dialogues that will shape intellectual, cultural and economic development on a shared basis within and across boundaries and nations."

As such academic freedom also engages the obligation by each member of the academic profession to excellence, to innovation, and to advancing the frontiers of knowledge through research and the diffusion of its results through teaching and publication taking into account the implications on humanity and nature to shape not just intellectual and economic development but culturally too.

The university has the obligation to uphold and demonstrate to society that it stands by its collective obligation to quality and ethics, to fairness and tolerance, to the setting and upkeep of standards – academic when applied to research and teaching, administrative when applied to due process, to the rendering of accounts to society, to self-verification, to institutional review and to transparency in the conduct of institutional self-government.

University is at once a disinterested party in that it exercises responsibility for the advancement of knowledge which provides support for, or stand in a contractual relationship with, the university for the services it may furnish. It must recognise that such expressions of scholarly judgment and scientific inquiry shall not place in jeopardy the individual expressing them.

If the free range of inquiry, examination and the advance of knowledge are held to be benefits society derives from the university, the latter must assume the responsibility for the choices and the priorities it sets freely.

Society for its part, must recognise its role in providing means appropriate to achieve that end. Resources should be commensurate with expectations – especially those which, like fundamental research, demand a long-term commitment if they are to yield their full benefits, even though it challenges popular conviction or judged as unacceptable by certain parties.

The relevance of this cannot be overemphasised. It becomes imperative that the ideals of a university are not compromised in any way by preventing arbitrary interference from politics and business, in compliance with internationally recognised standards. For this to happen, the academic integrity of university leadership remains uncompromising under all circumstances.

The writer is the president of IAU based in Paris, and was a member of the drafting committee of the Bangkok Declaration.