Higher education deputy minister Saifuddin Abdullah rapped the country's institutions of higher learning for continuing to "import and copy" ideas and methods from Western universities.
Despite having a national team of competent academics, Saifuddin asked why the country continues to invite consultants from other parts of the world to help run local universities.
"For how long will this dependence continue and what are its implications?" he asked, in his speech addressing an audience of 200 at "Decolonising Our Universities" in Penang today.
The three-day event aimed at academics from various Asian countries was organised by Universiti Sains Malaysia and Citizen International, a Penang-based NGO.
This "abject dependence on Western academics" for ideas, theories and methods fails to recognise the value of the country's academics and local scholars, Saifuddin said.
"Despite this, our scholars and academics will continue to be diffident, to feel inferior, timid about our own work and compare it unfavourably with the work of scholars from the West," he said.
If local academics still feel inferior and express helplessness, he said it would be better to close down these institutions rather than continue to maintain them.
"We are fooling nobody," Saifuddin quipped, adding that he hoped the conference could lead to significant changes in the current state of affairs.
Cultivating critical thinking
During a press conference, Saifuddin said the country has to develop its own knowledge and theories to deal with local issues instead of referring to Western ones, which have come about due to different circumstances.
On the international ranking of universities, he said it was merely a Western idea to preserve the hegemony and status quo of knowledge from the West.
He urged academics here to work in solidarity, to collaborate with one another to try and develop "our own worldview" of looking at things as "we are not short of intellectual competence".
Though the government raised these issues in the past, Saifuddin said "we are making progress", albeit slowly.
As for the Aku Janji pledge - which requires academics and students to sign an agreement to refrain from getting involved in politics or commenting on political issues - Saifuddin said "that is something else" because it hampers critical thinking and development.
"(Critical thinking) is about what the government wants in conducting research in new areas so that we can develop our own indigenous knowledge," he added.
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