Sunday Posts

Finally, Christmas: Time to pause. I drove around rather aimlessly on empty roads, not least because my car needed a bit of run after being ignored for weeks of my absence. But driving around in Christmas is pleasant, often with no one else on the roads at all, except on the ones which are heading out of town. This was a perfect end of a year of wandering around without a purpose but with an objective, when being on the road was more important than going somewhere. And, like this ride, one gets to know which roads to avoid even on the Christmas Day - I now know what I don't want to do next year! If I learned one lesson through the last couple of years, it is this: I have become weary of the educational-industrial enterprise. This is not just about profit motive in education: Having spent most of my time in For-Profit Education, I have none of the weariness about education businesses. I have, however, noted the apocalyptic view of sending the world to For-Profit schools: This, i...

Datuk Dr Paul Chan, President of Help University in KL, is a remarkable man. As someone who has built a successful university from ground up in what some of my English academic colleagues call as the Silicon Valley of Higher Education, he has a close first hand view of what innovation in Higher Education looks like. Yet, when the real Silicon Valley is waking up to Higher Education, President Chan remains remarkably anti-hype: No one wants innovation in Higher Education, because everyone is after standards and prestige, he said. Just before I met Datuk Chan last November, Help University caused a flutter in Western media, and with their partners in Southern New Hampshire University, by giving out an Honorary Doctorate to Kim Jong Un. Going by this, they are certainly not orthodox, nor a stickler of other people's standards. In fact, a part of our conversation was about the standards: In what seemed a continuation of views aired by Dr Mahathir Mohamad decades earlier, Datuk Ch...