Eventually, after the protestation and the outcry, Terence Gomez has resigned from his position at the University of Malaya.

The country has lost yet another talented and principled scholar. MU, that institution of higher learning that once enjoyed an exalted position among similar institutions in Southeast Asia in the early years of our independence, has taken another dip on its path of slow but certain decline. The brain hemorrhage of the nation continues unabated.

In my wildest dream, I would envision hoards of angry university students numbering perhaps in the tens of thousands - descending upon the MU campus to protest the blatant humiliation of our prominent academics at the hands of faceless bureaucrats and arrogant politicians.

But alas, this is Malaysia! Among other things, our present crop of university students have (what they consider to be) better things to do. Nothing is further from their busy mind than trivial and boring stuff like social justice and the moribund state of our universities. As their parents and their political patriarchs have harangued them ad nausium since childhood, their only mission in life is to study, pass exams, get a good job, raise a family, and live happily ever after.

In retrospect, one should not have been surprised by the outcome of this cavalier treatment of a notable academic in our midst. Some letter-writers on Malaysiakini have attributed this to racial discrimination. There might have been a tinge of that at work, and we will never know.

Nevertheless, I am as surprised as the letter-writer Dr Yung Chen Lin, that Terence Gomez could have lasted so long at MU as an associate professor.

I have read some of his works. His greatest contribution to Malaysia has been the detailed and erudite analysis of the intimate relationship between political power and business interest. He has, more than any Malaysian scholar that I know of, struck at the Achilles' Heel of money politics and political corruption in Malaysia.

The problem with his intellectual concern is not merely that it is politically incorrect. It is the sort of thing that conjures up the spectre of ISA. Within our political culture that casts an omnipresent web of white terror over all aspects of our national life, what amounts to direct or indirect expulsion of Terence Gomez from such a mainstream institution as a university would seem inevitable.

Terence Gomez is not the first distinguished scholar to suffer this fate, and neither will he be the last, until there is a change of government perhaps.

The core issue here is not merely the personal fortune of a world-renown professor. Given his impeccable credential, he can get a prestigious appointment anywhere in the better part of the world, though he may suffer from being torn (exiled?) from the Malaysia that he so obviously loves.

At issue here is the role of the university and its relation to the society at large, especially its uneasy relation to political power.

Plato's Academy

The idea of the modern university has its ancient roots in the Greek civilisation, where any distinguished philosopher could set up his own school to profess his teaching, and hence, the modern title of the "professor" as one who professes a unique doctrine.

The best known of these early schools is probably Plato's Academy, and hence all the modern connotation of the term 'academic". Plato's school was sited at a public park called Akademus some distance from Athens, that was established to commemorate the exploits of a Greek hero of the same name, who had shown great bravery at the battle against King Darius of Persia.

The idea of Plato's Academy as a community of scholars seeking truth, knowledge, excellence and wisdom in relative refuge from the turmoil of the world persisted for many centuries. At last, in 529 AD, it was closed down by the Roman Emperor Justinian because of his intolerant religious bigotry, and the Dark Ages descended upon Europe.

Fortunately, Plato's Academy became the prototype of a free and independent centre of learning dedicated to a collective pursuit for knowledge of the highest order. It has since become a model for the ideal of a university in the historical development of Western humanism.

The system of tenure for professors was instituted precisely to protect their academic freedom in their exploration of the Truth to its logical end without political or religious interference. Freedom of thought and the free flow of ideas must be the pre-condition for academic creativity and intellectual originality so crucial to the flowering of civilisations.

Nevertheless, the fate of Plato's Academy at the hands of Justinian has already presaged for posterity the perennial tension between politico-religious authorities and the higher centre of learning as a community of scholars devoted to a collective endeavour in their disinterested search for truth and knowledge.

Wholeness of man

Today in Malaysia, we witness in the Gomez Affair the re-enactment of this age-old contradiction.

Here, the universities cannot be further from the humanist ideal of universities like Oxford and Harvard that, explicitly or implicitly, base their educational philosophy on their aspiration to develop the wholeness of man as an end in itself, and not merely as a means to an end, in accordance with the noble traditions of the Enlightenment.

Through our near half century of independence, modernisation, social-economic development and nation-building, all institutions must be subsumed and subjugated to the Leviathan of the State for the purpose of serving the various ideologies constructed by those who hold the reigns of power.

First of all, Malaysian universities have to serve as the most crucial instrument towards achieving the twin objectives of the New Economic Policy at all costs, even and especially at the costs of lowering their academic standards, and sacrificing the very idea of excellence..

Then, the universities must satisfy the impulse of nationalism, in the production and dissemination of arbitrary truths necessary to the myth of the Malaysian nation, a myth that requires the collaborative effort of the political elite and their satellites of subservient intelligentsia lending intellectual legitimacy to the national project.

Of course, the economic imperative of nation-building would have compelled the superstructure of the state to absorb fully the university into its chain of productive forces. In the capitalist and then the late capitalist world, education is one of the most valued commodities. The most valuable asset in modern economy, as some economists tell us, is neither gold nor land, but human beings. The fancy term for it is "human resources".

Over the years, the Malaysian education system has become a conveyor belt in an assembly plant instituted with massive public funds for the sole purpose of producing human resources that would meet market needs.

You stuff a child of six into the entry point of this educational factory, and at the end of the day, popping out from the university exit doors, you are supposed to get the finished products: the skilled graduates who can fit easily like bolts and nuts in the gargantuan productive machinery of the national economy.

Principle instrument

Here, iron logic of the market place, to extract maximum production and profits at minimum cost, corresponds with the logic of the state to extract maximum discipline from the entire society with the minimum resistance. The purpose of a disciplinary society, as Foucoult would say, is to assure the ordering of human multiplicities, so that exercise of political power can be perpetuated to its maximum intensity.

Therefore, the universities in Malaysia, as apex of our educational system, alongside other apparatus of social control such as the media, the police, the army, the prisons, the hospitals and the factory floor, have become the principle instrument for the schooling of the entire Malaysian society.

Essentially, the administrative head of a universities play the dual role of a CEO of a large corporation and the principle of a primary school. Their real board of directors are the officials and the politicians in the Ministry of Higher Education. Ultimately, the broad directions and educational agenda of the universities are determined by the political masters of the nation.

In this scheme of things, the professors and the lecturers are but civil servants and employees, subject to the myriad rules and regulations of the vast government bureaucracy. The recruitment of students, the designing of content of the education process, the establishment of minimum academic standards, and the general running of their universities are very much beyond their grasp.

As for the students, well they are the objects of the entire process of disciplining and conditioning. They are the raw economic materials to be processed. They are the future citizens whose mind must be molded to adopt the pre-determined world view prescribed by the human panopticon that oversees the entire process of power exercise, that oversees all citizens like the all-seeing Eye of Sauron in Lord of the Rings.

What is wrong with this?

Well, for a start, in any institution of learning in general, and in the university in particular, the most important people ought to be the teachers and their students, in accordance with the ideal of the university as a community of scholars in search of Truth and the production of "knowledge". Among many things, like technical training to equip students for the productive and meaningful adult life, the university ought to shoulder the unique responsibility of engendering self-emancipation of human individuals, as a microcosm of self-emancipation of the entire society at large.

A great Malaysian society would not treat human beings as mere means to economic and political ends. Human beings are also ends in themselves, and therein lies their ultimate moral worth for living an ethically good life. The present system that plays with the mind, lives and destinies of scholars and university students like pawns on a chess board dehumanises and demeans humanity.

That is the real crisis in our higher education, as revealed in the Gomez Affair.