Bridget Welsh's article on the sorry state of the universities in Malaysia hit the nail on its head, and a hard hit at that. Yes, the Gomez resignation is just the tip of the iceberg.

At the root of all this is really an academic culture that is exposed to political interference that often comes from the Higher Education Ministry and self-serving politicians. This is coupled by a strange tolerance towards mediocrity among academicians and students. Also, ethnic politics does aggravate the situation.

In the vacuum that's left by many of the big guns in the local academia are the small players who try to give a semblance of respectability back to the local universities.

One of the things many of the universities do is to go for numbers crunching especially in an era of corporatisation and globalisation. For instance, various strategies were designed and incentives offered to ensure greater number of graduate students, which at times also involved the lowering of entry point qualifications. Apart from giving themselves a pat on their backs, the universities also earn a sizeable income from graduate students.

Numbers crunching also takes the form of certain academicians publishing in obscure journals or publishing their materials through their publishing firms or some nondescript publishing companies. A cursory look at their CVs can give a good impression.

As part of numbers crunching as well as the push for more research by local academicians is the creative act of doing collaborative research work that involves several individuals. What has happened is that you find a number of individuals applying for different research grants so that a few of them become pillion riders only. The same with academic writing; there are also pillion riders to make up the numbers. The principle of you scratch my back and I'll scratch yours also applies here.

With the promotion exercise that encourages numbers, you find some academicians scrambling for graduate students to supervise their dissertations or theses. Uncapped points are given to supervision. As a result, there are instances of academicians who supervise students who do research that don't match with the expertise of the former. The end result is that the supervision is superficial at best, slipshod at worse. The craving for graduate supervision even overwhelms the importance of academic publishing among the academicians.

Another problem that besets many of the local universities is that some departments or faculties are run by heads who aren't established in their areas of expertise or disciplines. They become insecure intellectually and professionally especially when criticised by their colleagues, and subsequently resort to 'protection' from their immediate superiors.

In due time these departmental heads become subservient to, and uncritical of, their superiors, something that should be an anathema to an academic institution that is worthy of its name. A patronage system is already put in place. This partly explains why difference of opinion, which is, and should be, one of the pillars of an academic institution, is not tolerated, let alone respected by the powers-that-be.

The close relationship between departmental heads and their immediate superiors sometimes facilitates better prospects for promotion. This surely gives a wrong message to the junior academic staff and others in academia. In other words, this would encourage some junior scholars to climb the bureaucratic ladder (in the early years of their academic careers) and in the very process pooh-pooh their core business of research and writing.

It doesn't take much intelligence to figure out why many academicians who are prolific and critical in thinking do not feel comfortable in such an environment.

Welsh is also right in saying that things aren't well especially in the social sciences and, if I may add, humanities. Local universities, especially at a time when there are thousands of unemployed graduates, were told to make themselves relevant vis--vis the industry. One of the problems arising from this is that, pandering to 'what the industry wants' renders many socially important disciplines such as sociology, political science, history, linguistics, and literature irrelevant in the eyes of the university authorities and some politicians.

They conveniently forget that these are the disciplines that provide the 'soul' to a nation; ringgit and sense and technology alone aren't adequate in nation building. Conforming uncritically to the wants of the industry could well blur the line between university and technical institution where critical and reflective thinking may not play an important role.

Given this situation, it is hardly surprising that not only standards and morale have come down in the local academia; academic bearing is also lost. Essentially, the role of an academic institution is to challenge conventions, to seek new ways of looking at, and doing, things in our social life - without having to lose its academic autonomy or independence. Only then can the so-called ivory tower become socially relevant. Otherwise, it is as good as being an intellectual and political dinosaur.