This e-mail is to echo the letters Merit has no relevance in local varsities and USM needs total restructuring .

It is interesting to see how our university vice-chancellors defend their universities' position while we all know how in bad shape our public universities are. What puzzles me is that while our most famous Universiti Malaya and Universiti Sains Malaysia are in bad shape rankings-wise, our politicians are still promising to build more so-called univerisities. Now, building a university has become a political product, rather than an educational need.

Our vice-chancellors are now saying they would like to increase the intake of foreign students in the graduate programs. This would be the easy to achieve compared to other aims (as in achieving better rankings). However, it is forgotten what a university intends to achieve. It takes decades or centuries for a university to grow its own personality. It takes years for a university graduate to perform and churn out good output. If the VCs can't take feedback and improve, one can imagine what kind of graduates we churn out.

Recently, I am had a chance to work with a few universities in the region including Singapore, Korea and Taiwan. Two graduate programme students in Malaysia were involved. I could see the difference among all. Our students did not even know how to do the research, you still had to spoonfeed them.

Research most of the time, has nothing to do with great 'hardware', it is the 'soft' elements which differentiate you from the others. A university is like a corporation. What kind of vision or culture a university has would make its students different from the others. If a university is not talking about excellence and just pays lip service to this ideal, so too will its students. When the university takes a short cut, the students take a short cut too. Why not?

One Russian expatriate told me that Malaysia has a very funny 'culture'. Malaysian government-linked companies like to hire expatriates to do critical researches, including in the field of our military.

Why must this kind of research must fall into the hand of foreigners, he asked. He believed there are Malaysians who do this research but were not hired. He was told these GLCs didn't want non-bumi guys. Until now, he is still puzzled by this.

It is a choice for everyone to make. Where do you want your kid to be? Where do you want your company to be? Where do you want your university to be? Where do you want your country to be?

To me, it is clear - there are no short cuts.