Concerning the Edmund Terence Gomez saga, Sam Simon asks what are the weaknesses of Universiti Malaya. There are at least three serious problems facing UM and other local universities and they are a lack of these three elements - independence from the government, clear rewards for research excellence and competition.

A good university should put academic excellence as its utmost concern. The way through which it attains this goal should be independent of government influence. It should also have the power to recruit the best students and academics without interference from the state.

Unfortunately, UM appears to have been deeply entangled with the objectives of the NEP. The NEP sees universities as tools that can help Malaysia's social engineering process. The NEP aims to increase the economic share of the bumiputera to 30 percent.

One way of achieving this aim has been by increasing the proportion of bumiputera graduates. The government has been meddling with the university recruitment process by setting quotas for students and perhaps even implicit quotas for staff.

For the NEP, it is more important for universities to give out graduation certificates than to publish papers. This results in a decline in original research which leads to a lack of effort in retaining fine researchers like Gomez and KS Jomo.

Rewards for research excellence in Malaysian universities have not been clear. In the UK, the quality and quantity of publications are important in determining how much the government funds the university. With good researchers, a university gets more funding hence making everybody's life easier.

We should make the funding of UM - hence the pay prospects of the administrators - dependent on good research. In this way, the administrators of UM would be more in line with international standards, and retain and recruit good quality academics.

A funding system that takes into account of research excellence will also increase competition. This means that any local university can try to poach good academics with research funding accompanying that academic to his new university. This will promote a healthy competitive environment in which academic excellence can thrive.

At the moment, it seems that UM gets its funding for just being very old and, once some time ago, very prestigious. Each university gets what the NEP decides to give so long as they churn out lots of graduates. There is no incentive for serious competition in research and development among universities.