Following Product of the System's letter on The unbelievable Professor Hashim Yaacob , I wish to echo the call for the incredible Professor Dzulkifli Razak, vice-chancellor of USM, to step down.

While there has been a lot attention given to the foibles of the VC of UM over the latest ranking exercise done by the Times Higher Education Supplement (THES), the public may have forgotten that one other local university suffering the same, if not a worse fate, is USM.

Last year USM was ranked 111th in the survey. This year it has completely disappeared from the radar screen. Even UKM made it to the top 100 universities in the field of Science. Actually, in keeping with its name, it should have been USM making it to the upper ranks in the Sciences! We should not just single out UM as the institution bearing the brunt of plunging standards of higher education in this country.

USM's Dzulkifli also went to town last year to trumpet its 111th placing, though he did not go to dizzying heights to emblazon this "triumph" in the form of banners and giant billboards all over campus. But the VC was an equal party to the same kind of antics that the UM's VC was dabbling in.

There was a lot of sloganeering and show of USM's "world class" standards. There was a lot of taxpayers' money spent in transporting its lecturers to pedestrian inventors' exhibitions all over the world just to win some medals of dubious academic worth.

The VC spent a major part of his time peddling various fancy themes and slogans to give the impression that USM is in step with the latest concepts, such as university-in-the-garden, sustainability and trans-disciplinarity. Sadly, these have only been translated into superficial public relations spins.

He should stop selling the idea that USM is anywhere close to "world-class" when its recent graduates are not even employable locally (forget about their global edge). There has been scant attention paid to the fundamentals of education itself. The academic curricula of most departments have not been changed since the last 10-15 years. There has been no leadership in this direction because most heads of departments are either incapable of envisioning new ideas or are happy to not rock the boat, in case such exercises may expose their incompetence.

Compared to the public spins on USM being the "leader" in science (but failed to make the international rank anyway), the amount of effort and expense spent on revamping or instituting the basics - such as a truthful system of student selection based on merit, and a credible assessment of teaching, learning and research standards - has been abysmally low.

USM also has an obsession with increasing its graduate student population. The trade-off has been the lowering of standards of admission. As a result, admissions of foreign students, especially ones with the means to pay, have gone up. Lecturers are given the impossible task of passing some of these students, who are not even qualified to do any graduate work in the first place.

Furthermore, this will really shock the public - after 35 years the university is still "experimenting" with the best way to "grade" exams and assignments; whether by giving absolute marks or conferring a letter grade for every assignment and then translating these grades into grade point averages and totaling these points to reconvert them back into an average.

This may sound weird, tedious and petty to the public, but it goes to show that if a university cannot get its fundamentals correct, what good is all that talk about "world class" in this and that?

The public should also be concerned about how deans and directors are selected in the university. We may be able to tolerate the "bumiputraisation" policy up to a point, but it has now come to sheer absurdity and bigotry. Unfounded rumours have circulated that a certain political party has a hand in not only ensuring that only "bumis" are put in all the places but only the "politically-kosher bumis" are there. And this it seems also applies to promotions of senior lecturers and professorships! This needs to be investigated in case the rumours are taken to be true.

The list of irregularities and ineptness on university leadership is a long one. We should not give too much emphasis on the rankings. We can quibble about the methodology here and there and there is always another point of view. Worse, both the VCs of UM and USM should stop wasting public expenses on hiring foreign consultants to tell why they failed to make it to the Thes list.

The answer to the deterioration lies from within. Why be extravagant about hiring a foreign consultant? Isn't this itself telling of the lack of faith in the products of your own system? We do not have to wait for the annual THES ranking to know that our higher education system is long in need of a change. We need courageous people to do this, not political party-hacks who masquerade as half-baked academics and shallow thinkers.