LETTER | I write this in admiration, respect and on behalf of my many friends who are still actively carrying out their duties in private universities and colleges. They have worked against a confusing background of policies made and not made and policies made only to be changed. My friends and others have worked hard to discharge their contractual obligations deeply aware of their moral obligations to their students. 

During these past 18 months, they have worked, against the uncertain official policies mentioned earlier and the ambivalent responses from their institutions. They are all affected by fatigue created as much by the additional and different kinds of work they are required to produce in these difficult times, as by the confusion shown by officials in handling the current situation. 

The recurring complaints include a lack of institutional understanding of online processes and flowing from that, an absence of any useful guidelines issued to staff or students about the academic expectations in the new forum. General directions are issued to the academics to go online without anyone monitoring the impact of the online mode of instruction on teachers or students. 

Nor are there policies developed in the institution to align teaching and assessments in the online or an investigation of either process. There is no mitigation of the traditional chores of academics, but only the addition of new tasks in the new environment. For example, teachers are expected to ‘mark’ papers online, but no adjustments are made to the modes of assessment or time given to the staff to complete the marking. 

Regular faculty meetings to discuss the difficulties, if they had been held over the last 18 months would have helped, some of them say, but there have only been directions to comply without caring to examine the difficulties of compliance.

It has not helped that many institutions are in the dark about handling the situation. No one, to my knowledge, has organised any course to help staff cope with the current situation. Nor has there been any formal discussion on how the future of higher education is to be handled. 

The Ministry of Higher Education and the Malaysian Qualifications Register (MQA)  must take responsibility for these processes but both agencies have been sitting on their hands. Institutions, hoping for more effective guidance from them have failed to receive any. Even pleas for help made to individuals have also brought little results.

I think we must face the prospect that the processes of higher education that we have grown up with are no longer sustainable in an environment that has been violently altered by the pandemic. In law, the concept of force majeure is a disruptive force that is unforeseen that fundamentally alters the obligations of parties under a contract. 

What was agreed to be done in a particular manner based on certain assumptions can no longer be done in that agreed manner because of unforeseen disruptions of those assumptions. 

When the Suez Canal was closed in the 1950s because of hostilities along the canal, shipowners’ obligation to deliver cargo within a stipulated time, estimated on the assumption that carriage will be through the canal, could no longer hold. Nevertheless, the carriage had to be completed, even if it meant that the carriers would have to take the longer route around the Cape of Good Hope.

Higher education regulators and providers must take a different route in delivering higher education. However, unlike the shippers in the Suez Canal situation, the hope for higher education may not lie in a longer route but a shorter one. This is a time to rethink higher education by jettisoning the trash, the debris, the bran, and the banter of courses that serve no purpose in education at the higher level. 

Maintain the ballast but review the cargo. It is time to reassess the number of subjects that are forced down the gullets of students and the mandated duration of the certificate, diploma, and degree courses. The suspensions forced on us by the pandemic gives us the respite to think through the future. 

The city of Wuhan in China built a makeshift emergency hospital to treat patients infected with the coronavirus in just 10 days. Makeshift must not be regarded as a derogatory term in times like this.

We have no choice, because, if as experts say, the pandemic will be with us in different degrees for at least another five years, the future we must worry about is already with us. More productive and purposeful engagement between regulators, institutions, staff, and students must start now.

The views expressed here are those of the author/contributor and do not necessarily represent the views of Malaysiakini.