I refer to the letter English-medium 'victory': Rahman no agent . I have just come upon this recent spirited debate in malaysiakini on the above subject and would like to share some of my observations. These views are purely personal and do not necessarily reflect the views of any organisation(s) that I may be identified with.

From 1970, all English-medium government-funded 'national' schools were progressively converted to Malay-medium schools arising from the implementation of the Tun Abdul Razak Education Commission Report (Razak Report) recommendations. This was not really without forewarning. As I recall it, from the mid-60s, schoolchildren and teachers alike speculated that when the 10-year grace period for English as an official language was up in 1967, the advent of Malay as the sole official language would mean that all national schools would be required to use Malay as the medium of instruction.

In 1970, when Abdul Razak was effectively PM (as director of the National Operations Council) and Abdul Rahman Yaakub was education minister, the government, without warning or notice, decided that fifth formers sitting for the SPM/MCE that year must pass Bahasa Malaysia or they would be deemed to have failed the entire SPM/MCE (equivalent of GCE 'O' levels).

This started the first major wave of a brain drain of Malaysian students to foreign institutions of higher learning as thousands of students who failed BM were not allowed to proceed to Sixth Form irrespective how many distinctions they scored in the other subjects. They had to go overseas (if they could afford it) or to private schools locally but were effectively barred from Malaysian national schools and universities.

Based on the gradual phase-in of BM as the sole medium of instruction in national schools, the change-over of the language medium in tertiary institutions should have 'arrived' in 1983 for year one students of local universities who were the first batch of Standard One students when BM as the sole medium of instruction was introduced in 1970.

However, by some madness that I have never fully understood (and which the government has never explained), year one students in local universities were, from 1974, without prior notice, required to attend classes and answer their examinations in BM. The students only became aware of this switch after they had enrolled in their respective universities.

Most of the lecturers then were not even proficient in BM and resorted to reading from translations when delivering lectures. Half the time, lecturers did not know what they were reading and skipped whole paragraphs without realising it, to the amusement and derision of many students. It was quite painful to see eminent deans and professors tripping over simple words and being laughed at and mocked by students.

This policy also caused a wave of emigration of faculty members to foreign institutions, including the National University of Singapore. Some Indonesian lecturers were employed to fill the gap but their accent and terminology were alien even to Malay students, let alone non-Malay students. So much for academic excellence! Amongst the lecturers who were then caught by the medium switch were Rafidah Aziz and Fong Chan Onn (both current cabinet ministers) and Johor Menteri Besar Abdul Ghani Othman, who should all have personal experience of the ludicrous situation.

Now, the education minister who presided over that farce was Abdul Rahman Yaakub. Shortly after this incomprehensible policy was implemented (ie, in the same year - 1974), Dr Mahathir Mohamed took over as education minister. Following him in this important position were successive Umno bright stars in the likes of Musa Hitam, Anwar Ibrahim, Najib Razak and Abdullah Ahmad Badawi, not one of whom when they were education minister apparently realised that the language policy should be reviewed.

On a related note, it was Mahathir as education minister who introduced the Universities and University Colleges Act in 1975 in response to widespread student demonstrations led by Anwar Ibrahim. The Act effectively emasculated students in Malaysia and deprived the universities of the autonomy they enjoyed up to that point. This is one important factor that, to this day, separates our mediocre universities from the best in the world.

In the mid-70s, I recall both Tunku Abdul Rahman and Dr Tan Chee Khoon (then an opposition MP), amongst others, protesting the switch of medium and pleading that, at the very least, mathematics, the sciences and technical disciplines, and law, should continue to be taught in English. Their pleas fell on deaf ears.

Fast forward to 2002 and hey presto, Mahathir suddenly realises, almost 30 years later, that bilingualism is the way to go. Many non-Malays of that era believed, rightly or wrongly, that the irrational hastening of the use of BM in the universities was but a further measure to impede their academic progress - notwithstanding the quota system which ensured that every bumiputera who met the minimum entry qualifications, irrespective of economic background, was not only guaranteed a place but with full government scholarship to boot.

Indeed, Dr Goh Cheng Teik alluded to this in one of his books of that era when he wrote that in the interests of communal peace, one or two generations of non-Malay youths would have to be 'sacrificed' as far as tertiary education was concerned.

In the mid-60s, the efforts of the Chinese community to establish a privately-funded university (the Merdeka University) to meet the increasing demand for tertiary education by Chinese-medium students was met with a firm 'No' from the government on the grounds that the Education Act then did not allow the establishment of private universities. Since then, private universities have been sanctioned by the dozens but a Chinese-medium university is still taboo.

To be fair, government policy was moderated somewhat from the mid-80s when Mahathir and his successive education ministers allowed private universities using English as the medium to be established. Although this policy was largely motivated by the commercial potential of higher education and resulted in virtually anyone with the very minimum of entry qualifications being admitted to university-level courses. So long as they could pay the high fees, it helped to satisfy the pent-up demand by young Malaysians who could not find a place in the publicly-funded universities.

In this era of globalisation, should not diversity be the clarion call? We should not only allow Chinese-medium universities, but indeed, we should allow universities of any language medium. Think of the attractiveness of Malaysia as an education hub if we had universities teaching in all the major languages of the world, be it Arabic, Spanish or Chinese. Think of the global students we could potentially attract.

On a related issue, remember when English, Mandarin and Tamil were banned from our radio and TV channels from 1972 to 1982, also without notice? At the time of the ban, Razak was PM and Mohamad Rahmat was information minister. For 10 years, Malaysians were subjected to 'rojak' Malay as announcers and DJs who were not proficient in the language were forced to use it. The ban was only lifted in 1982, after Mahathir become PM and as expected, at the Umno general assembly that year, then Information Minister Mohamed Adib Adam was savaged by delegates for having re-introduced 'foreign languages' on national radio and TV.

It took the political genius of Mahathir to defuse the issue. In his winding-up address, Mahathir played a tape of the incomprehensible Malay that had been hitherto broadcast daily (and for 10 years), on radio and TV and asked the delegates whether they were happy to hear Malay being mutilated by incompetent announcers. The answer was a resounding 'No' and the multi-lingual policy continued to this day.

I guess we have indeed come a long way since then. Or have we?