Quite a few readers have mentioned the need for Malaysia to modernise its political system and social culture; that building a modern nation cannot be accomplished simply by having foreign contractors construct the tallest this and the longest that in brick and mortar buildings.

Cyberjaya, furthermore, will never be another Silicon Valley without universities of the stature of Berkeley and Stanford to feed its technology and provide its creative personnel. Malaysia does not have any world-class universities and the Malaysian people are still not, on the whole, considered a very creative people.

This is not their fault; they are not simpletons - they've just been excessively sheltered from the world by a paternalistic, authoritarian government that fears ideas and information. Indeed, the government would not like to see its people become creative, because creative people tend to think for themselves; they tend not to passively accept every morsel of government propaganda that is crammed down their throats. (Bravo, then, for this refreshing and professional online newspaper, Malaysiakini.)

As an American university lecturer who has: (a) taught in Malaysia, Japan, Saudi Arabia and Dubai, United Arab Emirates; (b) lived in Western Europe; and (c) formally studied comparative education, I think a good start might be for Malaysia to open its doors to the American system of higher education rather than relying solely on British Commonwealth models.

After all, there is no question that institutions such as Berkeley, Stanford, MIT and Caltech nurtured Silicon Valley and have enabled the US to remain, for the present, well ahead of Japan and Europe especially in computer science but also in other high-tech areas. Many educators outside Malaysia - including the entire Singapore university system - believe the British system of centralised control has actually diminished the quality of British universities and allowed the US to assume the world lead.

The influential Oxford educational philosopher Alan Ryan, in a recent magazine article, asserted that two decades of government funding and over regulation had left Britain's universities in a mess. The only way to compete with such American institutions as Harvard, Yale and Stanford, he said, is to copy the US academic model.

"The US combines mass higher education with elite excellence," he wrote, "but it only achieves this through allowing wide diversity in standards, salaries, tuition fees and so on."

Meanwhile, in Britain, increased regulation, intended to raise standards and guarantee academic quality, is dismissed by many professors as unnecessary bureaucratic interference that ensures nothing but increased research of dubious quality and the "proletarianisation of British academic life."

This is according to David Cannadine, a prominent educator at the University of London, as quoted in the International Herald Tribune a few weeks ago.

Singapore realises the importance of these points. According to the Chronicle of Higher Education in its October 29 article, "United States replaces Britain as Singapore's higher-education model," Singapore Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong has "started referring to [Nanyang Technological University and the National University] as 'the Harvard and MIT of Asia,' and he told them to do the same".

"American-style higher learning has become an absolutely crucial part of our vision for education," Jacob Phang, the director of external relations at the National University of Singapore, is quoted as stating. "The very future of our economy is based on this realisation."

Endowments are another American advantage. The Tribune reports Harvard's current endowment as amounting to US$13 billion and producing "enough income to finance 26 percent of the university budget... Oxford and Cambridge, the only British universities that even approach the levels found at US institutions, have endowments of about 1.6 billion and 3.5 billion, respectively."

Why is that important? Because universities with more money are able to spend more on their students' education. Caltech (The California Institute of Technology), for instance, spends something like US$80,000 per student per year, according to officials there. "From Cambridge, England, to Cambridge, Massachusetts," goes a popular saying at universities in Singapore, according to the Chronicle piece.

Since 1997, when only one American university had a working partnership south of Johor Baru, the list has grown to include Caltech, the University of California at Berkeley, the University of Chicago, Cornell University, Stanford University and Johns Hopkins University. At the National University of Singapore, "the desire to become an American-style institution extends to physically mimicking... the look and feel of a typical college town in the United States" which will include movie theatres, jazz clubs, outdoor cafes and the like.

Completely ignoring the fact that the IT revolution has come out of the US may be a function of Dr Mahathir's cognitive dissonance that stems from his emotionally overwrought anti-American makeup. But the Malaysian people deserve better.

SCOTT SOUTH has taught EFL for the past 13 years in Malaysia, Japan, and Saudi Arabia. He is currently a lecturer in English at Dubai Women's College in the United Arab Emirates.