DAP supremo Lim Kit Siang has asked Universiti Malaya and Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia (UKM) to hold a referendum among their undergraduates to determine if the two universities should actually boycott the Times Higher Education (THE) varsity rankings.

After being criticised by UM students association chief Fahmi Zainol recently, Lim responded in a statement by saying that the opinion of everyone involved in the university must be taken into account.

Fahmi had defended the two universities' move to boycott the rankings, saying that there had been too much focus on varsity rankings that is affecting students.

Prior to that, Lim had called on Education Minister Muhyiddin Yassin to step in and stop the universities from proceeding with the boycott.

"Has Fahmi thought through the whole subject of university rankings and are his views his personal ones, or the official view of the PMUM executive committee, as well as representing that of the UKM students council?” he asked.

"Are they the views of the 50,000 undergraduates and post-graduate students in the two universities?" he added.

Lim also questioned why the boycott only applied to the THE rankings and not the QS world university rankings in which both the universities are participating.

He also said that participating in the rankings would allow the performance of an university to be measured, even though the rankings system has its flaws.

"Clearly, the point of participating is to see how much our public universities can improve over the years with a given amount of budgetary allocation.

"Without participating in the THE ranking, we won't know if the performance of our pubic universities have improved over time," he said.