What's The Point of UiTM?

by Terence A. Anthony

ENTRANCE TO UiTM SHAH ALAM CAMPUS | SOURCE: TOURISM SELANGOR

Dato Sri Sahol Hamid Abu Bakar's life trajectory reads like material that could be adapted into a heartwarming biography. 

I first heard the life story of my former Vice-Chancellor when I first entered UiTM Shah Alam. The man came from a modest background with parents who only had basic education. Like most who escaped his social class what he ambitioned his life to be at a young age isn't exactly how he lives right now. Instead of academia, he wanted to pursue a life in kickboxing. Who could blame him? When you're not in the ideal place on the social ladder, the frenetic sport provides that escapism.

But the world had different plans for him when representatives from the then ITM or Institut Teknologi MARA approached his family. It wasn't long before he was convinced that he should trade the boxing ring for higher education.

The former vice-chancellor wasn't the kind of student that scored straight As. He wasn't a man of privilege that could allow him access to private tutors or tuition centers.

Instead, ITM offered him to enter an advanced diploma program that admitted students that did well but wasn't enough to get them into degree placements. It was however enough for it to become his stepping stone for him to qualify for Colorado State University's Civil Engineering Degree programme. From there, academia was his lane and he soldiered on.

Years passed by and giving up a kickboxing career earned him a Ph.D. in Civil Engineering from Sussex University in the UK. That feat alone proved that when given the opportunity a man in dire situations can achieve remarkable things.

Not satisfied with just helping himself, he became Vice Chancellor for the now upgraded ITM, UiTM (MARA University of Technology). During his tenure, he introduced a program called Mengubah Destini Anak Bangsa (MDAB or to loosely translate it, Changing the Destiny of our People's Children). Instead of just admitting students into foundation studies, the program was designed to admit pre-diploma students. Basically, it is a course to equip those who didn’t perform well in school the necessary skills to enter diploma programmes and then hopefully use it to enter degree programs.

Dato Sri Sahol Hamid Abu Bakar’s story captivated me, not because it was the story of a Malay man who achieved social mobility. But his life intrigued me because it was a testament to the power of how public policy could change the life of a man from a working-class family, who could only conceptualize his way out of poverty through a violent combat sport. He then channeled that energy into being a learned academic who has his faith in the power of education to uplift thousands out of poverty.

UiTM and its genesis, ITM was only open to Bumiputra students. It has its own act governing it, explicitly mentioning that it was created in pursuant to Article 153 of the Federal Constitution. In it, the constitution empowers the government to create quotas to assist those who were of Malay and Bumiputra descend. That extends to the Orang Asli of West Malaysia and the Natives of Sabah and Sarawak.

In short, our former vice-chancellor was a product of affirmative action policies.

What's The Point of Affirmative Action?

INSTITUT TEKNOLOGI MARA (1979) | SOURCE: JABATAN PENERANGAN MALAYSIA

Affirmative action isn’t unique to Malaysia. Nor is the idea that a majority population deserves affirmative action. Post-apartheid South Africa didn’t magically recover. Institutionalized racism has removed them the corners of power and stripped away from the infrastructure they deserved. Rather than kicking out the white population who benefitted from apartheid, the nation tried to recover and lived together, side by side. The new Mandela led government realized the people could not live together if systemic inequality is eradicated. Affirmative action for the majority was in place to reverse the actions of apartheid.

Malaysia never experienced the same level of brutality like slavery or segregation in America and apartheid in South Africa. However, there was inequality because of the divide and conquer policies. The Malays were expected to be in the agriculture industry. The myth of the lazy native wasn’t considered, well, a myth in the minds of British officers. From being masters of their own land, Sultans had to accept foreign advisors in they wanted to live under British rule. It wasn’t long before a majority of Malays were scrubbed from political power and the necessary institutions needed to assist their welfare.

The existential fear that they may never be able to compete is a legitimate fear.

Affirmative action within that context was needed to alleviate the fears of the poor Malays. Because of colonial exclusionary policies, there wasn’t any real way for them to climb up the social ladder. Inequality between the Malays who were mainly farmers at the outskirts of cities, and the Chinese merchant class, has contributed to racial tensions. In the Malaysian context, this can be seen as a racial struggle. However, if you’re a fan of historical grand narratives (and forgive me for borrowing Marxist terminology) this could ironically also be seen as a misdirected class struggle and anger. Only this time, instead of having class consciousness, the Malay community used their Malay-ness as the focal point. Because of that, it is the prerogative of the Malays to use every single institution they can gain access to, preserve their institutional privileges or to add to it in order to compete in the future. Because a majority of Malays faced this problem and disadvantages, it was decided the whole racial group required targeted assistance in the form of affirmative action.

However, the context of the world I grew up in is different from the days when Dato Sri Sahol Hamid was a young man. Today, the Malay community has been empowered financially. According to Khazanah Research Institute, 60% of Malays whose families had no formal education managed to continue studies to tertiary level. (Also, I’m not that really diligent of a reader, I found the statistics from an Other.My article.) Those who had access to education led better lives for themselves and accorded a new found privilege to their children and grandchildren. ITM has been upgraded from an institute to a full-fledged university that received extensive funding. While in the past there were a limited number of schools for Malays, UiTM only admits Bumiputra students. There’s a campus almost in every state. I remember my friends and I joked around that if I wanted to develop a rural area, demand a UiTM campus to be built in that town. Then students from Perlis to Sabah will come with their pocket money to fund the surrounding businesses. Deep down we know that was a half joke. No longer they were victims of the British’s divide and conquer policies but instead, major institutions were led by prominent Malay businessmen and academics.

The urban-rural divide still exists within the Malay community and vertical inequality (inequality within a subgroup) is still a serious issue. Even when it comes to culture, Malays who live in urban areas have been extremely divergent from the culture of Malays in rural areas. As a Dayak man who has been living in urban/suburban Kuching for most of my life, the same can also be said for Dayaks. Even within urban areas, income inequality between those who live in PPRs (Program Perumahan Rakyat or Public Housing) and those outside PPRs are so bad that children face malnutrition. We’re talking about a country that’s classified as an “Upper Middle Income” country and with a capital city that has the same GDP as South Korea.

These very people need a pathway to climb up the education system. But because of the shift in the economic landscape, the question then becomes: if class instead of race was the issue, then why are so many so adamant against opening up UiTM for the inclusion of non-Bumiputras? HINDRAF (or the Hindu Rights Action Force) has long been fighting for at least a 20% quota for poor, working-class non-Bumiputras in UiTM.

Bumiputras argue that because of the existence of the vertical inequality mentioned earlier, it is their inalienable right to have these university quotas. But, it is packaged in a way that the issue is purely horizontal inequality (inequality between subgroups). There is some degree of truth to both characterizations, but the horizontal inequality is to a lesser degree today. To them, they deserve affirmative action not just because of inequality but because the land belongs to them. So implicitly whatever comes from this land goes to them first. Because of how affirmative action is structured in this country, even those who come from an upper-class background can technically still qualify for a place in UiTM. (Won’t mention names but I know several well-off people that made me wonder, why UiTM?)

This leads to a core contradiction in Malaysia’s affirmative action policies. If affirmative action is supposed to help the poor, then should it be coupled with the rhetoric you automatically deserve it because of your race? Then what about economic inequality that exists in different racial groups?

This begs the question, who deserves affirmative action?

Who Deserves Affirmative Action?

UiTM LAW FACULTY AUDITORIUM 1 | SOURCE: LAW.UiTM.EDU.MY

If affirmative action is to assist so a group of people has equal footing to compete economically, then Bumiputras who do not come from upper-class backgrounds and Malaysian Indians deserve it the most. 

With that, I agree wholeheartedly and sympathize with HINDRAF’s plea to have at least a 20% quota for Indians in UiTM.

Reading the history of how Indians ended up in Malaysia shows the catalyst to HINDRAF’s demands. Referring back to Emmanuel Surendra’s interview with economist Elsa Lafaye de Micheaux, South Indians are like the lost orphans of Malaysia. They were brought in by the British as cheap labour to sustain their industries. They worked in estates and plantations, with low wages and had no expectation they would own the land they explored and worked on. While on the surface it looks as if that the labourers were compensated for their labour while the rural Malay farmers only had for fixed income from farming, they mostly owned the land they had. That was the basis of capital that the Indians didn’t have.

To quote the director of MySkills Foundations, S. Pasupathi “For the Chinese, the Chinese new villages later became towns. For Indians, they woke up one day and the estates were no longer there. They had no skills and no education, so the social mobility of the children is limited.” He continued “There were no special programmes either, such as positive discrimination, which is what happened with the Malays,”

When the plantations could no longer provide for them, many migrated to urban areas where many didn’t own anything too.

Also according to Pasupathi, “There were two rounds of migration. One was out from the estates when they went to urban areas and set up squatter areas. Second was the eviction from the squatter areas as well and now many of them have moved to low-cost flats,”

The poor who left the estates became the urban poor. An MP from the Democratic Action Party,  (DAP), Charles Santiago said on Free Malaysia Today (FMT) “The majority of them are now in urban areas, living in poverty and part of gangs. About 30% of them drop out of school,”

But the saddest quote on the socio-economic conditions of the Indian community so far was by Charles Santiago: “The community is so far behind that it might take the government at least two generations to get the B40 group of low-income Indians to be on a par with others.”

The previous administration has attempted to alleviate the lives of the working class by providing BR1M (Bantuan Rakyat 1Malaysia), a form of cash handouts. While it is an attempt to create a proto-Universal Basic Income scheme and also an attempt to move away from the Malay-centric race-based policies, it is also a short fix that does not deals the long-term problem. The cash handout could alleviate temporary problems but it was only enough just for recipients to demand more in the future. One could also characterize it as a way to only fish for votes during an election cycle and just enough to not be part of long-term commitments.

Sociologist Denison Jayasooria, a research fellow at Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia told FMT “Handouts are quick fixes and quick fixes are not sustainable. Education, character development, capability development, neighbourhood building – all of these require long-term social work and community intervention.”

All the quotes above weren’t just empty gestures and rhetoric. Going back to the same Khazanah Report above, while 60% of Malay families who had no formal education had the opportunity to enter tertiary education, only 19% of Indians did. According to statistics from the Home Ministry in 2013 (Again, I’m not that diligent I got it from a Cilisos article), 70% of gang activity in the country were done by Indians. That meant the lack of opportunity for migration to urban areas and the lack of access to higher education means people are desperate to look for money. Crime, unfortunately, is the answer for the desperate. To quote Lafaye, “That means if you are not educated, there is no ladder in front of you.

With that entire context, HINDRAF’s plea for affirmative action isn’t something we should ignore.

What’s The Point of UiTM?

MENARA SULTAN ABDUL AZIZ SHAH | SOURCE: RAFIE HASSAN

To answer this question, there are several things that need to be pointed out:

(a) UiTM was established to provide university placements for Bumiputras

(b) It was done to complement the affirmative action policies of the country

(c) Affirmative action exists as a way to promote the underrepresented and to alleviate those who were left behind due to their socio-economic terms

(d) Bumiputras, because of the British divide and rule policy weren’t able to compete

(e) Thus they deserve affirmative action

If those who run UiTM believe they have the moral duty to alleviate poverty, then they should also have the moral duty to accept the one racial group that has been left behind, just like how the Bumiputras were at one point.

The argument that UiTM is strictly Bumiputra because they were indigenous to this land defeats the purpose of affirmative action. That’s because it means anyone who could lay claim to the soil regardless of social status will be afforded the resources meant to help the poor. When those who don’t need affirmative action eat up the resources, it does not benefit the poor Malay at all. It takes away the opportunity from them, under the guise that there is a moral claim behind it. If the poor Indian has a moral claim over a UiTM placement, it does not end the moral claim of the poor Malay. When both the rich Malay and the poor Malay qualify academically for UiTM, quotas for poor Indians would mean the rich Malay has to go, not the poor Malay. The person who already has the resources can afford to go elsewhere or at the very least could afford to wait. In the worst case scenario where the poor Indian has a seat over the poor Malay man, at least the poor Indian man equally deserves to be given the key to social mobility.

The enemy of the poor Malay isn't the poor Chinese or the poor Indian, but the rich who have usurped power at the expense of the poor.

Am I Then Not a Grateful Person For Being a UiTM Graduate and Benefactor of Affirmative Action?

DEWAN AGONG TUANKU CANSELOR, UiTM SHAH ALAM |SOURCE: VENUEPOINT.COM.MY

With my stance on the issue, especially with alums actively petitioning to protect UiTM’s Bumiputra exclusivity, I’m sure this question will pop up.

Yes, I am. I appreciate every single opportunity given to me by the institution. I do admit, I wasn’t the best student in the law faculty and I’m pretty sure many would say I didn’t use my opportunity to the fullest degree. I appreciate that Pn Norliza Abdul Hamid was so patient with this clueless boy in her Equity class. She has helped me countless times when I felt that it was the end of the road for me. I appreciate that Mr. John Chua tried to accommodate me when I was depressed and demotivated during my final year on campus. When he had to rush for another tutorial class he actually took the time to listen to me trying to explain why I was doing horribly in Corporate Law because I was too depressed to do anything and broke down in front of him. I appreciate that Dr. Jashpal Kaur didn’t brush me off when I started asking questions in hindsight were nonsensical after her Gender Studies class.

Maybe these were small gestures from them but it meant a lot to me. I would not trade the experience for the world.

But at the same time, I would love those who deserve it also get a shot in life. It’s not just for the non-Bumiputras. If other people understood that intentions of those who ran UiTM came from a place of empathy and wanting to alleviate poverty, then it will dispel the myth that the exclusivity came from racism.

For every Dr. Sahol Hamid out there, there’s a poor Indian out there who has to face the same existential problems that led to our university’s establishment.

The greatest irony is that Dr Sahol Hamid is currently the vice chancellor of Abdur Rahman Crescent University in Chennai, India while the Indian immigrants who are in dire need of targeted assistance in his home country are excluded from the powers that be.

The best way to show gratitude and say thanks for what we benefitted from is to extend the same principles to those who need it most.