CHINA: Universities to get more autonomy

Global Times17 October 2014 Issue No:339

 

Pessimism lingers regarding effectiveness

China's top education authorities have approved new regulations for nine top universities, which seek to increase the schools' autonomy, while observers have expressed concern about their effectiveness.
The nine universities include the country's top two universities, Peking University and Tsinghua University, the Ministry of Education announced on its website on Wednesday, adding that the newly established regulations will help the systematic reform of higher education and aid academic development.

Since 2013, a total of 32 universities have already seen their new regulations, which were drafted by the universities themselves, approved by the authorities.

All other Chinese universities are scheduled to establish their own regulations by the end of next year, according to the ministry.

To run a university according to its own regulations is the foundation of academic independence, Professor Xiong Bingqi, an expert in higher education at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, told the Global Times.

With these new regulations, the universities' management is supposed to operate with a higher-level of academic autonomy than previously, he added.
Peking University's new regulations indicate that more power over school management should be delegated to students.

The university set up a supervision committee for the first time to deal with disciplinary violations by students and school staff. The committee consists of students, teaching staff, members of non-Communist parties and the university's disciplinary watchdog.

Under its new rules, Peking University students also have the chance to become members of the school's academic board, allowing them to supervise the election of academic staff and investigate academic corruption, along with professors and delegates appointed by the university president. The number of delegates appointed by the president cannot surpass 15 percent of the board members.

No details have yet been revealed regarding any selection standards or what proportion of the board will be made up of student delegates.

Although the university is encouraging students to join these new bodies, students seem to be less enthusiastic, judging by the responses of students reached by the Global Times.

"We know very little about how those student delegates will be selected and who will select them. Even if we can participate in discussions about university affairs, the administrative staff will still be in charge of making any decisions," a history postgraduate student studying at Peking University, surnamed Huang, told the Global Times.

Tsinghua University has also emphasized its autonomy as it highlights the importance of budget independence.

Xiong expressed pessimism about the enforcement of these regulations as these universities' officials are still appointed by the government and universities are still entirely government-funded.
 

GLOBAL: How Germany managed to abolish university tuition fees

The Conversation17 October 2014 Issue No:339

 

If Germany has done it, why can’t we? That’s the question being asked by many students around the world in countries that charge tuition fees to university. From this semester, all higher education will be free for both Germans and international students at universities across the country, after Lower Saxony became the final state to abolish tuition fees.

It’s important to be aware of two things when it comes to understanding how German higher education is funded and how the country got to this point. First, Germany is a federal country with 16 autonomous states responsible for education, higher education and cultural affairs. Second, the German higher education system – consisting of 379 higher education institutions with about 2.4m students – is a public system which is publicly funded. There are a number of small private institutions but they enrol less than 5% of the total student body.

Back and forth with fees

Until 1970-71, West-German higher education students had to pay tuition fees at the level of about 120 to 150 German Marks per semester. There were needs-based exceptions but basically these fees had to be paid by every student.

When they came to power in the late 1960s, Germany’s Social Democrats supported higher education expansion by promoting widening participation and equal opportunities and by increasing the number of higher education institutions. From 1971 onwards, a system of state financial assistance for students was established and tuition fees were abolished. The assistance came first as a grant, later as a mix of half repayable-loan and half grant.

During the peak period of higher education expansion in the late 1960s, exclusive funding of higher education by the states became too much of a burden. New provisions were introduced for a framework law laying down the general principles governing higher education across West Germany. The first law, introduced in 1976, included a prohibition of tuition fees.

Despite a flirtation with the idea of re-introducing tuition fees under the conservative-liberal coalition government in the 1980s, a stalemate ensued over whether tuition fees would lead state governments to reduce their regular funding to universities.

Fees win out in late 1990s

The fall of the Berlin Wall and German Unification put all reform plans on hold for several years until the whole East German system of higher education institutions and academies had been evaluated and reformed. A new discussion about tuition fees then started around the mid-1990s, with their re-introduction seen as a solution to a number of existing problems in the higher education system.

Around the end of the 1990s, the dam of resistance broke by allowing the introduction of fees for so-called long-term students: students who had been enrolled several semesters past the regular duration of their study programme and had not finished.

Those states with a conservative government filed a law suit in 2002 against the framework law of higher education, arguing that its prohibition of tuition fees was an illegitimate intervention into the legal authority for educational matters of the states. The Federal Constitutional Court upheld the complaint in 2005; immediately, seven states introduced tuition fees.

In 2006, the framework law was abolished under wider reforms of German federalism. Tuition fees were capped at 500 Euros per semester, but Berlin and all East-German states refused to introduce them.

Excellence and crisis

Yet the same reform of federalism led the states to reclaim complete authority and responsibility for their higher education. This led the Federal Ministry for Education and Research to refuse any further co-funding with states on higher education. And it left the federal ministry with a lot of spare money. A large part of this was eventually invested into the German Excellence Initiative, a competitive funding programme launched in 2005 to support a group of universities to become global players.

But this also meant that the poorer states faced a funding crisis for their higher education institutions. The problem was aggravated by the fact the a number of the poorer states were located in East Germany, where all states had decided not to introduce tuition fees in the hopes to attract more students.

Gradual abolition

In successive years, as soon as state government elections have elected social democratic or green party governments, tuition fees have been abolished. The state of Hesse, for example, had tuition fees for only a single year. In the end only two states were left with tuition fees: Bavaria and Lower Saxony. The conservative government of Bavaria gave into the mainstream and abolished tuition fees in the winter semester 2013-14, with Lower Saxony abolishing fees in the winter semester 2014-15.

But the heads of higher education institutions negotiated with their ministries, arguing that they could not properly do their job of offering high-quality student experience if the loss of income from tuition fees was not compensated one way or another.

So most states have agreed to compensate their higher education institutions with extra money – not quite covering the loss in fees though – which was to be invested exclusively into the improvement of the quality of studies and teaching. Most ministries decreed that students had to be involved in decisions about how and for what purposes the money was going to be spent.

How funding works now

The present situation is that all higher education institutions receive a budget from the responsible ministry of the state in which they are located, based on annual or biennial negotiations. This basic budget is complemented by additional agreements between higher education institutions and the state concerning the intake of additional numbers of students and the money to compensate the loss of income from tuition fees.

There are additional funding programmes – some funded jointly by the states and the federal ministry – for supporting and promoting research, in the competition for excellence.

Of course, most higher education institutions continue to feel underfunded. The pressure on academic staff to attract external research funding has increased, as has competition for such grants. Still, compared to other countries in Europe, German higher education institutions continue to be rather generously funded by their states – an estimated 80% of their overall budgetary needs. There are also ample opportunities and considerable amounts of external research funding available.

Publicly funded, but for how long?

Despite the fact that competition for funding and accountability has increased in German higher education, there is still a general consensus that it is a public system and should be state-funded. The abolition of tuition fees, even by conservative state governments, reflects this consensus too. In fact, the new Federal Minister for Education and Research, a member of the Conservative Party, recently announced a major increase in the levels of needs-based state financial assistance to students that will start in the 2016-17 academic year.

But funding varies considerably depending on different institutional and regional factors. The winners of the German Excellence Initiative have received and are receiving considerable amounts of additional funding in the hope that more German universities will be able to achieve better positions on world university rankings. There were 12 German universities in the 2014-15 Times Higher Education World University Rankings, up from 10 the year before.

Higher education institutions in the poorer states (most of them in the east of Germany) receive less money and academic staff are being paid lower salaries while higher education institutions in the richer states (typically in the south) are better funded.

The debate about tuition fees – though dead for the moment – can easily be revived in the future. It has not been dropped from the agenda once and for all. Government policies continue to be in favour of tuition fees, most representatives of institutional leadership are as well, though for different reasons. But there is currently a lack of general public support. Once this has changed – and influential advisory bodies and think tanks are working towards such a change – the idea of tuition fees will be introduced again.
 

GLOBAL: Academic reputation affects citation count

Geoff Maslen15 October 2014 Issue No:339

 

An academic’s reputation plays a key role in generating increases in a scientific paper’s citation count early in its citation life cycle, before a tipping point, after which his or her reputation has much less influence relative to the paper’s citation count. This is the intriguing finding from a study by a team of collaborating social science analysts in Belgium, Finland, Italy and the US.

Using data compiled by Thomson Reuters Web of Science, the team studied 450 highly cited scientists, nearly 84,000 articles in scientific publication, and 7.6 million citations tracked over the equivalent of 387,000 publication years!

The scientists studied included 100 top-cited physicists, 100 highly prolific physicists, 100 assistant professors in physics, 100 top-cited cell biologists, and 50 top-cited pure mathematicians.

In a paper published in the US journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the team describe how they analysed, for each central scientist, his or her production as measured by the number of publications in a year, the cumulative number of citations received by publications, and a quantitative reputation measure defined as the net citations aggregated across all publications.

Combining several empirical features of the analysis, the researchers then investigated the role of the reputation effect, showing that author reputation accounted for a significant increase in the number of citations an academic could attract.

“Over a scientist’s career, a reputation is developed, a standing within a research community, based largely on the quantity and quality of his or her publications. Here, we develop a framework for quantifying the influence author reputation has on a publication’s future impact,” they write.

“We find author reputation plays a key role in driving a paper’s citation count early in its citation life cycle, before a tipping point, after which reputation has much less influence relative to the paper’s citation count. In science, perceived quality, and decisions made based on those perceptions, is increasingly linked to citation counts. Shedding light on the complex mechanisms driving these quantitative measures facilitates not only better evaluation of scientific outputs but also a more transparent evaluation of the scientists producing them.”

The researchers say that scientific reputation has emerged as a key “signalling mechanism” to address the dilemma of excessive information that arises in tasks such as evaluating, comparing, and ranking publication profiles in academic competitions. As well, a scientist’s reputation plays an important role as a signal of trustworthiness and quality, “a role that addresses directly the ‘agency problem’ characterising the reward system in science”.

“With little time to read every paper on a given topic, this trustworthiness signal is anecdotally consistent with the common practice of perusing the author names when preliminarily evaluating the relevance of a newly found publication,” the team says.

“In the past, an author’s identity and associated reputation was mainly linked to reference lists and personal interactions. Nowadays, an author’s reputation is becoming increasingly visible through searchable publication databases, laboratory websites, press, and other media, in addition to citations.”

In their introduction to the paper, the researchers say that citation counts are widely used to judge the impact of both scientists and their publications. Although many factors outside the pure merit of the research or the authors influence such counts, few investigations have been made into identifying and quantifying the role of author-specific factors.

They note it is also likely that institutional affiliation and journal reputation play a role in the citation dynamics. But they suggest that disentangling the interaction between the multiple reputation sources will likely be challenging and remains an open avenue for investigation.

Nevertheless, as measures are becoming increasingly common in evaluation scenarios throughout science, the researchers say it is crucial to better understand what the citation measures actually represent in the context of scientists’ careers.

“Moreover, how does reputation affect a scientist’s access to key resources, the incentives to publish quality over quantity, and other key decisions along the career path?” they say. “In addition, what role does reputation play in the mentor-matching process within academic institutions, in the effectiveness of single/double blinding in peer review, and in the reward system of science?”

They note that it is also important to consider the role of reputation in light of the increasing orientation of science around team endeavours with “multiple levels of hierarchy and division of labour”. But, because it is difficult to evaluate and assign credit to individual contributors, they say there may be an increase in the role and strength of the reputation in overcoming the problem associated with asymmetric and incomplete information.

“In addition to the collaboration network, reputation also plays a key role in numerous other scientific inputs such as money, labour, knowledge, and so on, that inevitably affect the overall quantity and quality of scientific outputs.”

Young scientists lacking a reputation can be negatively affected by the social stratification in science, the researchers say, adding that the “appealing competitive advantage gained by working with a prestigious mentor may be countered by the possibility that it may not be the ideal mentor-advisee match”.

Nevertheless, they say that their results have broad implications across the scientific community, given the numerous careers that interact with top scientists via collaboration or mentorship. 

AUSTRALIA: Graduates of top universities earn more

Alexandra Hansen15 October 2014 Issue No:339

 

Bachelor-degree graduates from Australia’s prestigious Group of Eight, or Go8, and technology universities earn a greater amount over their lifetimes than those from the lesser known and regional universities, according to a new analysis that found their total income was 6% more over a 40-year career.

For graduates with degrees in science or commerce, this equated to about A$200,000 (US$175,000) more over their career. The data showed that bachelor degree holders from top universities actually earned about 10% more over their lifetime, but this dropped four percentage points when social advantages were accounted for.

Go8 universities were more likely to enrol students with better previous school grades, students from private schools, and students with parents who had degrees and high profile jobs, says a report by an independent think tank, the Grattan Institute.

This means some of the difference could have been attributed to the fact that Go8 and technology universities enrol students who would have performed better anyway, rather than it being the effect of the university itself, the report states.

A much larger discrepancy was found in chosen course of study, with a law graduate earning A$300,000 (US$262,000) more than a science graduate over their career, and a science graduate earning up to A$1 million (US$875,000) more than a creative arts graduate.

“The report shows that when it comes to earnings, what you study matters more than where you study,” Grattan Institute researcher Andrew Norton said. “Studying engineering at any university is likely to lead to a higher salary than studying arts at a sandstone university."

Vice-chancellor of the regional Southern Cross University, Peter Lee, said he rejected any proposition that the quality of the education experience at a regional university was less than that at a city university, leading to lower salary outcomes.

Lee said there were many other factors, such as gender balance and salary differences between cities and regions, which could have explained the difference. For instance, Southern Cross University was made up of 73% female students, and females consistently earned less than males even when allowing for career gaps while family-raising.

Lee also said there are large salary differences between the city and the regions, attributing to some of the difference: “A lawyer in a big city law firm does earn more than a lawyer practising in a smaller firm in the regions.”

A higher education analyst at the University of Melbourne, Dr Geoff Sharrock, said the report’s most important finding where earnings are concerned, was that a student’s field of study was far more important than the university itself.

“Some fields pay much better than others, regardless of which university conferred the degree,” Sharrock said. “This suggests that students should choose their field of interest and ability first, and their institution second. In doing so, they may also factor in price differences and how much debt risk they are prepared to take on.”

In a comment on the report, Rosemary Stanton, a visiting fellow at the University of New South Wales, asked why was there an assumption that “earning a little more over a lifetime was a good thing?”

“It may mean that these people work longer hours and thus spend less time with their families, possibly impoverishing them in ways that have nothing to do with money,” Stanton said.

*Alexandra Hansen is an editor with The Conversation where this article was published. 

SOUTH KOREA: Lowest-ranked universities to see cut in funding

Korea Joong Ang Daily05 September 2014 Issue No:333

 

The Ministry of Education yesterday designated 19 universities and colleges in the lowest 15 percent in terms of their operations, restricting government financial support starting next year.

In an assessment of the nation’s 334 universities and colleges, the education authority singled out the schools in the poorest condition and suggested a restructuring via a reduction in their admissions quotas.

The ministry has sought to reduce university entrance quotas after it was discovered that XXX that there were too many universities in Korea based on the country’s number of college students and that many of them were operated irresponsibly.

Earlier this year, the government also began to invest 1.2 trillion won ($1.1 billion) in making universities more specialized in order to reduce the number of freshmen.

The assessment, which looks at nine criteria, including alumni employment rates and the number of students who received scholarships, encouraged schools to shrink admissions quotas by providing extra points.

“By suggesting a quota reduction in exchange for additional points, some universities and colleges … reduced their quotas by a total of 4,244 for next year,” a ministry official said.

One college went so far as to cut its entrance rate by 28 percent for next year to escape falling into the lowest 15 percent.

The ministry initially selected 35 universities in the lowest group and notified school officials on Aug. 22, explaining they could move out of the bottom tier if they shrank their admissions for next year by a certain extent.

Sixteen gave up admitting a total of 2,801 new students next year. The 19 remaining schools announced by the ministry yesterday rejected the suggestion to shrink their quotas.

Cheongju University, for instance, said it opted to forego some financial support from the government and maintain its entrance quota because a decrease in the number of its incoming freshmen would worsen its financial situation.

Those schools are excluded from being able to bid for government-run projects for financial support from next year. They will also be prohibited from increasing their admissions in certain departments. Additionally, new students at those institutions will be barred from receiving specific government scholarships based on their schools’ performance.

Seven out of the 19 universities and colleges in the bottom 15 percent in the poorest condition were dealt even harsher financial penalties.

Freshmen at those seven schools will be restricted from receiving government scholarships, and some will not be eligible for student loans in full.

BY KIM BONG-MOON AND YOON SUK-MAN [bongmoon@joongang.co.kr]

GLOBAL: Different ways of learning for students abroad

Hans de Wit05 September 2014 Issue No:333

When the European Commission recently published the results of the Erasmus programme for 2012-13, it was proud to announce an overall increase in numbers of students by 6% to nearly 270,000.

The numbers and trends presented in the press release are indeed impressive: the overall numbers, the percentage of European Union students who are spending part of their study abroad with the support of Erasmus – 10%, still only half of the target of 20% set by the Bologna ministers of education, though – the top receiving and sending countries (Spain is number one for both), as well as increases in staff mobility (13%), in teaching assignments (8.5%), in university cooperation projects (25.4% success rate) and in intensive language courses (9%).

What was in my view the most revealing information, but which received little attention, was the increase in job placements: 16%, compared to 3.8% in study placements.

Job placements vs service learning

Since 2007, Erasmus has offered students the opportunity for European traineeships, also referred to as internships or job placements. Since then, the numbers have increased and currently one out of every five Erasmus students does work experience in another country.

According to the commission, the largest group of students on Erasmus placements has either a social sciences, business or law background (31%), while students in humanities and the arts, engineering, manufacturing and construction counted for 17% each. France, followed by Germany and Spain, was the greatest sender; the United Kingdom, followed by Spain and Germany, the biggest receiver.

The inclusion of job placements in the Erasmus programme reflects the increased focus on employability within internationalisation: how can we prepare graduates to become European and global professionals?

If we compare this to the United States, we see less attention being given to traineeships in companies there, but more attention to International Service Learning, or ISL, stimulating students to have an international community service experience.

ISL is seen in the United States as an important part of study abroad and internationalisation, although not much quantitative information on ISL can be found, partly because it is in many cases integrated into study abroad.

In general there seems to be little quantitative data about international job placements and service learning beyond the data for the Erasmus programmes, while it appears as if a lot of activity in this area is taking place on both sides of the Atlantic.

Different rationales

The distinction between the increased emphasis on international job placements in Europe and on ISL in the United States reflects the different approaches to study abroad on the two continents.

While in the United States the main driver for study abroad at the undergraduate level is to make students less parochial and more interculturally and globally competent, in Europe academic rationales and – increasingly – the employability rationale are more dominant.

Global citizenship development versus global professional development, one could say.

At the same time, both in the United States and in Europe, the main focus is on study abroad and not on international job or community placements.

These two experiences might, though, have an even stronger impact on the development of intercultural and international competences than the study abroad experience because the student is confronted more intensively with society as a result and its population at large than within a purely academic environment.

Also little attention, certainly in Europe, is given to the opportunities that a combination of job placement and-or service learning with study abroad can provide.

Although the inclusion of job placements in the Erasmus programme has stimulated the interest of international officers for this aspect of mobility, in most cases international internships are dealt with either by units that manage local internships or by teaching staff and not by international offices.

This results in a situation in which international job placements are a marginal focus point for all three parties involved. This is also because international job placements are difficult to find, costly and time consuming to monitor.

In many cases, where the student manages to find a placement abroad, guidance and advice from the home institution is marginal.

To give only one small example: over the past month, after a desperate call from a student’s grandparents, my French wife helped a French student doing a two-month internship in a company in a small town in The Netherlands without any support from the home institution to solve the difficult communication problems she faced on her assignment and her living conditions.

This is, unfortunately, still more the rule than the exception in internships, certainly at the undergraduate level. Having a local supporting partner institution involved might make the experience more rewarding.

Need for a new approach

The current call for more employability, for more global citizenship development and for innovative ideas to enhance the internationalisation of higher education might make it a good idea to look for a new approach to old forms of work experience and community service and to integrate them into existing models of mobility and study abroad.

Over the years I have encountered very few examples in which universities include cooperation on job placement and community service learning in their agreements. Finding internships or community service opportunities abroad is left in most cases to the students themselves, teaching staff with personal contacts or commercial agencies.

Why not make use of the local network of partner institutions to find, monitor and evaluate internships and community service opportunities for students of the other university and vice versa?

Why not combine job placements and service learning with a summer course (for instance, in language and culture) and-or study at the partner institution, making the most out of this twofold experience?

A counter-argument might be that it is already difficult to find internships for local students – but more options could be opened up abroad for them via international partners to compensate for that. Also, internships could help to confront the frequent imbalance in student exchange-based study placements.

I cannot imagine that there are not already such forms of cooperation taking place and it would be interesting to receive some innovative examples in this area.

I have always found it surprising how little attention is given to service learning and in particular job placements as part of international learning experiences for students.

When we speak so frequently nowadays about global citizenship and global professional development, these two strategies are more important than ever.

* Hans de Wit is director of the Centre for Higher Education Internationalisation, CHEI, at the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore in Milan, Italy; professor of internationalisation of higher education at Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences in The Netherlands; and research associate at Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University in Port Elizabeth, South Africa. Email: j.w.m.de.wit@hva.nl.

Vietnam: Universities still have little autonomy

Last update 16:02 | 31/08/2014 by Vietnam net bridge

Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung has bemoaned the slow process of delegating more power to universities to enhance their autonomy, saying relevant agencies should accelerate the process to increase the quality of education.

Chairing a meeting on autonomy at public universities in Hanoi Tuesday, Prime Minister Dung said that making universities responsible for all their operations is a right policy and has delivered initial positive results.

According to Dung, their autonomy aims to create a motivation and a breakthrough to improve the quality of education and facilitate sustainable development of universities.

However, the process has been moving slowly and should be speeded up so that universities can soon be autonomous in terms of finance, organization, training, curriculums and issuance of degrees and diplomas, Dung added.

At the meeting, participants also discussed the implementation of such a policy. Professor Dr. Le Vinh Danh, president of Ton Duc Thang University, said the tuition cap should be removed. Tuition fees should be decided by factors such as training quality and demand of learners, he added.

President of Vietnam National University of Hanoi Phung Xuan Nha shared the same view, saying the quality of education and learners’ needs should be used as criteria for setting tuition fees and that the quality of universities should be judged independently and publicly.

According to some university leaders, they have limited professional autonomy in terms of issues like providing new courses and curriculums, so they want more autonomy regarding these matters.

Dung told the Government Office and the Ministry of Education and Training to gather opinions of ministries, agencies and universities presented at the meeting to improve a draft resolution on autonomy for universities before it is discussed at the Government’s regular meeting this month.

According to Dung, the draft resolution needs to pay special attention to personnel, enrollment, new curriculums and scientific research.
SGT/VNN

MALAYSIA:Not guilty, says first academic charged with sedition

Emilia Tan02 September 2014 Issue No:33

Azmi Sharom, a law professor at the University of Malaya, was on 2 September charged with sedition in a court in Kuala Lumpur. The public galleries were packed with academics and students from the university, and other supporters and rights activists. He pleaded not guilty.

Azmi is the first Malaysian academic to be charged under the 1948 Sedition Act, although a number of opposition politicians have faced sedition charges in recent weeks under the law that dates back to the British colonial era.

The professor, who was granted bail during the Tuesday hearing, will appear again before the court in October. He said in a statement later that he would fight the charge, saying it was a blow to academic freedom and freedom of expression.

“I hope reason will prevail,” he told well wishers at the court. Sedition can carry a jail term of up to three years.

Shocking charges

Azmi said he was “shocked” at the charges for comments he made relating to a Malaysian online newspaper on 14 August, on a 2009 crisis in the state government of Perak, describing the events of the time as “legally wrong”.

“My statements were based on established case law and democratic principles. They were given in my capacity as a law lecturer of 24 years standing,” he said.

Academics have been horrified at the charge, which they see as being used to silence anyone who criticises the government.

“If you believe in world-class universities, academics should be allowed to make professional comments. He [Azmi] is from the law faculty. He shouldn't be charged,” Rosli Mahat, vice-president of the University of Malaya academic staff association, told The Malaysian Insider online newspaper.

Rosli, who was at court with many other university staff and students to observe the proceedings, said the charges were “an affront” to the university.

Lau Yi Leong, secretary for national affairs for the Malaysia Youth and Students’ Democratic Movement, said academics were simply expressing their opinions in their professional capacity. Students fear they could be next in the firing line.

“Furthermore, it is undoubtedly clear that, at a time when new students are being enrolled into universities, it is the government’s intention to also warn the new students not to be too keen in applying their knowledge to social, political and economic issues,” Lau said.

Vince Tan, secretary-general of Progressive, University of Malaya – a student group – said in a statement last Tuesday: “Such charges show that the authorities have no regard for academic freedom, when an academician can be punished for commenting on an issue related to his field of study.

“When the intention of the government [is] to repeal a particular legislation, it should no longer be used to prosecute anyone. Such prosecution is also in utter disregard of the intention of the government of the day,” Tan added.

PM promised to repeal the law

Two years ago Prime Minister Najib Razak promised to repeal the 1948 Sedition Act and said it was to be replaced by a new National Harmony Act.

In a statement this week, the prime minister's office reiterated that the act would be repealed and replaced with the National Harmony Bill, which was currently being drafted. No timetable was given.

The Centre for Independent Journalism, or CIJ, added to the criticism, saying the continued use of the Sedition Act “makes a mockery” of the prime minister’s legislative reforms and pledge to repeal the act more than two years ago.

CIJ said in a statement from its directors Sonia Randhawa and Jac SM Kee that “too liberal” a use of the Sedition Act would stunt the function of universities and institutions of learning to the point that they would not be able to function appropriately.

“Restrictions must be necessary and proportionate. To censure legal opinion without demonstrating the threat to national security, public order or public morality is unnecessary and disproportionate,” the statement read.

Some activists believe that the move could backfire on the government and lead to stronger demands to bring forward the repeal of the Sedition Act just as the government previously changed the Internal Security Act that affected students’ political activities and academic freedom.

A government spokesperson said that academics, like other citizens, must adhere to the law.