Quick Editorial Note

Hey guys,

Just a quick editorial note as well as a reflection of the events of the past 2 months.

The furore over the Universiti Malaya (UM) plunge in the Times Higher Education Supplement rankings this year has created record amounts of traffic to this blog. I'm sure if you trawl through the archives here, you'll find sufficient articles to keep you occupied reading for hours! However, the focus on the rankings issue have probably diverted attention of the writers from other equally important (or possibly more so) education issues such as the students' rights and campus elections, which we have hardly blogged about (it will come!).

Over the last month, the interest in the UM debacle begins to taper off, and the Squatgate crisis stormed over the entire (well, almost) blogosphere. We have taken the liberty to take a breather on the issues around UM, lest it becomes stale, while catching up on other topics of note. Our education system is afterall, not just "UM" :-). However, you can be assured that both Kian Ming and myself have continued to research on the state of UM and other public institutes of higher learning, and will write about these issues when the appropriate time arises. This will ensure that the relevant authorities to continue to remain on their toes, in the task to provide educational excellence in Malaysia.

Partly due to the increased traffic however, this blog has begun to attract certain types of readers to the blog. You would occasionally find comments which have been deleted by the us in our posts, but these were largely hate-posts with undisputed racially "seditious" comments. We have practised a rather liberal policy of permitting heavily biased criticism which sometimes displays on the writers own skewed racial orientation. This is also to prevent accusations of bias and intolerance of opinions (there are quite a few against the authors here :-)) if we were to delete these messages indiscrimately.

However, of late, we find that there were quite a few long-winded racially biased (but not "extreme") rants which were just replicated and posted repeatedly on various entries on this blog, under a few rotated pseudonyms (i.e., 2-3 individuals using some 7-8 "names"). These "comments" were made irrespective of the topic of our entries, and they were just ranting for the sake of ranting. For example, the topic of the rants will always be on "NEP" or "migration", even if I'm talking about "kindergarten classes". They have now become some form of irritant, not just to the authors of this blog, but also to quite a few readers who have kindly written in to express their frustration.

Hence we have made the decision to exercise our editorial rights and powers to delete all posts which have already been posted on this blog in some earlier posts. Therefore, you might just find a few more deleted comment entries on this blog. I hope that the readers of this blog will be happy with this move, and it'll make the site a friendlier place to be. :-)

I've already spent a couple of hours identifying some of these repeat comments in the past, and deleted them off the site. We'll see how this extra moderating hassle works, and hopefully, we'll see less of the silly rants in the future. Thanks for reading and have a good holiday season!