Recruitment Opportunities for Local Varsities

Both Tony and I have highlighted, here and here, that our local universities have expressed the desire to recruit more lecturers from overseas. Many have been skeptical as to why good quality academics would want to come to teach in Malaysian universities which are poorly resourced and vastly underfunded compared to the top universities in the US and to a lesser extent in the UK. Let me propose one reason why academics who have been trained overseas, but more specifically in the US, would want to teach and conduct research in Malaysia - the shoddy treatment which non-American academics have been subjected to by the immigration authorities in the US.

I was alerted to the case of a Stanford Malaysian doctoral student, Rahinah Ibrahim, by a posting on the Malaysia Forum newsgroup. Here's a portion of the newspaper report which highlighted her case:

SAN JOSE, Calif. - Rahinah Ibrahim, a Stanford University doctoral candidate, said she was at San Francisco International Airport last year ready to fly to her homeland of Malaysia for a conference. Then she was told her name was on the government's terrorist no-fly list. Then she was handcuffed and put in the back of a police car. Then she was told it was all a mistake and her name was off the list. But the next day she was told again her name was on the no-fly list.
When she finally got to Malaysia and tried to return to finish her doctorate, she was told the U.S. Embassy had pulled her visa. She hasn't been back since. But she's fighting back from afar.

I know some of the folks at the US Embassy in KL through work and also through my Fulbright scholarship application and they are good people with the good intention of building strong ties between the Malaysian government and the US government but also between Malaysians and Americans more generally. I'm sure they do not welcome negative publicity from such cases like Kak Rahinah's. But I think they are mostly powerless to deal with such cases because the creation of such 'black lists' is in the hands of the Department of Homeland Security of which the Immigration and Naturalization Services (INS) department is part of.

I'm sure that Kak Rahinah's case is not the first time (or the last time) something like this has happend to an academic, especially one who happens to be Muslim and / or is from a Muslim country. When I first came to the US on my J1 i.e. Fulbright sponsored visa, I was asked to go and wait in a holding room together with a bunch of other people who were suspected of wanting to illegally immigrate to the US. I wasn't given any indication how long the wait was going to be (I almost missed by connecting flight because of this) and was made to feel like an illegal immigrant (even though I was being sponsored by a US-federal government scholarship).

In 2004, renowned Islamic scholar Tariq Ramadan, who was appointed to the position of Professor of Islamic Studies at Notre Dame, had his work visa rejected under the guise of the US Patriot Act. He subsequently resigned from his position at Notre Dame.

I'm sure that there have been many other reputable scholars in various fields who have had their work visa to the US rejected because of 'security' reasons. I know that this kind of uncertainty has dissuaded some students from countries like China to apply to do their undergraduate and graduate studies in the US and many of then have subsequently applied to go to countries like the UK and Australia instead.

I'm not criticizing the role of the US universities in these kinds of episodes. Indeed, many of the US universities are working hard to ensure a more open-minded visa policy for scholars and students so that they can continue to attract the best brains from all over the world. The Department of Homeland Security obviously has other priorities in mind when it comes to dealing with the same set of scholars and potential students.

Here is an opportunity for Malaysian universities to step in. They can step up their recruitment efforts among Malaysian PhD students in the US who have received this kind of shoddy treatment in the past and are fearful of future backlashes against citizens from Muslim countries. They can also step up their recruitment efforts among the bright non-Malaysian academics in the US or in other Western countries who feel that Muslims are somehow second class citizens and / or have been subjected to mistreatment from the authorities in these countries.

I'm sure that there are very bright scholars out there (especially here in the US) who would consider coming to teach in Malaysia because of fears of alientation in the US and in other Western countries. Here's where Malaysia has some comparative advantage. These scholars don't necessarily have to be of the 'Anglo-Saxon stock'. They could be from India or the Middle East or second and third generation immigrants living in Europe, Australia and / or the US.

The first challenge is to attract these scholars (Malaysian and non-Malaysian) to come (or come back) to our shores. The second challenge is to retain them within the system. The first challenge might not be that difficult to overcome, given the proper incentives. It is the second challenge that requires longer term and structurally more painful changes to overcome.