Research Centres in the UM

This post is inspired by one of the comments in Tony's post regarding the recognition of degrees from Beijing and Tsinghua universities by Malaysian authorities. The comment was:

"The 'Institute of China Studies' just outside the UM is just an almost empty building for years! I passed the building everyday to work and see almost no cars or inhabitants inside!There are many such CENTRES sitting in the campus doing nothing...just a FORM but no substance"

My impression of many of these centers is that they were set up for political rather than academic reasons. For example, the Institute of China studies was set up for the following reason and this was obtained from its website:

"The setting up of the Institute of China Studies (ICS) was proposed by the present Prime Minister of Malaysia Dato’ Seri Abdullah Ahmad Badawi after his visit to China as the Deputy Prime Minister in September 2003. The Ministry of Higher Education of Malaysia then directed the University of Malaya to prepare a proposal, leading to the establishment of the ICS on 5 December 2003."

In scrolling through the 32 research centers at the UN which can be found here,
I noticed a center call the 'National Antarctic Research Centre (Antarctica)' and that it was established sometime in 2002. I also recalled Dr. Mahathir visiting Antartica before he retired and segments of his own handheld video was made into a National Geographic documentary. When exactly did he visit Antartica? You guess it, 2002.

The following is a 'quick and dirty' way of assesing whether these research centers are 'active' or not. I checked through all 32 research centers on the UM website and tried to locate weblinks for each of these centers. While having its own website is not necessarily a good prediction of research work, it does give an indication about how serious this center is in promoting itself and the work which it is doing.

The UM research center website only produced 3 weblinks to 3 research centers out of 32 (Centre for Biotechnology in Agriculture Research (CeBAR), Centre for Civilisational Dialogue, Institute of China Studies) and the link to the Center for Civilisational Dialogue doesn't work.

For an additional check to see if there are websites for these individual centers which might not be listed in the page I was looking at, I googled these individual centers. I found 4 more centers which had their individual websites - the Clinical Investigation Centre, the Centre for Nanotechnology, Precision and Advanced Materials, the Centre for Research in Applied Electronics and the Centre for Xenobiotic Studies (SUCXes).

In regards to the content / quality of the research highlighted by these websites, I leave it to the better judgement of the experts in these areas.

I also found websites which were under construction for 6 of these centers, all under the Center of Research in the Faculty of Engineering:

The Centre for Emerging Biomedical Technology (CoEBET), the Centre for Energy Sciences, Centre for Innovative Construction Technology (CICT), the Centre for Signal & Image Processing, the Centre for Separation Science and Technology (CSST), and the Centre for Transport Research (CTR).

Which means that out of 32 research centers, only 6 have their own websites which are up and running. In fact, the Institute of China Studies, by its website at least, seems to be the one center which actually does produce some research. It has a bunch of visiting scholars there and the two guys running the show (Dr. Hou Kok Chung and Dr. Yeoh Kok Kheng) have a list of related publications out or in the process of being published.

This just goes to show that we are very good at launching many of these centers with great fanfare (usually with a big name politician or two) but not so good at doing the follow up work which is to conduct ACTUAL RESEARCH! Which reminds me, when exactly is Jeffrey Sachs going to come to Malaysia to take up his position as the first Royal Ungku Aziz chair in Poverty Studies?