New UM VC appointed

Hot off the press - Dr. Ghauth Jasmon has been picked as the latest VC of UM. According to the bio page of Unity College International, where he is the current CEO, "Prof Ghauth Jasmon graduated with a First Class Honours Degree in Electrical Engineering in 1979 and the PhD degree in Power Systems Engineering in 1982 from the University of London." Before his current appointment at UCI, he was the president of MMU.

My first thoughts on this appointment is to wonder if the Minister of Higher Education, Khaled Nordin, actually went through a VC selection committee, something which Tok Pa, the former Minister had promised, was to be a permanent committee. Tony has blogged extensively on this issue before including here and here. If this committee was tasked with the job of searching for a replacement for Rafiah Salim, it must have done its work very quietly since we never heard about its work anywhere. My suspicion is that they were probably not consulted at all, if such a committee still exists. This sets a bad precedent for future VC appointments under the current Minister of Higher Education since there is no guarantee that the candidate eventually selected would have gone through a thorough screening process.

This being said, at least the new appointee, Dr. Ghauth Jasmon, has more academic and administrative experience compared to Rafiah Salim. He was fast tracked to become the head of the Electrical Engineering department only 4 years after he obtained his PhD from UOL. He made professor 10 years after he obtained his PhD. He was appointed Deputy VC in 1995, 12 years after he obtained his PhD. (All this was at UM) Clearly a fast riser.

I'm not sure when he was appointed president of MMU but he started working there in 1997 and stepped down in 2007. During this time, he seemed to have overseen a rapid increase in the number of students as well as the building of infrastructure there.

He has both experience in the private as well as public university setting. He knows UM well since he taught there for more than 15 years. He oversaw the establishment and growth of MMU, one of the better homegrown private universities in Malaysia, in my humble opinion. Utilizing these skills, he might be a good candidate to oversee some positive changes at UM.

One possible knock on him is that I couldn't find many publications attributed to him when I did a quick search on google scholar. Perhaps some of our readers who are Electrical Engineers can do a better search on him and enlighten us as to his academic record. I also hope that our readers who graduated from MMU can enlighten us as to his record as President of MMU. From a few blog posts I've read, he seems to be someone who is 'on-the-ball' and pretty responsive to the demands on students.

We'll be keeping an eye out on him I'm sure. And I'm sure that Tony will weigh in on his own thoughts on this appointment as well.