Auditor-General’s shows the National Professors Council (NPC) is the epitamy of what's wrong with higher education
Auditor-General’s shows the National Professors Council (NPC) is the epitamy of what's wrong with higher education
The NPC website states its chairperson since 2019 is UKM anthropologist Shamsul Amri Baharuddin while UUM political scientist Mohamed Mustafa Ishak is deputy chairperson.
The NPC is a special organization created by the government to report to the Prime Minister’s Department (PMO) about issues regarding education. The NPC is supposed to have Malaysia’s best intellectual and academic minds in the membership. The NPC is supposed to be a body of wisdom, integrity and spirit of justice.
The National Professors' Council (MPN) has clarified it was independent of the government between May 2018 and January 2022, after the Auditor-General flagged it for misuse of funds between 2019 and 2023 in its latest report. Only in January 2022, that MPN was brought back under the government's purview and received funding from Putrajaya.
The NPC’s service scheme manual only allocates RM400 per month in fixed allowances for senior management. However, the chairperson and deputy chairperson received RM5,000 and RM4,000 per month respectively for a total of RM115,000 for the chairperson and RM92,000 for the deputy chairperson. In addition, the audit found that during the same period, payments of RM3,000 per month for fixed allowances to the NPC president, making a total of RM66,000, were also not approved by the board. RM46,000 and RM16,000 were paid to the NPC president-cum-CEO as well as the chief operating officer respectively from April 2022 to Jan 2024 without the board of trustees’ approval.
The NPA are the nation’s intellectual elite. With the values, ethics, integrity, and honesty shown above, how can Malaysia’s next generation of leaders be any better.
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Soon after 1957, a new chairman of the Overseas Cambridge Examination Syndicate was appointed. All our exams were organised by this CES. At that time we were still taking the Overseas School Certificate exam. What did the chairman do on taking office? Exam questions were being sold esp to tuition centres. At that time there were no photocopy machines. So the questions sold were 'original' ones. Apparently the new chairman ordered a few thousand extra copies which he surreptitiously sold for profit. In the inquiry, he somehow was absolved because he was connected. The lack of integrity was already evident. He was again involved in another issue which involved his integrity when he was a professor in a public university. So being professor doesn't mean anything in Malaysia. Letters before and after a name only matters to Bumis.
Allowances not approved but received should be returned. Better to disband this council ...