According to the Malaysian Star on Friday 12th November,
"Ministry deputy director-general (private higher education institutions) Datin Dr Siti Hamisah Tapsir confirmed that operations would continue at Fazley Inter national College, which had around 380 students. Dr Siti Hamisah said that a ministry taskforce investigated the college on Wednesday and found no irregularities. She added that visits by Britain’s Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education and the Malaysian Qualifications Agency were satisfactory".
So it would seem, from this report, that the Malaysian authorities are satisfied with the quality of the courses being run within their own country at Fazley College.
However, if this information is correct, did the Welsh Minister for Education know about this status when he said yesterday that "a serious systemic failure in both the validation processes and quality control has occurred”?
Given the high priority that he is giving this story, have any of his civil servants been in regular contact with the Malaysian authorities over their investigation into Fazley?
More relevantly, and in the interest of impartial reporting, why didn't the BBC report the results of this investigation by the Malaysian authorities five days ago?
Comments
In the absence of any balanced reporting from the BBC, the blogosphere is only place where you can get the opposite view to their story.
The BBC programme was weak and there are real questions over why the Minister has taken it so seriously.
Some have suggested to me that this is part of a grand plan to reorganise higher education in Wales – get rid of the University of Wales and you get rid of any obstacles to reorganisation.
Whether that is true or not may eventually come out in the wash but there is the impression of a ‘pact’ between the BBC and Cardiff Bay over this strory where there is little sense of what is actually happening but plenty of claims and allegations.
A number of questions arise from your response to Valleys Mam and this post, and the answers could shed light on what is a murky position.
Has the Minister and/or the University of Wales contacted the Malaysian authorities over their investigation into Fazley? Has the Minister seen the reports from the QAA into Fazley College and the recent institutional review of the University of Wales? Did the Minister contact the University of Wales at any time prior to or after the programme was published by the BBC?
If the answer is no to any of these questions, then there is a serious breakdown in communications between WAG and the University that has led to this situation.
But there also remains the question of whether UW knew about the qualifications of the director of Fazley College? If we look the accusations from the Minister, he states in the Western Mail that “of concern is the suggestion in the programme that, in an inspection of the university’s franchise of the Malaysian college, the Quality Assurance Agency had failed to check the validity of the degrees claimed by the director of the institute.”
Yet, in the BBC report, the QAA states “that the QAA's updated code of practice contained "clear advice" on the care with which universities needed to choose partners. This update, in October 2009, advises institutions to look at the ownership and governance of partner institutions”. Therefore, as the University's relationship with Fazley started before the QAA's changes to their regulations to consider the management of the colleges where validated courses are offered, the question is whether the University of Wales should have gone beyond what the QAA instructed them to do. As stated, the Malaysian authorities don’t give a fig about the ownership of these colleges, only the academic standards within, and there is no doubt over their stance on this.
The QAA has also given Fazley College a clean bill of health for the quality of its courses. Did the University also get a similar result during the recent institutional review? You hint at this which explains the political attack on the QAA.
If Leighton Andrews believes that there remains doubt over the actual quality of the courses, then he should make the accusation directly about Fazley. I would be intrigued to see what the legal ramifications would be and how the Foreign Office would react.
There is now a stink that is in danger of pervading the whole of the university sector in Wales, but that stink comes from Cardiff Bay and the BBC in Llandaff.
As a graduate of the University of Wales, I am of the opinion that the body must now takes its time to fully refute every single allegation from the Minister and restore its reputation - if it does not, then it does not deserve to survive.
I did feel compelled to write because I know that the facts are not being reported properly.
Sitting here in MIT in between meetings makes the situation seem so distant but, at the same time, the work we are developing here could be of real importance to Wales in the future.
Is any other university in Wales doing the same?
Dylan is currently visiting MIT's campus. One of the reasons why MIT is so successful and so rich is because it encourages its research groups to patent their discoveries from which everyone involved benefits, MIT, the inventors and ultimately the commercial companies that commercialise MIT patented inventions.
In Wales the universities give most of their IP away to the extent that foreign competitors benefit. I'm not sure if Cardiff University is part of the University of Wales, but its President is highly regarded (and for good reason) in the stem cell field to the extent he was awarded the Nobel Prize - yet he doesn't have a single meaningful active patent to his name. How so when he’s the father of stem cells?
Yet the University of Wales has provided resources through POWIS to Martin's new company (Cell Therapy Ltd, with Dr. Ajan Reginald) even though Cell Therapy doesn't have any meaningful patents to its name and even so has made some very big claims about developing a new stem cell based product for treating heart patients with scared tissue (when such treatments are already rolled out across the world and achieved notable success in treating scared heart tissue).
MIT has over 9,000% more patents in the largest market in the world than any university in Wales. Yet we hear very little about this from Dylan. Why?
Why no mention of how bad Swansea university is at getting registered patents in the world’s largest market for patented products even though Swansea has a supercomputer in its ILS (Institute of Life Sciences). In contrast a small research group at MIT has filed more patents using simpler computer technology/simulations (on faster battery recharging) – they published their findings and also filed a patent!
As I have noted, it would seem that the BBC has been highly selective in its approach to the programme. Take for example, the criticisms of the so-called "illegal" Accademia Italiana Fashion and Design Institute.
If, as the BBC claim, this institute is illegal, then why is it is still active and, more importantly, holding a fashion show in Phuket later this month? It is also worth noting what the BBC carefully omitted about the Institute – go to the website and see who endorses the Institute (but that wouldn’t have made such a good programme)
www.aithai.co.th