EFFORTS by the Higher Education Ministry to attract excellent foreign post-graduate students and offering them jobs as lecturers after graduation  is a very good move. However, the ministry must monitor these foreign students, and their supervisors.

One recent case involved a foreign student who obtained his doctorate degree in engineering from a Malaysian public university even though his research project had been exposed as a fraud. The student from a neighbouring country had been awarded a scholarship and was involved in the development of a lightning rod in 2004 that included the use of a laser device.

While the appearance of the lightning rod was new, its theory of operation was based on a technology, known as the early streamer emission (ESE) technology, that had been discredited by western scientists 10 years earlier.

Although the nature of the laser device was not made public at the early stages of its development, it was finally exposed as a fraud by the student’s supervisor, a senior professor and director of an institute, when he was questioned about it by a lightning expert during a Lightning Location Seminar in Port Dickson in 2007. This was revealed in the post-seminar record made by the host, TNB Research Sdn Bhd.

Before this exposure, the student had been involved with exhibiting the lightning rod with his supervisor in Kuala Lumpur, Germany and Switzerland. The lightning rod won several gold and bronze medals at these exhibitions because the foreign and local judges were not experts in lightning protection and were not aware of the discredited status of the ESE technology or the true nature of the laser device.

Although the invention had been publicly exposed as a scientific fraud, the supervisor and the student were never disciplined by the university authorities, by the Higher Education Ministry or by the Science, Technology and Innovation Ministry which funded the project.

The student managed to get his doctoral degree in engineering from the university but his thesis was not posted on the university’s website like other doctoral theses.

The student was recently recruited by the university as a senior lecturer and posted to the same institute where he had conducted his research.

Although it is commendable that the Higher Education Ministry attracts talented foreign students with scholarships and qualified foreign lecturers with teaching assignments in local institutes, it should reject students shown to be dishonest and lacking in intellectual capacity. It should also reject foreign lecturers who had obtained their doctoral degrees through dubious means.

If this country is to become a magnet for foreign post-graduate students, then the ministry should ensure that there is no hanky-panky research in our public universities and that our post-graduate supervisors are people of high academic standing and integrity. It should also investigate the university’s top management who allowed these dubious activities.

Otherwise our universities may just become degree mills that churn out dubious masters and doctorate degrees to the gullible public.

Source: The Sun – July 15, 2010