REMEMBERING AND COMPARING THE HISTORY AND ACHIEVEMENTS OF COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY IN NEW YORK CITY

…AND ITS PLACE IN THE LIST OF TOP UNIVERSITIES IN THE WORLD…AND MARA UNIVERSITY OF TECHNOLOGY IN SHAHALAM.

By Mansor bin Puteh

Columbia University in New York City started as King’s College with only eight students in a small building affliated with Church of England, in Upper Manhattan on 31 October, 1754, as a private research university.

It was one of the nine universities that were established before America gained its independence from Britain.

Surprisingly in many ways, halfway around the world, Mara Institute of Technology (MIT) or ITM) or Mara University of Technology (UiTM) as it is known today, have similarities with Columbia that not many are aware of, in that they were meant to serve their respective countries to create expertise in areas that were unknown to the two respective countries in that had yet to become independent from the same colonial powers, Britain.

Surely, many things can be learnt from Columbia, for UiTM to pursue a course that could lead it to become a more internationally prominent and recognizable university.

Columbia’s world ranking is in the top twenty, whereas Mara’s is in the top five hundred.

The differing agendas and approaches the two universities bring dividends to the respective communities each serves.

There are certain issues that need to be tackled and taken advantage of, to ensure UiTM’s future performance in the academic and professional sphere is further enhanced.

It has its first president, Dr. Samuel Johnson, who was also its only instructor!

Whereas UiTM started as RIDA Training Center or ‘Dewan Latihan RIDA’ started in 1956 (Two hundred and two years after Columbia was established) with only fifty students and a handful of instructors until 1965 when it was renamed, Mara College to 1967 when it was again renamed to Mara Institute of Technology till 1999 when it was given the status of a university and named Mara University of Technology that we know of today.

UiTM now has around 170,000 students at its thirteen states and twenty-one autonomous satellite campuses throughout the country, with 17,000 academic and non-academic staff, whereas Columbia has around 30,000 students and four thousand instructors.

Columbia has 9,000 undergraduate students and 20,000 graduate students compared to UiTM today that has 75,000 undergraduate students and 12,000 graduate students.

In the 1960s, Columbia students seized the administration building in protest against the involvement of their country in the protracted Vietnam War that had killed scores of thousands of American forces that aroused and created the Anti-War movement amongst students of other universities throughout the country that in the end forced their government to withdraw their forces in Vietnam.

And in Malaysia, UiTM or ITM students, too, had embarked on the same student activism in 1974, by launching a massive protest that forced the main campus in Shahalam to shutdown.

I was in my first semester at ITM when this happened.

Columbia was established in1754 or two hundred years before I was born, and many years before I finally got to go there as a graduate student in the late 1970s.

Thirty years later, in 1784, it got a new name of Columbia College; and in 1896 it became known as Columbia University, named after the alternative name for the country, after America!

And what a coincidence! Former American President Barack Hussein Obama too was there when I was in my last semester, as an undergraduate student. A photo of him is proudly hung in the Columbia bookstore as it to dispel any notion by some of his distracters that he had never been to the university and it was a lie he had created!

There is no university in Malaysia that had started this small and insignificant with no fanfare whatsoever, much less to later become one of the most prestigious universities in America and the world.

Even UiTM formerly known as Mara Institute of Technology - MIT or ITM – as it was fondly described as then, and emblazoned proudly on many early designs of the university tee-shirts, where I would later enroll to study in the School of Mass Communications majoring in Advertising, was designed for some purpose and schemes for future development and lofty goals which was to provide education, mostly free to Melayu and Bumiputera students who could not make it to the universities the country had then, so they may enter the private sector.

King’s College or Columbia University did not have such goals; only to give the best education to students without expecting them to do no more than what they wanted to achieve as their personal goals and not become part of the national one in America, which no-one knew what it was as the American government then had not been around yet, until a dozen years after it was first established.

RIDA College the precursor of UiTM had more students in its first batch and in better settings and full support from the federal government than King’s College which did not get any funding from the American government then.

It did not aspire to any higher aspirations, but success came in stages and in almost incomprehensible ways, without any plan to trust itself higher than the only ideals that its founders had then when it was first established which was to give the students the best education they deserved and environment that would allow them to pursue their individual aspirations and dreams.

This, however, is not a unique role and goal that Columbia had; all the other universities that were established in America earlier, too, had similar aspirations and goals at developing the talents of its people who were facing uncertainties as the country embarks on their independence campaign from Britain.

Columbia stands unique in that of the eight Ivy League universities, it is located in the largest city in America, and today its campus can be considered to be one of the best, if not the most beautiful university campus not only in the country, but also in the world.

I am not saying this because I was a student of the university; I knew about it long before that happened, as described by some people who had visited the university and the many others so they could make comparison, which I found out later to be not too far-fetched.

But it grew up in size and moved to a permanent campus after the Second World War with money donated by some characters who were involved in some shady businesses then. But this is hardly ever mentioned in its glorious history and development.

The Columbia campus however, because of its location in Manhattan, is small but it has still remained very much as it was when it was first developed.

But it did not stop the university from adding new buildings from some old ones, which I couldn’t help not to notice each time I return to the campus, when I found myself back in the city for whatever reason or no reason at all.

It was one of the first universities to be established in America and before the independence of the country and soon became one of the eight to be described as Ivy League universities, a name that conjures a lot of fantastical allegories and illusions.

As someone who had the opportunity and good fortune to be admitted into one of their graduate programs, I can vouch and make comparisons on how this particular universities could become what it is today, that most of the universities in Malaysia could never achieve, despite it (Columbia) not having done on purpose or deliberately to trust itself to the level that it is at today.

However, as of 2011, Columbia had 125 Pulitzer winners and 39 Oscar winners. This is something that UiTM or any university in Malaysia extremely difficult to beat.

But UiTM still has some accolades in the form of personalities and successful graduates or alumni who have benefited the society in their own special way with no-one who had managed to gain any measure of international success or recognition. And this is what matters the most with the university.