2007 ~ 2012 |
A NEW CAMPUS AND THE BIRTH OF SASS
Malaysian Politics and Civic Engagement
Prof. Joern Dosch
Metamorphosis never stops. We all learn along
the way, regardless of whether we are students or
academic teachers.
100
Many of
my SASS
students
wanted to
quench their
intellectual
thirst but
their interest
went beyond
academia in a
narrow sense.
My SASS journey was a short but very rewarding one
and even now, five years later, I am still benefitting
from all the great moments and experiences on the
Monash Sunway campus – or Monash University
Malaysia (MUM) as it is called today. I joined Monash
in early 2012 as Professor of International Relations
and Deputy Head of SASS (Research) and left some
eighteen months later as Acting Head of SASS. It was
always my plan to stay much longer but this is a story
for another day.
Before coming to Malaysia, I had lectured Asian
Politics and International Relations for almost 12
years at the University of Leeds in the UK where I also
headed the Department of East Asian Studies. For
all of my academic life I had been working mainly on
Southeast Asia and regularly travelled to the region
for short-term stays. However, being finally based in
the region made such a big difference. One of my
areas of specialisation is ASEAN and experiencing the
achievements and challenges of regional integration in
Southeast Asia first-hand from Malaysia was priceless.
Yet, the even more exciting part of my time at MUM
was working and teaching at SASS. It seems slightly
opportunistic to write this to a Monash audience
but I keep mentioning it also to anyone who likes to
listen in Germany, where I now live, and anywhere
else in the world: the degree of collegiality at SASS
was just amazing, something I have seldom, if ever,
experienced elsewhere. Equally impressive: the level
of enthusiasm among many students, from Bachelor
to PhD level, was second to none in my experience of
employment in higher education for a quarter century.
I come back to the enthusiasm part a bit later.
The first big joint project my new colleagues and
I embarked on once I had set foot on the Monash
campus was a book on contemporary Malaysian
politics, which Professor James Chin and I edited.
We called it “Malaysia Post-Mahathir. A Decade of
Change?” and it turned out to be a truly collaborative
effort. All of the School’s academic staff members
and several PhD candidates contributed a chapter
making the book a genuinely multidisciplinary one as it
covered everything from developments in politics and
foreign policy to economics, from gender and religion
to culture and cinema. At almost every university in the
world, university presidents, faculty deans, heads of
school and directors of departments strive for multi-
disciplinarity in research. Many fail but we certainly
succeeded. Now, a few years on, a look at the text
on the back cover makes perhaps even more
interesting reading than in 2015, when the book
was finally published (writing books always takes
much longer than expected):
“Mahathir Mohamad stepped down as Malaysia’s
longest serving prime minister in 2003. Officially he
does not hold any political office, but his view and
influence still prevail … While there are groups in
Malaysian society that would like to see the return
of Mahathirism, others are questioning if Malaysia is
heading in the right direction or if Malaysia should
return to Mahathir-type politics”.