Auditor-General’s shows the National Professors Council (NPC) is the epitome of what's wrong with higher education

Murray Hunter


Auditor-General’s shows the National Professors Council (NPC) is the epitamy epitome of what's wrong with higher education


JUL 04, 2024





Malaysiakini has reported “The National Professors Council (NPC), a government-funded council of professors at Malaysian universities, has been found to have abused its funding, the Auditor-General Department found. This includes paying large allowances totalling RM207,000 to the permanent chairperson and deputy chairperson without ministerial approval. The auditors also found that RM373,516 of NPC funds were used to pay the operations of two companies owned by board of trustee members.”

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.