What did AUKU teach students to become?

The question behind campus politics

When people discuss Malaysia's Universities and University Colleges Act (AUKU), the conversation usually begins with politics.

These questions matter, but I think they are only the visible part of a much larger question.

What kind of person does a university system teach a student to become?

University as a place to practise responsibility

A university is not only a place where people collect knowledge for a career.

It is one of the first institutions in which young adults are expected to make decisions without their families deciding everything for them.

They meet people who disagree with them, organise with strangers, manage limited resources and discover that a good intention can still produce a poor outcome.

This is where responsibility can become more than a word in a textbook.

It becomes something that has to be practised.

The lesson of permission

That is why I wonder whether the greatest cost of AUKU was ever limited to the number of demonstrations that did or did not take place.

The deeper cost may be the lesson carried by a system built around permission.

• Before speaking, ask whether it is allowed.
• Before organising, ask whether it is safe for the institution.
• Before disagreeing, calculate whether the disagreement will be treated as misconduct.

After enough repetition, caution no longer feels like a rule imposed from outside.

It begins to feel like maturity.

A law changes faster than a culture

To be clear, AUKU has never been one unchanging law.

The original 1971 Act, the major 1975 amendment and the later amendments did not impose exactly the same controls.

Some restrictions were removed, political participation was widened and the 2024 amendment gave student bodies more room to manage funds while changing the disciplinary structure.

It would be dishonest to describe a student in 2026 as living under precisely the same legal position as a student in 1975.

It would also be too easy to blame every weakness in university life on one Act.

The expansion of higher education, employment pressure, funding systems, administrative culture, social media and changing student priorities all matter.

Many students are cautious because they are worried about grades, debt and employment, not because they have read section 15.

But laws do more than punish individual acts.

Over decades, they shape the institutions that interpret risk and the administrators who learn what they are expected to prevent.

A restriction can disappear from an Act while the habit created around it remains inside procedures, offices and expectations.

This is why legal liberalisation does not always immediately produce a confident student culture.

Agency requires somewhere to practise

Students need somewhere to practise agency before society demands that they exercise it wisely.

• They need to choose representatives and then discover whether those representatives actually listen.
• They need to manage money, disclose it and answer when it is poorly spent.
• They need to organise a difficult discussion, protect participants and respond when the event does not go as planned.
• They need the freedom to be wrong without every mistake becoming proof that students cannot be trusted.

Rules with responsibility

This does not mean a campus should have no rules.

Universities have a duty to protect safety, prevent harassment, maintain academic continuity and keep public money accountable.

Political parties should not be allowed to capture a campus merely by calling that capture student freedom.

The alternative to over-control is not the absence of responsibility.

It is responsibility with real authority, clear limits, fair process and consequences that can be appealed.

A system that gives students no meaningful decisions cannot be surprised when they graduate without much experience of decision-making.

A system that treats disagreement mainly as a threat cannot be surprised when difficult conversations become either silent or explosive.

A system that manages every failure for students may keep the campus orderly, but it also removes the experience from which judgment grows.

The philosophy that survives the law

This is where AUKU matters beyond AUKU.

The law helped establish a philosophy of the university in which the institution was expected to control students before students could be expected to control themselves.

That philosophy can survive even after individual sections are amended.

What a replacement must answer

So the current repeal discussion should not stop at asking which restrictions will be deleted.

It should ask what developmental role a university is supposed to play.

• Will the replacement system trust students with organisations, money and disagreement while requiring transparency and due process?
• Will university leaders have enough autonomy to defend academic judgment, and enough accountability to avoid becoming unanswerable authorities themselves?
• Will students be treated as temporary risks to be managed, or as citizens learning how to carry power?

If the new law changes the name but preserves the same instincts, the most important lesson may remain unchanged.

Students will continue learning that good behaviour means staying within boundaries drawn by someone else.

What university should teach

I think a university should teach something more demanding.

It should teach that freedom is inseparable from explanation, that authority must answer questions and that participation includes responsibility for what follows.

A society cannot wait until people graduate and then suddenly expect them to become thoughtful citizens.

Citizenship, like every other serious ability, needs somewhere to be practised.

If university is not one of those places, we should ask where that practice is supposed to happen.