In the early 1980s, we at the National Institute for Public Administration (INTAN) hosted Professor Milton J Esman, one of two American professors who came to Malaysia as consultants to the government of Tun Abdul Razak, after the challenges of May 13th 1969, and introduced the concept of “development administration” to Malaysia. Their views, and …
In his book ‘Organisational Theory for Public Administration’, professor of public administration Mike Harmon quotes a real-life story wherein a young five-year-old boy in the US is battered to death by his stepfather. Although most, if not all, of their neighbours had heard of and knew about the wrongdoings, no one spoke up until it …
To me, the word ‘idiocrat’ is my coinage for writing columns in Malaysiakini since about a decade ago. It describes those with power but falsely assume that “such authority alone” can resolve issues within any modern civil society setting; when others are equally smart, ie, we are all more aware as a community. The coinage …
As children we, the Merdeka Generation, all learned the Humpty Dumpty Poem. It was an egg-shaped figure that sat on the wall and one day had a great fall and the refrain is: “all the King’s Horses and all the King’s Men could not put Humpty Dumpty together again!” Why so? The question why, is …
Time headlined a story for their April 3 issue entitled, ‘Is Truth Dead?’ Please see the picture below. This column will focus on ‘The Death of Common Sense’, a book by a former Harvard Law School dean, and reflect on today’s consequences of such a death of both the idea of objective truth and therefore also, …
