KUALA TERENGGANU: The Universiti Malaysia Terengganu (UMT) alumni is strongly against the proposed merger with Universiti Sultan Zainal Abidin (UniSZA).
UMT’s former students’ council president Abdul Aziz Mohamed Ridzwan said the alumni have started an online petition on Change.org to rally their members to fight the merger.
He said cost reduction and graduates employability issues, the two reasons said to be behind the proposed merger, hold no water.
“UniSZA and UMT are small universities with small budgets, therefore the savings that could be made by merging them will also be small.
The savings would be more significant if the Higher Education Ministry merged bigger universities, like Universiti Malaya (UM) and the International Islamic University (UIA) as they are much bigger and have annual budgets that are millions of ringgit more than UMT and UniSZA,” he said.
He said UniSZA’s hospital is the biggest ongoing project and whether there will be a merger or not, the government will still need to allocate money towards its completion.
Abdul Aziz, who graduated last year and is currently employed as a deck cadet of a merchant vessel in Singapore said UMT’s reputation as a university with a maritime focus will be lost once there is a name change.
“My Bachelor of Science in Nautical Science and Maritime Transportation degree from UMT was the reason why I was accepted as a deck cadet. The company knew and recognised UMT’s maritime degree programme,” he said.
He said the UMT branding strength will be lost and years of hard work, money and effort will have to be repeated with the new entity of the merged universities.
“It is likely that the merged university will carry Unisza’s name. We have no problems with that but UniSZA has no reputation as a university with a maritime focus.
UniSZA and UMT have been focusing on different fields and it will be a loss to the nation if UMT’s maritime niche be side-lined just for the sake of merging the two universities,” he said.
More than 5,000 people had signed the online petition against the merger and Abdul Aziz said the alumni are aiming to reach their 10,000 signatures soon.
“There is a lot at stake and we hope all UMT alumni will sign the petition. It is not much but we cannot do anything else to fight the proposed merger,” he said.