Meredith L. Weiss. Student Activism in Malaysia: Crucible, Mirror, Sideshow. Ithaca, NY: Cornell Southeast Asia Program Publications and Singapore: NUS Press, 2011, xi+302p.

Abstract

Student Activism in Malaysia: Crucible, Mirror, Sideshow Meredith L. Weiss Ithaca, NY: Cornell Southeast Asia Program Publications and Singapore: NUS Press, 2011, xi+302p.In April 2012, the amendment of the University and University College Act (UUCA) was approved in the lower house of Parliament in Malaysia. Before the amendment, UUCA had prohibited students from joining political parties and supporting political campaigning and protests. Although the amended law now allows students to engage in political activities outside campus, it is still restrictive because, for example, the law gives each university the power to decide which organizations are allowed for participation except political parties. But what is important here is that the Malaysian government has relaxed the UUCA, the restrictive provisions of which the government had hitherto refused to amend its introduction in 1971. Against this background, the decline of the intellectual quality and the apathy of students in local universities have become increasingly apparent in recent times. The major parts of Student Activism in Malaysia read as an historical narrative, but also give us numerous suggestions and hints concerning current Malaysian politics and society.The concept of is ambiguous, as this book points out. While Weiss defines student as a collective identity and discussions of in this book usually refer to students enrolled in tertiary-level institutions, the status of students is rather confusing since they are expected to be future leaders, students' potential may gamer them respect and cultivate arrogance disproportionate to their age and experience, yet they remain for the moment still subordinates in society (p. 3). On the other hand, Weiss argues that efforts to define activ- ism not as a social movement like others, but as a 'culture', obscure the mechanisms behind that activism: implicit or explicit framing processes, organizational maintenance, and other aspect of micromobilization for collective action (p. 5). Within the context of this book, its main objectives are to explore activism as a distinctive genre of social movement and also examine those political impacts and externalities that influenced activism in Malaysia (p. 3).The underlying focus of this book is activism, but Weiss's perspective is wider. She locates the within a larger environment and examines the relationship between activism and outside political forces, such as political parties and NGOs, and agenda like anticolonialism and socialism. This book consists of seven chapters. Except Chapters 1 and 7, each chapter develops historical narratives starting with World War II until 2010. Following the introductory and theoretical parts of Chapter 1, Weiss examines the pre-independence period (before 1957), analyzing the alliance between Malayan students, radical journalists, and early political parties and how they prepared for independence (p. 25). The first decade after independence from 1957 to 1966 is covered in Chapter 3. Chapter 4 focuses on the period of the heyday of protest from 1967 to 1974, when activism in Malaysia peaked. Students allied with peasants and urban squatters supported the protests among these sectors and also involved themselves in the general elections outside their campuses. However, activism and its environment drastically changed after 1974, following changes in the demographic trend. Weiss notes how prior to 1969 it was Chinese students who accounted for around 70 percent of the Malaysian undergraduate population, while Malays made up less than 30 percent (p. 19). She also notes how by the mid-1970s, those populations had nearly reversed (p. 19). The government tightened control over students and universities with the introduction in 1971 and the amendment in 1974 of the UUCA. Chapter 5 looks at the period of normalized higher education from 1975 to 1998 where new universities and other institutions for higher education proliferated and discusses how campus politics increasingly came to mimic the partisan patterns outside the gate (p. …