KUALA LUMPUR, July 8 — Prime Minister Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim today suggested that Education Minister Fadhlina Sidek maintain the Bumiputera quotas in public universities while opening up more spaces for high-achievers from other communities.
“Yes, I agree that the quotas should be maintained, but we must find another way to give spaces to non-Malay and non-Bumiputera students who are intelligent with good results so that it does not look like they are left out,” he said at a ‘Temu Anwar’ event in Universiti Utara Malaysia, Kedah.
In a video clip of the event posted online by Astro Awani, Anwar emphasised that quotas were meant to help Bumiputera students become competitive as they had previously been few in the engineering and medical faculties of public universities back in the 1960s and 1970s.
However, he said that the weakness of such a system is that it weakens meritocracy.
“There must be a fair balance,” he said, pointing to the affirmative action policy in the United States.
He added that although Malays were among the poorest in the country, the poorest of the poor were often ethnic Indians.
“Our responsibility is to uplift them,” he said.
He then warned against politicising such actions, especially for the state elections on August 12, saying that there were parties who have accused him of forgetting about the Malays.
He was responding to a student of the university who asked about the quotas and its effects on academically gifted non-Malay students.
