Universities crying for help due to a scarcity of research funding

By Chong Beng Lim

It’s disheartening to hear about local universities are crying for financial help (http://www.nst.com.my/news/2016/10/180206/v-c-let-us-charge-students-according-their-means ) while the Prime Minister Najib Razak vehemently asserts that Malaysia’s economy is ahead of South Korea, Iceland and China. 

But it’s more disheartening to read the article about the above issue with some English errors.

In the sentence, “There are serious challenges that forced onto us a lot of shortcomings, but we are striving to make sure that the quality of the teaching and learning process is not comprised.”

I think there was a typing error in the part, “the quality of the teaching and learning process is not comprised.” The word, ‘comprised’ should be changed ‘compromised’.

In the paragraph, “Acknowledging the adverse impact of the reduced “MyBrain” postgraduate research fund on the university’s research students, Wahid said like other universities, UTM was working hard to source for its own funds.”

As a verb, the word ‘source’ is transitive and must be followed by an object. Thus, “…to source for its own funds.” should be amended as “…to source its own funds.”

Perhaps, the writer should source the word ‘source’ properly from the dictionary before writing. 

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