Academia-Industry Collaboration: Report on the PR Seminar and a Proposal for a Permanent Forum

The recent seminar, "Bridging Academia and Industry for the Future of Communications," organised by the Public Relations Practitioners Society of Malaysia, marks an important milestone in academia-industry collaboration.

The organisers deserve high praise for their timely initiative in establishing a platform for a dialogue that is critical to higher education in our times. Bringing together regulatory bodies, corporate agencies, and higher educational institutions created a forum for rare and much-needed discourse between the two sectors. However, the dialogue also brought to light deep-seated frustrations and misunderstandings on both sides. It was clear that to bridge the gap between higher education and the modern workplace, there has to be a clear analysis of these friction points and a need to move past mutual blame towards structured, shared solutions.

The Academic Dilemma: Digital Disruption and Structural Rigidities

During the panel discussions and the culminating Roundtable, educators spoke candidly about the shifting dynamics within higher education lecture halls. A primary frustration centred on a perceived decline in student engagement, with educators noting that many students lean toward shortcuts—particularly by utilising generative AI platforms to compile essays and term papers. Over-reliance on AI directly causes cognitive offloading, where students bypass the mental "struggle" necessary to build strong neural pathways for problem-solving and critical thinking. When students use AI to generate immediate answers rather than reasoning through a problem, they transition from active learners to passive consumers.

Furthermore, the seminar highlighted a consensus among academics that the traditional, multi-year university degree structure requires urgent modernisation. The closures of higher educational institutions brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic showed that quality education is no longer confined to physical campuses. To match this environment, many educators advocated for a regulated move towards flexible, career-focused micro-credentials. These short courses allow individuals to master specialised market skills dynamically.

However, academics rightly pointed out that their agility in designing courses is heavily hampered by the prevailing higher education regulatory structure. The rigid quality standards and lengthy approval timelines enforced by the Malaysian Qualifications Agency (MQA) mean that by the time a dynamic communication syllabus is officially accredited, the digital tools and industry realities it covers have already evolved. This regulatory lag forces courses into a uniform template, inadvertently limiting institutional innovation and worsening the challenge of maintaining industry relevance. Durability rather than relevance is the order of play.

The Industry Grievance: The "Discipline" and Work-Life Debate

On the other side of the divide, corporate representatives expressed ongoing frustration regarding the qualities of recent graduate recruits. A common, repeated grievance across the room was a perceived shift in professional commitment, with older executives noting that younger appointees increasingly prioritise a strict "work-life balance" over a total dedication to corporate hours. Within the seminar, this was frequently interpreted as a lack of fundamental workplace discipline—a deficit that many speakers emotionally attributed to changing family dynamics and a decline in traditional, authoritative parental discipline.

While these frustrations are understandable from an employer/management standpoint, the applause from a section of the audience for past authoritarian structures, including the use of the cane, reveals a profound intergenerational misunderstanding. Neither the modern university nor the contemporary corporate workplace fully grasps how the digital landscape has fundamentally altered human life and labour, or how work and the workplace are still rooted in the transitions triggered by the Industrial Revolution. These transitions are tied to physical presence, rigid hierarchy, and unquestioning compliance.

Insisting on a work-life balance is not a sign of laziness; it is a rational, highly adapted response to a hyper-connected economy. Unlike previous generations whose work permanently ended the moment they stepped out of the office, modern digital communication practitioners are tethered to their workplaces 24/7 via smartphones, Slack, and endless algorithmic notification loops. They are expected to monitor live viral feeds and manage reputational risks at any hour. Protecting personal boundaries is an act of cognitive survival, not a lack of discipline. Furthermore, in an era of zero job security and shifting corporate layouts, young professionals view career progression as a flexible network rather than a lifetime contract of blind obedience.

Issues Not Raised: Structural Blind spots and Student Agency

While the seminar dedicated significant time to the behaviour of the younger generation, it was mostly silent on the systemic crises actively reshaping the Malaysian media landscape. These critical matters were only raised briefly by a single participant from the floor, leaving a profound void in the agenda. Specifically, the seminar failed to address how the communications industry should handle volatile, identity-driven crises that have recently held major businesses hostage. The "Allah Socks" controversy, viral geopolitical boycotts targeting established franchises like McDonald's and Starbucks, and highly polarized disputes surrounding the display of the national flag were all accelerated through decentralised social media networks. These are not standard corporate public relations issues; they are explosive intersections of domestic ethnic politics and global sentiments where traditional corporate crisis management handbooks are entirely defenceless. By omitting these live-fire challenges, the seminar paradoxically avoided discussing the exact environments where future graduates will be tested.

The other glaring omission on the agenda was the complete absence of the student voice in resolving the industry-academia alignment gap. Throughout the day, students were talked about, but never talked with. They were treated purely as passive products of a pipeline rather than active stakeholders in their own education. Forward-thinking global institutions, such as the University of Cambridge, have long recognised that student-led governance and participatory curriculum design are essential for institutional resilience. Allowing students a structured, collaborative seat at the table ensures that curriculum updates reflect the lived digital realities of the younger generation. By systematically excluding student agency from the conversation, both academia and industry are ignoring the very insights needed to fix the alignment gap.

The Solution: A Permanent Forum for Industry-Academia Dialogue

If academia continues to blame students for using modern tools, and industry continues to blame families for a lack of corporate submission, both sectors will guarantee their own obsolescence. The solution cannot be resolved through once-a-year seminars or static, bureaucratic Industry Advisory Panels that simply tick an MQA compliance box.

What is needed is the establishment of a Permanent Forum for Industry-Academia Dialogue.

This proposed council, preferably with statutory authority, would function as a formal conduit operating outside rigid bureaucratic hierarchies. Crucially, the framework must allow either sector the autonomous right to call an immediate dialogue whenever a major market disruption occurs.

• When the Industry Identifies a Capability Gap: If corporate agencies find that graduates lack advanced data analytics skills, legal literacy regarding greenwashing, or real-time crisis management capabilities, they can instantly trigger a forum session to co-design micro-credentials with university deans.
• When Academia Identifies a Structural Bottleneck: If educators need to test an agile, unapproved course structure within the live-fire sandbox of a corporate agency, they can use the forum to establish credit-bearing, immediate internship pilots without waiting for years of external regulatory paperwork.
• When Student Agency Drives Innovation: Drawing inspiration from global academic benchmarks, the forum will establish a Student Advisory Council. This allows students to pitch directly to industry heads and university deans, turning the generation that natively understands technology trends from passive consumers into active co-designers of their own courses of study.

By establishing this continuous, balanced feedback loop, the education-to-employment continuum will be structurally enriched. Moving past mutual blame will allow both sectors to deeply comprehend each other's parameters, limitations, and operational realities. Ultimately, this framework challenges us to stop managing higher education as an outdated factory assembly line and start cultivating it as a highly adaptive, shared ecosystem.

The seminar was held on 18 June 2026 at the IACT College.

Car Slaves

 

Sitting in the middle of the recent Hari Raya traffic jam, I remember an old cartoon showing a Martian peering into a telescope directed at Earth. He says to his companion, 'The planet Earth is populated by beings that move on wheels. They breed little two-legged creatures to guard, clean and move them. These smaller creatures live their lives around the wheeled beings and are slaves to them.

Staring into a darkness lit with brake lights of different shapes, I started thinking how completely accurate the Martian description was. We have become slaves to the car which dictates our every move.  The car decides when to leave the house, how long to suffer on the road, which toll to avoid, and when to refill our Touch ’n Go cards. If we do not own a four-wheeled being, we summon one with a tap on a phone, as if cars have become a new species of domesticated household pet, obedient, responsive, and always on call.

But how did we get here?

Post-independent prosperity brought two magical facilities of modern life: the housing loan and the car loan. Together, they promised the Malaysian dream of owning a house and a car. The small repayments meant we quietly transferred our financial freedom to the banks for fifteen or more years. We thought we owned these amenities, when in truth, the banks owned us. The car in the porch was not merely a convenience. It was debt on wheels.

But before the banks claimed us, we first claimed the car as something almost sacred. A family’s new car was treated with the reverence reserved for a newborn child. Before it even reached home, it had to be blessed. Hindu owners took it to the temple for a special archanai, where holy water was sprinkled, sandalwood paste applied, and lemons sacrificed beneath the tyres. Catholic and Anglican families drove theirs to church for a prayer and a generous sprinkling of holy water. Malay Muslim families held a doa selamat at home or at the surau. Buddhist monks tied yellow strings to rear-view mirrors. Sikh families offered an ardaas at the gurdwara. Chinese families welcomed their new vehicle with incense, oranges, and auspicious rituals. An idol or symbol was a permanent occupant of the vehicle.

The car emerged spiritually fortified, followed by a ritual every morning, when it was washed and cleaned, if not by the owner, by the maid standing on a stool to reach the roof of the car.

And like any family member, the car had its rites of passage. First came the newborn blessings. Then the wedding years, when it was dressed up with ribbons, flowers, and a “Just Married” sign. After that came the school‑bus years, when the car became a mobile cafeteria, library, counselling centre, and a repository for lost toys and stationery. And finally, the last rite of passage: the funeral convoy, where the car that once carried us everywhere, now accompanies us on our final journey. The car quietly witnesses our entire life cycle, patiently waiting in the porch like a loyal family member who never quite learned to talk but always knew where we needed to go.

Early houses had no porches or garages. So, we invented the makeshift garage: four poles holding a roof of zinc sheets. By the 70s, housing developers surrendered and built proper car porches, even for the smallest terraced houses. These became social spaces that became places to read newspapers, dry clothes, play games, and occasionally park the car.

But today, the car connects us to something far less innocent. The petrol that keeps it alive comes from regions where wars are fought, and civilians live under drones and airstrikes. The quiet sedan sitting in the porch is linked by an invisible pipeline to deserts where people are bombed for the very resource that keeps its engines running. The car that once symbolised our independence now reminds us of our dependence on banks, on oil, on global markets, on conflicts we will never see but cannot escape.

And that is the final irony: in domesticating the car, we have allowed the car to completely colonise us. It rules our schedules, shapes our cities, empties our wallets, and ties us to distant wars.

And yet, as the jam finally begins to move, I realise the car is still our companion; flawed, demanding, and occasionally exasperating, but always ready to carry us home.

Clocks, Calendars and the Panchangam

 

There were clocks everywhere in the house, but none showed the correct time after the old man died. The clocks had been under his care. He wound those that needed winding and changed the batteries of the rest. Most hung within his reach, and for those he could not reach, he had a small stool on which, even when frail with age, he climbed to tend to them.

Time dictated the old man’s life. If the clocks reminded him of the hour, the Hindu calendar he bought every year from a shop in Scott Road in Brickfields, reminded him of time’s location in the day, the month and the year. The Panchangam, which arrived annually by post from India with a declaration it was cleared by Customs, informed him of cosmic time, mapped against the movements of stars and planets.

For him, a day was not just hours of light and darkness. Each hour was shaped by celestial movements visible only in the Panchangam. Its pages divided time according to its terrestrial influence. There were good periods and bad periods, and he managed the affairs of his family according to these times. He was the conductor of their collective movements. “Not now,” he would say, looking up from the curled pages of the almanac. “Wait until 10:30. The Kalam is not right.”

And his children, raised under his authority, waited. They accepted his injunctions not merely out of obedience but out of an understanding that forces existed beyond their knowledge. If they must not walk into the rain without an umbrella, there must also be reasons for not stepping out at a certain hour that their father understood. If he said the haircut must happen on a Tuesday or a journey must begin before the sun hit a certain angle, they adjusted their lives to fit the cosmic slot he identified.

But as time progressed, the Panchangam began to lose its grip. Life was no longer shaped by celestial rhythms but by the schedules imposed by the state—bus and train timetables, office hours, school bells, payment deadlines, and the fixed times of public events. Time was no longer something to be interpreted; it was something to be obeyed. When it came to knowledge, no one turned to the Panchangam anymore, nor to books or a teacher’s notes. It was everywhere now, scattered into the digital ether. Turn on a computer, type a few words, and a hundred responses appeared, maybe thousands.

The children of his children practised a form of polite resistance. They smiled and nodded when he warned them of an inauspicious hour, then quietly checked their wristwatches, calculating whether they could leave just early enough to beat the traffic but late enough to satisfy his ritual. They moved between two worlds: the ancient rhythms of the Panchangam and the frantic, linear demands of English‑medium schools, which started and ended on fixed times unaltered by anything the Panchangam said.

By the time the great‑grandchildren arrived, the resistance had turned into a scoff. To them, time was a digital print on a smartphone that was flat, soulless, indifferent. They were educated according to prescribed curricula that made no mention of the Panchangam and lived for holidays gazetted by the government and not decided by the phases of the moon. A “good time” was a Friday night at the mall, regardless of where the planets sat in the heavens.

As the years pressed on, the transformations in the lives of the old man’s family came not from changes predicted in the Panchangam but from the way life was ordered by employment, holidays and the mundane timetables of buses and trains. We are now untethered from time beyond the clock and calendar. Retirement, moving from government quarters to their own homes, the incessant need to renovate their abode, the upgrading of their cars and the pressure to educate the young through schools and universities ordered their lives. There was also the inevitable but quiet greying of the hair. These were changes dictated by biology and economics and not by any grander cosmic order. We were merely aging in a line, moving further away from the ancestral script.

Then came the cancer.

To the doctors, the tumour in the old man’s pancreas was not foretold by any almanac but revealed by blood tests and x‑rays showing cells that no longer obeyed the body’s script. They spoke of prognosis, malignancy and palliative care, mapping out a timeline of inevitable decline. They looked at their charts and saw a man running out of time.

But the old man was looking at a different map.

While the clocks ticked on the walls, he spent his final weeks on the edge of the bed, his frail fingers marking dates on the Panchangam. He drew a red circle around two dates, thirty-five days apart. As the family learnt after his death, the first was an inauspicious day, the day he was diagnosed with the disease. The other was the day he died, an auspicious day according to the Panchangam.

When the end came, it was a quiet rebellion against every medical textbook. There was no gasping for air, no thrashing against the predicted pain. He didn’t die according to the doctor’s timeline; he died according to his own. He had seen his location in the cosmos, found the right Tithi, and simply let go.

He left the family with a peace that made the doctor’s predictions irrelevant. While they were busy measuring time in seconds and minutes, he had been living in a version of time that foretold how he would live and die.

Now, with the old man gone, the clocks have surrendered. They no longer need to be wound because no one is worried about the “quality” of the hour. We are “educated,” we are “global,” and we are utterly lost. We know exactly what time it is, but we no longer have any idea where we are in the cosmos.