The UMNO youth small fry, Dr Adham Baba, stumbled on an earth-shaking discovery: lecturers in local universities poison the minds of undergraduates regularly with ten-minute anti-government homilies. These undergraduates are so dim between the ears, he implies, that they are easily misled. He wants to expose these anti-national lecturers. He does not have the evidence. But in Bolehland you do not need it to run your enemy out of town. He realises he has taken more than he dared. So, now he wants to collect the evidence. He says lectures set aside ten minutes of an hour lecture to attack the government. It was so striking a discovery that even vice-chancellors are grateful beyond relief.

He from Universiti Utara Malaysia, Dato' Ahmad Fawzi Basri, so happy to ferret out lecturers who question, wants undergraduates to tape-record these homilies to help unmask these anti-national rascals. He is derelect in his duties by not unmasking them earlier. But then he is not appointed for his competence or for his understanding of what university education is all about. He, as his colleagues, is UMNO's resident apparatchiks, there to make the universities and colleges safe and quiescent for UMNO. He has failed. He does not know why. So, he is quick to take any simplistic solution offered by UMNO apparatchiks, and rush to prove them right.

He does not understand what universities are for: to think. In Malaysia, it is to close minds, and to make the UMNO-led government and the country perennially proud by singing their praises. But some undergraduates discovered books and ideas and independent thinking that went against the grain. They discussed and thought about the issues of the day not to be anti-government but to think through. The government cracked down hard. The rules in Malaysian universities were no better than in schools. The universities closed the minds of these young men and women. Any who tried to open them is a traitor, as these lecturers, the government insists, are.

Unorthodox minds, in the government's view, upset the national agenda: their challenge to orthodoxy could make Malaysia proud, to use a much desired but increasingly unattainable aim. Only those the government chooses should dare win Nobel Prizes and international recognition, did you not know? But without these unorthodox minds, society would not change. Would Malaysia have got its independence if a few unorthodox Malay politicians decided they would not be dictated by distant London to remove the powers and privileges of their Malay rulers, and raised the flag of revolt. Without that, could Tengku Abdul Rahman have declared independence from Britain on the 31st of August 1957? The Tengku, you would recall, was the son of privilege, a playboy prince, uncle of the present Sultan of Kedah, but it was he who led the move to independence. In the view of his successors, no doubt the British was stupid in not reining him!

But the UMNO-led government wants Orthodoxy enshrined as the national ideal: yours is not to question why. If you must disagree, contain yourself until after graduation, become a politician and then express yourself. But you can still be jailed for being ungrateful. You are, after all, an undergraduate and your job is not to think. But more and more undergraduates do. UMNO does not realise the social compact he had with the Malay is no more. What broke it bears repeating: when the Prime Minister, Dato' Seri Mahathir Mohamed, humiliated his nemesis and deputy prime minister, Dato' Seri Anwar Ibrahim, before destroying him politically. This went against the moral code the Malay holds dear.

The government thinks these moral codes are irrelevant in the Great Man's technocratic vision for the country. It does not matter if that is skewed. He wants it and the nation shall have it. He cannot be challenged. He is Orthodoxy personified. He cannot be challenged. The undergraduates do. Dr Mahathir cannot visit the campuses without a demonstration. The deputy prime minister, Dato' Seri Abdullah Ahmad Badawi, makes political capital out of talking to demonstrating undergraduates objecting to his presence at the UM campus. It does not work.

Recently, in university undergraduate elections, those who opposed the government swept the board despite strenous efforts to prevent them by changing the rules mid-stream. Why did that happen? The government is convinced it is these ten-minute homilies amidst lectures that did the trick. So, the lecturers must be destroyed. I would have thought that these people are so effective that the government would have co-opted them to their ranks. But it could not even if it tried. It has forgotten how.

So, the deputy education minister, Dato' Aziz Shamsuddin, charges into the fray. He has no evidence but he is in convinced what Dr Adham alleged is true. These lecturers are ungrateful that but for the unstinted generosity of the UMNO-led National Front government, they would be hawking kacang putih. "We regret the attitude of lecturers who give political sermons instead of focusing on academics during their working hours." (I do not know what this sentence means, but he should not be challenged, so I shall let it pass. But one thing is clear, he cannot ever be one of the lecturers he berates!).

That is not all. When the Selangor mentri besar, Dato' Seri Mohd Khir Toyo is accused of irregular land dealings, he decides that condoms could only be sold to married couples under prescription. When the Johore mentri besar, Dato' Ghani Othman, is faced with explaining what happened to all those hundreds of millions of missing funds, he wants Malay couples getting married to undergo an AIDS/HIV test. So, when the information minister, Tan Sri Khalil Yaakob, wants the education ministry to investigate these ten-minute homilies when he does not to explain his negligence in allowing a booklet about Malaysia as an Islamic state came to be edited and printed by his ministry and which should have earned them all a free holiday at the government-run hostlery at Kamunting. Those who produced that booklet, and the minister, are as anti-national as UMNO insists these lecturers are. But what is allowed Zeus is disallowed the cow. More so in Bolehland than Ancient Greece.