University of Malaya Association of New Youth (UMANY)

UM was previously proud to announce that UM students enjoyed student autonomy and bragged that the organising of the campus elections are completely controlled by its students (CEC). However, it has now become a puppet of the authorities, blindly following policies which were put in place to interfere with campus democracy! Since the change of the Federal Government in 2018, the opportunity for student autonomy to grow arose. For the first time in more than 40 years, the CEC, which is an all-student committee, was established with the full support from UM in order to hold campus elections during the second semester of each academic year. At that time, UM actively supported the reformation and was even willing to clear the obstacles for its students which arose when holding campus elections to show its support and protection for campus democracy. Today, ever since the Ministry of Higher Education under the Perikatan Nasional government started to intervene in matters pertaining to unive...

The Universiti Malaya Campus Election Committee (UMCEC) had previously on two separate accounts, dated 27 June and 10 July respectively, postponed the supposedly annual Universiti Malaya campus election. This indefinite postponement is the result of the university’s Board of Directors (the Board) making things hard for UMCEC upon the intervention of the Ministry of Higher Education (MoHE).  According to sources from UMCEC and the Universiti Malaya Students’ Union (UMSU), the MoHE had given a suggestion to standardise all campus elections in the first academic semester across public universities. A member of MoHE sitting in the Board later directed UMCEC to adhere to the suggestion. Consequently, various university departments started taking orders from the MoHE to suggest delaying the campus election. Suara Siswa UM believes the interference of the MoHE and the UM management in the campus election had overridden the rights of UMCEC in organising the election and infringed the auton...

University of Malaya Campus Election Committee (UMCEC) issued an official statement last night, stating that our campus election could not be held as scheduled in mid-July, due to a proposal from the Ministry of Higher Education. They unreasonably suppress students and deliberately block the democratic process, aiming for gaining and strengthening their control towards university students. It will undoubtedly cause students' previous efforts on restoring campus democracy to waste! According to the CEC statement, the Ministry of Higher Education ordered the election dates in all public universities to be postponed to November, the first semester of the new school year. They unreasonably postpone our campus election to the next semester, which is not only a disrespect for student autonomy but also highlights the fragility of campus democracy under insidious political forces. Campus elections, which should symbolize democracy and fairness, have now been infiltrated and crippled by pol...

The University of Malaya (UM) Campus Election is a major democratic event of UM where all undergraduate students have the right to vote for the new leadership board of the University of Malaya of Students’ Union (UMSU). Every year, the Campus Election Committee (CEC) is the party which is responsible for organising the UM Campus Election, with its committee and members consisting of UM students. At the end of 2018, the first CEC board was formed upon the first reformation of university policies by the Ministry of Education, which came into being due to the efforts of UM student activists. The formation of CEC has conferred UM students the power to organise campus elections on its own, signifying the first step towards restoring student autonomy. The CEC plays an important role in reflecting student autonomy as well as campus democracy. Unlike the campus elections which were controlled by the university management and various political parties prior to 2018, the elections organised by t...