UCAPAN CANSELOR MAJLIS KONVOKESYEN KE 9 UNIVERSITI TEKNOLOGI PETRONAS

UCAPAN CANSELOR MAJLIS KONVOKESYEN KE 9 UNIVERSITI TEKNOLOGI PETRONAS 16 OGOS 2009

Yang Berbahagia Tan Sri Dato Sri Dr Mohd Hassan Marican Pro-Canselor Universiti Teknologi PETRONAS Yang Berbahagia Datuk Ainon Marziah Wahi Pengerusi Lembaga Pengarah Universiti Teknologi PETRONAS Yang Berbahagia Datuk Dr Zainal Abidin Haji Kasim Rektor Universiti Teknologi PETRONAS Ahli-ahli Lembaga Pengarah Universiti Teknologi PETRONAS Ahli-ahli Senat dan Pengurusan Universiti Teknologi PETRONAS Naib-naib Canselor dan wakil-wakil universiti-universiti Tetamu-tetamu jemputan, ibu-ibu, bapa-bapa, tuan-tuan dan puan-puan serta para graduan yang dihormati sekalian Assalamualaikum warahmatullahi wabarakatuh dan salam sejahtera Terlebih dahulu saya ingin mengucap tahniah sekali lagi kepada graduan yang sekarang ini boleh digelarkan sebagai ‘graduate’. I have congratulated every single one of them, that means I have congratulated 511 people. I have also congratulated the award winners very gladly. But now the congratulations are verbal. Now you are going to face life as real people. No longer looking towards your parents for sustenance but you have to work for yourselves now. But even if you work for yourselves I am quite sure you will always remember the people that you owe your success to. Your parents firstly, the university and the members of the academic staff, but more generally to the society in general because without a society that is peaceful and progressive, that is fairly well-developed, there wouldn’t be this opportunity for you to study at a prestigious university like Universiti Teknologi PETRONAS. So while you are glad that you have got through, you must never forget that you owe an obligation, to all these people; society in general, your parents, and of course, the university. Universiti Teknologi PETRONAS I think, is well on the way to becoming the best university in Malaysia. But that will depend on a lot of things. Of course the university itself will strive to provide the best education possible for the students coming to this university. But the students themselves have to work in order to make this university better known and highly respected. There are some universities in the UK for example which has become very well-known because of the way they speak. We talk about the Oxford accent. I am not proposing that you have a PETRONAS accent. But I would certainly suggest that when you leave the university and you work, you will show a certain character that will always be associated with the graduates of this university. What are the things that you can do? You must be, not only people with knowledge, but also with upright character. You will be people who always strive for the best and you will always try to contribute as much as possible to whatever organization that you work in. You should show the highest quality in terms of honour and responsibility. If you do all these things; all the graduates from this university put their minds to achieving these things, it will not be reflected only on you but it will be reflected also to the university so that the university will become a university which produces the best graduates not only in terms of their acquiring knowledge but also in terms of their character, their behaviour, their willingness to work hard and above all in whatever endeavour they enter into, they will be successful. Then, people will recognize you and people will go around and say, “Well, he is from Universiti Teknologi PETRONAS”. That would mean that we have succeeded in contributing towards making this university a first-class university in this country and also it might be ranked as among the top universities of the world. That is not just the ambition of the university. That is not just the ambition of the country. It should also be your ambition as graduates from this university. It is not too difficult to be of good character but we live in a world full of rogues and today we see how the economy of the world has collapsed. The economy has collapsed because people who are very intelligent, who graduated from some of the best universities in some countries have worked out systems of making money for themselves without regard for what happens to others. It is these people who came out with mathematical formulas and other systems in order to make money easily who have brought down the economy of the world. They excel in abusing the systems they work in. For example, in the banking system. They saw opportunities of how to make use of the system used by the bank in order to gain access to huge amounts of fund, to invest these funds, even though these funds are not backed by anything. They know that banks can lend more money than it has, than they have, and they work out a system to borrow the money from the bank and then to invest in rather ‘unsavoury’ kind of investment activities. For example you know that in 1997, the currency traders had sold down the currencies of many countries, including Malaysia. And the result is that they became extremely rich but the people whose currency they played around with became extremely poor. It was not a win-win formula. It was a formula that takes out of other people and leave them very poor. These people have worked out this formula because there are people in the universities, people who have graduated from famous universities, who advocated this way of making money. They do not invest in productive activities. They do not produce anything. They do not create jobs. And yet they made more money than those who start industries and strive to work hard in order to make profits for themselves. What they do of course, is to borrow money from the banks and sell the money so that the value of the money would go down and when the value goes down sufficiently they would buy back the money to deliver to those people who had bought at a higher price. That way they made not millions, but billions of dollars. They made money but others have to lose money. Whole countries can go bankrupt because of their activities, yet these people are not uneducated people. They are highly educated people. They come from some of the best universities but because they were greedy, they studied the system and they decided that there was a way to abuse the system in order to make themselves very rich. But these things cannot last forever. And so it is that today we see the collapse of the whole system and the many people who invested lost all their money. The banks lost money, the insurance companies lost money, the mortgage companies lost money, the hedge funds also lost money and of course the currency traders lost money. Everybody lost money because these people were highly trained, very clever university graduates but they made use of the knowledge that they gain in the university in order to find ways of cheating people basically, of abusing systems, so that they can make money for themselves at the expense of other people. As I said, this kind of activity cannot last forever. It has been going on for decades but eventually when the amount they lost was so big, there was no way for them to cover up and so it is that we have now to face a currency crisis. Now in your life outside of the university, you will come across people like that. People who have a lot of system or formulae in order to make money easily. Of course in this country, we had Mr Pak Man Telo. But he is nothing. He is not university educated, I think. But Mr Maddoff in America, cheated everybody of 50 billion dollars before he was caught. So you can see that it is not just the uneducated people who would be doing all these criminal things but the educated ones also indulge in, well, criminal activities. Except that because they were highly educated, the game they play is also much bigger. Many people are very gullible in this country also. If somebody comes along to them and say “We can change a ten-dollar note into a-hundred-dollar note, they are quite willing to invest in such a thing.” And how many of them, highly educated people who have been cheated because they were greedy, they wanted to make something out of nothing. When you work, always remember that for whatever you earn, you must deliver, in terms of your service, in terms of your ideas, in terms of your management, in terms of contributing towards the success of whatever organization that you are working with. That should be your creed, your character. So that you will never be accused of cheating people. And then people will say, “Well, he is from Universiti Teknologi PETRONAS. That shouldn’t be.” So while you have acquired in this university great knowledge which will help you in your life, help you to earn a better living, you should always remember that you have a name to guard. The name of the university must remain clean all the time. Indeed it must remain a great name so that people will look up to this university and people will scramble to get into this university. Because if they get their children into this university, then of course they are going to benefit, and benefit fully. So I wish you all the very best, congratulations once again, and also congratulations to the parents who have brought you up to this stage and enable you to get a university education at this particular university. I wish you all the best. Thank you. Media coverage:

Speech by Tun Chancellor, 16 August 2009 Speech by Tan Sri Hassan Merican, 16 August 2009 Media Coverage on 16 August 2009 Media Coverage on 17 - 19 August 2009

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