UGM marks 54th birthday, pledges bright future

UGM marks 54th birthday, pledges bright future

Sri Wahyuni, The Jakarta Post, Yogyakarta

The country's oldest university, the Gadjah Mada University,
turns 54 this year. On Dec. 20, the university will celebrate its
anniversary by handing out a host of new awards to students,
academics and even non-academic staff members.

Four new awards, for example, will be presented to researchers
at the university for the best intellectual property rights, best
international publication, best collaborative research, and best
applicable research.

Awards will also be given to students for academic
achievement; lecturers who have shown an outstanding commitment
to community-service or the best educational achievement; and
other staff members for the best performance.

Awards play an important role in the management of a
university, they motivate students to increase their knowledge
and to enjoy healthy academic competition. Vice chairman of the
anniversary celebration committee Toni Atyanto Dharoko said that
once a sense of competition was installed at the university,
bigger achievements for the institution as a whole would follow.

The awards presentation, said Toni, was also in line with the
theme of this year's anniversary celebrations: "Strengthening
Brotherhood and Appreciating Achievement."
"The theme is appropriate, especially in unifying the students so
that the development of our academic culture at UGM is
accelerated," Toni said.

For UGM, reaching 54 means two things: The university must
maintain its status as the people's university, while, at the
same time, moving toward becoming a prominent research university
of international repute.

It was just three years ago that UGM became an autonomous
institute of education, along with three other prominent
universities in the country, after previously being state-run.

Change was apparent at all levels of the university's
management. Rather than simply providing educational, research,
and community-service activities, the university took up the
challenge of making research the basis for such activities.
Scientific research, accordingly, became applicable,
collaborative, and multi-/cross-disciplinary.

"This certainly needed appropriate strategic and operational
steps (to implement)," university rector Sofian Effendi said.

Among the steps needed, he said, includes boosting the
research environment at the university. This would involve
improving research facilities, establishing a rewards-awards
system for researchers, increasing research quality and
increasing applicable, collaborative, and multi-disciplinary
research.

However, such steps would certainly require a huge amount of
money to implement, said Sofian.

For example, he said, to improve on-campus Internet access,
the university must spend Rp 6 billion per year.

Sofian however, is optimistic that with its new status as an
autonomous university, UGM will make its way into the top ten
Asian universities by 2020.

Established on Dec. 19, 1949, with only six faculties, UGM
currently has 18 faculties and various post-graduate programs.

Some 6,000 new students are selected annually out of the tens
of thousands of high-school graduates who attend UGM's entrance
test.

Up until August 2003, 134,219 students had graduated from UGM,
consisting of those who graduated from diploma programs (17,358),
under-graduate programs (94,923), post-graduate programs
(21,406), and doctorate programs (532).

With 2,262 lecturers and nearly 60,000 students in various
programs and fields of study, what can the nation say but:

Happy birthday!