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!