Friday, December 15, 2006

RM 500 million donation to Cambridge??

I've only just heard the rumour, which says that our beloved government is mulling over a donation of RM 500 million (GBP 72 million) to Cambridge... I went like "WTH??!! What do they plan to get with this money??"... So, let's come up with some theories, which are, likely, wildly wrong... Let our minds wander...

1) Setting up a "M'sia College"
Maybe the money would be used to setup/buyout a "Kolej M'sia"... According to the recent endowment breakdown published by Varsity, the money would qualify this new college to be the 15th richest college here... Incidentally, it'll be even larger than Catz.. Not bad, for a college... Most importantly, the hall should serve food from home... I'm sure that formals in this new college would be a hit among all the asians here... I would certainly eat there every day!!

http://www.varsity.co.uk/news/598/1/

2) Setting up a research institute
The new research centre that I work in, was built at the cost of GBP 15 million plus another initial GBP 8 million in research funding... So, the money would be more than enough to setup a nice building, and fund a lot of research into stuff related to M'sia... Maybe we can do some language, cultural, agricultural, anthropological, political and other research here...

http://www.admin.cam.ac.uk/reporter/2004-05/weekly/6001/16.html

3) Setting up a research exchange
As an extension to idea #2, maybe we can tack on research collaboration with other local M'sian universities... Maybe some researchers from M'sia can spend a year or so over here as part of their research, and vice versa, on some sort of "research exchange" programme... This ties in nicely with the idea of M'sian universities providing the facilities, while foreign ones provides the wealth of knowledge and experience...

http://sybreon.blogspot.com/2006/11/research-in-msia.html

I think that 3 is enough for now... It's almost 3am anyway... Anyway, if this rumour is true and the money is approved, I'm sure that Prof Richard would appreciate the gesture... We all know how hard she's been trying to raise a billion pounds for the 800th anniversary...

PS: In case it's not clear, this blog is not meant to be taken seriously...

1 comment:

Dan said...

maybe they heard about how hard it is for malaysians to host sporting events here and decided to build us a sports stadium :P