Dean of Faculty of Accountancy, UiTM visit to ECU, WA

Date: June 5, 2009 (Friday)
Time: 3 - 5 pm
Venue: Building 2, ECU Joondalup

An informal meeting session was held between Prof Ibrahim Kamal, Dean of Faculty of Accountancy, UiTM Malaysia and key staff from ECU's School of Accounting, Finance and Economics. The session was organised by UiTM's Faculty of Accountacy staff that are currenly enrolled in ECU's PhD program in its Joondalup campus.

The ECU staff that were present were, Dr Clive Reynoldson (Head of School), Prof Malcolm Smith (Professor of Accounting), Dr Hadrian G. Djajadikerta (Faculty International Representative) and Dr Zubaidah Ismail (Senior Lecturer). Prof Malcolm, Dr Hadrian and Dr Zubaidah are also supervising/co-supervising these PhD students from UiTM.

The purpose of meeting was to discuss possible future collaboration proposals between these two universities. Prof Ibrahim began by explaining UiTM's vision and mission of achieving a Research University (RU) status. He took the opportunity to introduce ARI, our Faculty's own research insititute, which have been approved as MOHE's Centre of Excellence. He added that UiTM is basically on the right track in achieving a RU status and elaborated on MOHE's requirement to ensure that each university, particularly UiTM, has 60% of its academician having PhD qualifications.

Among the future collaboration proposals suggested by Prof Ibrahim were, PhD twinning program between UiTM and ECU, Undergraduate student exchange, appointment of Visiting Professor and appointment as Editorial Board members for our Faculty's publications, i.e. Malaysian Accounting Review, Journal of Financial Reporting and Accounting and Asia-Pacific Management Accounting Journal.

Dr Clive expressed his views that Malaysian Government was generous when awarding scholarship to academicians pursuing their post-graduate studies overseas. He was astonished upon knowing about various benefits that these public servants are getting of which are not a practice in other countries and Australia particularly.

In replying to Prof Ibrahim suggestions, Dr Clive and other ECU staff have expressed their interests to pursue onto this possible collaboration and believed that it would definitely bring greater benefits to ECU. The next step is to convey this intention to ECU's International Office and to make the necessary arrangement to materialise this matter.

We, the current PhD students are indeed hopeful that the collaboration will become a reality. It will certainly bring greater benefits to UiTM, future Malaysian students and to our beloved Faculty of Accountancy.

Last but not least, I would like to thank to those colleagues (in no particular order) for co-arranging this event: Halil, Rani, Zainun, Sharifah and Rahimah. Thank you very much for your cooperation and endless support.

"UiTM di hatiku..."