Letters from

by

Fauziah Ismail

When in Cambridge, never ask where the University is. You will likely not get an answer to the question as there is no one building that represents Cambridge University, one of the oldest universities in the world and one of the largest in the UK.Cambridge University, one of two British elite universities is unlike any other establishments of higher learning in the world. The university is represented by 31 colleges, each autonomous and independent with its own governing body and charter. Established in 1209 to examine and to confer degrees, Cambridge University's reputation for outstanding academic achievement is known worldwide and reflects the intellectual achievement of its students, as well as the world-class original research carried out by the staff of the University and the colleges. These colleges at Cambridge University were established from 1284, principally to teach and house students at all levels.Today, the colleges are mainly concerned with the teaching of their undergraduates and the academic support of both graduate and undergraduate students and of scholars and research workers. The role of the university has also hugely expanded through the provision of facilities such as teaching and research laboratories. The University at present has more than 15,500 full-time students -- over 11,000 undergraduates, and nearly 4,500 graduates, which is about 14 per cent of Cambridge's total population of 110,000. About 15 per cent of the student body is from overseas, coming from over 100 different countries. Because of its high academic reputation, admission to the University is highly competitive.Only about a third of applicants are admitted, and most overseas students already have a good degree from a university in their own country. Out of the 53 UK Prime Ministers to date, 14 attended Cambridge University (26 attended Oxford, two went to other universities while 11 others did not attend universities.) Cambridge University also produces Nobel Prize winners.
One of the users of the University of Cambridge's University Library, or UL in short, is Muhammad Salleh, a director of the Institute of Malay World and Civilisation at the Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia in Bangi.I had met him at the library by chance. He was waiting for a temporary reader's ticket to be issued by the admission officer. While it takes one week to process a reader's ticket ("We are processing some 10,000 students now ... yours will have to wait," an admission officer told an applicant), someone like Muhammad can be give a temporary ticket to enable him to use the facilites at the library.The professor of Malay-Indonesian literature was in Cambridge for a few days to research materials on Malaysia's second prime minister, the late Tun Abdul Razak Hussein."There are some great Malay manuscripts here," Professor Muhammad said, adding "you should go through them while you are here." The library has in its collection some six million books -- from Enid Blyton's which Malaysians grew up reading to those written by literary finesse -- and it gets some one million new books each year. It has materials on Malaysia's Prime Ministers. Looking for a book in this Library may seem a tedious task but with the advent of modern technology called the computer, which Cambridge claimed was developed here in 1949, finding a book is not all that difficult. Through the computer, one is able to trace a book. A student here can access the University Library's Online Catalogue System on the computer at their respective colleges. Through the system, he can find out where the book he wants is located in the library building, whether it is borrowable or if the book has been taken out by another reader. He can also request for the book to be "fetched" by the library staff and he can also indicate when he wants to pick up the book.
But knowledge obtained from textbooks is nothing compared with those gained through experience. Mrs Eirlys Park, an authorised tourist guide with the City of Cambridge, is a living proof of that.
The sixty-something year old Englishwoman, who regularly take visitors through Cambridge's "wonderland", has a treasure of information on the back of her hands, especially those which have not been documented for touristic purposes.
A visitor here can get around by reading the different printed materials from the Tourist Information Centre about the history of the respective colleges while standing in front of it but if he goes on a guided tour with Park, he is sure to get more information out of the materials than anyone else.
"A very famous man from your country studied at St Catharine's College," she said during a tour of the colleges in Cambridge. Rightly so, the late Tunku Abdul Rahman was an undergraduate student at the college, usually referred to as "Catz", in 1922.
An authorised biography written by Tan Sri Mubin Sheppard on the late Tunku Abdul Rahman Putra Al-Haj found at the University Library said that he did two years of law and a final year studying history and graduated with a BA in 1926. His lodging house at 11, Grange Road still stands today.
Taking visitors through one of the back lanes of Cambridge, Park pointed out a quaint pub called the Eagle, which was part of history in the making.
"This was the first place Francis Crick and James D Watson burst into when they discovered the structure of the DNA," she said in front of the pub.
Crick, a biophysicist, and Watson, a geneticist, discovered the structure of the DNA in 1958.
Following the discovery, Crick and Watson -- together with Maurice Wilkins whose X-ray diffraction studies of DNA helped Crick and Watson determine its structure -- shared the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1962.
Visitors will also be shown the area where the first stored-programme computer called Electronic Delay Automatic Calculator was pioneered by computer scientist Maurice Wilkes in 1949.

* These are some of the articles I wrote for Business Times while I was at Cambridge University.

My Report