Bigwig’s visit

I forgot to mention yesterday that the Prime Minister of Malaysia, Datuk Seri Abdullah Ahmad Badawi, made a visit to M’s and my place of work, Curtin University of Technology! He received an Honorary Doctorate from the university.

Obviously I don’t have a journalistic bone in my body. Early last week we were told about his trip, and I considered giving you all a scoop but it all seemed a bit hush-hush (for a few days there was nothing in the university’s media releases as far as I could see), and I didn’t know whether it was a good idea to blog it then – would I have been violating the confidentiality principle? Could I have been dooced? And then I got really busy and forgot all about it.

It was bad timing of behalf of Pak Lah, really, because yesterday was Guild Day, right in the middle of O Week. Guild Day is when the student guild arranges all sorts of amusements and organises all the student clubs and various university services and so forth to come along and provide information to new students – even the library has a stall. It’s like a fair and campus just swarms with wide-eyed school-leavers. Most staff were pretty preoccupied with getting the new students orientated and enrolled and so forth and didn’t manage to go and welcome such an esteemed visitor. I would have loved to have gone but I was in meetings all morning, and then I had classes to teach all afternoon, and I didn’t even think of the visit until M and I were in the car on the way home.

I wonder how the visit went. It seems to have been a pretty low-key sort of visit because I haven’t seen or heard anything in the Australian media about it (there was a small mention of it in a report in the Malaysian Star, though). There was a bit of gossip flying around last week that John Howard might be visiting campus as well, but judging from yesterday’s media release, he didn’t. It’s probably just as well, because the amount of ill-feeling some staff would have been feeling towards our PM would probably have caused a malevolent aura to settle over the campus. (Ok, I exaggerate, but I just wanted to write that last sentence. 😉 )

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