History
The establishment of USM began with an agreement through a resolution which was approved by the Penang State Legislative Assembly in 1962, which called for the establishment of a university college in the state. The acquisition of a piece of land in Sungai Ara was then followed by the ceremonial laying of the foundation stone by the then Prime Minister of Malaysia, Y.T.M Tunku Abdul Rahman Putra Al-Haj on 7 August 1967.
USM was established in 1969 as the second university in Malaysia. It was first known as Universiti Pulau Pinang. The university operated on borrowed premises at the Malayan Teachers' Training College at Gelugor. In 1971, it moved to its present 239-hectare site at Minden (formerly Minden Barracks of the British Far East Command) in Gelugor, 10 kilometres from the city of Georgetown.
There are two other USM campuses: one at Kubang Kerian in Kelantan, known as the Health campus, and the other at Seri Ampangan in Penang, known as the Engineering campus. The former houses the School of Medical Sciences, the School of Health Sciences and the School of Dental Sciences, while the latter houses the six engineering schools.
Universiti Sains Malaysia teaches in the fields of Pure Sciences, Applied Sciences, Pharmaceutical Sciences, Building Science and Technology, Social Sciences, Humanities and Education as well as conducts research.
USM offers courses at undergraduate and postgraduate levels to more than 28,000 students. USM has won the Asian Innovation Award in which USM emerged as the only winner from this country.
Read more about this topic: Universiti Sains Malaysia
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“The best history is but like the art of Rembrandt; it casts a vivid light on certain selected causes, on those which were best and greatest; it leaves all the rest in shadow and unseen.”
—Walter Bagehot (1826–1877)
“There has never been in history another such culture as the Western civilization M a culture which has practiced the belief that the physical and social environment of man is subject to rational manipulation and that history is subject to the will and action of man; whereas central to the traditional cultures of the rivals of Western civilization, those of Africa and Asia, is a belief that it is environment that dominates man.”
—Ishmael Reed (b. 1938)
“What is most interesting and valuable in it, however, is not the materials for the history of Pontiac, or Braddock, or the Northwest, which it furnishes; not the annals of the country, but the natural facts, or perennials, which are ever without date. When out of history the truth shall be extracted, it will have shed its dates like withered leaves.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)