Ungku Abdul Aziz


Ungku Abdul Aziz bin Ungku Abdul Hamid is a Malaysian economist. First General Director of the Council on Language and Literature of Malaysia . He is the former Vice-Chancellor of the University of Malaya from 1968 to 1988 and he was awarded the title of Professor Diraja in 1978.

Brief biography

Ungku Abdul Aziz was born into a royal family- his father a Malayan prince and military officer while his mother was a Circassian woman. He graduated from the English College at Johor Bahru and the Malay School in Batu Pahat. He received his higher education in Singapore at Raffles College in 1951. Ungku defended his doctoral dissertation in Waseda University in 1964. Ungku first worked in the state administration of Johore before working from 1952 to 1961 as a lecturer at the University of Malaya, with a one-year break, when he headed the Council on Language and Literature of Malaysia.
From 1962 to 1965, he was a professor and the Dean of the Faculty of Economics of the University of Malaya.

Awards

Abdul Aziz is a cousin of Syed Muhammad Naquib al-Attas and Syed Hussein Alatas as well as Sultan Ibrahim of Johor on his father's side. His father was of Malay and Circassian descent, while his mother was English.
His daughter, Zeti Akhtar Aziz, was the former governor of Bank Negara Malaysia, Malaysia's central bank.

Legacy

His name was given to the secondary school in Sabak Bernam, the public hall and the 11th residential college at the University of Malaya.