UK Menon

U K Menon is a lawyer-educator with four decades in education. He now specializes in law and policies on education with a broad interest in all areas of education, including hospitality education. His first encounter with hospitality was as a lecturer at the Mara Institute of Technology where he developed a course covering the legal environment of the hospitality industry. In 1993, when he headed the academic division of Stamford College, hospitality education was one of the core areas of the college having the largest student enrolment in the country. The American Hotel and Lodging Association (AHLA) was Stamford’s main supplier of hospitality programmes and learning materials. In his capacity as head of studies, Menon carried out several surveys of hotel education in Malaysia focusing on the subjects taught and interactions between institutions and industry. AHLA awarded its highest award, the Lamp of Knowledge to Menon and the Head of the Hospitality Programme, Mr Reginald Pereira jointly.
Menon was at different times, Deputy Vice-Chancellor, Wawasan Open University, Director of Studies and CEO Stamford College, Malaysia, Associate Director, Asia Law Centre (University of Melbourne) and architect and coordinator of the law program at the Mara Institute of Technology, Malaysia.
He taught Corporate Law and Professional Legal Practice in Malaysia, Australia, and the United States. In 1995, the University of Melbourne appointed him Hon Visiting Scholar for his work at the Asian Law Centre. In recent years he designed and taught a higher education capacity building programme for academics and administrators in Indonesia, Kyrgyzstan, and Tanzania. To keep up with the digital times we live in, he developed and taught privacy and personal data protection laws and principles to audiences in Malaysia. Very recently, together with his colleagues from Espact, he has started a research project on corruption in higher education. Mr Menon also co-founded the Data Science Association whose objectives are to introduce data science in Malaysia.
In 2019, he was appointed consultant to the Ministry of Higher Education to review and harmonize the laws on higher education and was appointed on several other Ministerial committees whose purpose was to reform education in this country.
He is currently CEO of Espact Education, a company that he set up with senior academics from around the world to continue playing a role in education. Espact provides a forum and facilitates the team of experts to think and develop strategies to make higher education widely available. You can learn about Espact at www.espact.com.my