Professor Solehah Yaacob who claimed ancient Malays taught flying kung-fu to Chinese fired by her university

A university professor claimed ancient Malays taught the Chinese how to do flying kung-fu. That sentence alone should have ended her academic career faster than it did, but here we are, and now it finally has. International Islamic University Malaysia let Solehah Yaacob go after her greatest hits reel of pseudo-history went viral and made the institution look ridiculous by association. Good. Universities exist to sort out true claims from nonsense, not to grant tenure to whoever tells the most entertaining story.

What's strange is how long this took. Viral clips of a professor asserting martial arts sorcery as historical fact don't require a lengthy investigation. Either the university's vetting process is broken, or someone was hoping this would blow over quietly. It didn't, because the internet doesn't forget a claim that absurd, and eventually the embarrassment outweighed whatever bureaucratic inertia was protecting her.

There's a broader point here that has nothing to do with Malaysia specifically. Academic institutions everywhere have gotten soft on policing basic factual competence, as long as the nonsense flatters some preferred narrative. Nobody was going to lose their job over this until the ridicule became too loud to ignore. That's backwards. The standard should never be "did it go viral," it should be "was it true," and universities that only act once the internet forces their hand are telling on themselves.

Firing her was the right call, late as it was. The lesson worth sitting with is that plenty of other faculty members are making equally unserious claims in fields nobody's paying attention to, and they'll keep their jobs simply because nobody filmed it.