Bravo Law Professor Savitri Goonesekere!

November 12, 2011, 4:33 pm

by Carlo Fonseka

When the history of university education in Sri Lanka in the early decades of the 21st century comes to be written, law professor Savitri Goonesekere should surely figure on a peak of resplendent courage. Having sat next to me at fortnightly meetings of the University Grants Commission for several years, Prof SG knows my favorite quote from Ernest Hemingway : " If people bring so much courage to this world, the world has to kill them to break them, so of course it kills them…" Her love for Sri Lanka is no less than that of any son of a Bandaranaike      (creator of the SLFP and the Sri Lankan epitome of liberal patriotism) and her patriotism has manifestly impelled her to run the risk of paying the price of courage by making public her cogent critique of our contemporary university system (Sunday Island, 30th October 2011). The risk was imminent and the predictable assassination attempt came swiftly in the Sunday Island of 6th November. Two highly articulate political academics in our university system, both liberally endowed with incisive prose resource capable of vanquishing any "hard talker" from every quarter, went for her jugular. But Prof SG will survive the onslaught because she has immense inner reserves "which passeth show".

Diagnosis & Therapy

 Unlike Doctors Rajiv Wijesinha and Dayan Jayatillake, I –  by self-proclamation ‘the permanent  member’ of the UGC during the relevant period – must confess to a guilty conscience induced by Prof SG’s forthright indictment against the UGC. I am sorry to say, however, that I cannot concur with her diagnosis of what went wrong with our university system in our country which never dedicated even 3% of its GDP to education. Prof SG knows that good education in the modern world is expensive and that the acquisition of this weightless thing called knowledge has turned out to be one of the dearest pursuits in the present world. Currently with 4 million children to educate out of resources derived from less than 3% of the country’s GDP, it is surely unrealistic for us to aspire to become the "the knowledge hub of Asia" as the political rhetoric picturesquely puts it. Yet, as an academic lawyer, Prof SG’s diagnosis seems to be that our university system reached its present state of crisis not mainly because of under funding, but because the Universities Act No.16 of 1978 as amended, has not been duly implemented. This is implied in her judgment that "our university system cannot gain any kind of recognition that will make us ‘the knowledge hub of Asia’ unless we recognized the importance of intellectual freedom, thought and expression and realize the promise of these Constitutional guarantees in our universities" ( p.17, Sunday Island, 30th October). In line with her diagnosis lawyer SG’s main therapy for our financially ailing university system is a legal one, namely, implementation of the Universities Act to the letter! As Mark Twain truly said, "if your only tool is a hammer, all problems look like nails." It looks as though to law professor SG all problems are legal in nature and therefore remediable by law.

Economics & Politics

I submit that the crisis of university education in our country is not fundamentally a problem of law and order but one of perceived inequalities in educational opportunity. The visible breakdown of law and order is only the symptom of a serious malady in the body politic which Prof SG herself unerringly senses: "…Much of the violence [in our university system] can be traced to deep insecurities felt by those who will perhaps (emphasis added) not be able to access fee levying institutions or fears that graduates from the state systems will have to compete for employment with peers who will have acquired superior skills in better resourced private institutions…" Prof SG’s use of the word ‘perhaps’ in the paragraph I have just cited, prompts me to parody Hamlet’s famous response to his mother: "Perhaps madam! Nay it is. I know not perhaps". For the violence generated by socio-economic inequalities, law professor SG’s knee-jerk reaction is rigorous implementation of the law. But law is not the answer to our university crisis because law cannot and will not cure a felt sense of social injustice. You don’t have to take my word for it. Here is what The Economist (the most conservative newspaper in the world which commenced publication in 1843) opined in an article titled: "Democracy? Freedom? Justice? Law? What’s all this?" published in its Millennium special edition dated 31st December 1999: "…The institutions of law exist almost everywhere. Yet much of the globe remains literally lawless. For billions, lawyers, binding contracts and courts to enforce them remain out of reach. Property rights and civil rights are the preserve of a small elite or even pure fiction. At best, civil law is often what a corrupt judge says it is, and crime what such judges say poor men have done but rich ones not. And the biggest threat to life and liberty is often the very government that poses as the guardian of both. Remember this the next time someone tries to raise a chuckle by quoting the line: Let’s kill all the lawyers."  The line is, of course, from Shakespeare and it might be wondered why even in his time lawyers were not popular. I suspect that even at that time the law, at least as it was practised in England was not widely perceived to serve the public interest. After all, the law merely regularized the rule of the powerful who made the law. As it was then in England, so it seems now to be in Sri Lanka.

What to do?

 What then must we do? My answer will be old hat to my friend Prof SG. Inequality, gross inequality, in the distribution of wealth is the root cause of the basic conflict in our society. This conflict has been aggravated by the exponential growth of our population since Independence (7 million in 1948, over 20 million today). In addition, what economists call ‘the law of scarcity’ (i.e. most things people want are available only in limited supply) has continued to operate. So there has been an inevitable struggle by all for a bigger share of the scarce resources; a struggle for existence; a struggle between the classes. The universities have been the open theater in which the struggle has been enacted visibly and vociferously. The principal weapon exploited by the academic underclass for promoting the struggle in the universities has been the activity called "ragging". Covert and overt violence has been a constant feature of the rag administered by the malignantly aggressive members of the underclass. The (submerged) aim of the rag has been to cut down to size members of the privileged class and establish a sort of "equality of degradation". The rag disrupts academic life, fouls the intellectual environment and discourages serious scholarship. Over the years the academic staff (including me and even Prof SG) tried hard but failed dismally to effectively control vicious ragging let alone eradicating it. The pernicious spirit of the rag persists throughout the period of university life of students. In recent decades ragging gradually transformed itself into a species of political terrorism perpetrated by a particular group of political activists. The current Chairman of the UGC, Prof Gamini Samaranayake, whose academic specialty happens to be political violence, has publicly identified the campuses as "uncleared areas". The terrorism in these "uncleared areas" was beyond the power of the academic staff to control by constitutional means. In that context the political authority in the country was obliged to try non-academic strategies for dealing with the phenomenon of endemic political violence in our universities. The current Minister of Higher Education by virtue of his own university experience is admirably equipped to understand the underlying reality prevailing in our universities. And now he has been obliged to undertake the Herculean task of attempting to clear these "uncleared areas". Given his proven political skills he will predictably do it his way. One of his first steps has been to introduce the leadership training programme on campuses, which some academics (I think, mistakenly) see as an erosion of academic freedom. For my part, I wish him well and fervently hope that he will succeed in doing what people like me pathetically failed to do in our time.