What to do with New Funds?
Six Percent of the GDP for Education:
October 2, 2012, 7:19 pm
, The Island
Jayadeva Uyangoda
Member, Arts Faculty Teachers’ Union- Colombo
by Jayadeva Uyangoda
Member, Arts Faculty Teachers’
Union- Colombo
The
demand made by the FUTA for increased allocation of annual government
expenditure on education has now emerged as a national policy slogan,
with many sectors of society adopting it as their own demand. This is a
key achievement made by the FUTA in its three-month long struggle.
Some,
even those in the government, are now asking how this 6% of GDP
allocation should be spent. Understandably, government ministers in
charge of the subject of education and even some Vice-Chancellors seem
to be rather confused about how such an allocation could conceivably be
spent. This is where all those who back the 6% demand now have to
propose to the government how the increased public money on education
should not be wasted and actually be productively utilized for the
benefit of our country’s education.
This opens up an
unprecedented opportunity for the stakeholders of education in Sri
Lanka to further deepen the public debate by focusing on what concrete
steps should be taken to improve all aspects of education – quality and
standards of teaching, learning and evaluation; infrastructure that
includes buildings, class rooms, laboratories, libraries, and even
cafeteria; development of academic as well as non-academic human
resources; capacity building in administration and management; student
and staff welfare, bursaries and scholarships; text books; research and
publication. It should encompass school, technical, and university
education that come under the Ministry of Education as well as Higher
Education.
Universities
One possible reason
why the minister and his officials seem to be perplexed by the FUTA
demand for higher allocation of government expenditure in the
university system is that they are not adequately familiar with the
problems and needs in the higher education sector. Their limited vision
for higher education does not seem to go beyond the task of maintaining
the institutional status quo. Actually, to maintain the present status
quo in the universities, with annual allocations for usual recurrent
expenditure and limited amount of capital expenditure, substantially
higher allocations for universities will not be required at all. New
funds are needed to change the status quo, and to raise the quality and
standards of Sri Lanka’s higher education. That is the goal for which
FUTA is campaigning.
Meanwhile, educational policy-makers of
our country also seem to share a rather limited understanding of
university problems, which is skewed towards issues such as student
indiscipline, ragging, and student violence. It is really doubtful
whether Vice-Chancellors, or other university officials, have the
practice of briefing the Ministers or the President about problems and
needs that require greater monetary allocation. The only problem in the
universities they seem to be aware of is student politics, ragging and
violence, and trade union agitations by FUTA. The rather expensive
leadership training programme is their ill-conceived response to this
problem.
Interestingly, the government seems to be committed
to the goal of making Sri Lanka an internationally competitive center
of learning. If the government is serious about involving the
universities to play an active and dynamic role in the knowledge hub
project, there is an urgent need to make a massive capital investment
to improve, upgrade, and modernize and then maintain with
sustainability the entire university system in all its aspects. Years of
neglect by governments as well as university administrations has led
the university system into a deep crisis characterized by
demoralization among students, as well as the academic and non-academic
staff, backward and decaying infrastructure, stagnation of
universities as mere undergraduate colleges, excessive reliance on
political patronage by university administrations, and now a
mutually-hurting breakdown of communication between the Ministry of
Higher Education and the UGC on one side, and academics, students and
non-academic staff on the other side.
How should the 6% of
the GDP be spent? As the cliché goes, it is the million -dollar
question, literally as well as metaphorically. The answer is linked to
the ways out from the accumulated crisis from which the entire
university system suffers. It is obviously not up to the FUTA to propose
unilaterally how much capital is required for investment in different
areas of the entire educational sector. That should be a consultative
exercise of planning for short-term, medium-term and long-term
university development to be undertaken by the Ministry of Higher
Education, in consultation not only with the UGC and university
bureaucracies, but also with teachers and students who have firsthand
knowledge of many things that the VCs and the UGC ignore, or take for
granted, in accordance with their professional culture of being
committed to maintaining the institutional status quo. The FUTA has
raised the issue as an important public policy matter. To take the
policy debate to a higher level, stakeholders can now ideally identify
and propose priority areas into which public funds should move.
Let us identify some critical areas that require urgent attention for improvement in our universities.
Infrastructure
Almost
all the universities in Sri Lanka, including the relatively new ones,
have an outdated, inadequate, and aging system of physical
infrastructure, that includes buildings, class - rooms, lecture halls,
laboratories, libraries, not to mention the toilets and cafeteria with
appallingly unhygienic conditions. Peradeniya may be considered an
exception. Even the massive buildings that have been constructed
relatively recently, like the Faculty of Arts and Faculty of Law
buildings at the University of Colombo, are crumbling due to premature
aging, precipitated by low-quality construction, bad designing, and
massive pressure emanating from the ever increasing student population
who use them. Classrooms, lecture halls and even the university
libraries, as a general practice, are both primitive in terms of
facilities they offer.
The elementary nature of the
infrastructure in our universities stands out in comparison with the
universities in other Asian countries of comparable economic status,
such as Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines and Thailand. Only a
handful of classrooms in our universities have audio-visual facilities,
a must in modern methodology of teaching. Even they are of exceedingly
low quality. Furniture in classrooms in general is of poor quality and
inadequate to cater to increasing numbers of students. Almost as a
rule, classrooms, lecture halls, teachers’ office rooms, and libraries
continue to remain without air-conditioning facilities, compelling
students and teacher to sweat it out throughout the day, even all these
buildings, as the case of Colombo University vividly illustrates, have
been designed and built for air-conditioning. The reason offered by
the university authorities for not having air conditioning for
classrooms, lecture halls and libraries is the lack of financial
allocations. The same explanation is offered to the perpetuation of
ever deteriorating hygienic and public health facilities in the
universities, which are used by thousands of students, teachers,
non-academic staff and visitors, day in day out.
The lack
of adequate housing and residential facilities for students is one of
the most glaring dimensions in the infrastructure crisis in our
universities. Teachers don’t have housing facilities either, except the
limited residential facilities available at Peradeniya University. Good
universities all over the world provide subsidized housing for its
students, teachers and non-academic staff, but not in Sri Lanka. The
private houses leased in by universities as student hostels, even those
provided for student monks, are veritable "hell-halls" – dirty,
unhygienic, over-crowded, and liberally populated by rats, cockroaches
and mosquitoes. They are simply unfit for human habitation.
Vice-Chancellors, UGC members, Ministry Secretaries and Ministers are
either unaware of these sub-human conditions under which our university
students live, or they are professionally insensitive to these
realities. An example to illustrate this insensitivity, when a group of
female undergraduate students complained to a VC that the showers of
their bathrooms did not have water for a few days, the VC shot back
asking whether these young women had bath showers in their village. One
student with a sense of humour humbly suggested to the VC to build a
Weva (irrigation tank) near their hostel!
Our university
libraries need a rapid increase in financial allocations, several times
more than what they get at present, to build and maintain their
resources, facilities and services. Except the library of University of
Peradeniya with some past glory, all other university libraries,
including that of Colombo, do not actually qualify to be university
libraries. The libraries of the universities of Kelaniya,
Jayewardenepura, Ruhuna, Sabaragamuwa, Batticaloa, Jaffna and Oluvil,
not to mention others, are so poor in their stocks of books and
academic journals that one wonders why they are called university
libraries, to begin with. In the absence of a proper accreditation
system to maintain standards of our universities, libraries have become
the first to suffer fund cuts among all the units of the universities.
For the past several decades, the university libraries have not got
enough annual grants to buy new books, and renew their subscriptions to
academic periodicals. Even the access to electronic databases, in this
age of cyber learning, is quite limited. As the library of university
Colombo amply testifies, without air conditioning or access to methods
to preserve documents which are rather expensive, valuable collections
of old books are left to rot and decay. When asked about this
depressingly poor conditions of the library of a university which
claims to be the premier university in Sri Lanka, the answer one gets
is quite simple: "no money." Sadly, library development, that requires
new financial resources, has not been for decades among the priorities
of the VCs or the UGC.
It is no exaggeration to say that
the physical quality and the conditions of life shared by students,
teachers and non-academics within the premises of the Sri Lankan
universities is appallingly low. Actually, our universities are
institutionalized microcosms of generalized conditions of poverty,
misery and squalor that continue to haunt some segments of our society.
No wonder that there are only a very few foreign students volunteered
to accept scholarships offered by the Ministry of Higher Education to
study in our universities. If the Minister of Higher Education
seriously expects foreign students to join universities, he needs to
improve the quality of physical and infrastructure conditions of all
universities. The reason is simple. Students of any country who usually
go abroad for university education, even on partial scholarships that
the Minister has generally offered, are from middle-class backgrounds,
who have expectations of the quality of life as students that are far
ahead what our universities can offer at present.
Academic Standards and Teaching Programmes
One
area where new injection of capital of substantial proportions is
urgently required is to start full-time postgraduate programmes as an
integral part of the university system in Sri Lanka. None of our
university faculties offer full-time Masters or Doctoral causes as a
component of their regular teaching programmes. Our universities are
actually not full universities; they are mere undergraduate colleges.
Limited numbers of post-graduate programmes are conducted by Faculties
of Graduate studies on the fee-levying basis with evening or weekend
classes. Many of them are not up to international standards and in fact
poor in quality. Their low quality is primarily due to the fact that
they are part time courses. Their participants are part-time students
who have little or no time for rigorous post-graduate learning or
research.
The absence of regular and full-time post-graduate
courses has other negative consequences for the entire intellectual
culture of the universities. Teachers who engage only or mainly in
undergraduate teaching are hardly compelled to excel themselves as
teachers or researchers. Undergraduate students do not have the benefit
of interacting with Master’s or Doctoral students for intellectual
stimulation. There is no stable or sustainable culture of research and
knowledge production built into the university system either. The
prevailing emphasis, as its has evolved since the 1940s, has been on the
dissemination, not production, of knowledge through undergraduate
teaching. Research and publication has a low priority, because
teachers, even professors, spend most of their time and energy on
conducting undergraduate programmes. The UGC and the Universities do
not have research funds, except occasional allocations of small size.
In the absence of a vibrant research culture, there are hardly any
applicants for even those funds from Faculties other than Medical where
research is built into the professional careers of academics as medical
practitioners. There is no adequate financial support for regular
research conferences or for publication of research papers in the form
of journals, books and edited anthologies. There is absolutely no money
available in the universities to publish post-graduate dissertations.
Those teachers with a commitment to research and publication are forced
to seek funding from non-university sources, or do their research in
collaboration with non-university research centres. Similarly, our
universities do not have a culture of assisting, through travel grants,
teachers or research students in their participation in international
conferences or research symposia. ‘No money" is once again the
ready-made answer available to those who make inquiries regarding such
assistance.
What should the UGC and the Ministry of Higher
education do to change this situation? One policy option is to
re-orient the existing system so that our universities will become
universities in the fullest sense of the concept, with fulltime and
regular Masters and Doctoral programmes and post-graduate research,
paralleled with undergraduate degree courses. This requires allocation
of quite a large amount of financial resources to recruit new staff
with doctoral qualifications, expansion of libraries and laboratories
with adequate facilities, setting up of research centres, offering
research fellowships to academics at home and abroad, facilitating
conferences and publications, provision of scholarships and research
grants to teachers as well as students, and finally, facilities for
publishing academic journals and books. These are minimally necessary
pre-requisites to make Sri Lankan universities internationally
recognized centres of excellence.
Human Resource Development
One
major dimension of the university crisis in Sri Lanka is the
progressively decaying human resource base in both academic and
administrative spheres. Policy-makers seem to be totally insensitive to
this aspect of the crisis. Protests against the low levels of salaries
of the academic and non-academic staff are just one manifestation of
this crisis. The government’s ‘solution’ of promising and not
delivering pay hikes has not worked and it is unlikely to work in the
future either.
As the FUTA has repeatedly pointed out, lack
of academic cadre provisions for departments as well as the inability
to fill even the limited numbers of existing vacancies for academic
positions have created a serious erosion of the academic human resource
base in all of our universities. The inadequacy of cadre provisions
for academic departments is particularly felt in new universities such
as Ruhuna, Sabaragamuwa, Rajarata, East and South- East, which were
established with minimum cadre facilities. Some departments function
with the help of temporary teachers and visiting lecturers. The Medical
Faculty of the Rajarata University is a well-known case in point. With
the expansion of student population, the cadre base of the Faculties
and Departments needs to be expanded even in older universities such as
Peradeniya and Colombo. This is a point made in department, faculty
and institutional evaluations conducted a few years ago under the
auspices of the IRQUE Project. Repeated requests made by Departments
and Faculties through VCs for more cadres have only been rejected by
the UGC on the excuse that the Treasury approval has not been granted.
Even the UGC decisions made a few years ago to create new cadre
provisions have been rejected by the Treasury. The explanation there
too has been a simple one: "no money."
The inability of the
universities to fill even the limited available vacancies,
particularly at lower and middle levels, is an issue highlighted by the
FUTA. This is where the need for immediate and substantial salary
increases becomes crucial.
Why is a substantial expansion of
the academic cadre base of the universities needed? The simple answer
is that Sri Lanka needs a substantial increase in the opportunities to
enter universities, available to children who pass the A/L examination.
The university entrance, as the cliché goes, is the most serious
bottleneck in the system of education available to Sri Lankan children.
Democratization of opportunities for university education is a
long-felt social need in Sri Lanka. The best option available is to
expand the existing universities, rather than setting up new ones. To
prevent further deterioration of the quality and standards at the
universities, an increase in the university academic cadre, with a
commitment to recruiting the best, is quite crucial.
Post-graduate
training for junior academics is an issue which the universities and
other higher education authorities have not been able to address
effectively, once again for the simple reason of lack of financial
resources. With the expansion of the numbers of universities, numbers of
academic staff have also been increased with the result that in their
employment pyramid, our universities have a somewhat wider base level,
consisting of relatively young academics. Although the vast majority of
them need post-graduate qualifications, many of them find it extremely
difficult to obtain overseas scholarships. Unlike it was the case a
few decades ago, foreign scholarships do not easily come by now. Those
who complete their local Masters degrees at local universities, for the
confirmation in the post and to satisfy the minimum requirements for
promotions, need doctoral training abroad. The Ministry of Higher
Education or the UGC do not have a mechanism to send these teachers
abroad on scholarship for doctoral training. The limited facility that
has been made available under the National Center for Advanced Studies
need to be improved and expanded substantially to address the urgent
needs of the academic human resource development. Sri Lanka can learn
from the example of the countries such as Indonesia and South Korea
which during their economic take off period sent their young university
academics to the best universities in America, Europe, Australia and
Japan on full government scholarships for post-graduate training. Such a
scheme does require new allocations to the Ministry of Higher
Education and the Universities.
One of the most neglected
areas of university development is the capacity building among the
non-academic and administrative staff. If our universities are to
receive substantially high levels of new funding, human resource
development in the administrative and managerial spheres should be a
priority area of policy attention. Without managerial skills development
of the administrative staff, coupled with attractive salary packages,
the universities will continue to lag behind the private sector in the
domain of institutional management. Officials at various levels, —
registrars, deputy and assistant registrars, bursars, deputy bursars,
technical officers, the clerical and other support staff – require
greater professional training, other than the skills development in the
art of being subservient servants of the VCs and Registrars. Large
numbers of unskilled young men and women recruited on contract basis for
clerical and office work with no job security or in-service training
can hardly constitute the back bone of university administrative staff.
The point then is simple. Without a strong administrative and
managerial cadre base at all levels, and their skills development
through training and re-training, any greater allocation of funds to
universities is not likely to make a change.
Student Welfare
Welfare
is another area for improvement in the university life of our country.
This includes subsidized housing and residential facilities, health
insurance, subsidized transport, culture and recreation facilities for
students. The facilities available to students at present are quite
meagre. Welfare facilities available to teachers and non-academic staff
are no better. It is quite astounding that the University of Colombo
which claims an elite status, does not have a single bus to provide
transport, subsidized or not, to students, staff and teachers to travel
to the university, a facility available, for example, in Bangladesh.
This is the case with our other universities as well.
Although
the IMF might object to it, a substantial increase in the student
bursaries is a long overdue need. The mahapola scholarship offers each
recipient only a miserly sum of Rs. 2, 500 a month, which is hardly
adequate for a student to pay for meals even for a weak, despite
minister Bandula Gunawardena’s economic theory of stone-age survival.
Increased student bursaries at all levels of education, from school to
undergraduate education, are a social need in Sri Lanka, because
education still functions as the most important means to upward social
mobility for the poor and the low-income families, who constitute the
majority of the country’s population. The reasoning here is that the
economic cost of increased student bursaries will pay in the long-run,
economically as well as socially.
Text Books
The
lack of text books in Sinhalese and Tamil, and in English appropriate
to Sri Lankan/South Asian contexts, is a key drawback in higher
education in Sri Lanka. Private publishers are reluctant to print
university level textbooks because of the limited scope of the market
and the high cost involved in translations and writing. The programme
to publish translations of textbooks in natural, social and human
sciences implemented by the Education Publications Department in the
1960s and 1970s for the benefit of A/L and university students is a
model worth revisiting now.
A systematic textbook
translation and writing programme, to be initiated on an urgent basis,
would require skills training in translating academic work, editing,
and printing, as well writing new text books in English, Tamil and
Sinhalese. If university students are to be oriented towards learning
in English, writing textbooks in English by local university teachers,
rather than using texts books published in the US and England, is the
most appropriate option. Since there is a significant expansion in the
scope of courses offered in different faculties in our universities, a
separate unit for textbooks can even be established at the UGC with the
participation of universities. At present, our university students do
not have the habit of buying textbooks for two other reasons than the
non-availability of books. The non-inclusion in undergraduate curricula
the requirement of consulting textbooks as compulsory, which is an
extension of the non-availability of text books in vernacular languages
and in accessible English, is one. The other is the financial
hardships most undergraduate students encounter. These problems can also
be overcome through two steps: revising undergraduate programmes that
makes buying text books a compulsory component of learning, and
increasing student bursaries in the form a book allowance.
Conclusion
The
above are some thoughts for how to make use of additional funding to
improve the university education. The requirements in the school and
technical education sectors would be far greater than these, requiring
much more public funding. Now is the moment for broadening the public
discourse on state spending on education. Eventually, inputs from
society, particularly from stakeholder communities, will enrich the
debate and hopefully the government’s agenda for strengthening Sri
Lanka’s education sector as well.
