Waste and corruption in the university system
The Care of Children – 18
November 18, 2012, 12:00 pm
By Prof. Rajiva Wijesinha, The Island
I have been wondering for
some time about whether this column should also deal with the problems
of university students. Last week, having found myself by far the
oldest among the Sri Lankan delegates to a Conference on Indo-Sri
Lankan relations held at Osmania University, and older too than most of
the Indian participants, I realized I had to accept I was clearly of an
age to think of university students, and indeed many lecturers, as
children in need of care.
This feeling was exacerbated by
the excellence of the presentations by the younger participants at the
Conference. Whilst some older lecturers seemed to content themselves
with jargon, the session I chaired had two very bright girls from
Jawaharlal Nehru University who produced excellent and very practical
papers on the Sri Lankan diaspora. They however were postgraduates, and
from a place I have long known as a centre of excellence, admission to
which is highly competitive. To my surprise they were equaled by two
undergraduates from Patna University, who did a precise and well argued
presentation on Indo-Sri Lankan trade relations.
I cannot
imagine many Sri Lankan students doing as well. This is not because
they are not equally capable. The problem is that we hardly stretch
them, with many lecturers in many departments thinking that reading out
notes to be copied constitutes teaching.
Of course there
are exceptions, and I can think of at least two universities, and
several faculties, the products of which are as good as those from
Indian universities. But one of the universities that is of high quality
is the Kotelawala Defence University, and it is precisely because its
staff as well as its students are not allowed to sink into complaisance
that its students have improved in quality.
Sinking lower
Peradeniya,
on the contrary, seems to sink lower and lower with every passing
year. The second immediate reason for my worries about what our
students are getting is that, on the two days before I left for
Hyderabad, I attended sessions of the First COPE Sub-Committee, which
now looks at academic institutions. One reason however that one should
not complain too much, is that for almost all the time spent inquiring
of seven institutions in the two days,
I was the only person
present apart from the Chairman. If our legislators do not care enough
to try to ensure that students get value for the public money spent on
them, I suppose we cannot really expect university administrators or
lecturers to care either.
Ultimately we will only achieve
accountability if we ensure that information is made available to all
stakeholders, and they are given the right to question. Students should
not be decision makers, but their views must be considered, and I have
long argued that they should be given access to university accounts.
When I first made this suggestion a decade back, the then Chairman of
the UGC told me that they were accountable to Parliament, which I did
not think adequate. Having seen how COPE functions – and it clearly does
much more now under the Chairmanship of D E W Gunasekara than it has
done for decades – I now know this is not adequate.
I was
delighted that the Deputy Vice-Chancellor at Peradeniya also advocated
this, perhaps because he too was in despair about what had been going
on at the University. He and the new Registrar seem to be trying to set
things to rights but, for the first time in looking at University
accounts, it seemed to me that there were clear indications of fraud
and corruption. Previously – with one institution attached to Colombo
being an exception, about which the Vice-Chancellor agreed that
crookedness seemed obvious – the worst we could be sure of was
incompetence. Here clearly the incompetence, if that was all it was,
was culpable. The idea that sub-standard furniture should be accepted
because buildings had to be equipped in a hurry was for instance
totally unacceptable. It must have been obvious to anyone, certainly
including those waiting to place more orders, that beds which shook
when they were received would soon collapse under student usage.
But
as bad was the failure to ensure that students were actually taught.
The schedule of lecture hours by all academic staff that COPE had had to
ask for (since clearly no one with administrative authority had
thought of this before) had not been looked at by the Peradeniya
administration. We had to instruct the UGC Chairman to send the
schedule to all universities, asking them to study it and send back a
report on how they would ensure that lecturers actually did what they
were supposed to do, and were held accountable for the public money
they absorbed.
Sheer absurdity
The sheer
absurdity of what many of our universities do became obvious to me
during the last few weeks, during which I found Divisional Secretariats
packed with graduates who have been recruited with no clear
understanding of what they were supposed to do. Some of them had given
up proper jobs because of the government indulgence they greedily
grasped, but I suppose government thought it had no alternative since
so many others were otherwise unemployable.
Sadly it has
not occurred to any government that the obvious alternative is to make
educational institutions target employability, with full accountability
for their activities.
One bright young Divisional Secretary
told me that, having tried to identify talents amongst those entrusted
to him, so he could make gainful use of them, he found almost all
without the capacity to work productively. He was a product himself of a
Faculty that many years ago the Chairman of the UGC described as the
cutting edge of the University system, and I could understand this,
having realized his competence, as that of another Secretary from the
same Faculty, one Tamil, one Sinhalese. But unless we try more
intelligently to replicate this, we will simply be wasting public
money.
