Prof. Epasinghe appointed Chancellor, Pera. Uni.

March 6, 2012, 9:22 pm

By Cyril Wimalasurendre, The Island

KANDY – President Mahinda Rajapaksa has appointed Professor P. W. Epasinghe as Chancellor of the University of Peradeniya.

The appointment is for a period of five years.

Professor P. W. Epasinghe has succeeded Dr. Premadasa Udagama who held the office of the Chancellor.

Professor Epasinghe earlier served at the University of Sri Jayawardenapura.

Higher Education Under Attack

Published on Thursday, March 1, 2012 by Common Dreams

by Immanuel Wallerstein

For a very long time there were only a few universities in the world. The total student body in these institutions was very small. This small group of students was drawn largely from the upper classes. Attending the university conferred great prestige and reflected great privilege.
This picture began to change radically after 1945. The number of universities began to expand considerably, and the percentage of persons in the age range that attended universities began to expand. Furthermore, this was not merely a question of expansion in those countries that had already had universities of note. University education was launched in a large number of countries that had few or no university institutions before 1945. Higher education became worldwide.Occupy Davis protestors pepper-sprayed by campus police (Photo: Wayne Tilcock/The Enterprise/AP)
The pressure for expansion came from above and below. From above, governments felt an important need for more university graduates to ensure their capacity to compete in the more complex technologies that were required in the exploding expansion of the world-economy. And from below, large numbers of the middle strata and even of the lower strata of the world's populations were insistent that they have access to higher education in order to improve considerably their economic and social prospects.
The expansion of the universities, which was remarkable in size, was made possible by the enormous upward expansion of the world-economy after 1945, the biggest in the history of the modern world-system. There was plenty of money available for the universities, and they were happy to make use of it.
Of course, this changed the university systems somewhat. Individual universities became much larger and began to lose the quality of intimacy that smaller structures provided. The class composition of the student body, and then of the professorate, evolved. In many countries, expansion not only meant a reduction in the monopoly of upper strata persons as students, professors, and administrators, but it often meant that "minority" groups and women began to have wider access, which had previously been totally or at least partially denied.
This rosy picture came into difficulty after about 1970. For one thing, the world-economy entered its long stagnation. And little by little, the amount of money that universities received, largely from the states, began to diminish. At the same time, the costs of university education continued to rise, and the pressures from below for continued expansion grew even stronger. The story ever since has been that of the two curves going in opposite directions - less money and increased expenses.
By the time we arrived at the twenty-first century, this situation became dire. How have universities coped? One major way was what we have come to call “privatization.” Most universities before 1945, and even before 1970, were state institutions. The one significant exception was the United States, which had a large number of non-state institutions, most of which had evolved from religiously-based institutions. But even in these U.S. private institutions, the universities were run as non-profit structures.
What privatization began to mean throughout the world was several things: One, there began to be institutions of higher education that were established as businesses for profit. Two, public institutions began to seek and obtain money from corporate donors, which began to intrude in the internal governance of the universities. And three, universities began to seek patents for work that researchers at the university had discovered or invented, and thereupon entered as operators in the economy, that is, as businesses.
In a situation in which money was scarce, or at least seemed scarce, universities began to transform themselves into more business-like institutions. This could be seen in two major ways. The top administrative positions of universities and their faculties, which had traditionally been occupied by academics, now began to be occupied by persons whose background was in business and not university life. They raised the money, but they also began to set the criteria of allocation of the money.
There began to be evaluations of whole universities and of departments within universities in terms of their output for the money invested. This might be measured by how many students wished to pursue particular studies, or how esteemed was the research output of given universities or departments. Intellectual life was being judged by pseudo-market criteria. Even student recruitment was being measured by how much money was brought in via alternative methods of recruitment.
And, if this weren't enough, the universities began to come under attack from a basically anti-intellectual far right current that saw the universities as secular, anti-religious institutions. The university as a critical institution - critical of dominant groups and dominant ideologies - had always met with resistance and repression by the states and the elites. But their powers of survival had always been rooted in their relative financial autonomy based on the low real cost of operation. This was the university of yesteryear, not of today - and tomorrow.
One can write this off as simply one more aspect of the global chaos in which we are now living. Except that the universities were supposed to play the role of one major locus (not of course the only one) of analysis of the realities of our world-system. It is such analyses that may make possible the successful navigation of the chaotic transition towards a new, and hopefully better, world order. At the moment, the turmoil within the universities seems no easier to resolve than the turmoil in the world-economy. And even less attention is being paid to it.

Immanuel Wallerstein, Senior Research Scholar at Yale University, is the author of The Decline of American Power: The US in a Chaotic World (New Press).

The threat to our universities

What are universities for? Should they be businesses 'competing on price'? Are students 'consumers', concerned only with getting jobs? A half-baked market ideology informs official thinking about higher education, and it undermines an ideal that a vast number of people cherish

• Stefan Collini
• guardian.co.uk, Friday 24 February 2012 22.56 GMT

'A corporation for the cultivation and care of the community’s highest aspirations and ideals' … Univeristy of Birmingham degree ceremony. Photograph: Christopher Furlong/Getty Images Europe

Take one job centre. Add several apprenticeship programmes. Combine with an industrial lab (fold in a medical research centre for extra flavour). Throw in some subsidised gigs and a large dollop of cheap beer. Don't stir too much. Decorate with a forward-looking logo. And hey presto! – you've got a university.

At this point, I should be able to say (according to the formula): "Here's one I made earlier." In reality, of course, no one has ever successfully created a university by following this recipe. But if you simply go by what is now said about universities in official pronouncements from government departments or funding agencies or employers' associations, you could be forgiven for thinking that this recipe pretty much describes what these institutions are all about.
In recent years, universities have been in the news as perhaps never before, but increasingly in public discourse in Britain, they are said to serve two purposes – and two purposes only. The first is to "equip" "young people" to get jobs in "the fast-moving economy of tomorrow". The other is to contribute to "growth", to develop the "cutting-edge products" needed in "today's competitive global marketplace" (and preferably to discover the odd miracle drug, too).
I realise that by merely raising a quizzical eyebrow about the self-evident priority of these goals I am going to be damned for being out of touch with "the real world". What's even more curious is that everyone who expresses the slightest reservation about this vocabulary turns out to live at the same address. Simply to suggest that universities might have other purposes is immediately to be classed as someone who "lives in the ivory tower".
The current government certainly seems hell-bent on trying to make universities function more like cost-cutting skills retailers to whom employers can outsource their job-training (in England, anyway: Scotland remains faithful to its more democratic traditions of public higher education). And it is this element of ideological fantasy that is so worrying. For example, it's nonsense to say (as last year's white paper did) that saddling students with future debt is a way of putting them "at the heart of the system", not least because they are already at the heart of the system. Ah, but a focus on "consumer satisfaction" will force "service providers" to "drive up standards", won't it? This management-consultancy blather has settled on the topic like a thick fog on the Thames, obscuring the view beyond Whitehall or Westminster. As a result, our higher education system is to be turned upside down, even though at no point in the Browne review or the ensuing white paper has there been any evidence-based analysis of how universities are alleged to be failing in their tasks at present.
In individual instances, they do fail of course, and perhaps fail too often, though mechanisms already exist for investigating and in some cases remedying these failings. From anecdotal evidence (especially conversations among parents of university students), it may seem that the major systemic failing is the paucity of individual attention that students receive in many universities – seminar sizes are too big and tutorial hours too few.
If true, those are serious failings, but their two main causes are not hard to identify. The first is the expansion on the cheap that has been forced on universities, especially in the 1990s and early 2000s: student-staff ratios have almost tripled in recent decades (within this pattern, there are huge variations, of course). And the second reason is the over-emphasis on research that has been encouraged by the mechanism of the research assessment exercise, now renamed, in best Orwellian style, the research excellence framework. A university's funding rests heavily on the outcome of these flawed exercises; as a result, career rewards are now tilted strongly towards research achievement. But the new proposals will not tackle either of these causes: most universities outside the elite will still be underfunded and overcrowded, some disastrously so, and the distorting mechanisms of research assessment will be more powerful than ever.
And even if you are among those who think that graduates should make an additional contribution to the costs of higher education beyond that which they already make as taxpayers, that is no reason to invent a fantasy-world of paying "fees" to "service providers" who "compete on price". The benefits for both the individual graduate and for society as a whole are benefits from a system of higher education, not just from a particular institution. The teaching methods, the scholarship, the research, the ethos – these are not the creation of a single self-contained institution any more than are the careers of those who teach there. The single greatest defect of the new funding arrangements is not the whole elaborate machinery of loans itself, expensive and unfair though that is: it is the core notion of universities as businesses "competing on price" (ie "variable fees") and the half-baked market ideology that informs it. And this in turn reflects an impoverished notion of what universities are "for".
Clearly, we need to start from somewhere else.

Because the huge expansion of recent decades has involved a growth not just in student numbers but also in the range of subjects and types of institution, it is too late in the day to attempt to be insistently purist about the usage of the term "university": for better or worse it is now applied to a great variety of forms of post-secondary educational institution. And these institutions are expected to serve several important social functions, from vocational training to technology transfer, just as they are asked to further several admirable social goals, from inculcating civic values to promoting social justice.
The picture is further complicated by the great multiplication of subjects of study and research. In reality, many universities have long offered courses that went beyond the traditional core of disciplines in the humanities and the social and natural sciences, but there has been a marked expansion of such courses in recent decades. Diplomas in golf course management sit alongside masters in software design; professorships of neo-natal care are established alongside postdoctoral fellowships in heritage studies.
It is worth emphasising, in the face of routine dismissals by snobbish commentators, that many of these courses may be intellectually fruitful as well as practical: media studies are often singled out as being the most egregiously valueless, yet there can be few forces in modern societies so obviously in need of more systematic and disinterested understanding than the media themselves. In addition, universities are increasingly centres of the creative and performing arts as well as hubs of policy advice.
We have to recognise the speed and scale of the transformation that has taken place. Nearly two-thirds of the roughly 130 university-level institutions in Britain today did not exist as universities as recently as 20 years ago. And with this expansion have gone dramatic changes in the character of our universities. At present, over five times as many students in British universities study business studies and accounting as study English, over six times as many are doing courses in practical subjects allied to healthcare as in history, and so on.
And for the most part, the largest numbers of students are to be found in the least traditional universities. Leaving aside the Open University, which is obviously a special case, 18 of the 24 largest universities in Britain (in terms of student numbers) in 2010 did not exist as universities before 1992. Such educational enfranchisement has, in principle, been a great democratic good, one we should continue to support, but there is no doubt that it has complicated public perception of the nature and role of universities.
During the same period we have also seen a dizzying growth in the costs of big science and of the share of university budgets now taken up by science, engineering and medicine. In the most research-intensive Russell Group universities, these subjects alone account for almost five-sixths of the universities' turnover. So, in discussing higher education, we have to be realistic about these characteristics of the present system. Mass education, vocational training and big science are among the dominant realities, and are here to stay.
But however important these features are, they, too, are not the whole story. And one way to get these features in perspective is to realise that, throughout the long history of universities, there has been a constant tension between the practical ends that society thinks it is furthering by founding or supporting universities, and the ineluctable pull towards open-ended inquiry that comes to shape these institutions over time. In fact, the very open-endedness of their principal activities threatens to legitimate forms of inquiry that may run counter to the aims of those who founded or supported them.
Since universities are in some ways puzzling and opaque institutions, attempts to describe them naturally tend to bracket them with more familiar or immediately intelligible concepts. Perhaps the most frequent, because most plausible, misconception about universities is, as I have suggested, that they are simply a marriage of convenience between a type of vocational school and a type of industrial research laboratory. But analogies between universities and quite other types of institution may, precisely because they are less fashionable, be more illuminating. Some, at least, of what lies at the heart of a university is closer to the nature of a museum or gallery than is usually allowed or than most of today's spokespersons for universities would be comfortable with. The latter would doubtless be afraid that it would make universities seem too "backward-looking" – a damning phrase from the lexicon of contemporary right-mindedness. One of the reasons why the question "What are museums/galleries for?" can be helpful in thinking about universities is precisely because it reminds us that the answers do not depend just on the interests of the current generation. All conservation, all transmission or handing-on, and in fact all inquiry, is implicitly governed by its relation to the future.
There are other aspects of universities that may suggest resemblances to a variety of quite different types of organisation – to thinktanks, accreditation quangos and performing arts complexes, as well as to sports clubs, community centres and dating agencies. In addition, as we are now often reminded, universities are large employers and one of the chief sources of prosperity for local economies. But all of these comparisons pick up on what are contingent or inessential features of universities, on functions that have come to be appended to their main tasks of extending understanding through teaching and research, and this brings us back to the central question of how best to characterise these main tasks.
❦
Almost a century ago, the American social critic Thorstein Veblen published a book entitled The Higher Learning in America: A Memorandum on the Conduct of Universities by Businessmen, in which he declared: "Ideally, and in the popular apprehension, the university is, as it has always been, a corporation for the cultivation and care of the community's highest aspirations and ideals." Given that Veblen's larger purpose, as indicated by his book's subtitle, involved a vigorous critique of current tendencies in American higher education, the confidence and downrightness of this declaration are striking. And I particularly like his passing insistence that this elevated conception of the university and the "popular apprehension" of it coincide, about which he was surely right.
Even today, after all the vast changes that have overtaken universities and that separate them from the institutions that Veblen knew, and despite – as much as because of – the great educational enfranchisement that has taken place in recent decades, there still lingers this popular conception, almost a longing, that the university should be a protected space in which thoughts and ideas of this kind can be pursued to the highest level. Whatever the reality of the experience of actually attending one of today's semi-marketised, employment-oriented institutions, there remains a strong popular desire that they should, at their best, incarnate a set of "aspirations and ideals" that go beyond any form of economic return.
It is crucial that attempts to make the case for universities in present circumstances should not lose sight of this deep and pervasive conviction. In saying this I am certainly not forgetting or underestimating the degree of misunderstanding and hostility that universities, in England at least, have encountered from some politicians and some sections of the media over the past two or three decades. But I suspect that among the public at large there is, potentially, a much greater reservoir of interest in, and latent appreciation of, the work of universities than this narrow and defensive official discourse ever succeeds in tapping into.
In talking to audiences outside universities (some of whom may be graduates), I am struck by the level of curiosity about, and enthusiasm for, ideas and the quest for greater understanding, whether in history and literature, or physics and biology, or any number of other fields. Some members of these audiences may not have had the chance to study these things themselves, but they very much want their children to have the opportunity to do so; others may have enjoyed only limited and perhaps not altogether happy experience of higher education in their own lives, but have now in their adulthood discovered a keen amateur reading interest in these subjects; others still may have retired from occupations that largely frustrated their intellectual or aesthetic inclinations and are now hungry for stimulation.
Such audiences do not want to be told that we judge the success of a university education by how much more graduates can earn than non-graduates, any more than they want to hear how much scholarship and science may indirectly contribute to GDP. They are, rather, susceptible to the romance of ideas and the power of beauty; they want to learn about far-off times and faraway worlds; they expect to hear language used more inventively, more exactly, more evocatively than it normally is in their workaday world; they want to know that, somewhere, human understanding is being pressed to its limits, unconstrained by immediate practical outcomes.
These audiences are not all of one mind, needless to say, and not all sections of society are equally well represented among them. At various points in their lives their members may have other priorities, and there will always be competing demands on their interests and sympathies. But it is noticeable, and surely regrettable, how little the public debate about universities in contemporary Britain makes any kind of appeal to this widespread appreciation on the part of ordinary intelligent citizens that there should be places where these kinds of inquiries are being pursued at their highest level. Part of the problem may be that while universities are spectacularly good at producing new forms of understanding, they are not always very good at explaining what they are doing when they do this.
Major universities are complex organisms, fostering an extraordinary variety of intellectual, scientific and cultural activity, and the significance and value of much that goes on within them cannot be restricted to a single national framework or to the present generation. They have become an important medium – perhaps the single most important institutional medium – for conserving, understanding, extending and handing on to subsequent generations the intellectual, scientific, and artistic heritage of mankind. In thinking about the conditions necessary for their flourishing, we should not, therefore, take too short-term or too purely local a view, nor should we focus exclusively on undergraduate teaching.
Adopting this wider perspective may also help us become more aware of the limitations of treating economic growth as the overriding test of value. Taking a longer-term view of the history, and indeed the future, of universities encourages us to ask fundamental questions of the goal of "contributing to national economic prosperity". How much prosperity do we need (and who counts as "we")? Is it desirable at any cost? What is it, in its turn, good for? And so on. Any serious attempt to address these questions will inevitably have to invoke non-economic values. Most people recognise the standing of such values in their own lives – they do not care for their partners or their children in order to generate a profit any more than they admire a beautiful view or a natural wonder because it increases employment – but it has become difficult to appeal to such values in a public sphere the language of which is chiefly framed by the combination of individualism and instrumentalism.
Universities are not just good places in which to undertake such fundamental questioning; they also embody an alternative set of values in their very rationale. If we are only trustees for our generation of the peculiar cultural achievement that is the university, then those of us whose lives have been shaped by the immeasurable privilege of teaching and working in a university are not entitled to give up on the attempt to make the case for its best purposes and to make that case tell in the public domain, however discouraging the immediate circumstances. After all, no previous generation entirely surrendered this ideal of the university to those fantasists who think they represent the real world. Asking ourselves "What are universities for?" may help remind us, amid distracting circumstances, that we – all of us, inside universities or out – are indeed merely custodians for the present generation of a complex intellectual inheritance which we did not create, and which is not ours to destroy.
Extracted from What Are Universities For? by Stefan Collini, published by Penguin at GBP 9.99

ATIs to get degree awarding status

March 4, 2012, 9:30 pm


by Dasun Edirisinghe, The Island.

Advanced Technological Institutes in the country would be gazetted as degree awarding institutions soon, Higher Education Minister S. B. Dissanayake said.

All the ATI’s would be upgraded with necessary facilities to enable them to function as degree conferring higher education institutes, the minister said adding that initiatives had already been taken to change the medium of instructions in those institutes from Sinhala and Tamil to English.

Minister Dissanayake said that the government expects to recruit foreign students too to the ATIs. The ministry would introduce new courses to the ATIs in parallel to granting them degree awarding status. He said that they would expand the course duration from two years to three years in ATIs.

At present only 20 per cent from those who qualify at the GCE (A/L) examination entered the Science stream courses in the universities and 50 per cent for Art stream courses. The reset for any other courses, Dissanayake said.

According to ministry statistics, there were 40,000 students who sought tertiary education but a large number was shut out as the university system could accommodate limited only a limited number of students per year, he said.

Therefore, the ministry had to provide higher education opportunities for them.

"We have also received reports about several ragging incidents from the ATIs around the country," Dissanayake said adding the ministry had to take tough decisions to stop inhuman ragging in ATIs.

Pera Convocation on March 14

March 4, 2012, 9:41 pm , The Island.

By Cyril Wimalsurendre

KANDY – The General Convocation for 2011 of the University of Peradeniya will be held on March 14 at the University Gymnasium, the acting register of the University stated, yesterday (01).

This convocation scheduled for March 01, was put off due to a strike action by the non-academic staff of the university.

Passes and invitations already issued to graduates, parents and visitors for the convocation scheduled for March 01 are valid for march 14, the acting registrar informs.

Chemicals in our brains

March 2, 2012, 7:17 pm , The Island


A. N. Suranimala

René Descartes wrote his famous piece "I think, therefore I am". My reconsideration of his view was published in The Sri Lankan Journal of the Humanities, 2001/2002. My arguments were theoretical, mainly from Buddhism but also from recent biological research, (Andrew Newberg, Edward O Wilson, Eugene D’Aquili & Vincent Rause, and Richard Dawkins) that there is no "I". But then, something happened to me last year that made me really experience it, that in fact, there is no "I".

I had a fall that probably broke some ribs and I was in severe pain and without sleep so I gobbled two pain killers – paracetamol with codeine, and a strong opiate. And on top of all that I had a bad flu. At this same time, I stopped smoking and that might have further withdrawn stimulation. I felt weird things, and was mildly claustrophobic, felt frightened inside a lift, little things (like the mis-behaviour of our politicians) made me unhappy and I couldn’t sleep. My friend a head-shrink said that the mild depression that followed was probably mainly due to the flu caused by Sneaky, the flu germ, compounded by the drugs. So when the doc gave me fluoxetine, it was to restore and maintain the levels of my brain’s chemical transmitter, serotonin. It did, wow. What I am therefore saying is that small things altered my personality, first the flu germ, then the added insult of the 2 drugs and then the lack of a natural chemical and other factors that added to it: thus my mind (if I had one) was really so fragile, and so dependent on the transmitter. No serotonin, and I get to be odd. Now bananas are full of serotonin but it is illogical, and certainly insulting, if I am equated to a banana. However, the mind is so flexible and fragile; there is no permanent entity that I can call "me" or "I". It is a matter of brain chemistry, so I agree with Andrew Newberg et al. in their important book Why God won’t go away: Brain science and the biology of belief, in which they say "In simpler terms, brain makes mind". Thus we cannot have a permanent entity called a soul at all, as I discussed in the aforesaid Descartes essay. Chemicals compose us and we are always in flux, as Buddhism says. If we drink coffee, we feel pepped up, if we guzzle beer, we get happier, if we swallow panadeine and Tramadol we become mild nuts, so we seem to be different persons at these different times. Did you know that if you, a man, gets an overdose of an oestrogen, a hormone that makes females, females, you, the man, become a sort-of-female, a feminised male (ooops, I nearly said womanized). But if you give a female an overdose of testosterone that makes a male a male, she gets to be a macho male with all his paraphernalia. And what is the difference between these aforesaid males and females? I’ll tell you – just some hydrogen and oxygen atoms and what chemist egg-heads call ‘double bonds’. And so macho Shah Rukh Khan and fabulous Ashwariya differ essentially only by some hydrogen or oxygen atoms and one or two chemical double bonds. Sharon Begley (NEWSWEEK February 18, 2008) says: "…women in several studies say their husbands or lovers are more attentive and amorous when they are ovulating" while producing these chemical hormones.

When I look at a picture of sculptor Auguste Rodin’s masterpiece The Kiss, I re-title it "See, my androgens are working" and when I see his "La Danaide" (below), which brings into vivid life, the utter beauty of a woman or the beauty of an utter woman, I re-title it "See, what my oestrogens can do".

So, girls and boys, and you dolled-up Hi-society females who prance about in your finery waiting for the camera of a Hi Society magazine, your sublime feelings of love that wreak havoc on intended in-laws, or your notion of "I" that wreaks havoc on others, are merely a matter of chemistry. Maybe the olde alchemistes got it right when they tried fiddling with chemicals to make the elixir of life for eternal youth. But as Sidney Harris, the master science cartoonist, depicted, that can never be tested for proof as the experiment will last till eternity.

Then, being an admirer of Vincent van Gogh’s paintings, his vibrant colours - yellows, blues, reds and greens – and whorls of corn fields, trees and vivid scenes of nature, painted with bold strokes of his brush - struck me as a parallel with the hallucinatory experiences of Aldous Huxley after his experimental dose of LSD, the mind-expander (The Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell). The parallel that I think exists, is with the chemically-induced visions of Huxley and the mental disease of van Gogh for it is known that such diseases are due to dis-equilibrium of the chemicals in the brain. Indeed an article Manic Depressive illness and Creativity by Kay R. Jamison (Scientific American 1995) wrote: "Several studies now show that creativity and mood disorders are linked".

And finally came a report – The amazing brain - from the UK (The Island, 3rd April. 2010) that "… researchers revealed in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that they had essentially been able to switch off their subjects’ moral compasses by applying powerful magnets to a small region of the brain just behind the right ear". This is a very disturbing and degrading finding because what thousands of years of civilisation and life-long Sundays in temples and churches achieved, if at all, were undone in a moment by a cheap magnet over a small piece of the brain.

But my head-shrink-friend told me that one of his tools-of-the-trade Cognitive Psychotherapy can cure depression without drugs, which means that, after all, we are not dependant on a load of chemicals. Head-shrinkers and Newberg et al say there is a link between mind and body so we probably have this nebulous thing called a mind on which Cognitive Psychotherapy acts, however confused a mind it is, and then the mind affects the body. But that is too much philosophy for me though René Descartes revelled in it.

And why do "I" (or whatever it is) have these exhilarating musings at 5 am? I have my best ideas at 5 am, if they are any good at all. I think it is because there is, after an overnight’s starvation, mild hypoglycaemia (low blood sugar), or a high cortisol level that jolt my brain and when in the morning I have a belly-full of corn flakes, the "transporting effect" (Aldous Huxley’s experience of LSD) of the hypoglycaemia disappears till tomorrow’s 6 am when I will be again in the hum-drum world of income-tax and shopping for potatoes and onions for my wife.

This progressive demolition and reduction of the psyche of a human, supposedly the acme of biological evolution, into a bag of chemical-tricks has had its macro-precedents. First came Copernicus to show us that planet-earth is not the centre of the universe but a speck of dust in outer space; then Charles Darwin came in to show us that the human, the "Lord of all I survey" was preceded over billions of years by other creatures big and small including slugs and worms. Then we had Karl Marx who proposed that we were mere pawns of economic forces; Sigmund Freud then showed that we are not even masters of our much-vaunted selves, and that we are under the tight, inexorable control of unconscious thoughts, our Ego and our Id.

Eggheads have had these thoughts before I had them: for one, Hippocrates: "Specifically, he blamed the imbalance of natural body fluids for emotional disturbance. The brain, he said, is influenced by the presence of four humors: blood, phlegm, black bile, and yellow bile. When these fluids were in the wrong place or wrong proportion, illness (both physical and emotional) was the result. An excess of yellow bile could overheat the brain to the point of mania and rage. Black bile, on the other hand, tended to chill the brain and cause melancholic feelings", (Overcoming anxiety, Panic and depression: New ways to regain your confidence. [Gardner and Bell 200] ).

So don’t exult in the vain thought that you are the ‘highest form of life in the universe’ (James Thurber in I Believe), you are not; you are just a bag of chemicals.

University non-academics suspend strike after ministry assurance

March 1, 2012, 10:42 pm , The Island.

by Dasun Edirisinghe

University non-academic staff yesterday suspended their strike action, demanding immediate rectification of their salary anomalies, following an assurance from the Higher Education Ministry that it would be resolved within three weeks.

Ministry authorities also promised the top members of the Inter University Trade Union Federation that the arrears caused by the anomalies too would be paid to the non-academic staff with their April salary.

IUTUF President R. M. Chandrapala told The Island that they put off their trade union action for three weeks on the assurances given by the ministry officials. "We believe the ministry authorities would keep their promises and issue relevant circulars immediately. If no action is taken within the stipulated time to grant solutions to our grievances, we will resume the strike," he said.

Chandrapala said that Higher Education Ministry’s Secretary Dr. Sunil Jayantha Navaratne gave the assurance around midnight Wednesday.

The entire university system was paralyzed for two days (Tuesday and Wednesday) due to the strike of the non-academic staff. The IUTUF executive committee met yesterday morning and decided to resume work from noon yesterday.

Pathological science Arsenic CKDU  and Pesticides

February 29, 2012, 8:31 pm, The Island.


Dr. Anura Wiejsekara

Registrar of Pesticides

Pathological Science

A few days ago (on 21st of February) an important regulation under the Control of Pesticide act No. 33 of 1980 was discussed and passed by the Parliament of Sri Lanka. Although both government and opposition members of the parliament were supportive of the regulation all were very critical of pesticides. The issue of Arsenic in pesticides was the favorite subject of discussion during the debate. While listening to our honorable members of the parliament for over four hours I was reminded of Pathological Science.

The term Pathological Science was coined by the Nobel laureate Chemist Irving Langmuir in 1953. He defined pathological science as an area of research that do not go away long after it was given up as false by the majority of scientists in the field. In other words it is the science of things that are not so. N-Rays described by the physicist Prosper-René Blondlot in 1903, Polywater of the Physicist Nikolai Fedyakin in 1960s and Cold Fusion by electrochemists Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann in 1989 are often cited as examples of pathological science. Probably it is too early to decide, whether recently revealed faster than speed of light particle and Arsenic based life forms in the United States are also cases of pathological science. However, the Arsenic scare that is being advertised by various activists in Sri Lanka at present certainly has characteristics of Pathological Science.

Medical Doctor Henry I. Miller, physician and fellow at Stanford University has published an article titled ‘Activism, Mendacity, and Pathological Science’ in Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology News (Vol. 29, No. 15 -2009). In this article he states that "Consumers are increasingly being exposed to pathological science. It is the specialty of self-styled public interest groups, whose agenda too often is not protection of public health or the environment, but intractable opposition to whatever research, product, or technology they happen to dislike. This is not a harmless diversion: When their machinations give rise to overregulation—or even bans—of safe and useful products or processes, all of society is the poorer for it".

Arsenic

What transpired in the parliament debate mentioned above was the depth of the Arsenic scare that has been created by a group of activists through media. The word ‘Arsenic’ has become synonymous with poison among the general public although there are more deadlier poisons in the world probably due to horror stories of deliberate poisoning by use of Arsenic. Yet it is largely unknown that Arsenic is the 20th most abundant element in the World. Scientists consider Arsenic as a trace element but not a rear earth element. Being the 20th most abundant element it is present in the environment in varying amounts. It is naturally found in the air, water, soil, plants and animals including humans. Arsenic occurs in above average amounts naturally in some areas of the world. Human activities have sometimes lead to the accumulation of Arsenic in excessive amounts in certain areas. It is estimated that fossil fuel burning alone add 80,000 tons of Arsenic to the world environment annually. In nature, Arsenic as many other elements cycle in the environment. Animals including humans have evolved mechanisms of excreting Arsenic when it is consumed in normal amounts. However, long term consumption of relatively higher amounts of Arsenic leads to accumulation of Arsenic in various body tissues and to Chronic Arsenic Poisoning.

CKDU

From what I have read Chronic Kidney Disease (CKD) or gradual deterioration of kidneys is not an uncommon ailment around the world. There seems to be many different causes for CKD like diabetes, high blood pressure, genetics, snake poisons etc. In addition to CKD with known causes doctors have found CKD that cannot be explained with known causes. This form of chronic kidney disease with unknown cause is called Chronic Kidney Disease of Unknown etiology (CKDU). There is CKDU in Balkan countries for the last 50 years and doctors are still trying to find the cause of this disease. Similarly the workers of sugar cane fields in Central American countries are also suffering from a form of CKDU. Unfortunately increasing incidence of CKDU has been reported from very specific geographic areas of Sri Lanka too. Many scientists in the country have been studying the disease trying find out the causal factor or factors of this disease. Few hypotheses have been put forward and many experiments have been conducted trying to prove these hypothesis. Yet the published results indicate that that there is no consensus among the scientists on cause of CKDU in Sri Lanka.

The most recent hypothecs put forward is that the causal agent of CKDU in Sri Lanka is Arsenic. This probably is a worthwhile hypothesis to test. But unfortunately proponents of the hypothesis have shown exact characteristics of pathological science making it very difficult for fellow scientist to accept their results. The following paragraph from Dr. Millers article is exactly true for the Arsenic scare that has been dumped upon our society by proponents of above hypothesis. Dr. Miller says "activist-funded research is commonly held to a lower standard or none at all. Activists’ claims are typically promoted by alarmist press releases and reported by the media (their dual mottos: "If it bleeds, it leads," and "Never let facts get in the way of a good story"), but seldom are they independently peer-reviewed and published in scientific journals. Sadly, after its claims are repeated again and again, policy-makers, the media, and the public come to accept this pathological science as credible—or even proven".

Pesticides

The proponents of the CKDU due to Arsenic first claimed that excessive amounts of Arsenic in CKDU endemic areas come from pesticides and most of this Arsenic accumulates in water and rice. Later they withdrew the claim of Arsenic in rice apparently due to political pressure. They also have implied that certain multinational companies add Arsenic deliberately to increase the effectiveness of pesticides. How true the words of Dr. Miller when he wrote "Activists who disapprove of certain kinds of R&D or marketed products often try to stigmatize them via guilt by association with corporate interests". The Arsenic found in certain pesticides is in parts per billion levels. They are nothing but unavoidable impurities that come from the production process. If companies add such low amounts of Arsenic to increase the efficiency of their pesticides as the proponents claim the companies are wasting their time. Such low levels of Arsenic will not kill any pest and pest control cannot depend on chronic effects of pesticides.

The proponents of ‘Arsenic from pesticides’ also claim that there is no Arsenic in bed rock of Sri Lanka and therefore, our soil cannot contain Arsenic in it as soil is form by the withering of rocks. Yet there is published literature to show that Arsenic is present in bed rocks of this country!

As the Registrar of Pesticides I have a responsibility to investigate the claims made on pesticides. As I have already explained to the public (article published in The Island on 17th June 2011) Arsenic was found in few pesticides in minuscule amounts as impurities. The duty of fifteen members of the Pesticide Technical and Advisory Committee formed according to the provisions of the Control of Pesticides Act was to decide whether the amounts of Arsenic found in certain pesticides would cause Arsenic accumulation in the environment due to repetitive use of pesticides over long period of time. They listened to the views of leading geologist in the country who have studied Arsenic in our environment. They studied the published scientific information relevant to the issue and the committee decided that there is no evidence at all to support the idea that pesticides cause Arsenic accumulation in the environment, agricultural or natural. By contrast we found enough scientific evidence from published literature to falsify the claims of Arsenic hypothesis proponents.

There is an interesting study done by a local group of scientists to find out why elephants eat soil (geophagy) from certain areas in the jungle but not from other areas. They have analyzed soils from Udawalawa sanctuary for this purpose. One of the chemicals they analyzed happened to be Arsenic. The relevance here is that this study shows that soil from Udawalawa has more Arsenic (9-33 ppm) than what has been found in pesticides of CKDU endemic areas (maximum 2.6 ppm). Such findings do not support the claims of Arsenic hypothesis proponents.

Proponents of Arsenic hypothesis have blamed the Registrar of Pesticides (ROP) for not banning the pesticides with Arsenic. On the contrary it is the ROP that has banned importation of any pesticide to Sri Lanka with Arsenic as an active ingredient. This piece of regulation under the Control of Pesticides Act has been misinterpreted by the proponents in support of their cause. In addition they claim that ROP has stated that eating small amounts of Arsenic is not a problem. This again is a misinterpretation of my attempts to educate the public on the natural occurrence of arsenic as a trace element.

Dr. Miller states that "Frequently decision makers give up the difficult task of finding out where the weight of scientific opinion lies, and instead attach equal value to each side in an effort to approximate fairness. In this way extraordinary opinions are promoted to a form of respectability that approaches equal status. This kind of undeserved moral equivalence frequently compromises governmental decision making and has given rise to unscientific and inconsistent regulation of many other products and technologies as well, including pesticides and other chemicals".

It is true that some of the regulatory decisions that we have taken have been induced by the Arsenic fiasco. Yet I have made it certain not to give way to unscientific and inconsistent regulation of pesticides in Sri Lanka. As Dr. Miller points out "No one should mistake activists’ misdemeanors and mischief for naive exuberance or excessive zeal in a good cause. In case after case, their motives are self-serving and their tactics callous".

The present Dean of the Faculty of Science, University of Peradeniya once told me that there are four types of people according to Buddhism. Later, I found this explained in Valahaka Sutta of Anguttara Nikaya. Four types of people are; those who know that they know, those who know that they don’t know, those who don’t know that they know and those who don’t know that they don’t know. There are many parties involved in the Arsenic fiasco in Sri Lanka; proponent of the Arsenic hypothesis, scientist, journalists, politicians, religious leaders, registrar of pesticides and so on. I will let you decide to which type the parties involved in the Arsenic fiasco belongs to.

Discussion on university crisis

February 29, 2012, 9:58 pm , The Island.

A panel discussion entitled ‘University crisis’, organised by Transparency International Sri Lanka, is to be held at the auditorium of the Organization of Professional Associations, Stanley Wijesundera Mawatha, Colombo 7, today at 4p.m.

The panelists would be the former Vice Chancellor of the Sri Jayewardenepura University, Dr. Jagath Wickremasinghe, Dr Nirmal Ranjith Dewasiri from the Colombo University and Convener of the Inter University Students’ Federation, Sanjeewa Bandara. Dr. Mahim Mendis of the Open University, will be the moderator, a TISL spokesman said.

Private Medical Schools:
An Educationist’s Perspective

February 29, 2012, 8:29 pm , The Island.


Raja C. Bandaranayake

[The text of the Inaugural Lecture of the Forum for Sri Lankan Medical Educationists, delivered on 9 January 2012, at the Postgraduate Institute of Medicine]

Continued from yesterday

The relationship between the private medical school and the teaching hospital may take one of several different forms:

1. The private medical school has its own teaching hospital. This is the model used by most established schools.

2. The private medical school shares a teaching hospital with a public medical school. This model usually affects both schools adversely.

3. The private medical school pays a fee to a public hospital for using it as a teaching hospital. Usually the fee is very high fee, eroding the school’s income.

4. The private medical school uses one or more existing private hospitals for clinical teaching.

 The most suitable model is the first one, as the school can develop its own identity and become a useful resource to the community, without being an encumbrance to any other training institution. However, private patients are generally averse to allowing medical students to learn from their illnesses. Thus many private medical schools utilize public hospitals for a significant part or all of their clinical training. I am of the firm opinion that, if a hospital, public or private, is designated a teaching hospital, carrying with it all the benefits of a teaching hospital, a condition of patient admission to that hospital should be their consent to be used for teaching purposes.

Another potential disadvantage is the laxity of student admission policy adopted by some private medical schools. Often admission is dependent on paying capacity than on academic merit, sometimes even at the expense of ignoring minimum standards. Some schools insist on minimum standards but these are often below those required for admission to state schools. This would naturally compromise the quality of the product.

Private medical schools sometimes pose a threat to public medical schools by attracting academic staff from the latter with higher salaries and/or better working conditions. Another strategy is for faculty to work part-time in each institution. I have seen both these practices occur, often to the detriment of an already established public school.

Private medical schools, because they are expensive, result in a diminution in socio-economic diversity in their student populations. Combined with the fact that patients admitted to private hospitals usually lack that diversity, such bias will affect the graduates’ ability to deal with lower socio-economic patient groups and minority groups.

Unless rural medicine is a stated goal, private medical schools tend to be established in urban areas, in order to attract the wealthier sectors of the community. Rather than correct the mal-distribution of doctors, such schools tend to contribute to it. In some countries permission is granted to open new schools only if they are located in under-served areas.

Guidelines for the establishment of private medical schools

The key to ensuring that any private medical school contributes effectively to healthcare in the community in which its graduates serve is to enforce a system of monitoring which guarantees that minimum standards are met.  In order to meet these standards prerequisite resources must be in place before the school is permitted to admit students. It is not enough if the school is allowed to open its doors on promises that it will meet these requirements in the future. Schools often may agree to "put facilities in place", particularly for the conduct of clinical training, but often find themselves in difficulty to do so effectively when students are due to enter the clinical training phase. They then have to resort to interim measures until suitable facilities are available. Irrespective of whether the school intends to have its own teaching hospital, or to use the facilities already available in the public or private sector, the facilities must be available and/or agreement must be reached before students are admitted. If clinical skills are to be taught in the early phases of the curriculum the facility of a clinical skills laboratory must be available before students are admitted. The nature of the curriculum plan will determine the resource requirements for the school to implement the different phases of the curriculum.

Even more important are human resource requirements. No school should be allowed to open its doors to students if it is to depend on academic staff of an existing school for the implementation of the teaching program. As pointed out above, this could lead to lower standards in both schools.

Minimum academic requirements should be insisted upon in the system of student admission to the new school, commensurate with existing requirements in the country. Allowances should not be made based on socio-economic status, influence or paying capacity of the candidate.

The task of ensuring that the minimum criteria for a medical school are met is the responsibility of the independent body granting licensure to the graduates of the school to practise in the society which the school is to serve. In most instances this is a medical council (such as the Medical Council of India, the General Medical Council in the UK or the Australian Medical Council in Australia), or other specially appointed body (such as the Liaison Committee for Medical Education in the US) which is not affiliated to any particular medical school or university in the country. It must be recognised that certification of competence, manifested by the granting of the degree, is an internal matter, which is the responsibility of the training institution, while licensure to practise in a given country or society is an external matter, which is the responsibility of the independent licensing body. These are clearly distinct functions. For example, a school may deem its products competent based on internal assessment, but the licensing body may not find the assessment procedures used meet minimum standards for safe practice. On the other hand, the curriculum may be deemed appropriate for practice in one country but not in another. These are issues which have to be dealt with by the licensing body, which in Sri Lanka is the Sri Lanka Medical Council (SLMC).

What then can the SLMC do in this regard? The practice of undertaking pre-accreditation visits by a responsible and entrusted body, such as the SLMC, can go a long way to ensuring that adequate facilities are in place in any proposed medical school, public or private, before it is allowed to admit students. I would suggest that SLMC develops its own set of guidelines for such pre-accreditation, as well a set of standards representing the minimum essential requirements before a new school can commence training. These guidelines and standards can take into account the socio-economic realities in Sri Lanka better than standards developed elsewhere by other bodies. If such a set of guidelines and standards are in place now, before new schools are ready to commence, then the SLMC can be entrusted with the task of appointing an accreditation committee which can judge each proposed school’s plans and resources against the standards before approval is granted. In doing so, the Council must judge the resources available in relation to the intended curriculum plan.

If a private school is opened jointly with an existing school in another country, SLMC must ensure that the standards of the latter are at least on par with the minimum standards expected of a medical school in Sri Lanka before such a joint venture is accredited for licensure in Sri Lanka.

The Council should be particularly wary of prestigious schools using their prestige to encourage sub-standard schools to be opened in Sri Lanka, and ensure that adequate standards are met before such schools are allowed to admit students.

Conclusion

 I have attempted to take a dispassionate and educational view of the vexed question of privatisation of medical education. The history of the trend of privatisation and the forces which contributed to its development point to important lessons for Sri Lanka as it grapples with this issue. The advantages and disadvantages of privatisation must be considered carefully and steps taken to enhance the former while minimising the latter. I see any venture which contributes to the development of healthcare in the community as a positive one. However it could be fraught with dangers if adequate safeguards are not taken to maintain the high standards of healthcare which this country is noted for. I have outlined some steps which could be taken by an independent body, such as the SLMC, to avert these dangers. We must be constantly vigilant to prevent the "trade school mentality" of the pre-Flexnerian era from permeating our medical schools, which until now have been held in high esteem internationally.