Kuppi Talk

The Chairman of the University Grants Commission (UGC) of Sri Lanka, Prof. Sampath Amaratunge, is widely being quoted on social media these days as having said at a COPE (Committee on Public Enterprises) meeting that there are no employment opportunities for as many as 70 percent of the Arts graduates (graduates produced in the fields of the humanities and social sciences) in the country. He is also quoted as having said that the under-employment of the Arts graduates is the sole reason behind the criticism that is out there against the entire university system in the country.

The Parliamentary Select Committee on Education recently released its report on its programme for reforms in general education and higher education. Headed by Dr. Wijedasa Rajapaksa, the more than 10-member committee only had two members who had had anything to do with higher education, namely, Drs. Harini Amarasuriya and Charitha Herath. Yet it has audaciously proposed sweeping and fundamental changes in education, particularly higher education. It is noteworthy that Dr. Amarasuriya refused to be a party to the report and released her own dissenting report, outlining her fundamental differences with its findings.

A couple of weeks ago, I attended the UN conference on Sustainable Development Goals at the University of Hull, in the United Kingdom. The theme of the conference was ‘Just Transition for Sustainable Development,’ and the popular discussions were spearheaded by natural science scholars who proudly presented new research—funded by private companies—on innovative technology for renewable energy.

Interest-free loans of LKR 1.1 million are to be offered for students to follow degree programmes at private higher educational institutions. An amendment to the Universities Act has been proposed to establish a Quality Assurance Council under the University Grants Commission (UGC) to maintain the quality of academic programmes offered by state and non-state higher educational institutions.

I began thinking about this article when the Kuppi Collective began studying the government’s plans to enact labour reforms. We had initiated discussions with others, including academics, to understand the situation and quickly realised the highly controversial nature of these reforms and their potentially serious repercussions. Yet, hardly any debate regarding these reforms seemed to emanate from within universities.

I caught myself the other day saying something to this effect in the classroom – “now that you know what I expect, I’d like you all to think through why you’ve chosen the answers you have”. At the time, I assumed that this was a very open invitation to students to revisit the whys and hows of their choices within the second language classroom. Upon further thought, however, I realise that even this exercise allows for freedom on the student’s part only if they agree that my framing of language competency is not to be questioned. In essence, I had already biased their answers by requiring them to be familiar with knowing what I wanted as a teacher.

The domain of the humanities and social sciences is under attack more than ever before. The relevance, as well as usefulness of the degrees earned in those fields, is being questioned left, right, and centre. The question of whether it is meaningful at all to be spending, if not wasting, the limited financial resources available in the coffers to produce graduates in those fields is raised constantly, at multiple levels. Attempts are being made to introduce a little bit of soft skills into the curricula in order to add ‘value’ to the degree programmes in the field. The assumption here is that either such degree programmes do not impart any skills or the skills that they impart are of no value. We often see this widely-shared profoundly negative attitude towards the humanities and the social sciences (more towards the former than towards the latter) being projected on the practitioners (students, teachers, and researchers) in those areas.

The classroom is believed to be a site that nourishes scholarship, diversity, creativity and dissent. It should facilitate students and teachers of diverse genders and sexual preferences to live out their identities, if they wish to, without hindrance. However, in reality, the classroom, in Sri Lanka, remains a microcosm of the larger society and often re-produces the social hierarchies of gender and sexuality. One’s body, expressions and desires are policed heavily in this space through unwritten codes of conduct entrenched in discourses of gender and sexual normativity. Today’s Kuppi Talk explores how the classroom in the Sri Lankan context remains a space that marginalizes women and LGBTIQ+ persons and what needs to be done to make this space more inclusive.

Last week’s Kuppi column, by Kaushalya Perera, focused on labour concerns at state universities and the impact of measures taken by the government on the recruitment and retention of academic staff. In this article, I specifically draw attention to the factors that affect attracting and retaining young lecturers and their career development in the state university system, especially at a time of economic crisis. To do this, I will use my own experiences and those of junior lecturers in the medical and dental fields with whom I have had conversations across several state universities.

A couple of years back, at a workshop on graduate employability (sponsored by World Bank loans), we were told that producing graduates was like producing cars. The buyers – potential employers – want to know what they are getting. Let’s consider this analogy at face value. We would then remember that the quality of a car depends on not one but multiple things, of which labour is a significant issue, as the Michigan automobile industry realized last year.