Ahilan Kadirgamar
The countryside and peripheral regions have been neglected in the national imagination for many decades. This has also been the case with regional universities which were seen as mere appendages to the university system, and sometimes created to appease political constituencies in the regions. The exclusion of the rural world and the institutions in those regions was not accidental nor inevitable, but the consequence of conscious policies promoted under an extractive and exploitative global order. Neoliberalism globalisation, initiated in the late 1970s with far reaching policies of free trade and free flow of capital, or the “open economy” as we call it in Sri Lanka, is now dying. The United States and the Western countries that promoted neoliberalism as a class project of finance capital to address the falling profits during the long economic downturn in the 1970s are themselves reversing their policies and are at loggerheads with each other. However, those economic processes will continue to have national consequences into the future.
At the heart of such policies is the neoliberal city, which has become the centre of the economy with expanding financial businesses and a real estate boom. Such financialised cities also had their impact on universities in lower income countries, where commercialised education with high fees, rising student debt, research for businesses and transnational educational linkages with branch campuses of Western universities, have become a reality.
In the case of Sri Lanka, while neoliberal policies began with the IMF and World Bank Structural Adjustment Programs in the late 1970s, the long civil war forestalled the accelerated growth of the neoliberal city. I have argued over the last decade and a half that it is with the end of the civil war in 2009 coinciding with the global financial crisis that a second wave of neoliberalism in Sri Lanka led to global finance capital being absorbed in infrastructure and real estate in Colombo. The transformation of Colombo into a neoliberal city was overseen by Gotabaya Rajapaksa as Defence Secretary with even the Urban Development Authority brought under the security establishment. While Colombo was drastically changing with a skyline of new buildings and shiny luxury vehicles drawing on massive external debt, there were also moves to promote private higher education institutions. The Board of Investment (BOI) registered many hundred so-called higher education institutions; these were not regulated and many mushroomed like supermarkets and disappeared in no time when they incurred losses.
In contrast to these so-called private higher education institutions that proliferated in and around Colombo, Sri Lanka drawing on its free education system has over the last many decades also created a number of state universities in peripheral regions. However, these regional universities lack adequate funding and a clear vision and purpose. The current conjuncture with the neoliberal global order unravelling, and the immediate global crisis in energy and transport are grim reminders of the importance of local economies and self-sufficiency. In this column I consider the role of our regional universities and their relationship to the communities within which they are embedded.
Regional context
The necessity and the advantage of robust public services is their reach into peripheral regions and marginalised communities. This is true of public transport as it is with public hospitals. Private buses will always avoid isolated rural routes as their margins only increase on the busy routes between cities and towns. And private hospitals and clinics flock to the cities to extract from desperate patients, including by unscrupulous doctors who divert patients in public hospitals to be served in the private health facilities they moonlight. Similarly, it is affluent cities and towns that are the attraction for private educational institutions.
Public institutions including universities can only ensure their public role if they are adequately funded. Over the last decade and a half, with falling allocations for education, our state universities have been pushed into initiating fee levying courses, both at the post-graduate level and also for undergraduate international students. These programs are seen as avenues to decrease the dependence of universities on budgetary support. However, the reality is that it is only universities in Colombo that can draw in students capable of paying such high fees. Furthermore, such fee levying courses end up pushing academics into overwork including by offering additional income.
Therefore, allocations for underfunded regional universities need to be steadily increased. Housing facilities and other services for academics working in rural districts would ensure their continued presence and greater engagement with the local communities. Increased time away from teaching and research funding earmarked for community engagement will provide clear direction for academics. Indeed, such funding with a clear vision and role for regional universities can provide considerable social returns. In a time when repeated crises are affecting our society, agricultural production to bolster our food system as well as rural income streams and employment are major issues. Here, regional universities have an important role today in developing social and economic alternatives.
Reimagining development
In recent months, there have been interesting initiatives in the Northern Province where the Universities of Jaffna and Vavuniya have been engaging state institutions on issues of development. In an initiative to bring different actors together, high level meetings have been convened between the staff of the Agriculture Faculty and officials of the Provincial Agriculture Ministry to figure out solutions for long pending agricultural problems. Similar meetings have also been organised between provincial authorities and the Faculties of Technology and Engineering in Kilinochchi. These initiatives have led to academics engaging communities and co-operatives on their development needs, particularly in formulating new development initiatives and activating idle projects and assets in the region. Such engagement provides opportunities for academics to share their knowledge and skills while learn from communities about challenges that lead to new problems for research.
One of the most rewarding engagements I have been part of is an internship program for the Technology Faculty of the University of Jaffna where four batches of final year students from food technology, green farming and automobile specialities have been placed for six months within the co-operative movement through the Northern Co-operative Development Bank. This initiative has created a strong relationship between the Technology Faculty and the co-operative movement with a number of former students now working fulltime in co-operative ventures. They are at the centre of developing solutions for rural co-operatives, including activating idle factories and ensuring quality and standards for their products.
I refer to these concrete initiatives because universities’ role in research and development in Sri Lanka, as in most other countries, are often narrowly conceived to be engagement with private businesses. However, for rural regions, the challenge even with technological development is the generation of appropriate technologies that can serve communities.
In Sri Lanka, we have for long emulated the major Western universities and in the process lost sight of the needs of our own youth and communities. Rethinking the development of our universities may have to begin with an understanding of the real challenges and context of our people. Our universities and its academics, if provided the progressive vision and adequate resources and time to engage their communities, have the potential to address the many economic and social challenges that the next decade of global turmoil is bound to create.
