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| Saturday, 13 December 2003 |
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Of Jolly Uncles, foreign aid and equity by Prof. S. Rainajeevan H. Hoole A recent column, taking a nationalist stand, held out three points that aid agencies are an Uncle Jolly who gives out freebies which ultimately have to be paid back, that language tests they promote like TOEFL are another wonderful example of sending money back to America, and that the UGC has effectively killed the indigenous University Test of English Language (UTEL). In western culture my uncle named Jolly has his individuality as his most important attribute. That he is uncle is secondary. Uncle is therefore an adjective. In Eastern culture, his status as uncle is paramount. His name Jolly is simply the adjective. So an Englishman's Uncle Jolly is our Jolly Uncle or, to please feminists, Anty [sic.]. That is my point. We are a status conscious society where status considerations and loyalties, dilute our standards. Bosses are those with, not competency, but the most influence. Invited speakers are not subject experts but those in authority. Recall how university admissions were dramatically increased just to accommodate a Governor General's daughter, "the infamous Gopallawa Batch." Singapore, mindful of these Asian values, has kept up educational standards by asking Cambridge to conduct their national examinations. So too West Africa. Thus UTEL, though a very alive initiative that will save us money, will need foreign benchmarks like TOEFL and ELTS or go the way of all things Sri Lankan. When we dish out postgraduate degrees under capacity building ADB funds, standards suffer. Running a part-time MSc programme (that is what nearly all are), we cannot get students so we admit general degree and ordinary pass honours graduates. Those really good go abroad. Part-timers work and come tired, getting in a weekend material that full-time students get over a week. They cannot cope. Assignments are not turned in. The mid-term is a disaster. Having started the programme we must show success. So most pass. The few bright students are not challenged the speed of the convoy being the speed of the slowest ship. Certainly in fields like computers our MSc standard is lower than for competitively selected B.Sc. students. The number of new MScs now becomes an index of our ADB-funded development! So too our research degrees the MPhil and the prestigious PhD. Lots of them are given out under ADB scholarships now. But every thesis presumes a new discovery and must be accompanied at least by a publication. Where are these papers? It is the newest fraud by academics aspiring towards the professorship. Now we have newly embarked on giving out higher doctorates, meant for creating a new area of research or altering the direction of a field through seminal publications. The Dean setting up a DSc evaluation had assured the Senate that the two British examiners had DSc degrees. Upon their reports, the examination committee whose Chairman had never published a single international paper and therefore knew little of research, recommended the award of the degree. In the event, according to their web pages, one examiner had only a PhD and been a full professor only from 1999. The other had 3 honorary DSc degrees from Athens, Khartoum and Malaysia! The awardee had, besides papers in journals controlled by his faculty, 20 proper papers in international journals something that a few good professors here have without claiming a higher doctorate. But to the Chairman it must have seemed an amazing record. Indeed, a Tamil with similar international papers had been turned down by the same university for a mere Associate Professorship and moved out to such a position abroad. It is a patronage game that minorities cannot win. For usually minorities have no godfathers and need external watchdogs. For example the 5-year ADB project coming to an end soon excluded all three universities of the North-East, which stay down because funding for new programmes goes to the established ones on grounds of capacity. Swedish money allowed local managers to put southern universities on the Internet while the North-East remained unconnected. The idea of equity is alien to us. Similarly, aid for school quality improvement hardly reaches estate schools. Our Jolly Uncles are therefore a mixed bag. Aid is indeed misused through, besides the examples mentioned, foreign trips, vain advertisements with photographs of bigwigs and hotel meals that keep all quiet. Loan funds also prop up favourable governments by creating the appearance of wealth at the expense of future generations. But these same funds if used properly towards development, would make us capable of paying them back. Our Jolly Uncles, despite taking back a good part of the funds, play an important role that we have failed at Ÿ?" equitable resource allocation and quality assurance. If the funds are not properly utilised, they halt further disbursements, whereas in our hands any remaining funds would be finished off. Our wastage of funds would be bigger if not for their checks. Our Jolly Uncles are not always as qualified as we are but they are free of our parochial loyalties. Remember, they do not create programmes like the ADB capacity building fiasco for universities. We propose the programmes and in funding them, they put in the checks and balances. We are unfit, as experience shows, to manage them all by ourselves. Our Jolly Uncles now ensure that new money is disbursed evenly. Jaffna University is going through being wired. Our Jolly Uncles in INGOs monitor school resource allocations and remind the ministry of its obligations. It is the only way of managing our house until we engender a local enabling environment. Let us face it. We have failed all our tests as a nation and could do with a little help, even if it is going to cost us dearly in consultants' funds. Without help, there will be more wastage and less equity. There would even be no attempt at peace. And we would be permanent beggars. |
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