Post-graduate education has been neglected in universities

Prof. Wiswa WARNAPALA, Minister of Higher Education

Speech delivered by Prof. Wiswa Warnapala on the occasion of M. Phil/PhD programme in Library and Information Science of the University of Colombo on June 25 at the Sri Lanka Foundation Institute.

SPEECH: Library and Information Science has now emerged as a separate academic discipline, and it has graduated from a professional-oriented discipline to an academic discipline.

Librarianship, from the very beginning, was a profession, and its professionalism began to develop in association with the development of Libraries and Librarianship during the 19th century.

It was in Britain that a network of Libraries came into existence, and the Public Libraries Act of 1850 resulted in the establishment of a network of Public Libraries in Britain.

The British Library Association was formed in 1880, and it was with the emergence of this organisation that professionalism in Librarianship came to be recognised.

Since then the Librarianship, despite its growing academic content, remained a processional qualification; in other words, academic degrees, like the ones which this Institute proposes to promote at the University of Colombo, were not given recognition.

It was this professional - orientation in the career of a Librarian and the absence of much academic content in the work associated with a Librarian prevented its development as an academic discipline till the arrival of modern technology, with which Library Science has been revolutionised.

The development of the academic Library, which includes Libraries of Universities and other institutions associated with the Universities, had an impact on Library studies. They were very much different from public and other Libraries because the academic Library has a vital component pertaining to research and reference.

All of us are aware of the fact that Public Library lends books for home reading and its function, therefore, was very limited whereas the academic Library has a wider function in providing facilities for both reference and research.

It is this character of the modern Library which has widened the scope of Library Science, and it is on the basis of this experience that degree programmes in Library Science came to be introduced.

The National Institute of Library and Information Science is today inaugurating a post-graduate programme, which proposes to award M. Phil, and PhD degrees in the relevant field. What does it mean. This Institute, through its post-graduate programme, is planing to produce research scholars in the field of Library Science.

Since Library Science is now an academic discipline, it would be useful to refer to academics. Academics always stick to their own subjects and they become experts in their own field.

In this connection, I would like to refer to an interesting episode involving Leonard Woolf. He produced a book titled Principia Politica in 1953, and all reviewers mentioned that the ideas of the author did not fit into the situation then prevalent in the world.

It was E.H. Carr who wrote a devastating review; E.H. Carr stated that Leonard Woolf was not an academic. He was only a public intellectual.

Academics are people who divide knowledge into compartments and for them all genuine knowledge is specialised knowledge. I said this because we are trying to elevate the status of a professional Librarian to that of an academic.

Sri Lankan universities, from the very inception, developed as undergraduate institutions.

The university administrators and Government policymakers concentrated on the development of universities as undergraduate institutions, and this, though a vital requirements in the initial stage of the development of universities, led to the neglect of post-graduate studies.

Yet another reason was the over-emphasis on foreign post-graduate degrees, and this was primarily due to the influence of the colonial period and also due to the availability of scholarships from different organisations.

Such development have had a salutary effect on the formation of a sizeable group of academics with foreign post-graduate degrees and they, apart from the social respectability they enjoyed as academic, provided inspirational guidance to the undergraduates who were bent on learning.

With the expansion of the Universities, question arose as to how the universities could provide facilities for post-graduate education for those in the academic staff.

Today I am told that there is a severe dearth of teachers with good post-graduate qualifications; we all know that prestige of a university depends, to a large extent, on its qualified staff and its contribution to knowledge through research and publications.

In my view, all universities should pay special attention to the staff needs of the higher education institutions and to ensure a suitable number of teaching and research faculty for the successful implementation of the post-graduate programmes.

It needs to be well organised; unfortunately, in our Universities post-graduate programmes, excepting those in the established Post-graduate Institutions, are not properly organised and they are not properly supervised by the respective Head of Departments or the Dean of the Faculty.

It is here that both national and international exchanges of faculty is necessary to crete a centre of excellence. As a result of the process of globalisation, international.

cooperation and international division of work cannot be avoided in higher education. This encourages both quality and innovation, and it is on the basis of this that universities could prove their international competitiveness.

Special efforts should be made to ensure high quality of research and teaching in higher education. Library Science has now become a nationally important field of study, and the postgraduate courses, which we inaugurate today, in addition to the enhancement of professionalism in the librarianship, would develop as an attractive academic discipline. Therefore, in my view, it needs to be based on the following criteria;

(1) the quality of educational research and professional activities of comparable standards abroad;

(2) their strategic role as the economic, social and cultural development of Sri Lanka;

(3) labour market needs for which higher education degrees are required.

This, in my view, applies to all postgraduate courses in the universities. In our universities sector, there are eight postgraduate institutes.

According to available statistics, the total number of postgraduate students enrolled at the postgraduate Institutes stood at 422 in 2006, and this, when looked at from the point of view of the staff needs, is inadequate to meet demand.

This shows that attractive incentives have not been provided to attract more enterprising graduates to undertake postgraduate research, and in an environment, where foreign scholarships are scarce, more graduates should make use of the existing postgraduate facilities in the country.

Higher education could be transformed only on the basis of an expansion of postgraduate education. In this context, one can say that the universities need a postgraduate policy, which must necessarily contain both academic studies and professional training.

In designing postgraduate programmes, the universities need to take into account the requirements of the system; I refer to such things as the requirements of various disciplines and the aspirations of the learners.

The policy-makers should remember the fact that if postgraduate studied are exact copy of a foreign model, they will hardly fulfill the criteria to which I referred.

The aim of post-graduate studies is to produce researchers in the relevant field, and if this lofty aim is to be realised, the postgraduate programmes have to be located within research centres or institutes engaged in research.

Today, in the modern world, we have programmes called ‘academic’ which lead to the attainment of Master’s or Doctoral degrees, and are aimed at higher teaching or research within or outside the university.

These programmes primarily focus in areas of natural science, social, science and humanities. There are professional speciality programmes, like this one which we are inaugurating today, which offer a degree for a specialist or an expert.

There are various models of postgraduate programmes, resulting from various influences coming mainly from Britain and United States. In the ‘academic’ postgraduate programmes, we see formal stages in which University teachers and researchers are provided with opportunities to prepare themselves for an academic career.

Such programmes, in my view, are of fundamental importance to the expansion, development and reproduction of learning centres in a country.

We know that postgraduate programmes, based on the need to train university teachers and researchers are costly, and therefore, this type of postgraduate study programme should be located in places with proper infrastructure.

If a postgraduate programme is to succeed, it requires what is called inter-university cooperation and this is very vital for countries with scarce academic resources.

In the light of these considerations, one can conveniently say that Sri Lanka, at this given point of time, needs a well-thought out postgraduate strategy which can enhance the quality of higher education.

It is a properly designed policy that can ensure quality in the higher Education system of Sri Lanka. The NGO-based research, with which the University Dons are involved, is yet another reason which has contributed to the decline in postgraduate research in our universities.

The World Bank too has recognised the slow expansion of post-graduate education in many parts of the world, and this is especially true of Sri Lanka.

In developing countries, the enrolment rate in postgraduate studies was 2.4 per cent while the rate in the United States was 12.6 per cent. In the OECD countries, on an average, one PhD is produced per year per 5,000 students.

In Thailand, postgraduate studies represent 3 per cent of the overall enrolment and it was 8 per cent in Korea. This shows that postgraduate education is integrally linked to the process of development. In the Asian countries, the absence of a proper system of postgraduate education could be traced to a tradition of sending students abroad.

Concluding my remarks, it needs to be mentioned that our universities system, which is more than eighty years old, is an established system which can easily produce number of post-graduate programmes to address the staff need as well as the needs of the country in different areas of development activity.

I would like to request the universities, instead of over-concentrating on under-graduate studies, to take steps to expand post-graduate programmes with a view to assisting the country to accelerate the process of economic and social transformation of Sri Lanka.

The country needs, at this juncture, more university trained researchers and professionals, graduates with advanced technical and managerial skills, who can enrich the intellectual enterprise in the country.