Student indiscipline in universities

Prof. Wiswa Warnapala, Minister of Higher Education

Higher Education: In the last few weeks, violence among undergraduates have become endemic and the sporadic incidents of violence resulted in the closure of the universities for weeks and months, resulting in the failure to work according to the calendar of the University.

No university, because of the nature and pattern of organised violence among the undergraduate community, can work according to established university calendar, and the failure to work according to the calendar cost the nation billions of rupees.

Violence in the universities is a malaise which needs to be tackled by formulating policy on such issues as student welfare and student discipline. The latest incidents at Rajarata, Kelaniya, Peradeniya and the Aesthetic University at Horton Place are alarming and they, apart from the fact that they manifest examples of student indiscipline, demonstrate the extent to which our universities have deteriorated as centres of learning.

The challenge before the Government is to convert them into centres of learning. In other words, the culture of learning, for which the universities were known in the fifties and sixties, needs to be restored if the university system is to survive as places which produce and make use of knowledge for development.

Academic leadership

There are numerous instances where the academic leadership is challenged and there are instances where

 they have been taken hostage and violent and unethical methods are used to intimidate the academic leadership; such moves are politically motivated, and usually done according to a hidden political agenda.

Even trivial and typical issues of the university nature are used to articulate demands and mobilise support among the undergraduates, and such developments, apart from disrupting the annual academic programme, interfere with the administration and the maintenance of discipline in the universities.

The academic community, though commands respect among the undergraduates community of a given university, has failed to establish its authority via its varied academic achievements, and this, due to their aloofness, has made a partial contribution to the growth of this malaise in the universities.

This, in my view, shows that there is a wide gap between the academic leadership and the undergraduate community. If a proper academic leadership is to be projected, an academic cannot be a mere administrator; he needs to be a person who enjoys wide recognition in the world of academia as a reputed intellectual.

Once the undergraduates come to know that there was an academic who has excelled in his own field of study and who has an international reputation as a scholar, they think twice before embarrassing such an academic.

Number of factors

In Sri Lankan universities, there are number of factors which affect both welfare and discipline among the student community. The growth of the university, the growth in the number of faculties and the expansion of the student community, have affected both welfare and student discipline, and the paucity of resources, especially those related to student welfare, primarily the accommodation issue and other related matters have created problems.

No Government can find immediate solutions to such problems and they could be tackled through a process of long-term planning of the university education in the country.

The rapid growth of the university in the last several decades amply demonstrate the way in which the number of students expended; there were 904 students in 1942 when the University of Ceylon came into existence and in 2007 the annual intake was in the regions of 18,000 students.

This is the nature of the expansion in the context of a situation where nearly 117,435 students qualify to enter the universities. This massive growth in student numbers took place in the last three decades, and the system too expanded along with the expansion in student numbers.

State funding

State funding too increased; in 2004 to 2006 there has been a considerable increase of the recurrent grants per student from Rs. 69,200 in 2004 to Rs. 136,900 in 2006. Similarly, the capital grants per student increased from Rs. 1,667 in 2004 to Rs. 4,232 in 2006. It is here in this context that we need to look at this rapid growth from the point of view of the social composition of the student population in the Universities of Sri Lanka.

The elitist orientation of the early period has disappeared in; in other words, students belonging to the urban middle class or the affluent sections of the Sri Lanka society, have decline and the dominant position of the public schools has also declined.

Today, a significant proportion of students, for that matter, come from rural backgrounds and the lower middle class and poor social backgrounds. The demand for education is based upon the size of the child population and the expansion of education benefits to all social classes.

Because of this, their aspirations and preferences for employment are entirely different; these factors too have contributed to the visible deterioration of discipline among the undergraduates.

Jennings, in his Students Guide, expressed his views on student discipline and one can say that they are not applicable in a context where indiscipline has become endemic. Still we can derive inspiration from his thought. He stated that - "discipline of the university is quite unlike discipline of a school, for it is almost entirely self-discipline".

Though there is the Board of Residence and Discipline (BRD), they do not use all the powers at its disposal; instead their aim is to give the utmost liberty to the undergraduate, believing that the task of the university is to create a sense of moral responsibility.

Discipline in a university is considered a part of the education which the university gives, and the idea is to create a sense of responsible citizenship. The university, through education and other activities, provide opportunities for them to wield responsibilities and thereby get them initiated into citizenship.

Therefore, the student community should learn to abide by university rules and the laws of the land, and it is only through the acceptance rules and laws that discipline within a unitary university could be maintained.

Today, all rules and laws are violated to mobilises students around typical university issues which have no relationship to issues in the country.

Unlike in the past, the present generation of undergraduates are not associated with a student movement with broader perspectives. Sri Lankan student movement has become an appendage of a certain political group, whose base is in the universities, which has its own agenda, and it is this group which is responsible for de-stabilisation of universities in Sri Lanka.

Student movement

No student union, as in the fifties and sixties, wants to get itself associated with an international student movement, and their existence is unknown to them primarily because of the fact that most students do not have a world vision.

Therefore, the student movement here in Sri Lanka, led primarily by a militant minority of activists with a political agenda, is interested only in typical university issues and other parochial issues with no broader perspective, either local or international. In the last several months, no university, especially those students in Social Sciences and Humanities, has discussed or debated a major international issue.

This shows the nature of intellectual poverty among the present generation of students. The Sri Lankan student community had a broader vision and a world vision in the fifties and sixties, and they, in fact, established links with such international student organisations such as International Union of Students (IUS) and the World Federation of Democratic Youth (WFDY).

The lack of this relationship with the international student movement is due to two important factors; since the 1971 insurrection the student community has been used to implement a political agenda, and secondly, the reason was the lack of competence in English-bilingual competence - to understand the world and to construct a world vision.

Disappeared

Vision perceptions and involvement with an international student movement disappeared in the early seventies as the student community came under a leadership, which, without a broad international perspective, thought in terms of articulating the students on the basis of narrow nationalist demands while mouthing Marxist slogans with no understanding of the basics of Marxism.

It was a movement without an intellectual content. One can attribute number of reasons for the absence of an intellectual content. Today there, this lack of intellectual debate, discussion and argument in the Universities; no political and economic issues, with their international implications, are articulated.

They have failed to produce a single worthwhile publication; those days the Union Society magazine and the publications of different societies showed the nature of the intellectual activity among the undergraduates.

Whatever they produce today are propagandist in nature; their numerous slogans on the University walls show their intellectual poverty. The propagandist nature of their work has stifled their originality and their enthusiasm has been allowed to dissipate.

This kind of intellectual poverty is reflected in their posters, and the language with which they disseminate ideas of disruption is very crude. This is largely due to the absence of a youth culture in the country. In the West, at one stage, especially in the late sixties, there was the phenomenon of the youth revolt and youth unrest, which, in the process, gave birth to an autonomous youth culture.

There is no such youth movement in Sri Lanka, except perhaps to organised protest of undergraduates based on typical and trivial university issues, for example, the lack of hostel accommodation or facilities in a canteen. What does it show? Absolute intellectual poverty of a generation.

Movement to reject

In the West, youth protest began as a movement to reject the adult world. One cannot say that the university undergraduates in Sri Lanka are protesting inside the campus as a form of rejecting the adult world.

In the Sri Lanka Universities, unlike in the West, the youth culture is not based on dress, music and art. It is based on a political culture, deriving from inspiration from insurrectionist politics, which began in the seventies with an ideology, the Marxist strands of which showed that the whole-thing was a hotch-potch of all ideologies, including the petty-bourgeoisie pseudo radicalism.

It was the ideology, with which a group of students with a political agenda of their own, continue to dominate the student community by forcibly imposing a single monolithic view on issues, and this is very much fascist in character.

It is similar to Pol Potian Nihilism. Students bent on studies and intellectual achievements reject this monolithic theory which is being articulated through various social and economic issues affecting the student community. Violence is often used as an effective instrument to propagate this monolithic ideology among the student community.

The most overtly political protest among young people is dominated and largely confined to a small minority of students who employ all techniques, including physical violence, to mobilise support.

This kind of student political culture needs to be eliminated to establish a culture of learning in the universities. Unfortunately, this sort of student culture is promoted inside the universities by a small boisterous group of students, who are drop outs, who forcibly remain in universities for more than 10 years and play the role of the permanent student activists.

They are a kind of full timers; there is such a leader who has failed all examinations. They represent a particular student group whose single aim is to disrupt the academic programmes of the Universities.

Force of de-stabilisation

This has become a major force of de-stabilisation of the universities. The general opinion is that most of those in strictly professional studies, from law to education, are fairly conventional and see themselves as preparing for adult life rather than revolting against it.

It is the politically-motivated groups-pawns in the hands of a militant group of students-who cannot see their lives clearly mapped out and whose employment prospectus are not guaranteed, that constitute the leadership of political protest and they specialise on typical university issues and trivialities to mobilise student support to disrupt the academic programmes in the universities.

It is this context that the question of employability of graduates needs to be given thought and consideration. The intensity of involvement of the university youth with violence is interwoven with the question of the absence of employment opportunities, and the universities, therefore, need to break-away from the traditional mould and begin to search for models which could bring about a solution to the issues.

In the absence of employment opportunities in the immediate situation, the student community, largely consisting of rural youth, tends to get articulated on this issue and they are used by the militant student groups with a political agenda.

It was this group of students who de-stabilised the system in the late eighties and it affected a generation of students. Therefore, the aggressiveness aroused by kicking against open doors is often directed against established authority, and the way it is vented provokes counter violence.

The student community is propelled into action by a 'false consciousness' and it has no ideological or intellectual foundations. The force behind is a political agenda of a political group which has a record in this country as pseudo-revolutionary insurrectionist group.

Students violence experienced in the recent past does not fall within the ambit of youth revolt; it, as in the West, is not an attack on adult radicalism. It is violence without a proper objective; its primary aim is to destabilise the universities and through it to partially implement a political agenda.

Today the young undergraduate is working on the basis of a series of wrong priorities, this generation has been indoctrinated with peculiar ideas, some of which show that they are not civilised and they do not have a world vision.

They do not accept that the present society is knowledge-driven, and they do not want to acquire knowledge. They mouth slogans to threaten liberal values and liberal institutions as their enemy, and the life styles of an affluent society are emulated. It can be explained in terms of a new youth culture, the political manifestations of which are found inside the universities of Sri Lanka.

Their protests, though relate to universities issues, are part of political agenda, and this has been the pattern since the seventies; there is a vocal minority of students who want to dominate the intellectual life of the undergraduate.

A socially boisterous student community has emerged in a country where employment opportunities are still strictly competitive and scarce. They are trying to articulate and mobilise the young on the basis of issues appealing to them.

In the given context, the Sri Lankan youth, primarily the university youth are alienated from the conventional wisdom of the elders. The alienation of the youth is a major problem in any society. Today, what we witness is social non conformity of the youth and this came along with the expansion of university education.

Numbers had an effect on the system. Therefore, one has to ask whether growing student unrest and violence is part of a social divergence or the continuation of the protest policies. Violence is engineered by a group of militants - full-time student politicians - who remain inside the universities without passing a single examination - who are there to implement the political agenda.

It is this relationship which has stifled interest in international issues; they are not at all discussed and debated, and this shows that they do not have a world vision.

Therefore, the student issues here in Sri Lanka do not transcend international frontiers and they are purely local and typically University issues. The absence of an interest among the Sri Lankan students to integrate themselves with international student organizations has affected the world vision of the Sri Lankan student community.

Even minimal intellectual interaction is absent; there is no culture of learning and this had deteriorated in the last two decades.

Important changes are necessary in the policies pertaining to curriculum development; quality and relevance, teaching and learning have tended to decline; they need to be restored with an innovative set of policies.

Such things need to be immediately restored to make Universities more functional, and the academic approach to learning should undergo a change and there is an increased need for diversification through an immediate renewal of learning and teaching in the Universities.

It is my view, that all these issues would be addressed by the New Task Force on Higher Education Policy which we propose to implement at the Higher Education Ministry.