Internal governance of the universities in Sri Lanka - Part II:

Role of University Grants Commission

Text of speech delivered by Higher Education Minister Prof. Wiswa Warnapala at the Conference of Vice Chancellors in Wadduwa on August 28. First part was published yesterday.

Therefore, strangely enough, the existence of those representatives in the Court of the University has contributed to University autonomy rather than the reverse. In practice, the powers of the Court were purely formal, and it met once a year to review the financial account. With few exceptions, the academic membership of the Court was almost entirely confined to Deans and Professors. In this kind of set up, the executive governing body was the Council, a body very much smaller in size and responsible, under the supervision of the Court, to finance and external relations.

It enjoyed the final authority in making academic appointments. It, then as today, consisted of representatives of the academic staff, again mainly Deans and Professors and members appointed by the Court - which function is now in the hands of the University Grants Commission.

In Britain, nearly three-quarters of the Council were non-academic, and the Council, which has become powerful in the absence of the University Court, is predominantly academic, and the few non-academic members, who come as eminent men with experience in various professions, do not dominate the Council, and they, in the end, became an appendage of the Vice Chancellor.

The University Court functioned as an institution till it was abolished in 1982, and the Council was given the right to nominate three persons, from whom the Head of State was able to pick a person for the post of Vice Chancellor. This, in fact, is the current procedure adopted for the purpose of appointing the Vice Chancellor. With the establishment of a number of Universities, this type of change was necessary as the University Court system was acceptable only in the context of the single unitary University which functioned in the period 1942-1962.

The Council, in the present context, is the effective governing body, and it can make regulations. In the existing structure of governance, the Vice Chancellor is the most important official of the University who enjoys power in respect of both policy-making and administration. He has to make decisions individually and collectively.

Most of the decision-making lies with the Council which is headed by the Vice Chancellor who, as the chief executive officer, is responsible for all the decisions. In fact, there are two processes with which the Vice Chancellor is associated with - they are the policy-making process and the administrative process. Therefore success of a Vice Chancellor depends on a variety of factors, and most of the pressures come via extraneous sources which are linked to students violence and stoppage of work by the students - I mean the boycott of lectures.

Therefore the major administrative problems are associated with disruptive tendencies among the undergraduate community, part of which is politically mobilized, to de-stabilize the University and thereby to disrupt the academic program of the University and also paralyze the academic administration within the University.

This, in the last several decades, has become the major challenge - or the major test - for a Vice Chancellor in running the University administration and maintaining the academic life of the University.

As in Britain, Sri Lanka has the Committee of Vice Chancellors and Directors -CVCD- and this Committee, which has been recognized by the Universities Act of 1978, has an advisory role, and its meetings could be used to discuss matters common to all the Universities in the country. It needs to be mentioned that the role of the CVCD is fundamentally advisory, and this role has been assigned to it by the Act of 1978.

In Britain, the Vice Chancellors Committee was preceded by the Bureau of the Universities of the Empire, and the Committee of Vice Chancellors came into being in 1918. The process began in 1887 and the purpose was to take counsel on matters relating to University grants and it was in 1911 that the Universities discussed the need for effective machinery for joint action. In its early days, it functioned as a hesitant body and it met four times a year. With the creation of the Vice Chancellors Committee, the ad hoc business conference of Universities came to an end.

On the basis of this evolution, three institutions became the principal organs of government in a University, and they are the University Court, the Council and the Senate. The Court, where it functioned, was supreme and the Council was responsible to court and Senate was subordinate to Council. Institutionally, those are the formal relationships but the distribution of effective power and responsibility, as you all know through experience, is very different. In our earlier system, though the Court was supreme, nearly all its powers were delegated to the Council as a working body and it functioned as the effective decision-making centre.

In this way, the Council began to enjoy a comprehensive set of powers, and the principal piece of legislation or statutes explicitly empowered the Council to “review and control or disallow any Act of the Senate and give directions to be obeyed by the Senate and review the instruction and teaching of the University”. Any member or servant of the University who is aggrieved could appeal to the Council and in the Sri Lankan context, there is the University Services Appeals Board (USAB) which has been given a central position with an appellate jurisdiction. Some Vice Chancellors, through arrogance, with the assistance of the Council, do not show much enthusiasm in respecting the decisions of the USAB, which, in a way, are of judicial character. Its decisions are binding on the University but they, probably basing their decisions on academic freedom, challenge them in the Supreme Court and millions of rupees are wasted on such cases.

To be continued