‘Make universities strategic partners in development’
- Part II:
Academics’ contribution to community vital
Text of Address by Professor Ranjith
Senaratne, Vice Chairman, University Grants Commission at the
convocation of the University of Sri Jayewardenepura held at the BMICH
on February 5, 2012, titled ‘Let us make our universities a strategic
partner and a catalyst of regional and national development’
[Continued from Saturday (18)]
The opportunity to serve the community and society is a privilege and
an honour. George Bernard Shaw said, “My life belongs to the community,
and as long as I live, it is my privilege to do for it whatever I can. I
want to be thoroughly used up when I die, for the harder I work, the
more I live. Life is no brief candle to me. It is a sort of splendid
torch which I have for only a moment, and I want it to burn as brightly
as possible before handing it on to future generations.”
Greatness of a university is measured by the contribution of members
of its community to society, country, and the world at large. Former
President of Cornell University, USA, Frank Rhodes said, “Without
community, knowledge becomes idiosyncratic: the lone learner, studying
in isolation, is vulnerable to narrowness, dogmatism, and untested
assumptions, and learning misses out on being expansive and informed,
contested by opposing interpretations, leavened by differing experience,
and refined by alternative view points. Without community, personal
discovery is limited, not because the individual inquirer is less
creative or original than the group, but because his or her conclusions
remain unchallenged and untested; private knowledge is knowledge lost”.
Plato reminded us that, “even those who scale the pinnacles of learning
must not make the mistake of continuing to live in a rarefied
atmosphere. They must descend again among the average citizenry and
partake of their labours. Then only would they be justifying the years
of special training and effort that have gone into their education.”
Industrial growth
Muhammad Yunus, with a doctorate from a renowned university in the
USA, has been teaching elegant theories of Economics in a university in
Bangladesh. Then he began to question the purpose of teaching such
high-level economic theories, which were of little relevance to the
community specially when the people in the immediate neighbourhood of
the university were severely malnourished, reduced to 'walking
skeletons' and waiting to die. Then Yunus went into the community and
was surprised to learn that a small amount of financial support could
make a world of difference in the lives of the poor. This led to the
introduction of a scheme to provide micro-credit, without collateral, to
the entrepreneurial poor. This brought about a formidable change in the
income and living standards of the rural folk. It finally gave birth to
the Grameen Bank, which earned Yunus the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006.
In many parts of the world, universities have now become powerful
catalysts and agents of growth and wealth creators. They mobilize and
channel their intellectual and infrastructure resources for industrial
growth and regional and national development. Thus great cities
naturally have great universities that contribute to the cities’
intellectual, social and cultural vibrancy as well as influence their
development. In a knowledge-based global economy, there is even greater
synergy between a city's development and the university's. Stanford
University in California, Punjab University in Punjab, India, Fudan
University in Shanghai, China, Chalmers University in Gothenberg, Sweden
and NUS in Singapore are some telling examples in this regard.
Rural areas
The rural folk are ready to contribute their might in the journey of
transformation of our country into a developed nation. We have in the
community, many talented and versatile people who have not had formal
education. But they have worked in the laboratories of life. They are
not funded by the government like we are, but they use their own energy,
their own creativity, their own enterprise and their own money to
innovate. They are not formally trained in scientific analysis, but
their powers of observation, analysis and synthesis are no less than
those of formally trained scientists. They do not import concept from
the Western world, but generate their own ideas and innovations from the
grassroots.
Degree programmes
Therefore, it will be mutually beneficial and re-informing for the
universities to be engaged with the community. However, with a very few
exceptions, the universities in our country still remain as 'ivory
towers' or 'isolated academic islands' and continue with their
traditional teaching and research. Consequently, barring the graduates
produced, the services rendered by them to the community are woefully
inadequate. Given the profound impact, the universities could make on
the community, society and the country at large, they should no longer
remain as ivory towers, but should descend from them and contribute
towards improving the lives of rural folk whose sweat, labour and toil
contribute in no small measure to the sustenance of the universities in
our country.
Therefore, it is incumbent upon the universities to develop an
organic partnership with the community and evolve a mechanism and an
action plan to unleash the latent talents and creative energies of the
rural youths and harness the under-utilized and unutilized human and
natural resources in rural areas for the benefit of our nation and our
country.
Prof. Ranjith Senaratne |
Building an organic relationship with communities requires not only
re-creating and re-positioning our universities, but also re-modelling
the degree programmes so that they incorporate engagement with community
as a core value and an integral part of university education and
research. Firstly, it is necessary to create an enabling environment for
community engagement. Here, the formulation of appropriate policies
recognizing community service as a prime function of the university
becomes a sine qua non. Then putting in place the appropriate
institutional structures, systems, processes and programmes is essential
in creating and sustaining an ambiance conducive to engagement with
community. Here, the academic staff need to facilitate, direct and guide
community work that should be well-integrated with the academic
objectives and research endeavours of the university.
Awards schemes
There are some staff members in the universities who are already
constructively engaged with the community and are making a significant
contribution to community development. However, a sizable proportion of
the academic and administrative staff of universities still believe that
community service is only a token or a subsidiary objective of the
university and that financial resources should not be allocated for such
activities. Some still believe that universities should remain as elite
institutions and should not get involved with the grass roots. Therefore
a change of mind-set across the board also becomes critically important
for the engagement with community to be successful. In addition,
community problems are multi-faceted and demand a multi-disciplinary and
trans-disciplinary approach, but universities still work mainly along
disciplinary lines with hardly any team work across disciplinary
boundaries. Therefore in order to ensure an effective community
engagement, instead of rigid boundaries between the departments and
faculties, we need to create 'porous and permeable' boundaries providing
for free diffusion of ideas, talents, and resources across departments
and faculties. These are some challenges that we will face in
internalizing and institutionalizing engagement with community.
For the engagement to be effective and impactful, it should be
embedded in the mission of the university, and should be reflected in
the responsibility entrusted to the academic staff, in rewards and
encouragement awards schemes (I.e. To felicitate the most outstanding
community service provider), in career structure, recruitment and
promotion criteria, learning experience of students, and in the nature
of relationships with external organizations. Introduction of mandatory
credit-bearing courses and assignments related to community service and
development proves important in getting students involved in ‘service to
community’ and ‘academic citizenship'. It should be stressed that
outreach activities should never be treated as merely a service function
of the university, but as an integral part of the university's
responsibility to the community.
Moreover, for effective engagement, the degree programmes should be
modelled on an ‘apprenticeship’ approach that applies classroom learning
though actual practice. Just as medical students must spend time in
hospital wards and surgery units to become skilled doctors, other
undergraduates should work in relevant government institutions,
community organizations and such like to gain the firsthand knowledge,
hands-on experience and practical skills to become effective
professionals. Graduates produced through such degree programmes will be
prepared to live with the local community, to listen and learn from
them, help them in solving their problems and developing and executing
plans. Such graduates could guide them towards self-reliance through the
process of social mobilization, capacity building, capital formation,
transfer of technology, skills enhancement, productive linkages, and so
on.
Building Sarasavi villages
Engagement with the community can be further facilitated and
augmented through the establishment of community service centres in the
villages connected to the university through ICT. Students and teachers
could live, study, teach, train, work and learn at these centres with
the villagers. This will help both the staff and students understand not
only the day-to-day problems, thinking, attitudes, needs, hopes and
aspirations of the villagers, but also the social, cultural and
political landscape of the community. This proves very important in
finding acceptable solutions to the problems of the villagers.
Most of our universities have Faculties of Arts, Management and
Science. Some have in addition Faculties of Medicine, Engineering,
Agriculture and other disciplines. These Faculties can select a
disadvantaged village or two in their respective regions, which can
serve as field laboratories for the staff and students; they can,
through their specialized knowledge, add value to the endeavours of the
villagers. They can apply their knowledge, skills and experience in
finding solutions to the problems faced by the villagers, improving
their sanitation, hygiene, health, nutrition, livelihood, environment
and social status.
This will help build model villages which can produce a ripple
effect. The knowledge and experience gained and lessons learnt in
building such villages can be shared across the universities, and
applied elsewhere with suitable modification. In addition, the
university staff and students could be a strategic partner in several
key development initiatives recently launched such as Pura Neguma, Divi
Neguma, Gama Neguma etc. contributing to their success. Such
constructive engagement of students with the community will result in a
blending of knowledge and practice, which will contribute in no small
measure in producing well rounded and well grounded graduates, who will
be highly valued by the employers.
The wealth of knowledge and experience gained through such engagement
would enable the universities to offer very useful courses related to
rural development. Therefore community engagement, besides making
graduates more employable, will enable them to contribute positively to
the development process, facilitating the transformation of Sri Lanka
into a developed country. Thus the engagement with community would
afford a new meaning, new direction and new momentum to higher
education, making the universities in Sri Lanka true and effective
partners and catalysts in regional and national development.
Towards a developed nation
Development is a process, and it cannot be imported like goods or
services. Therefore in finding solutions to our provincial and national
issues, we should not borrow models from developed countries such as
Japan, USA, UK or Singapore. Knocking at others' door will be futile and
counterproductive. Instead of importing theories and transplanting
concepts, we need to work out our own solutions. We need to find
home-grown answers, homespun solutions to our local issues. Here we need
heavily to depend on our capacity for building our own intellectual
assets. These include upstream scientific and technological discoveries,
midstream development of innovative products, processes and services,
and downstream commercialization of the discoveries and innovations in
the regional and global markets. Therefore it need to be emphasized that
university academics must continue and enhance their cutting edge
research related to local context in order to become effective in
community and regional development.
The universities with their rich and diverse intellectual and
infrastructure resource base, coupled with an army of over 60,000
dynamic and resourceful students, could become powerful catalysts of
national development in a knowledge economy.
However, this enviable human resource base in the universities has so
far remained untapped or heavily under-exploited. If it is properly
mobilized and channelled for regional development, the universities can
become the locomotives of regional growth and effective partners in
transforming Sri Lanka into a developed nation. It behoves the
university authorities to make appropriate interventions at this crucial
hour. The earlier it happens, the better.
I would like to remind you that the public funds that sustain the
seats of higher learning have contributed to your education and to your
achievements. Thus you have a moral obligation and an inescapable
responsibility to give something tangible back to your society, to your
nation, to your country, which enabled you to become what you are today.
Therefore wherever you are going to be and whatever you are going to do,
please nurture a deep sense of national commitment uppermost in your
mind. I wish you all a bright, rewarding and prosperous future!
Concluded |