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| Sunday, 5 September 2004 |
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| News Business Features Editorial
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Unrest in universities : Violence without objectives by Prof. W. A. Wiswa Warnapala, Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs
In the recent past violence among the university students have become endemic and no serious thought has been given to tackle this malaise. Two recent incidents at Jayawardenapura and Peradeniya are alarming and they, apart from the fact that they are manifest examples of student indiscipline, demonstrate the extent to which the universities have deteriorated as centres of learning. For instance, the murder of two students as alleged by fellow students at Jayawardenepura; and the latest incident is that the Dean of the Faculty of Arts at Peradeniya and several members of the academic staff, (for the first time in its history), were attacked with human excreta. It has been mentioned that the incident at Peradeniya was an organised affair and it happened at the Open Air Theatre where the late Prof. Ediriweera Sarachchandra staged several epoch making dramas which opened a new chapter in Sinhala culture. This attack, apart from the humiliation suffered by the Dean/Arts, represented an open challenge to the academic leadership of the university. It also showed that the academic leadership has failed miserably to establish its authority via its varied academic achievements and does not command respect among the students in the university. This shows that there is a wide gap between the academic leadership and the student community. An academic cannot be a mere administrator; a Dean who occupies the position of the Head of the Faculty needs to be a person who enjoys wide recognition in the world of academia as an intellectual giant. Once students come to know that here was an academic who has excelled in his own field of study, they think twice before collecting their own human excreta to give a 'shit bath' to the particular individual. In the Sri Lankan set up, the student community is not associated with a student movement with broader perspectives; here the student movement is involved only in typical university issues and other parochial issues with no broader perspective, either local or international. It is my view that the Sri Lankan University student community had a broader vision in the fifties and sixties, and they, in fact, were associatted with the international student bodies such as the World Federation of Democratic Youth (WFDY). This kind of perception and involvement with the international student movement disappeared in the mid-seventies as the student community came under a leadership, which thought in terms of articulating them on the basis of narrow nationalist demands, while mouthing Marxist slogans with no understanding of the basics of Marxism. Yet another inadequacy, which is noticed by everyone, is the lack of an intellectual debate on major political or economic issues. They have also failed to produce a single worthwhile publication; not even a weekly. Their music and theatre-largely at Peradeniya and Jayawardenepura, are totally propagandist, because of which the innate originally found among them has been allowed to dissipate. This type of intellectual aridity is reflected in their numerous posters, the sloganisation of which is utterly crude. In the West, at one stage, there was the phenomenon of youth revolt and unrest, which in the process, gave birth to an autonomous youth culture. There is no similar phenomenon in Sri Lanka - except perhaps the organised protests of undergraduates. What does it show? Absolute intellectual poverty of a generation. Youth revolt The youth culture which developed in the West primarily via the universities, rejected the adult world and it created its own leaders, symbols and demands. It had the features of a sub-society function, and the movement of the youth, though generating enthusiasm, remained basically harmless from the point of view of aspirations. One cannot say that the university undergraduates in Sri Lanka is protesting inside the campus as a form of rejecting the adult world. In the Sri Lankan universities, unlike in the West, youth culture is not based on dress, music and the worship of cults and leaders. It is based on a political culture of the youth which began in the seventies with an ideology, the Marxist strands of which are very limited. It was an idealogy, with which a group of student leaders, tried to dominate the student community by imposing a single monolithic view on issues. Students who are bent on serious studies and intellectual achievements, cannot stomach this monolithic theory which is being articulated through various social and economic issues affecting the student community. In Universities in Sri Lanka - many would agree with me - the most overtly political protest among young people is dominated and largely confined to students who are a small minority. In the past, it was this minority of students who ended up as intellectuals; unfortunately today they are a group of students who forcibly remain in the Universities for more than ten years and play the roles of permanent campaigners for a particular student group. This is the force of de-stabilisation in the universities. The general opinion among the students is that most of those in strictly vocational and 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 group of students, who cannot see their lives clearly mapped out and whose employment prospectus are not guaranteed, that form the leadership of political protest. It is in this context that the academic leadership and the policy makers need to give thought to the issue of employability of the graduates. The intensity of involvement of the university youth with violence is interwoven with this question, and the universities, therefore, need to breakaway from the traditional mould and begin to search for models which fit into this equation. In California, in the sixties and seventies there were a series of student protests and the authorities thought that Marcus was the main influence on the protesting youth. Absence of prospectus In our universities, the frustration of the student community was due to absence of prospectus for the future, and the university community, consisting largely of rural youth, tends to get articulated on this issue. 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 intellectual or ideological foundation. Student violence, which Sri Lanka experienced in the recent past, does not come within the description of youth revolt; it is not an attack on formal adult radicalism. It is violence without an objective; no wider ideological objective. It strictly leads to destruction and fascism, and it does not lead to even adult radicalism. Adult radicalism of the forties and fifties have now disappeared, and the reason was that the young University radical is working on the basis of a set of wrong priorities. This needs to be attributed to the virtual death of the traditional left parties and the total disappearance of their influence among the under-graduate community. Partly the reason was international, and the trend is the same in many a developing country. Today most of what still seems progressive to the adult world has become reactionary to the young, and the trends within the process of globalisation are not understood by the youth. In my view, a whole new generation has been created in the past two decades which is sceptical and hedonistic, and critical of the adult world which provides stability. This generation has been indoctrinated with peculiar ideas, some of which are far removed from the reality in a highly developed knowledgeable society in the modern globalised world. They do not accept that the present society is knowledge-driven. It is an interesting phenomenon that youth, irrespective of their eagerness to protest and revolt, are ready to embrace all traits in an affluent society. Though they mouth slogans to threaten liberal institutions as their easiest enemy. The life styles of an affluent society are imitated. It can be explained in terms of a youth sub-culture, the manifestation of which is found inside and outside the universities in Sri Lanka, and simple sexual themes remain dominant in the tele-dramas of the country. This, in my view, is another signal of the emergence of a youth sub-culture with which student militancy has assumed importance. The difference between political and non-political trends among students are not highlighted. The phenomenon of a socially boisterous student community is inevitable in a country where the employment opportunities are still strictly competitive and scarce. In the context, the Sri Lankan youth, and the university youth are alienated from the conventional wisdom of their elders. This alienation of the youth is a major problem in any society. It would be interesting to quote an English poet who, while writing on the student rag, wrote that "We smashed up everything and what was the funniest part, we smashed some rotten old pictures which were priceless works of art". This in effect demonstrated the social non-conformity of the student community, and this kind of social non-conformity came along with the university expansion of the sixties. In Britain, the university expansion of the sixties brought in 'the fellows in Putney'. One has to ask the question, specially in the context whether student violence in Sri Lanka, whether it is the newest form of youth's traditional social divergence or the continuation of the idealistic and protest politics of the country. I tend to think that the youth unrest in the universities is more social in nature as they have numerous problems, both social and economic, and due attention is necessary to find solutions to those issues. The so-called question of international does not exist in the Sri Lankan case, and the students, unfortunately do not focus attention on a world vision. Therefore the student issues here in Sri Lanka do not transcend international frontiers and they are primarily local in character. In Sri Lanka, the university youth is very unlikely to take up issues and causes that emerge from their situation and to pursue them outside the boundaries of their national culture. In the sixties when Patrice Lumumba was killed, the student community at Peradeniya staged a massive demonstration and marched to Kandy where they attempted to pull down the Ward statue which was then right in front of the Queens Hotel. World vision The failure to integrate the Sri Lankan student movement with the international student organisations has affected the world vision of the Sri Lankan student community and this is a major drawback in the movement. There are international interactions between students but the minimal intellectual interaction is not encouraged by the university and its administrators. In Sri Lanka, the lop-sided expansion of the universities resulted in a situation where the student community, despite its limited capacity to attain high intellectual attainments, claim political importance on the ground that they represent the nation's intelligentsia. It is this aspect which make them confrontational and non-conformist; today the Sri Lankan student community, as their counterparts in the West of the sixties and seventies, question the nature of disciplinary systems and University governmental structures. Students take up these issues because there are real problems affecting them. Universities are large complex bureaucratic institutions, and they, in my view, need to undergo a transformation in order to develop better methods of integrating the student into larger society. Important changes are necessary in the course content of subjects; the main question being whether the 30,000 students in 2004 be allowed to study the same range of subjects and adopt the same academic approach when the number remained at 3000 in the sixties. This is the area where the crisis is, and it is this conflict which is certain to threaten the substance of University education. The belief in the virtues of the present standards of intellectual excellence is under attack and this means that the academic approach to learning must undergo a change. |
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