Scandalous State Of Sri Lanka’s University System Sans Collegiality

By Rajan Hoole –October 29, 2015

Dr. Rajan Hoole

Collegiality is central to the culture of universities. It means that we are all equal as colleagues and it is our function and duty to voice opinions freely and demand corrective measures when we see something going wrong. Heads, Deans, Vice Chancellors and the UGC Chairman have administrative functions, but are otherwise equal to the most junior academic. Academics have a right to be heard and a right of reply within a reasonable time to the representations they make. Our problems begin when these officials start mistaking their office for a crown on their head. The system becomes authoritarian and repressive all the way down. The right to reply guaranteed by the Establishments Code has become a dead letter.

The end of collegiality means the end of checks on authority, leaving the system open to unlimited abuse. The UGC evades responsibility for well-documented abuses by politically appointed vice chancellors, whom it had recommended, by claiming that their hands are tied by university autonomy, which has already been killed by political fiat. In reality what such vice chancellors do is to use their power to control deans, heads, and control leave, promotions and appointments of heads, to isolate and harass all who question them, never daring to reason out why. That is the funeral of every vestige of academic virtue.

Even as people have become inured to symptoms of rot and the stench of systemic decay, Jaffna was shocked by a recent explosion in the University that lifted the veil on deep-seated abuse, revealing the shocking vulnerability of young women, staff and students, while administrators had treated signs of the malaise with the casualness of business as usual.

The Jaffna University Science Teachers’ Association (JUSTA) has been active in trying to curb abuses at their very fount – blatant favouritism and disregard for rules in academic recruitment. This is what over time corrupts and degrades a university. JUSTA’s reports, largely based on council minutes, have been widely circulated. In two instances candidates who led the merit list for the post of probationary lecturer wrote to the previous Council, which had many of the present deans and the present vice chancellor as chairman. None of these had the courtesy of a reply. The previous UGC Chairman promised an inquiry; the current Chairman promised last June to place our reports before the UGC Council, but nothing has been heard since.

After several attempts to take the matter up at the University Council, the reports were placed before a newly created Grievance Committee after unpromising hiccups about terms of reference calculated to exclude our complaints. In the face of the Vice Chancellor’s hostility and the scale of the problem which calls for considerable motivation, time and energy from an ad hoc committee, the issue seems foredoomed to a slow death in the Council. Those who read our reports cannot but feel that something is very rotten in the state of the University.

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