Students’ troubles in universities: A question of misconceived cultural property rights? 

 Being the hotbed of trouble in the correct direction is a must

Monday, 25 July 2016

Sri Lanka’s state-owned universities have always been hotbeds of trouble. Troubles are good for universities if they are in the right direction. Universities are knowledge-makers and knowledge-making comes from troubling the existing knowledge. If there is a problem or trouble out there, university academics together with students go on ‘troubling the trouble’. In that manner, they find solutions to the problem at hand. That is how the world has heard of the leaders in the trade like MIT, Harvard, Princeton, Oxford or Cambridge. They trouble the trouble and come up with new inventions that add to their good track record and also serve the mankind at large.

If, on the other hand, a university purely goes by the knowledge which it had in the past or is having in the present, then, there is no new knowledge created. Hence, for universities to do what they are expected to do, they should always be hotbeds of trouble.

Being the hotbed in the wrong way is a curse

But, Sri Lanka’s state-owned universities have become hotbeds of trouble for the wrong reason. Instead of finding solutions to existing troubles, they have been noted for creating new troubles for themselves.

Worse, they leave those troubles without a solution thereby entangling the society too in their troubles. When the frustrated society tries to come out of those troubles, they disrupt that process too. It leads to creating one trouble after another and bring forth a series of troubles which cannot be solved easily. The end result? The failure of the university system in the country to do what it is expected to do, namely, functioning as society’s knowledge builders. It disrupts education, stunts research and development and pushes universities back to the past.

Two ominous events at Sri Lanka’s universities 

Two recent events at two leading state universities have been the latest testimony to this unsavoury development. One is the renewed wave of ragging at the University of Kelaniya which is not common only to that university. The other is the clash between a section of Sinhala students and Tamil students at the University of Jaffna.

The first is intolerable but could be confined only to the locality of the respective university. The second is to be abhorred and should be nipped in the bud before it becomes the source of another gruesome nationwide ethnic clash.

Read More