IN THE GROVES OF ACADEMIA
PERHAPS IT’S TIME FOR FIJI, WITH SO MUCH INVESTMENT IN EDUCATION FOR ITS CITIZENS, TO INSTITUTE A NATIONAL EDUCATION COMMISSION TO PLAN FOR THE FUTURE OF OUR CHILDREN WHOSE EDUCATION IS VITAL FOR FIJI’S UNIQUELY MULTI-ETHNIC COMMUNITY.
Recently I received two rather long articles from a professor, formerly of the University of the South Pacific (USP).
The two articles, with a couple of parliamentary contributions, make ‘interesting’ reading in the Chinese sense.
Something seems to be going rotten in the state of our universities, as Hamlet would have seen it with his ghostly vision.
I do not have the full narrative of our regional university story. And my professor friend dare not write it himself.
In the meantime I also received a copy of a book by a most distinguished academic who holds professorships in Charles Sturt University, Oxford, and Delft University of Technology, the Netherlands.
Professor Seumas Miller’s book, published by Cambridge University Press, is titled Institutional Corruption.
It should be essential reading in universities, especially in management courses, and parliaments. Its central theme is corruption in public and private sectors and how to combat this corrosive virus.
So here are a few of my thoughts – if I repeat myself it’s because history repeats itself; first as tragedy, later as farce.
The USP saga is acquiring farcical dimensions, judging from these reports.
Many windows, two doors and one lift
In the groves of academia, there’s usually a huge, Chancellorial edifice with many windows, but with only two doors. And a lift to go up and down.
Windows, of course, give us a view limited in scope and space. Each window opens up vistas that we’re most familiar with, but it’s really only a slice of life so complex, so multitudinous like islands floating in the South Pacific seas.
The two doors, though, are of academic freedom and teaching your students. What we may term the life of the mind where the head is held high without fear and the mind is free and there’s that ‘freedom of the imagination’ so eloquently mentioned in the current Fijian Constitution.
And if you’re lucky a sliding side door, a kind of firescape, may lead you to research or an act of creativity from a poem to a philosophical treatise or a lifesaving innovation.
Universities all over the world have been profoundly affected by COVID-19 – several universities in Australia are in dire straits financially; foreign students who bring huge private income to the institutions couldn’t return to resume their courses, so halls of residence and large lecture rooms are empty. The campuses are silent as cemeteries.
I often walk across two faceless campuses in Canberra, both my favourite haunts to meet old colleagues and a few students. Without students, a campus looks like a landscape without trees.
As many as 40,000 jobs have been lost this year in Australian higher education. While universities have become more dependent on government funding, the present government’s attitude is that they should use their reserve funds; there is no job-seeker or jobkeeper payments for tertiary employees. Some senior administrators have voluntarily taken a reduction in their salaries. Wonder if anyone has volunteered to do it at USP?
The tradition of philanthropic generosity is still limited on this island continent though there are billionaires walking like fatted calves. Admittedly one or two are generous with their pocket change.
Weeks ago I attended a meeting of three writers in a big hall named after Australia’s late leading historian Manning Clark. In a hall that could accommodate a thousand, barely a hundred listeners were present.
Reminders of Delhi years
So the current sad, sordid saga of USP made me think of my university days in Delhi. I spent four years as an undergraduate in Delhi University, two years went watching cricket matches, one year in love.
But they were my most delightful and deeply enriching years in reading, writing and forging absolute friendships that have lasted to this day.
Whenever I travel to Delhi, apart from meeting family, the joy is meeting my golden codgers of college days; four of them still live in New Delhi, though scarred by life’s struggles like most of us.
Two have migrated to Canada and California. One has died.
Sixty years ago, Delhi University, in the early 1960s, was a great place to live and study. Jawaharlal Nehru was the prime minister of the largest democratic nation in history the like of which the world had not heard of before or seen since.
He was the Everest among the then world leaders, though one can, in hindsight, see his Himalayan blunders too.
India was a secular, socialist republic, though imperialism had taken its toll over almost a century fighting for freedom. And when it came, it was bloody, but India was unbowed.
The Indian State was never bigger than what Nehru and his colleagues governed believing in democracy as the best form of governance for India despite its amputated parts.
This idea of a plural democratic polity of such an old civilisation with the garb of modernity and fabric of modernisation was the biggest challenge faced by any prime minister ever.
But despite the massive challenges, there was a great sense of freedom in the Indian Union with a resurgence of fearlessness on the streets of Delhi. This was Gandhi’s great gift to the Indian people.
Leaders came from many parts to have a glimpse of the Indian realities so overwhelming that most leaders would have gone under.
It’s here I met Dwight Eisenhower of the ‘I like Ike’ slogan. Or Kawame Nkrumah and many others visiting India, including our ageing Queen.
We, as foreign students, were always invited to the receptions and there was no restrictions on drinks, but most of us were happy with tea and coffee or glasses of mango lassi or nimboopani.
The more discerning ones though went only for rare scotch and soda water.
The Chancellor of Delhi University was the president of India, Dr S. Radhakrishnan, a former Spalding Professor of Philosophy at Oxford.
And one saw him and Nehru at many international functions.
Pundit Nehru always had time for children and university students. He thought these educational institutions were the new temples of India. He wrote some of the finest prose ever penned on the subcontinent to inspire young men and women.
Compared to him, so well read and widely travelled, many current leaders are yokels, both in their thinking, policies and prejudices. A postgraduate university is named after Nehru in New Delhi. JNU is a place I always revisit and have launched a couple of my books there and given talks.
With the assassination of Gandhi in 1948 and the death of Nehru in 1964, India’s two noblest architects disappeared.
Fate of USP
These thoughts haunt me as I visualise the confused fate of USP where many of us began our humble careers in academia.
I’ve written about it often enough. There isn’t another regional institution in the South Pacific with its reach or richness in its variety and multiplicity, its potential and possibilities.
Universities are the most exciting inventions of the modern world with ancient roots. Sadly they have been devalued because they seem to have become places of management, often bad ones at that, though schools of management proliferate like tares in the biblical wheat fields.
I’m told today an MBA degree from Harvard is worth three BAs from Oxford!
Many universities have lost their autonomy because they are so dependent on government funding or act as governments’ handmaidens.
Their essential tasks — truth to power, provided you know the truth, — their search and research for new knowledge, dissemination of ideas, meeting of minds — have vanished for personal aggrandisement and greed.
Even grants and donations from some wretched regimes now dominate the agenda and research undertakings of several universities.
Some academics become His Master’s Voice for a copper medal. And we lose our freedom by not using it on issues that are ethical and moral. They concern all of us.
Once upon a time a university was the conscience of a community.
In fact today I’ve more admiration for writers and journalists who are being imprisoned in jails without a charge or trial simply for following their professional obligations.
It shows why dictatorial regimes fear the mighty pen.
Now seldom any dissenting voices are heard from the groves of academia, except where salary increase is an issue.
No one I know in academia consistently condemns what is happening in Hong Kong or in so many other countries in the throes of despicable regimes.
Or how asylum seekers and refugees are treated in our region for a fistful of dollars. Because if you did say something, you may not get a visa to travel or a grant to gallivant or a gong for going silent.
Needless to say there are brave men and women, but they have become rare exceptions. They are now the endangered species.
It’s time to reassert the true value and vision of the great and nobly conceived institution - the university - the like of which is not replicated in think-tanks, institutes for special research or management centres.
The academic freedom of the university, like parliamentary privilege, is a gift of generations for generations.
It can generate new ways of thinking in small islands of the vast ocean deceptively called the Pacific.
Fiji’s universities
Fiji has three universities; a few of their former Fijian VCs have undergone some revaluation of their reputation in the public’s consciousness.
They deserve a fair hearing in the court of public opinion and in the respect of their colleagues.
Perhaps it’s time for Fiji, with so much investment in education for its citizens, to institute a National Education Commission to plan for the future of our children whose education is vital for Fiji’s uniquely multi-ethnic community.
And see for ourselves where the rains (and reins) of mismanagement began to beat us in our pursuit of the life of the mind and heart in service to the region.
And care for those who are associated with all the three universities in Fiji. Let’s not be hoodwinked by the dubious ranking system. Universities are known for their centres of excellence and certain individuals.
The rest of us are grist to the sausage mills.
We should have a more integrated system of higher education with integrity – individual and institutional.
The USP saga makes a sad and saddening narrative.