Features

A people’s university and a national crisis

Published

3 years ago

2023/07/4

By Shamala Kumar

I began thinking about this article when the Kuppi Collective began studying the government’s plans to enact labour reforms. We had initiated discussions with others, including academics, to understand the situation and quickly realised the highly controversial nature of these reforms and their potentially serious repercussions. Yet, hardly any debate regarding these reforms seemed to emanate from within universities.

Considering the potentially grave implications of the proposals, the silence raises questions about whether universities are adequately fulfilling their role as institutions integral to our democratic system. In this article, I explore why universities seem disengaged in critical debates, and analyse how changes in education policy and the neoliberal character of the present moment contribute to further disengagement from our role as active agents in democratic processes.

Contrary to what one might expect, Sri Lanka’s public universities and university teachers’ job roles do support public engagement. Many who discuss higher education reforms seem unaware of the emphasis given in our promotion schemes and work norms for engaging in “national development” activities. This is quite different from the job description of an academic who works in a high-ranking university in a global north setting where the primary focus is on securing funding and publishing in high impact journals.

This is also different from the expectations of those working in local non-state higher educational institutions where teaching is emphasized. Furthermore, most university academics in Sri Lanka maintain ties with national and international bodies aligned with their areas of expertise and serve the public as experts in their respective fields. Thus, the lack of engagement in such dialogue is not because of a lack of space for engagement beyond the confines of universities or because of a lack interest on the part of academics.

Challenging structures of power

The problem seems to lie in the types of engagement that occupy university teachers. As others, such as Noam Chomsky and Cornell West have observed, academics can work to consolidate existing systems of power, or can confront, question, and challenge them. In Sri Lanka, this means that our work may support the prevailing authoritarian regime and antidemocratic system; we may uphold neoliberal ideological positions that serve the class interests of the elite.

Alternatively, we could align ourselves with the marginalized majority that constitute our country and world. The former brings with it State support and political patronage, while the latter can be unpopular, leaving us vulnerable and open to attack. Perhaps this partly explains the lack of discussion on issues like labour reform and the rather tenuous alignment of our work, more generally, with the concerns of those who are systematically marginalized and excluded in economic and political structures of this country.

But university teachers hold positions of privilege with substantial space to speak. These freedoms are unique, particularly in the repressive environment of the present moment. Spaces for public discourse, especially when critical of the State, are rapidly shrinking. Most recently, Natasha Edirisooriya’s arrest drastically diminished the space to use comedy to spotlight the absurdities of our political class, and the arrest of Bruno Dinakara, critical vlogger, reduced freedoms within social media spaces – freedoms that had been curtailed during the previous President’s tenure, or even earlier. These arrests have occurred within a context of increasing repression against any form of public protest or even gathering. University teachers’ positions, in contrast, have protections that give us the space to speak.

We also have privileged access to information with which we can question problematic ideological positions, potential hidden intentions and misrepresentations that drive government actions, and provide the historical and global context in which these actions occur. In Sri Lanka, as an integral element of our policy on free education, we are awarded some independence from the interests of capital as well.

Unlike in many universities elsewhere, our work is not contingent on self-funding through grants and fees. As a result, our ‘accountability’ to funding agencies and private capital is relatively lesser. Instead, our universities operate through public funds raised through the collective labour of the people. Thus, our lack of critical engagement in public policy and our unwillingness to support and augment voices on the margins, is deeply troubling.

Silencing through education reforms

Reforms to education policy are also in the offing, which will likely make our silence even more tangible in the future. We can guess the direction the reforms are likely to take, based on the trajectory of changes that have occurred in university administration and function in recent times. These changes to how universities operate have done little to strengthen the ties between universities and the politically weakest segments of the country.

For instance, the emphasis placed on publication statistics by the University Grants Commission (UGC) to gauge research performance rewards scholarship of global relevance over work that engages with local problems. High impact journals, those that determine “hot topics” in research, are likely to accept articles that address these global rather than local concerns.

Furthermore, as (the already miniscule) public allocations for research contract, university teachers may need to align their research with the interests and ideologies of funding agencies, at the expense of work that address locally specific concerns. The space to carry out research that challenges such institutions and their concerns and ideologies may also contract over time.

With respect to teaching, universities, steered by the UGC, are placing greater weight on technical skills, both in the content of existing courses and in new degree programmes. These changes in content come with a cost as the emphasis on technical solutions, de-emphasizes understanding the ideologies and historical contexts which have produced and sustained the roots of problems.

For instance, students in agriculture may be tasked with finding ‘solutions’ to the cost of importing fertiliser but the curriculum may not address the ideological and historical causes for this dependence on imported and costly fertiliser in the first place. Such technically-oriented curricula may train students to formulate technical solutions that align with government policies, but may not help them to think critically about the ideological framing and roots of the issues involved.

These are not trends that are specific to Sri Lanka. Globally, standardized curricula as a marker of “quality” through costly local or international certification bodies have gained popularity. Standardisation further alienates people from education because standardized curricula are based on global benchmarks, for the most part, and leave little room for teaching and learning that is responsive to the present moment. This was evident during the pandemic, when we continued to teach the same content while the world, as we knew it, was falling apart. The proposed educational reforms are likely to cut public funds for higher education, making access to higher education conditional on whether a student can access funds for it. These changes will be justified as necessary because of the prevailing crisis situation.

Crisis, however, is a feature, rather than the exception of a system driven by global capital and weak government. In crisis, there is urgency requiring immediate responses accompanied by attacks on any depth of analysis, on contextualizing and “theorizing” – they are viewed as needlessly “complicating” matters, impractical and even dangerous. For instance, any analysis critical of the government’s negotiations with the IMF have been attacked as futile and rejected. Problems within crises are, instead, narrowly framed, devoid of a critique of their ideological foundations. This, however, is not the way we at universities must confront issues, as such simplistic framings can neglect those rendered marginalized and silent.

Within this ethos, how can we claim spaces in universities for public engagement on critical issues, such as labour reform, particularly aligning ourselves consciously with those who have the least voice within systems? How can we guard against educational reforms that further disengage us and how might we challenge larger national and global trends that distract or intimidate us into complacency? Perhaps, first we must be conscious of our function in expanding democratic spaces. We must deliberately create spaces for the public in universities.

Last Saturday’s Open day at Peradeniya seems a step in the right direction. The university can transform into a public space, open and welcoming to the public, always and not just on “open” days. Further, we must create dialogue in universities and elsewhere which provoke us to speak out when changes in policy or university administration affect our capacity to call out governments whose actions are not in the best interest of the people. To this end, let’s begin by framing the proposed debt restructuring, the most recent attack on working people, within the historical context of the bond scam, which resulted in an immense loss of public funds that are yet unaccounted for, and deliberate on how we can arrive at socially just solutions to debt restructuring such as the wealth tax, which remains elusive and off the table.

(Shamala Kumar teaches at the University of Peradeniya)
Kuppi is a politics and pedagogy happening on the margins of the lecture hall that parodies, subverts, and simultaneously reaffirms social hierarchies.

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Features

Recruiting academics to state universities – beset by archaic selection processes?

Published

13 hours ago

2026/03/3

Thilina Walpola

by Kaushalya Perera

Time has, by and large, stood still in the business of academic staff recruitment to state universities. Qualifications have proliferated and evolved to be more interdisciplinary, but our selection processes and evaluation criteria are unchanged since at least the late 1990s. But before I delve into the problems, I will describe the existing processes and schemes of recruitment. The discussion is limited to UGC-governed state universities (and does not include recruitment to medical and engineering sectors) though the problems may be relevant to other higher education institutions (HEIs).

How recruitment happens currently in SL state universities

Academic ranks in Sri Lankan state universities can be divided into three tiers (subdivisions are not discussed).

* Lecturer (Probationary)

– recruited with a four-year undergraduate degree. A tiny step higher is the Lecturer (Unconfirmed), recruited with a postgraduate degree but no teaching experience.

* A Senior Lecturer can be recruited with certain postgraduate qualifications and some number of years of teaching and research.

* Above this is the professor (of four types), which can be left out of this discussion since only one of those (Chair Professor) is by application.

State universities cannot hire permanent academic staff as and when they wish. Prior to advertising a vacancy, approval to recruit is obtained through a mind-numbing and time-consuming process (months!) ending at the Department of Management Services. The call for applications must list all ranks up to Senior Lecturer. All eligible candidates for Probationary to Senior Lecturer are interviewed, e.g., if a Department wants someone with a doctoral degree, they must still advertise for and interview candidates for all ranks, not only candidates with a doctoral degree. In the evaluation criteria, the first degree is more important than the doctoral degree (more on this strange phenomenon later). All of this is only possible when universities are not under a ‘hiring freeze’, which governments declare regularly and generally lasts several years.

Problem type 1

– Archaic processes and evaluation criteria

Twenty-five years ago, as a probationary lecturer with a first degree, I was a typical hire. We would be recruited, work some years and obtain postgraduate degrees (ideally using the privilege of paid study leave to attend a reputed university in the first world). State universities are primarily undergraduate teaching spaces, and when doctoral degrees were scarce, hiring probationary lecturers may have been a practical solution. The path to a higher degree was through the academic job. Now, due to availability of candidates with postgraduate qualifications and the problems of retaining academics who find foreign postgraduate opportunities, preference for candidates applying with a postgraduate qualification is growing. The evaluation scheme, however, prioritises the first degree over the candidate’s postgraduate education. Were I to apply to a Faculty of Education, despite a PhD on language teaching and research in education, I may not even be interviewed since my undergraduate degree is not in education. The ‘first degree first’ phenomenon shows that universities essentially ignore the intellectual development of a person beyond their early twenties. It also ignores the breadth of disciplines and their overlap with other fields.

This can be helped (not solved) by a simple fix, which can also reduce brain drain: give precedence to the doctoral degree in the required field, regardless of the candidate’s first degree, effected by a UGC circular. The suggestion is not fool-proof. It is a first step, and offered with the understanding that any selection process, however well the evaluation criteria are articulated, will be beset by multiple issues, including that of bias. Like other Sri Lankan institutions, universities, too, have tribal tendencies, surfacing in the form of a preference for one’s own alumni. Nevertheless, there are other problems that are, arguably, more pressing as I discuss next. In relation to the evaluation criteria, a problem is the narrow interpretation of any regulation, e.g., deciding the degree’s suitability based on the title rather than considering courses in the transcript. Despite rhetoric promoting internationalising and inter-disciplinarity, decision-making administrative and academic bodies have very literal expectations of candidates’ qualifications, e.g., a candidate with knowledge of digital literacy should show this through the title of the degree!

Problem type 2 – The mess of badly regulated higher education

A direct consequence of the contemporary expansion of higher education is a large number of applicants with myriad qualifications. The diversity of degree programmes cited makes the responsibility of selecting a suitable candidate for the job a challenging but very important one. After all, the job is for life – it is very difficult to fire a permanent employer in the state sector.

Widely varying undergraduate degree programmes.

At present, Sri Lankan undergraduates bring qualifications (at times more than one) from multiple types of higher education institutions: a degree from a UGC-affiliated state university, a state university external to the UGC, a state institution that is not a university, a foreign university, or a private HEI aka ‘private university’. It could be a degree received by attending on-site, in Sri Lanka or abroad. It could be from a private HEI’s affiliated foreign university or an external degree from a state university or an online only degree from a private HEI that is ‘UGC-approved’ or ‘Ministry of Education approved’, i.e., never studied in a university setting. Needless to say, the diversity (and their differences in quality) are dizzying. Unfortunately, under the evaluation scheme all degrees ‘recognised’ by the UGC are assigned the same marks. The same goes for the candidates’ merits or distinctions, first classes, etc., regardless of how difficult or easy the degree programme may be and even when capabilities, exposure, input, etc are obviously different.

Similar issues are faced when we consider postgraduate qualifications, though to a lesser degree. In my discipline(s), at least, a postgraduate degree obtained on-site from a first-world university is preferable to one from a local university (which usually have weekend or evening classes similar to part-time study) or online from a foreign university. Elitist this may be, but even the best local postgraduate degrees cannot provide the experience and intellectual growth gained by being in a university that gives you access to six million books and teaching and supervision by internationally-recognised scholars. Unfortunately, in the evaluation schemes for recruitment, the worst postgraduate qualification you know of will receive the same marks as one from NUS, Harvard or Leiden.

The problem is clear but what about a solution?

Recruitment to state universities needs to change to meet contemporary needs. We need evaluation criteria that allows us to get rid of the dross as well as a more sophisticated institutional understanding of using them. Recruitment is key if we want our institutions (and our country) to progress. I reiterate here the recommendations proposed in ‘Considerations for Higher Education Reform’ circulated previously by Kuppi Collective:

* Change bond regulations to be more just, in order to retain better qualified academics.

* Update the schemes of recruitment to reflect present-day realities of inter-disciplinary and multi-disciplinary training in order to recruit suitably qualified candidates.

* Ensure recruitment processes are made transparent by university administrations.

Kaushalya Perera is a senior lecturer at the University of Colombo.

(Kuppi is a politics and pedagogy happening on the margins of the lecture hall that parodies, subverts, and simultaneously reaffirms social hierarchies.)

Features

Talento … oozing with talent

Published

13 hours ago

2026/03/3

Thilina Walpola

Talento: Gained recognition as a leading wedding and dance band

This week, too, the spotlight is on an outfit that has gained popularity, mainly through social media.

Last week we had MISTER Band in our scene, and on 10th February, Yellow Beatz – both social media favourites.

Talento is a seven-piece band that plays all types of music, from the ‘60s to the modern tracks of today.

The band has reached many heights, since its inception in 2012, and has gained recognition as a leading wedding and dance band in the scene here.

The members that makeup the outfit have a solid musical background, which comes through years of hard work and dedication

Their portfolio of music contains a mix of both western and eastern songs and are carefully selected, they say, to match the requirements of the intended audience, occasion, or event.

Although the baila is a specialty, which is inherent to this group, that originates from Moratuwa, their repertoire is made up of a vast collection of love, classic, oldies and modern-day hits.

The musicians, who make up Talento, are:

Prabuddha Geetharuchi:

Geilee Fonseka: Dynamic and charismatic vocalist

Prabuddha Geetharuchi: The main man behind the band Talento

(Vocalist/ Frontman). He is an avid music enthusiast and was mentored by a lot of famous musicians, and trainers, since he was a child. Growing up with them influenced him to take on western songs, as well as other music styles. A Peterite, he is the main man behind the band Talento and is a versatile singer/entertainer who never fails to get the crowd going.

Geilee Fonseka (Vocals):

A dynamic and charismatic vocalist whose vibrant stage presence, and powerful voice, bring a fresh spark to every performance. Young, energetic, and musically refined, she is an artiste who effortlessly blends passion with precision – captivating audiences from the very first note. Blessed with an immense vocal range, Geilee is a truly versatile singer, confidently delivering Western and Eastern music across multiple languages and genres.

Chandana Perera (Drummer):

His expertise and exceptional skills have earned him recognition as one of the finest acoustic drummers in Sri Lanka. With over 40 tours under his belt, Chandana has demonstrated his dedication and passion for music, embodying the essential role of a drummer as the heartbeat of any band.

Harsha Soysa:

(Bassist/Vocalist). He a chorister of the western choir of St. Sebastian’s College, Moratuwa, who began his musical education under famous voice trainers, as well as bass guitar trainers in Sri Lanka. He has also performed at events overseas. He acts as the second singer of the band

Udara Jayakody:

(Keyboardist). He is also a qualified pianist, adding technical flavour to Talento’s music. His singing and harmonising skills are an extra asset to the band. From his childhood he has been a part of a number of orchestras as a pianist. He has also previously performed with several famous western bands.

Aruna Madushanka:

(Saxophonist). His proficiciency in playing various instruments, including the saxophone, soprano saxophone, and western flute, showcases his versatility as a musician, and his musical repertoire is further enhanced by his remarkable singing ability.

Prashan Pramuditha:

(Lead guitar). He has the ability to play different styles, both oriental and western music, and he also creates unique tones and patterns with the guitar..

Features

Special milestone for JJ Twins

Published

13 hours ago

2026/03/3

Thilina Walpola

Twin brothers Julian and Jason Prins

The JJ Twins, the Sri Lankan musical duo, performing in the Maldives, and known for blending R&B, Hip Hop, and Sri Lankan rhythms, thereby creating a unique sound, have come out with a brand-new single ‘Me Mawathe.’

In fact, it’s a very special milestone for the twin brothers, Julian and Jason Prins, as ‘Me Mawathe’ is their first ever Sinhala song!

‘Me Mawathe’ showcases a fresh new sound, while staying true to the signature harmony and emotion that their fans love.

This heartfelt track captures the beauty of love, journey, and connection, brought to life through powerful vocals and captivating melodies.

It marks an exciting new chapter for the JJ Twins as they expand their musical journey and connect with audiences in a whole new way.

Their recent album, ‘CONCLUDED,’ explores themes of love, heartbreak, and healing, and include hits like ‘Can’t Get You Off My Mind’ and ‘You Left Me Here to Die’ which showcase their emotional intensity.

Readers could stay connected and follow JJ Twins on social media for exclusive updates, behind-the-scenes moments, and upcoming releases:

Instagram: http://instagram.com/jjtwinsofficial

TikTok: http://tiktok.com/@jjtwinsmusic

Facebook: http://facebook.com/jjtwinssingers

YouTube: http://youtube.com/jjtwins