Connect with us

Features

Sustaining vistas of Peradeniya Campus landscape beyond 80 years

Published

on

By Professor Emeritus Nimal Gunatilleke,
(nimsavg@gmail.com)
Member, Sustainable Development Council of Sri Lanka

The Peradeniya University was literally ‘more open than usual’ on the 01 July 2023, when it celebrated the very first Founder’s Day on her 80th (or 81st to be exact) birthday. Thousands of people, the majority of them being the young aspirants to higher education, thronged this world-renown Garden University of Sri Lanka on that day. They would have been, no doubt, enthralled by the scenic beauty of university park while paying equal or more attention to an assortment of events organised by the university within its library- and different faculty premises.

Amongst them, the Great Chronicle – Mahawansa text, which was selected as the authentic copy to be listed among the 64 new items of documentary heritage inscribed on the UNESCO’s Memory of the World (MoW) International Register in 2023, was on display at the new wing of the University Library. Also, the memorabilia of Prof. Ediriweera Sarachchandra including his hand-written briefs and the original costumes of the iconic Maname stage drama and a selection of rare paintings and line drawings of George Keyt MBE (1901 – 1993), who is considered Sri Lanka’s most distinguished modern painter was on display. Likewise, different faculties, too, had their own thematic exhibits for public viewing.

The university should be congratulated on organising such an event for the first time in its history for which the public response was so outpouring and the University was less than prepared for this ‘widely open-than-usual’ blitz. It reflects the inquisitiveness of people from all walks of life to see for themselves what is going on inside these portals of higher learning about which a gloomy picture has been painted more often than not.

I was informed by a former employee of the university that 17 busloads of students, their parents, and teachers, all from a single school in Jaffna had come, probably traveling overnight.

The lead taken by Peradeniya University in celebrating Founder’s Day with an Open Day, which most universities the world over has as a regular feature in their annual calendar is indeed heartening. It should surely be on the annual calendar of all our universities. Even more remarkable was that the Park was cleaned up of litter and residual garbage almost completely the following day and a special tribute to the University Health Services in charge of the garbage disposal among the many other chores they performed to their utmost to cope with the sudden deluge. Thankfully, the heavy rains that followed would have washed away any undesirables that remained.

University Park

The walk along the maze of driveways and footpaths within the University Park seemed to have fascinated the young and the old alike on this Open Day, as I myself, was witness to it. In this context, what came to my mind immediately was the Queen’s Drive on the occasion of the formal opening of the University of Ceylon at Peradeniya by HRH Duke of Edinburgh K.G in the presence of H. M. Queen Elizabeth II on the 20th April 1954, 69 years ago. The panoramic landscape along this Queen’s Drive on which the Royal Entourage was escorted by the first Vice Chancellor of the University Sir William Ivor Jennings is vividly described in the guide booklet that was prepared on the occasion. The landscape of the Peradeniya University Park which was planned by Sir Patrick Abercrombie and Mr. Clifford Holliday and implemented to near perfection by the renowned landscape architect Mr. Shirley d’Alwis during the preceding 10 years has been described in this booklet in the following way: ‘IN TWENTY YEARS’ TIME, THE UNIVERSITY PARK SHOULD BE MORE BEAUTIFUL THAN THE ROYAL BOTANIC GARDENS’.

This was probably not an impetuous statement as Sir Ivor was already well aware of the outstanding beauty of the Royal Botanic Gardens, which he acknowledges as among the finest botanic gardens in the tropics at the time. He goes on to quote Count Angelo de Gubernatis – a mid-Victorian visitor from Naples in the former’s book ‘Kandy Road’: ‘ If India is the paradise of Asia; if the Island of Ceylon is the Paradise of India; the botanic Gardens of Peradeniya is the paradise of Ceylon, and thus, as has been said the Heart of paradise’(sic. p.59).

Most likely Sir Ivor was referring to the approx. 320-acre (130 ha) University Park Landscape which he compared with the Peradeniya Botanic Gardens. A detailed description of the avenue planting along the main driveway and the selection of tree species displaying the University Colours (Scarlet and gold) twice a year is given in the said booklet. Except for the larger Mara trees along the Galaha road and some rubber trees still surviving on the New Peradeniya Estate (now the University Park) amidst the buildings, all other trees were planted or have grown from seed in nurseries at the time the landscaping was originally planned.

When trees and woody climbers are in bloom (mostly planted exotics and some escapees from the Royal Botanic Gardens across the road), it is truly a magnificent spectacle to behold. For someone with a botanical interest seeing the nuanced seasonal changes in leafing and flowering of the manicured gardens and the associated woodlands is indeed a delight beyond measure.

However, the Mara trees are more than a century old now, and with the added weight of the aggressively growing woody creepers/lianes overtopping these tree giants pose serious risks of their limbs falling off during strong winds causing dangers to passersby. The curatorial staff of the University should join hands with those of the Botanic Gardens personnel, who are more professionally trained to manage its Park while incorporating creative ideas coming from academia through their research pursuits. In that way, the panoramic landscapes of the two institutions together uniquely positioned on either side of the Kandy Road would be even more beautiful than what Sir Ivor would have envisioned.

However, conventional landscaping with elegantly designed and manicured lawns, beds of exotic flower species including potential invasives, rows of non-native trees, etc., may help shape an aesthetically appealing, relaxing campus environment, but it also could pose a veiled threat to the native wildlife populations. The invasive and non-native species without their natural predators or normal control mechanisms, can spread exponentially and become dominant which we are already witnessing in the Peradeniya University Park.

History of Forest Conservation Initiatives in Hantana Mountain Amphitheatre

In addition to the 130 ha of the University Park in the lower slopes and the valley of the Mahaweli Ganga (part of Ganga Wata Korale), approximately 1100 acres (445 ha) on the upper slopes of Hantana forms a mountain amphitheatre draining to Maha Oya which meanders through the University Park and deposit its relatively clean water to the Mahaweli river just above the railway bridge. Hantana Ridge is the last westward bastion of the Hantana mountain range which forms the catchment from which the University continued to draw its water supply during Sir Ivor’s time until recent times.

The Hantana water scheme was initiated during the Second World War period to ensure a steady pipe-borne water supply by the troops of Lord Louis Mountbatten’s South-East Asia Command who occupied this parkland.

Realising its value as a watershed for the campus community, Sir Ivor was of the view that the Upper Hantana Campus land bequeathed from the Old Peradeniya Tea Estate should go back to a jungle with the added benefit of earning revenue from its timber that would provide a valuable endowment. Indeed, the Forest Department was advised to plant the area first with Mahogany in between the shade trees (mostly Albizzia spp.) of the abandoned tea plantation. In more recent times, in particular, during the USAID-funded Reforestation of Upper Mahaweli Catchment project in the 1980s, the remaining pathana grasslands on ridge tops and upper slopes were planted with Caribbean pine. About 100 ha or 14% of the University lands have been planted with pines during this project.

Large-scale planting of Pinus spp. in the watershed areas was (and still is) vehemently criticised by environmentalists having experienced negative impacts on biodiversity, soil, and water conservation exacerbated by frequent fire hazards. The University of Peradeniya was very much a contributor to this nationally important environmental debate on public media at the time, so much so that a symposium on ‘Reforestation with Pinus in Sri Lanka’ was jointly organized by the University of Peradeniya and the British High Commission on behalf of the Overseas Development Administration of the UK, in 1988, to address this sensitive issue between the environmentalists and forestry professionals. Being a part of the catchment of the Victoria Reservoir built with generous British assistance and together with the keen interest of the then British High Commissioner to Sri Lanka David Gladstone on sensitive environmental issues of this nature would have paved the way for the British sponsorship of the event.

Quoting famous poets Longfellow, Tennyson, and Kipling, on ‘black and gloomy temperate pines’ ( in Hiawatha) in his Keynote Address, the High Commissioner conveyed the message that the objective of organising the symposium was to come to the grips of the problem of Pinus cultivation in Sri Lanka and if possible to reach a consensus on how to handle the issue of commercial and scientific considerations in guiding the hand that sows the seeds of the new forests or the tree farms. Reinforcing his standpoint, he went to the extent of posing 17 questions on Pinus cultivation in Sri Lanka for which answers were sought from the participating professional and scientific community at the end of the symposium, before embarking on supporting any further large-scale afforestation schemes based on Pine.

This landmark symposium probably would have positively contributed to the inclusion of a University of Peradeniya- Oxford Forestry Institute (UP-OFI) Link project to the overall Aid/Loan program on the Forestry Sector Development Plan for Sri Lanka with bilateral and multilateral funding in the early 1990s. The UP-OFI Link project was primarily geared toward facilitating collaboration in training and research in forest management.

Around the same time, Dr. Nihal Karunaratne, a distinguished citizen of Kandy, while being a member of the University Council in the late 1980s was instrumental in establishing a Forestry Subcommittee on ‘Reforestation of the University Lands’ and strongly supported the ongoing conservation efforts at the time. We ourselves being members of the same committee, while supporting his noble initiative, also proposed that a selected portion of the University land could be used as a crop gene pool garden in which the rare and valuable varieties of food crops, indigenous medicinal plants, industrial crops like rubber, and others could be maintained for posterity.

Being located in an environmentally favourable landscape in close proximity to the germplasm gardens of the Department of Agriculture and surrounded by traditional Kandyan spice gardens with fast-disappearing valuable gene pools of mixed species in them (spices, fruits and beverages like coffee), it would be a tremendous boost to agro-biodiversity conservation that the University could offer at a local, regional and even global scale.

As an example, the University of California, Riverside Citrus Variety Collection (UCR-CVC), USA is one of the most important collections of citrus diversity in the world. This collection with over 1000 accessions spread over in approx. 10 ha on the UCR campus is used for long-term research in plant breeding and educational extension services

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_California,_Riverside_Citrus_Variety_Collection#:~:text=The%20collection%20is%20composed%20of,in%20the%20Rutaceae%20subfamily%20Aurantioideae).

On a similar mission, we received a very favourable response from the Rubber Research Institute of Sri Lanka at that time for establishing a rubber gene pool garden (seed orchard) with FAO assistance but unfortunately, these efforts did not materialise.

Subsequently, there was a subcommittee of the Lands, Buildings, and their Maintenance Committee (LBMC) for developing a Master Plan for Landscaping the University of Peradeniya in the 1990s especially to address primarily the issues of encroachments and requests for timber extraction. Towards the master plan preparation, maps depicting i) Land Use, ii) Contours and Slope Classes at 10 m intervals [1:10,000], and iii) physical structures were prepared with support from the UP-OFI link project and handed over to the then Vice-Chancellor. Around the same time, yet another project – The Multipurpose Tree Research Network of the Faculty of Agriculture in collaboration with the Sri Lanka-German Upper Mahaweli Watershed Management Project – was mooted to conserve stream reservations – Maha Oya in particular – with aesthetically pleasing landscaping incorporating appropriate tree planting. Currently, there is an urgent need for this as the Maha Oya embankments are eroding as a result of flash floods arising upstream in Upper Hantana with a threat to the very existence of the playing fields.

While serving on those committees and with our own experience in forest ecology, we initiated several forest restoration experiments in lower Hantana i) Reforesting pathana grasslands and ii) converting Pinus plantations into mixed-species plantations in 1991 and 2004 respectively, using several broad-leaved species that are widely used for timber and medicinal uses in Kandyan districts viz. Gini Sapu, Bedi Del, Mahogany, Albizzia, Bulu, and Mee.

Both these trials have proved to be successful applied ecological research models and after 20 years or more; these long-term forestry trials have demonstrated that indeed pathana grasslands as well as Pinus plantations can be converted to native species stands. Consequently, these two sites are being regularly used as demonstration models in providing training in restoration ecological fundamentals to the students at Peradeniya and other universities over the last two decades.

The above is an abridged chronological narrative of the history of some of the conservation efforts by the University of Peradeniya (formerly University of Ceylon) during the past eighty years since Sir Ivor’s initial recommendation for establishing revenue-earning forests in Hantana Watersheds. However, in the present circumstances, while aligning with our legally binding national commitments to the global conventions on the environment (UNCBD, UNFCCC, and UNCCD), there is a need for a transformative shift to a more ecologically sustainable campus landscape, in particular, the upper Hantana hill slopes.

We need to reassess the ecological and socio-economic context that this important watershed provides in this era of our national commitment to achieving Sustainable Development Goals – the UN’s blueprint for a more sustainable future for all. Their adoption could place environmental restoration, sustainability, adapting to climate change, and ensuring water security under the international spotlight. Two classic textbook examples of this kind of long-term watershed restoration projects, to take a cue from, are the Hubbard Brook Watershed Ecosystem in New Hampshire and the equally famous Catskill/Delaware watershed project in upstate New York, both in the USA. With the availability of modern computer and sensor technologies, long-term hydrological and meteorological monitoring in the Hantana watershed would be an invaluable teaching and research tool with the potential of upscaling onto all major river systems deriving wider-scale benefits in the era of changing climate.

Sustaining Peradeniya Campus Landscape as outdoor living laboratories

The campus landscape is the most highly visible representation of the university and its relationship with nature. Just like its buildings, the campus landscape can be seen as the physical embodiment of the cultural and other values of the region it represents – Kanda Uda Rata – being located at the Northwestern edge of the central highlands. As such, the campus landscape together with the surrounding Kandyan Spice Gardens of traditional communities in Uda Peradeniya, Dangolla, Penideniya, Hindagala and Mahakanda, is an asset for cultural sustainability, among others. It offers the potential to integrate environmental, economic, and cultural sustainability entwined with intellectual well-being into the fabric of the university for generations to come.

The present site for the then University of Ceylon chosen after an intense ‘battle for sites’ over a decade or more since the 1920s has emerged as a landscape that expresses the soul and personality of this outstanding institution about which Sir Ivor once had said that it had one of the most beautiful environments in the world. So many literary works have been associated with Hantana Mountain Range and its foothills. Consequently, the campus landscape with the human-dominated University Park and the nature-dominated Upper Hantana Wilderness has the potential to become a key instrument to advance university sustainability and a legacy for future generations to build upon.

A major portion of the Upper Hantana watershed is included in the Hantana Environmentally Protected Area (EPA) of the Central Environmental Authority declared under a Gazette notification (# 1641/28) which is under review at present. As such, the Hantana watershed is pronounced as a climatically benign and land degradation-neutral area of national importance with its inherent biological richness and ecosystem services effectively conserved.

The world today faces extraordinary environmental challenges and all Universities, being caldrons of innovative thinking have a crucial role to play in meeting this challenge of utilizing the campus landscapes as the best outdoor laboratories for socio-cultural, economic, and scientific exploration and management.

Today, the Peradeniya University campus landscape together with its neighbouring Kandyan Spice Gardens of world repute provides multifarious functions, including aesthetic appreciation, recreational facilities, and a living laboratory for academic pursuits while delivering crucial environmental services including ecological safeguards.

The ‘Living Campus Landscape’ concept could be incorporated into the University’s Environmental Sustainability Strategy, specifically to address the challenges of a growing peri-urban campus alongside the opportunities for a healthy environment provides for people and nature. For example, sustainable campus landscapes can demonstrate effective reduction of the university’s carbon footprint. In this context, perhaps a more rationalised perspective than what Sir Ivor originally envisioned to meet the current and future challenges through strengthening partnerships with public and private sector institutions and local, regional, and global communities including the ever-loyal alumni in these changing climates is the need of this critical hour.

Universities the world over are no longer ivory towers; they are inevitably the microcosms of the larger society with all its attendant advantages and drawbacks churning up from within. An enduring legacy of sustainability backed by meaningful transformative changes integrating scholarship with environmental stewardship can inspire generations to come.



Continue Reading
Click to comment

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Features

Leadership, Ethics & Non-compromise – I

Published

on

Navigating the Winds of Change:

(Keynote address delivered at the first Award Ceremony of the ‘The Bandaranaike Academy for Leadership & Public Policy on 15 February 2025 at Mihilama Medura, BMICH, Colombo)

I have been made to understand, today marks the awards ceremony of the first cohort of students at the ‘The Bandaranaike Academy for Leadership & Public Policy.’ So, it is a happy day for all those graduating in a world where immediate work and life circumstances are not generally marked by happiness.

I apologize for starting on a seemingly morose note, but we are in more dire straits – as a nation and as citizens – than we have ever been since Independence. And much of this unhappiness stems directly from decisions taken by people we have considered leaders. In many cases, we have also elected them – repeatedly. But I am not talking only of public leaders who are often visible, but also of people away from the public eye, in leadership positions, such as in public and business organizations, kin networks, schools and formal and informal groups, who also take decisions that affect others – and often in life-changing ways.

The founders of this academy must certainly have had a sense that local and global structures of leadership are in relative disarray when they decided that the vision of the academy is to ‘create the next generation of ethical, effective and socially responsible leaders.’ From my vantage point, I would summarize these expectations in three words: Leadership, Ethics & Non-compromise’. These are the ideas I want to talk about today against the backdrop of our country’s vastly transformed political landscape and societal mood.

Let me lay it out there: leadership and its congruent qualities, such as ethics and non-compromise, do not simply emanate from a course or a syllabus. Certainly, conceptual and theoretical aspects of leadership, what ethics mean, when and when not to compromise in an abstract sense can be ‘taught’ through forms of formal instruction. I see that your postgraduate diploma courses such as ‘Strategic Leadership’ and ‘Politics & Governance’ emphasize some of these aspects. Similarly, the course, ‘Executive Credential on Leadership & Public Policy’ appears to emphasize some core concepts that would have to feature in any discussion on leadership, such as ‘Ethical Leadership and Social Responsibility’, ‘Leadership Strategies for a Changing World’, ‘Visionary Leadership’ and ‘Moral Leadership’ which have all been flagged either as course outcomes or focus areas.

But beyond this kind of abstraction in a classroom, leadership and its affiliated characteristics must necessarily come from life and how we deal with its multiple layers in society. A classroom, or a course, is essentially a controlled environment while society is not. The latter, by virtue of its composition, is messy and unpredictable. Leadership, in such situations, is one thing that theory and bookish knowledge alone cannot inculcate in a person beyond a certain point.

It is this, I want to elaborate in my talk today. It has become extremely clear to me that in our immediate living environment, and particularly in politics, across the board, leadership along with qualities like ethics and non-compromise, is woefully lacking. This absence stems from the relentless abuse of the key attributes of leadership which have been buried in the corrupt political system and compromised societal mores we have inherited.

So, let me take you beyond the classroom today and give you a glimpse of situations I have had to encounter. I suggest, you juxtapose these experiences and perspectives against what you have learned in the academy, your schools, your universities, from your parents and elders and your lives in general, and then proceed to fine-tune these or even unlearn your instructions, if needed. I have always found common ground in what American essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson once noted about leadership. He said, “do not follow where the path may lead. Go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.” What he is essentially talking about is the necessity of a vision to be able to lead.

But, more importantly, we must have the commonsense and the political will to distinguish between vision and hallucination, however popular and rhetorically similar both can be. Adolf Hitler had a hallucination of globally disastrous proportions while Nelson Mandela and Mohandas Gandhi had emancipatory visions whose long-term influence far exceeded the geographic and political boundaries of their countries. All three had a large number of followers, with very different consequences. And all of them were leaders, too.

What I want to say at the outset is that mere popularity of a person at a given moment is not an indication of leadership unless it is enhanced and enriched by ethics and the non-compromise of those standards. That is, leadership with morals as opposed to being devoid of them.

In my last professional incarnation, the core idea was to establish a university where none existed, an entity called South Asian University that belonged to the eight nation states of South Asia. It was intended to be a place where no one nation, political or ideological position would dominate; a university where existing conflicts between nation states would not percolate into the classroom. This was a grand vision spawned by a group of people who could lead when it came to ideas of equality in an unequal world.

Interestingly, in the initial years of its existence, it was possible to adhere to these principles and visions as long as there was leadership at important levels of the administration and academic decision-making where these principles were upheld and put into practice. For instance, Indian and Pakistani Independence Days were celebrated within minutes of each other, albeit amidst some tension, but essentially without violence or confrontation. The university did not get involved in any of these, but provided a safe environment. Today, only 14 years later, one cannot see a single Pakistani student on campus.

The iconic lecture series that I helped initiate, ‘Contributions to Contemporary Knowledge,’ which has now been discontinued, was kicked off by a highly successful and well-attended lecture by Gananath Obeyesekere. The Sri Lankan scholar was not invited because of our common nationality, but solely for his reputation reaching across national boundaries and hence was demanded by my Indian colleagues. My job, as a leader, was to make it happen. That is, all these events in the first 10 years of the university’s life established its identity as a South Asian socio-political as well as cultural-knowledge space and not an Indian socio-cultural enclave, though physically located in New Delhi. This was possible because of leadership and clarity of vision at different levels.

Even when crude nationalistic ventures were initiated at the apex of the administration or among students, some of us had the sense and authority to not let them proceed. Similarly, when events were organized which were considered anti-Indian by some misguided people, we had the moral and ethical wherewithal and strength to continue nevertheless, on the conviction of our ideas and the correctness of our decisions.

One such instance was the celebration of the work of the Pakistani poet Faiz Ahmad Faiz in 2015, when some Indian students complained we were turning the university into a Pakistani enclave. Yet the event was not cancelled, was again well attended and was very positively reported, including even in the Indian mass media. This is also where the notion of non-compromise played a pivotal role. That is, there was never any expectation of compromise in my mind and those others who helped organize it when we knew quite well this kind of rhetoric might emerge.

Continuing further, the point I want to stress is, leadership cannot and should not be merely based on individual popularity or on narrow personal interests. We see both tendencies when it comes to political leadership in Sri Lanka, our immediate geographic neighborhood, and elsewhere in the world. This is how political dynasties have emerged where families seem to believe that to be in leadership positions is a birthright passed down through divine authority. This misplaced thinking is to the detriment of the rest of us as a direct result of dubious forms of leadership that dynastic politics usually generate.

How can we expect a person to lead a nation or even an electorate in any degree of seriousness, when they fabricate their educational qualifications, when their professional backgrounds are works of fiction, when they have never worked a single day in the real world or when their achievements are in the realms of criminality. We have such leaders right here on our own soil whose political survival we have ensured through our vote and our very pronounced lack of reflective criticality. Our collective tolerance of such ‘leadership’ is shameful and says much about our own intelligence, ethics and apathy.

(To be continued)

Continue Reading

Features

USAID and NGOS under siege

Published

on

A file photo of the USAID signage being removed in Washington

by Jehan Perera

The virtually overnight  suspension of the U.S. government’s multibillion dollar foreign aid programme channeled through USAID has been headline news in the U.S. and in other parts of the world where this aid has been very important.  In the U.S. itself the suspension of USAID programmes has been accompanied by large scale loss of jobs in the aid sector without due notice.  In areas of the world where U.S. aid was playing an important role, such as in mitigating conditions of famine or war, the impact is life threatening to large numbers of hapless people.  In Sri Lanka, however, the suspension of U.S. aid has made the headlines for an entirely different reason.

U.S. government authorities have been asserting that the reason for the suspension of the foreign aid programme is due to various reasons, including inefficiency and misuse that goes against the present government’s policy and is not in the U.S. national interest.  This has enabled politicians in Sri Lanka who played leading roles in previous governments, but are now under investigation for misdeeds associated with their periods of governance, to divert attention from themselves.  These former leaders of government are alleging that they were forced out of office prematurely due to the machination of NGOs that had been funded by USAID and not because of the misgovernance and corruption they were accused of.

 In the early months of 2022, hundreds of thousands of people poured out onto the streets of Sri Lanka in  all parts of the country demanding the exit of the then government.  The Aragalaya protests became an unstoppable movement due the unprecedented economic hardships that the general population was being subjected to at that time.  The protestors believed that those in the government had stolen the country’s wealth.  The onset of economic bankruptcy meant that the government did not have foreign exchange (dollars) to pay for essential imports, including fuel, food and medicine.  People died of exhaustion after waiting hours and even days in queues for petrol and in hospitals due to lack of medicine.

PROBING NGOS 

There have been demands by some of the former government leaders who are currently under investigation that USAID funding to Sri Lanka should be probed.  The new NPP government has responded to this demand by delegating the task to the government’s National NGO Secretariat.  This is the state institution that is tasked with collecting information from the NGOs registered with it about their quantum and sources of funding and what they do with it for the betterment of the people.  Public Security Minister Ananda Wijepala has said he would deal with allegations over USAID funding in Sri Lanka, and for that he had sought a report from the NGO Secretariat which is operating under his Ministry.

 Most donor agencies operating in Sri Lanka, including USAID, have rigorous processes which they follow in disbursing funds to NGOs.   Usually, the donor agency will issue a call for proposals which specify their areas of interest.  NGOs have to compete to obtain these funds, stating what they will do with it in considerable detail, and the impact it will have.  Once the grant is awarded, the NGOs are required to submit regular reports of work they have done.  The donor agencies generally insist that reputed audit firms, preferably with international reputations, perform regular annual or even six-monthly audits of funds provided.  They may even send independent external monitors to evaluate the impact of the projects they have supported.

 The value of work done by NGOs is that they often take on unpopular and difficult tasks that do not have mass appeal but are essential for a more just and inclusive society.  Mahatma Gandhi who started the Sarvodaya (meaning, the wellbeing of all) Movement in India was inspired by the English philosopher John Ruskin who wrote in 1860 that a good society was one that would care for the very last member in it.   The ideal that many NGOs strive for, whether in child care, sanitation, economic  development or peacebuilding is that everyone is included and no one is excluded from society’s protection, in which the government necessarily plays a lead role.

 SELF-INTEREST

 Ironically, those who now demand that USAID funds and those organisations that obtained such funds be investigated were themselves in government when USAID was providing such funds.  The National NGO Secretariat was in existence doing its work  of monitoring the activities of NGOs then.  Donor agencies, such as USAID, have stringent policies that prevent funds they provide being used for partisan political purposes.  This accounts for the fact that when NGOs invite politicians to attend their events, they make it a point to invite those from both the government and opposition, so that their work is not seen as being narrowly politically partisan.

 The present situation is a very difficult one for NGOs in Sri Lanka and worldwide.  USAID was the biggest donor agency by far, and the sudden suspension of its funds has meant that many NGOs have had to retrench staff, stop much of their work and some have even closed down.  It appears that the international world order is becoming more openly based on self-interest, where national interests take precedence over global interests, and the interests of the wealthy segments of society take precedence over the interests of the people in general.  This is not a healthy situation for human beings or for civilisation as the founders of the world religions knew with their consistent message that the interests of others, of the neighbour, of all living beings be prioritised.

 In 1968, when the liberal ideas of universal rights were more dominant in the international system, Garrett Hardin, an evolutionary biologist, wrote a paper called “The Tragedy of the Commons”.  Hardin used an example of sheep grazing land when describing the adverse effects of overpopulation. He referred to a situation where individuals, acting in their own self-interest, overexploit a shared resource, like a pasture or fishery, leading to its depletion and eventual destruction, even though it is detrimental to everyone in the long run; essentially, the freedom to use a common resource without regulation can lead to its ruin for all users.   The world appears to be heading in that direction.  In these circumstances, the work of  those, who seek the wellbeing of all, needs to be strengthened and not undermined.

Continue Reading

Features

Dealing with sexual-and gender-based violence in universities

Published

on

Out of the Shadows:

By Nicola Perera

Despite policy interventions at the University Grants Commission (UGC), university, and faculty levels, sexual- and gender-based violence (SGBV) is so entrenched in the system that victim-survivors seeking justice are more likely to experience concerted pushback than the empathetic solidarity of their peers. Colleagues and friends will often close ranks, rallying to protect the accused under misguided notions of safeguarding the reputation of, not merely the assumed perpetrator, but the institution. While gender and sexual inequalities, inflected by class, ethnicity, religion, region, and other characteristics, shape the identities of the perpetrator and victim and the situation of abuse, the hyper-hierarchised nature of the university space itself enables and conceals such violence. It’s also important to note that women are not the exclusive victims of violence; boys and men are caught in violent dynamics, too.

Similar to intimate partner violence in the private confines of home and family, violence attributed to the sex and gender of abusers and victims in our universities goes heavily underreported. The numerous power imbalances structuring the university – between staff and students; academic staff versus non-academic staff; senior academic professionals as opposed to junior academics; or, senior students in contrast to younger students – also prevent survivors from seeking redress for fear of professional and personal repercussions. Research by the UGC in 2015 in collaboration with the Federation of University Teachers’ Associations (FUTA) and CARE International Sri Lanka, and more recently with UNICEF in 2021, revealed discomfiting truths about the university as places of work and education. In naming oneself as a survivor-victim, even within whatever degree of confidentiality that current grievance mechanisms offer, the individual may also represent (to some members of the university community, if not to the establishment itself) a threat to the system.

Conversely, an accused is liable to not just disciplinary action by their university-employer, but to criminal prosecution by the state. Via the Penal Code, the Prevention of Domestic Violence Act (2005), etc., the law recognises SGBV as an offence that can take place across many contexts in the private and public spheres. (The criminalisation of SGBV is in line with state commitments to ensuring the existence, safety, and dignity of women and girls under a host of international agreements, such as the United Nations Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women, Vienna Declaration on the Elimination of Violence Against Women, the Sustainable Development Goals, International Labour Organisation conventions regarding non-discrimination in employment, etc.). Specific to the university, the so-called anti-ragging act (the Prohibition of Ragging and Other Forms of Violence in Education Institutes Act of 1998, in addition to UGC circular no. 919 of 2010, etc.) deems SGBV as a punishable offence. The rag is one site where SGBV often finds fluent articulation, but it is hardly the only one: this is not a problem with just our students.

As the apex body governing higher education in the country, the UGC has not remained insensible to the fact that SGBV harms the lives, rights, and work of students, staff, (and other parties) in university spaces. The Centre for Gender Equity/Equality sits at the UGC level, along with gender cells/committees in individual universities. Universities and faculties have elaborated their own policies and bylaws to address sexual- or gender-based harassment and sexual violence. Although variously articulated, these policies touch on issues of consent; discrimination against a person, or creation of a hostile environment, on the basis of their gender or sexuality; the spectrum of actions that may constitute harassment/violence (including through the use of technology); coerced or voluntary sexual favours as a quid-pro-quo for academic or professional benefits; procedures for making and investigating SGBV complaints; protection of witnesses to an investigation; the irrelevance of the complainant’s sexual history to the complaint at hand. And here begins the inevitable tale of distance between policy, practice, and effect.

Different faculties of the same university may or may not include SGBV awareness/ training in the annual orientation for new students. The faculty’s SGBV policy may or may not appear in all three languages and Braille in student handbooks. Staff Development Centres training new recruits in outcome-based education and intended learning outcomes may or may not look at (or even realise) the politics of education, nor include an SGBV component in its Human Resources modules. Universities may or may not dedicate increasingly stretched resources to training workshops on SGBV for staff, or cover everyone from academics, to administrative staff, to the marshals, to maintenance staff, to hostel wardens.

Workshops may in any case only draw a core of participants, mostly young, mostly women. Instead, groups of male academics (aided sometimes by women colleagues) will actively organise against any gender policy which they construe as a personal affront to their professional stature. Instead, the outspoken women academic is painted as a troublemaker. Existing policy fails to address such discourse, and other normalised microaggressions and subtle harassment which create a difficult environment for gender and sexual minorities. In fact, the implementation of gender policy at all may rest on the critical presence of an individual (inevitably a woman) in a position of power. Gender equality in the university at any point appears to rest on the convictions and labour of a handful of (mostly women) staff or officials.

The effect is the tediously heteropatriarchal spaces that staff and students inhabit, spaces which whether we acknowledge them as such or not, are imbued with the potential, the threat of violence for those on the margins. The effect, as Ramya Kumar writing earlier in this column states, is the inability of our LGBTQI students and staff to be their authentic selves, except to a few confidantes. Since the absence/rarity of SGBV complaints is no evidence that the phenomenon does not exist, perhaps a truer indication of how gender-sensitised our institutions and personnel are, comes back again to the reception of such complaints. Thus, a woman accuser is frequently portrayed as the archetypal scorned woman: abuse is rewritten not just as consent, but a premeditated transaction of sexual relations in exchange for better grades, a secured promotion, and so on. A situation of abuse becomes inscribed as one of seduction, where the accuser basically changes their tune and cries harassment or rape when the expected gains fail to materialise. Especially with the global backlash to MeToo, society is preoccupied with the ‘false accusation,’ even though there is plenty of evidence that few incidents of SGBV are reported, and fewer still are successfully prosecuted. These misogynist tropes of women and women’s sexuality matter in relation to SGBV in university, because Faculty Boards, investigative committees, Senates, and Councils will be as equally susceptible to them as any citizen or juror in a court of law. They matter in placing the burden of documenting abuse/harassment as it takes place on the victim-survivor, to accumulate evidence that will pass muster before a ‘neutral,’ ‘objective’ observer.

At the end of the day, when appointments to gender committees may be handpicked to not rock the boat, or any university Council may dismiss a proven case of SGBV on a technicality, the strongest policies, the most robust mechanisms and procedures are rendered ineffective, unless those who hold power in everyday dealings with students and persons in subordinate positions at the university also change.

(Nicola Perera teaches English as a second language 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.

Continue Reading

Trending