Do not abuse Sri Lanka Administrative Service and degrade university education

‘Words ought to be a little wild, for they are the assault of thoughts on the unthinking.’ – John Maynard Keynes

By Usvatte-aratchi
(The writer has not been a member of
either SLAS or of a university faculty.)

Parliament and government in our country in the 21st century so far have been dominated by persons with no post-secondary education and often with little secondary education. This has been accompanied by a lack of people with high level management experience. In contrast, parliaments in the 20th century have had a surfeit of persons with both university education and professional experience. There were Solomon Bandaranaike, Philip Gunawardene, S. A. Wickremasinghe, Pieter Keuneman, N. M. Perera, Colvin R.de Silva, G. G. Ponnabalam, S. J. V. Chelvanyakam, Dudley Senanayake, M. V.P. Peiris, W. Dahanayake, Felix Dias Bandaranaike, Lalith Athulathmudali, Ranjith Atapattu, Ranil Wickremesinghe, Sarath Amunugama, G. L.Peiris, W. B.Wijekoon and several others. We have yet to elect a local university graduate as the President of the Republic. Recent governments have forsaken such men and women, except for two or three, or more likely, such men and women have forsaken political activity altogether. Viyath Maga is a new emergence, that has yet to be tested. Jaffna was once rightly reputed for its educated public who actively participated in its civic life, but no longer. These changes are strange in a society where education at all levels has grown markedly during the last 70 years, not only grown massively but also diversified, both geographically and content wise.

Governments were assisted by a senior management team first recruited as junior managers from among the brightest output of the universities. Only university teaching challenged the attraction of the Ceylon Civil Service to bright students from universities. They accomplished brilliantly tasks of management, though often not innovation. While Taiwan, South Korea, Singapore and Malaysia saw opportunities in a new world of electronics, shipping and aviation, our bureaucracy failed to free themselves of the politicians’ infatuation with Rajarata and to lead us into the brave new world. Our entrepreneurs were hopelessly lethargic. The exception was the collective of public servants under President Premadasa, who took the garment industry to all corners of the island. If any group of people accumulated wealth during these last 20 years, they were politicians who were in government and occasionally a few other men who collaborated with those politicians. And those politicians accumulated wealth more rapidly and in larger bulk than in their wildest imaginations. That they are not in prison tells its own story.

The present government has gone further than any other. There are all too few men of university learning in the government but the intellectual heavy lifting in government (not withstanding Viyath Maga) seems to be in the hands of men and women of little post-secondary education and even less of relevant professional experience. See the confusion in the administration of the vaccination programme; this, in a country whose healthcare workers nearly eliminated malaria 70 years ago with no help from the WHO, the World Bank, the Doctors without Borders, OXFAM or Bill Gates––Malaria still kills more than a million every year in Africa––and poliomyelitis two decades later and still later childhood diseases DPT. Grave is the danger that the government has placed the public in when they failed to read the danger in permitting a ship turned down by two ports on their voyage to come to harbour in Colombo. So, is the crisis that peasants face in planting seed designed to grow with inorganic fertiliser, now using miniscule amounts of organic fertiliser. There is a strong case for going back to using organic fertiliser; but it is also necessary that plant breeders develop seed that respond with productivity to that fertiliser. Otherwise, we must take the responsibility for pre-1965 yields (before the introduction of H-4, BG 111 and later seed) and the consequent necessity to import large quantities of rice. The price of cereals in world markets are already up. VP tea growers face the same hazard as those plants may not respond to organic fertiliser as they do to inorganic fertiliser. Nor can plantations, given the price of tea and of labour, any longer employ labour for weeding, in the absence of chemical herbicides. The government has given an Apple IIG desktop to growers and asked them to mine bitcoin.

There is a saying in our villages:

‘ekak kadatolu hada gannata gihin mata vu kariya;

dekak kadatolu hada dunnai induruve achariya’:

the smith to whom I handed over (an implement) to repair one defect returned it to me with two defects’. Apt, indeed!

Young men and women who enter the Administrative Service are among the brightest output of our schools. Usually, they come into the arts faculties at universities having been admitted entirely on merit, not subject to entitlements on the basis if quotas. Pundits often blame these students from rural schools for choosing the arts stream. They have not looked at the preponderance of 1C schools in rural areas when 1AB schools abound in urban areas. Truthfully, the only stream available for rural children to swim in that desert is the Arts Stream. It is a pity that, like Amu Darya and Syr Darya that end in the Aral sea, they end up in a desert. These students receive little private tuition, being too poor to buy it. In SLAS, the best of them end up as CEOs, Secretaries to ministries. They may be poorly taught in universities, but intelligence cannot be mottled by bad teaching and stupidity emblazoned with sophistication. The present government has appointed as Secretaries to ministries and as Chairmen of corporations senior military men (retired or in service) under whom members of the Administrative Service must work. Military men and women may excel on the battlefield. But public administration in a modern complex society is a different ball game, as chess is from American football. It must gall these civil servants near the end of their careers to be denied opportunities of occupying CEO positions for which they have been trained for long years from the time they joined as junior managers. One cannot expect deep commitment from them. It is wrong to deny SLAS men and women what is their right.

Some assume that there exists a strong association between the number of graduates in STEM subjects and the rate of economic growth in a society. Read a little bit of history. In 1890, when the United States toppled Britain off its pedestal of top dog in economic wellbeing, the US had less than two percent of its population as university graduates, most of them in Arts. In 1890, there were no motor cars in US but by 1929, every household there had a car. Cars were not imported from Britain or elsewhere. When Britain brought down the industrial revolution to this world 1760-1840, ‘Formal education in Britain before 1850 was, with the exception of a very small minority, confined to what we would consider today an elementary education.’

(Joel Mokyr.2009). The two English universities in Oxford and Cambridge, did not have departments of engineering. As the official historian of Cambridge University wrote ‘In 1870 the university of Cambridge was a provincial seminary enhanced by a traditional prestige, by expertise in a small range of disciplines ….’ The Cavendish Laboratory was still to come. The University of London had not begun to throw in its weight. Redbricks showed their colours later. Yet, Britain had completed the first Industrial Revolution!

Britain did not have its students enrolled in foreign universities (though much was learnt from Germany in late 19th century) or steal science and engineering secrets from other countries to become the factory to the world. They had none to steal from. If entrepreneurs, whether private or state, work under the right policies, economic progress takes place and university graduates find employment in those enterprises.

In 1975, there were no courses in computer programming in colleges and universities in US for an electronics industry to blossom in 1990. When did you first hear of Tsinghua University and the Harbin Institute of Technology? When industries grow, university graduates take up jobs offered. During the last decade of the 20th century, there were letters in The New York Times from Ph.D.s in mathematics that they drove taxis to make a living. (There was a huge exodus of mathematics men from the USSR after its collapse.) By 2005, Wall Street firms and banks could not find enough of them for employment.

The relationship between education and employment is not as simple-minded as our rulers imagine. Both administrators and scholars had learnt those lessons from manpower planning in the USSR and the forecast for manpower in Britain the early 1960s. The number of doctors trained according to manpower plans was so low as to create a problem of running NHS. The first large scale migration of Indian doctors (some doctors from Ski Lanka also joined in) to Britain took place in that milieu. Nor have we heard of successful economies that stacked up loads of trained manpower and waited for economic growth to take place. Literacy is another matter, altogether, as we have learnt from China and Vietnam, unfortunately belied in Sri Lanka. The wheel is an old invention; it is too costly to invent it again.

SLAS men (and women) have the know how to work government programmes. Military men excel in the battlefield. Let not the latter invade the former lest disaster should overtake us all. Universities do not stack up graduates waiting for industries to grow to give them employment. Promote the growth of industries; trained personnel will come in. Do not abuse SLAS and do not degrade university education.