Midweek Review
Puravara Visvavidyala (Pura Sarasavi)
By Usvatte-aratchi
‘Words ought to be a little wild, for they are the assault of thoughts on the unthinking.’ – John Maynard Keynes
In the beginning, all universities were City Universities (puravara visvavidyala): Bologna, Montpellier, Paris, Oxford, Heidelberg, Upsala and Utrecht and that for two reasons: first, in medieval Europe, where universities began as universitas generale, the city was the only polity available. Countries as political entities and national governments, were at least 600 years into the future. Universities needed law and order to work, in quiet. And these cities were ports on the Mediterranean: Venice, Genova and in other places, on river banks: Bologna (connected to the Po with canals), Utrecht on the Rhine, Paris on the Seine, Oxford on the Thames (Isis), Harvard (and, much later) MIT on either bank of the Charles river. There was good reason for that. In medieval Europe and in 17th century Massachusetts, travel by water was the fastest. Students and teachers walked to schools, rode on horseback or rowed a boat. Scientists from Cambridge, after rowing on the Cam and the Muse, rode a horse to Gresham College to attend the Royal Society meetings. Trains, motor cars, steamships and airplanes were at least 700 years away in the future. Let us remember that did not prevent scholars from coming from afar either to learn or to teach. In each universitas generale, there had to be students from beyond its neighbourhood and the student body was divided into ‘nations’. In 13th century Oxford there were two: Australes (Southerners) and Borrealase ( Northeners). (Recall that well into the 17th century, education in Europe was in Latin). As for teachers, there were
Constantinus Africanus from Tunis who wrote on medicine, Avicenna from present Iran who taught medicine and peripatetic Bartholomeus Anglicus, who taught philosophy in many places, including Paris. Books written by Constantinus and Avicenna were taught in universities well into the 16th century. Universities were city organisations but they were places where students and teachers from all sorts of places learnt and taught. We will jump to modern city universities in a minute.
Before that, a quibble about the name: why puravara ? There are also maravara (thugs). Why not pura sarasavi? Pura has a good genealogy:
vana vana pathi turehi
pura pura pathin medurehi (gira sandesa)
(in forests, on king-of-the-forest treetops and in cities (pura), in city chief’s mansions).
Word of Kumaratunga Munidasa’s coinage
Sarasavi was a term coined by Kumaratunga Munidasa to signify a university and has much merit to commend it over visva vidyalaya. In non-European societies, universities are often identified by other names. In China, it is daxue (e.g.Bejing daxue); in Thailand it is maha vithyalai (Tammasat Maha vithyalai). Vishvavidyalaya has its origin here and in India. It arose, perhaps, from a misreading that university has something to do with the universe (vishvaya) of knowledge. It is understandable as the word traces its origins to the same Latin usage meaning ‘combined into one (uni+versus)’. However, the popes who issued Bulls to charter early 13th and 14th used ‘universitas vestra’ to address a group, which form was not limited to universitas generale. He would address a guild of goldsmiths with the same term. And a universitas generale was a group, sometimes, of students (Bologna) and sometimes, of masters (Paris). The usage survived and morphed into university in English and say universite in French and universidad in Spanish. The term has no connotation that the universe of knowledge is taught in a university. It was not true in medieval times (Bologna taught law, Salerno medicine and Paris theology and arts); it is not true now (Remember the adage that Harvard men do not know to count and of MIT men how to read.) In Hindu culture sarasvati or sarasavi has association with knowledge and has been so used widely in Sinhala writings. I cited earlier Sinhala use of pura to mean a city. Pura sarasavi reads dandy, doesn’t it?
President drawing inspiration
The President perhaps draws his inspiration for city universities from his knowledge of his adopted nation, the United States of America. In the US, education is a matter for States and not the Federation. There are state universities, the President’s own state has the magnificent California State University System extending from Berkeley, San Diego to Santa Cruz. I am more familiar with the east coast and New York state, in particular. The New York State University (SUNY) system extends from Buffalo in the north to Stony Brook in Long Island. In addition to SUNY, there are City universities, the best known being the New York City University (CUNY) with two celebrated colleges: Hunters in mid-Manhattan and Queens in Fresh Meadows. The City University is owned and operated by the City of New York, with taxpayers’ money and students’ fees. In addition to these city universities, there are Community Colleges, owned and operated by counties. The entire primary and secondary school system is owned and operated by locally elected Schools Boards with revenue from property taxes.
Pinnawala, where a City University is to be located, is no city but an elephantine village. It does not have the resources of many kinds to run a university. Pinnawala cannot raise tax revenue sufficient for the purpose. As it stands, there are no residential facilities for students and staff in the neighbourhood. In the 13th century, a university that was started by students in Florence (Firenze) was abandoned because house rent was too high for students to afford. In a report on the University of Calcutta in 1918 (Sarkar?), it was observed, that students were in poor health partly because of wholly inadequate housing they lived in. There will have to be large scale construction to provide lecture rooms, well equipped labs and engineering labs quite apart from residential facilities for students and staff; perhaps like in Peradeniya. Finding that many competent teachers will be most challenging. These facilities will have to be repeated in all 10 districts for the time being, no small enterprise in matters personnel and financial.
At the inauguration ceremony of the Pinnawala project, both the President and the Minister emphasised that city universities will be there to supply graduates who can walk into workplaces. Did they ever ask themselves or their advisers, ‘Where are the workplaces that these young men and women would walk into?’. Anyone who expects that puravara visvavidyala themselves will generate job opportunities for their graduates, is presenting a new paradigm of development. We need to sit down and think hard. It is one of the common and convenient myths that this country has not developed for lack of trained personnel. In 1964, while a student, I read a paper before a group of eminent economists overseas and pointed out that Ceylon then had higher levels of education than most developing countries but was poorer in economic performance, contrary to the then growing tendency among economists to find a close relationship between investment in education and economic growth. I was almost politely shouted down. However, unhappily for us, subsequent developments have borne me out. I also wrote a paper in Education in Ceylon, A Centenary Volume, published in 1969 by The Ministry of Education and Cultural Affairs, in which I generalised on this phenomenon. The slogan about ‘the gap between skills and job opportunities’ (coined perhaps by Ronald Dore of Sussex) came from the ILO employment missions that were launched in 1971 or so.
Those missions went to Ceylon, the Philippines, Iran, Kenya, Colombia, Venezuela and a few others. Those mission reports had no impact on the development of those economies. We decided to carry the burden for the missions. However, graduates from Moratuva find employment, mostly overseas, before their final GPA is known. A professor in architecture in Moratuva told me, a few years ago, that of the 11 students in his final years class, 10 had left for employment overseas, within a few months of graduation. A young man who stayed with us and graduated in physics 2019 in Colombo was offered employment in Siemens in Germany before he graduated. Graduates in Commerce from Jayawardenapura find employment overseas, often easily.
Seeking more jobs in Saudi Arabia
Our Foreign Minister ‘urged Saudi Arabia to provide more jobs to Sri Lankans to work in skilled and professions there’ (The Island 14th August). Surely, this country has an exportable surplus of skilled personnel (including terrorists) and professionals. These young men and women go overseas for employment at reasonable wages mainly because there are none such here. A young university graduate who becomes a teacher is paid some Rs. 33,000 and an allowance of Rs.!0,000, I learn from an old friend. They love their country but working in a congenial environment and the prospect of a good living much more. Our graduates walk into professions overseas. Those with lower levels of education walk into homes abroad to clean them, sometimes to offices for clerical jobs. But for this latter exodus, our unemployment rates today would exceed 10 percent of the labour force.
If students did not go to university, they would have gone to either West Asia for employment or added to the locally unemployed school dropouts. I will turn the premise of the President and his Minister on its head and say, ‘Our graduates are unemployed because there are no jobs into which that they can walk into’. If enterprises do not grow, I am afraid graduates from Puravara Visvavidyala will walk not into jobs but on to street protests.
Look around!
Look around you. Taiwan has a population that is 0.2 of the total world population. Taiwan produces 80 percent of the world output of semiconductors. Is every Taiwanese employed in semiconductor production a Ph.D. in quantum mechanics? When South Korea, Malaysia and Singapore started to industrialise and then to take on electronic industries, did they have massive increases in university output in engineering and in electronics? Why does Singapore import so much labour and we export so much? Did China undertake massive programmes in science and engineering education to become the factory to the world? It is in the current Five Year Plan ending 2025 that China ‘will vigorously cultivate talents with technical skills’ (The Economist). For that matter, go back in history, and Britain, when it was the factory of the world, did not have more than 2% of its population (1902) as university graduates, almost all of them in arts. That was true of the US when it overtook Britain as the world’s richest country about 1900, although there had been a professor of science at Harvard College from 1756. About arts graduates’ inability to fit into jobs, remember that the British empire was built and run when the two pre-eminent universities in Britain did not have a faculty of engineering.
What changed in Korea, Taiwan, China, Malaysia and Singapore was that enterprises grew to employ young people. Changes in policy that Deng Xiao Ping brought about in China in 1978 saw a magnificent growth of enterprises, both state owned and privately owned. We saw the birth of a new economic formation: state capitalism. In India, massive and widespread unemployment of university graduates was whittled away after 1992, with Manmohan Singh reforms that ended the permit raj and new enterprises grew ending the ‘Hindu rate of growth’. IITs, now powerhouses sending out manpower competent in engineering to the world, were first established in 1951 (Kharagpur), 1958 (Bombay), 1961 (Delhi) and others later. Yet it was after 1995 or so that the Indian economy began to grow fast and cut down graduate unemployment in India.
Central to all these changes was the growth of enterprises, no matter who owned them. Historically, the sequence in development has been for enterprises to emerge before skilled workers find employment. So far it has not been a chicken and egg question. There were no changes in educational policy before those enterprises flourished. Trained workers followed.
Every established truth deserves fresh examination, when new evidence emerges. And new evidence will meet the eye of those that seek.