My presentation at this conference will focus on the dehumanisation process within institutions of higher education but from a largely Indian and Asian perspective. It is more in the nature of a self-reflection. Over the past several sessions we have discussed many significant issues affecting higher education including the future nature of universities, funding problems and other pressing matters. However, one aspect on which we have not spent adequate time is on some self-reflection and some self-criticism. It is incumbent upon us to examine how deeply we ourselves – teachers and administrators – are implicated in the degeneration of the present system.

The students attending this conference were provided a regular session to air their concerns. I attended the session yesterday and was surprised to find that few non-students or seniors attended the session. In my humble opinion, the students ought to have been given a plenary. After all, besides research, students comprise the major focus of the university. Some would say they are its primary focus.

Therefore in this presentation I would like to examine the dehumanisation of university environments from the perspective of the student community. One of the student speakers yesterday – Mohammad Shafiq Bin Abdul Aziz from USM – was of the firm opinion that the relationship existing between the university and students is similar to the one obtaining between a master and his slaves. He was very clear about this. He described the features of masters: people who know everything; people who must be obeyed; people who cannot be wrong. To this, he counter posed the qualities of slaves (students) – they are weak, they have no civilisation and no knowledge and their sole role is to obey orders and regulations which have been set up by their master. In fact, it appears that universities have been set up to take care of the well-being of professors and lecturers and that students exist only to serve the master.

In our 2010 Multiversity Conference held here in Penang, Saifuddin Abdullah, the Deputy Minister for Higher Education, made a frank admission that universities today lack soul. He said that only having grand buildings and labs did not make a university, universities must have soul. I would go further and say that soulless universities very naturally assume that students lack soul as well. In other words, universities assume students have neither personality nor desire and everything is to be laid down for them, like where they should get into the bus, the route the bus would take to its final destination and when they could get off. There is no scope for modifications. This was the position described by another USM student from India, Mohammad Zubair.

Zubair in fact went on to declare that higher education had been reduced to a “laundry process” – students are presumably seen as dirty, rural, stinky, uncivilised, barbaric individuals that must be taken, for their own good (and after they have paid for the service) through a mental cleansing process that would make them suitable for life in the modern world. Both Shafiq and Zubair were anxiously attempting to draw attention to university environments which have become profoundly dehumanised and from which learning has long since fled.

We should be frank enough to admit that very little of “learning” takes place in universities today. There are a number of activities that do take place within these institutions and appear to have some connection with learning. But in fact one could even argue that universities specialise in putting up mindless road blocks to learning. Let me refer to India here which is a very good example of this.

By simply insisting on higher school certificates as a basic requirement or a bar for entering higher education, all universities have solved the problem of numbers by very adroitly keeping more than 90% of the adult population outside their walls. In this context, endless discussions about enabling greater access of unprivileged people to universities are quite hypocritical since the rules are designed to prevent entry. This to my mind is the first large-scale slaughter of human beings that takes place every academic year and it is done mindlessly by higher educational institutions. I know of only one instance – that of Annamalai University in the Tamil Nadu state of India – which permits adults, whether qualified by school or not, to register for its undergraduate courses.

The second mass slaughter of individuals – this time of youngsters – takes place with those who do procure school passing certificates. In Delhi, for example, the admission to three of the most prestigious colleges in the city is now restricted to those with marks above 95%. Not going into the terrible tension this creates for youngsters and their families in the city, one can well imagine the psychological impact of not being able to make the grade on the thousands of students who have marks below 95%. However, the institutions do not care. In fact the three prestigious institutions lead the pack not due to anything inherently excellent in their make-up but because they are able to harvest the crème-de-la-crème of the student class every year.

The third large-scale slaughter of individuals takes place once the students enter the class room and within weeks the teachers who address them have already in their mind divided them into two categories: low performers and high performers. The low performers are noisy, sit in the back benches, are not interested in academics and generally include all those young people who display the behaviour that any normal person would display when kept within sterile and barren institutions faced daily with largely boring lecturers who have themselves (with a few exceptions) stopped learning ever since they got their degrees and positions.

Ironically, the classification of low and high performers habitually applied to students has now come to haunt the professors and lecturers as well in the form of the ranking circus. During our last Multiversity conference at Penang in June 2011, Prof. Zhou Li from Renmin University in Beijing told us about what Yi Zhongtian, a popular member of the Chinese intelligentsia had observed about the ranking disease in 2009:

“Since the Education Ministry launched the reform in the form of quantitative management, all China’s universities have become chicken farms. If you want to be promoted from an instructor to an associate professor, you have to lay so many eggs; if you want to be promoted from an associate professor to professor, you have to lay so many more eggs. And the places to lay the eggs, i.e., authoritative publications and core journals, are also prescribed. Teachers are so busy laying eggs that they have no time to teach students or do research. Just recently, they said, ‘Hey, you should lay more “innovative” eggs!’”¹

So now universities are reduced to the status of chicken farms and students see the system as a laundry in which they are sent rolling and tumbling and nicely educated to remove the stench of their ignorance and the dirt of their rural personalities. Well, to that imagery, we can now safely add the circus as well.

The modern university discounts intellectual freedom which is a prerequisite for producing creative individuals. This is manifest directly in the procedures involving compulsion, especially compulsory attendance. There is very little doubt in my mind that if the requirement of compulsory attendance were removed, university professors would largely be bereft of audiences. Compulsory attendance is no more than a means to keep unwilling learners tied to classrooms and has absolutely no pedagogical value. You can see good examples of compulsory learning when you go to a circus where you can see elephants and monkeys performing mindless acrobatics, in fact doing things in which they would normally never engage.

This brings me to the actual learning process which allegedly is underway in our institutions of higher education. Filling students with information and ensuring that they have compulsorily acquired certain knowledge is considered “successful learning”! In fact, the common approach now of the pedagogical project is to see students as an empty bucket and the predominant role of the teachers, lecturers and professors to ensure that this bucket is steadily filled with large volumes of pointless information till it is flowing at the brim. When it begins to overflow, the student is declared “educated,” and certified accordingly. Psychologists may rave about the “joy of learning,” but most university campuses are in fact joyless learning environments where students face the prospect of unrelenting boredom added to the tension of examinations and making grades.

The other feature of the university system – which was strongly critiqued by professor Tan Sri Dzulkifli Razak in his presentation – is its close imitation of the factory model of production. One major aspect here is the reliance on uniforms. Uniforms are a useful technique of ensuring that students know that they are students and belong to a special subordinate category without power. Factory workers are made to sport uniforms for the same reason. At no time should students with a yellow uniform pretend that they have the knowledge that is reserved only for blue colour uniforms. Only when they are certified can they give up the uniforms. But not for long. There is only a short interlude after which the student, post graduation, joins a company only to find that she has to adopt the dress code of the company or the uniforms that identify them with the company as its property in exchange for a modest wage.

I am amazed to discover that there is no legal responsibility fixed on university administrations and the teaching community to guarantee effective or successful learning. The right of institutions to “fail” students is difficult to accept in view of the fact that students pay tuition. The right has been unilaterally appropriated because universities have power whereas students don’t. Actually, the “failure” of a student is an admission that the system has failed in delivery. Under consumer law, the student would be entitled to reimbursement of her fees at the very least.

To add to all this, we have the pervasive disease of Eurocentric studies: the learning schedule includes compulsory ingestion of volumes of material that have mostly originated with western academics studying western societies.

At Multiversity, we have been trying under a “decolonisation project” to focus attention on the construction and use of non-Eurocentric curricula. Though almost every teacher in the university admits to the need for a wholly decolonised (non-European) curriculum of studies, the actual shift towards decolonised academic frameworks has been rather slow. Practically all the social sciences, their theories, their analytical categories have been simply and uncritically inherited or borrowed from western academia. Now this creates a problem: university lecturers are unable to make such material interesting or relevant to the students since the fact of the matter is that it is not relevant to situations in their own countries and, in addition, it is almost always old or outdated. Lecturers teach it because they have to teach it. But students find it impossible to relate to it and so it becomes compulsory learning which is used only to pass examinations and get certified and then rejected or forgotten. Final result is there is no real learning which is useful to students in later life once they leave university and attempt to fit into society.

This is where the academic community in our part of the world should be severely castigated and criticised. They could not have continued so uncritically for more than half a century with ideas and theories inherited during the colonial period from the West. There is simply no justification for such conduct. Eurocentric academics are therefore largely responsible for the meaninglessness of most studies offered in institutions of higher education today.

Here, as an aside, I would like to draw the attention of this learned audience to the marked difference in approaches to learning between the Indian and Western systems. While I have characterised the present approach of Western, Malaysian or Indian universities as the “empty bucket” model of learning, it is important to at least to know that in earlier periods such a method of learning was considered inferior and unacceptable. In fact, in the traditional guru-disciple relationship of learning prevalent in India, the guru never provided the final answers to the student. The student in fact was made to spend several years to discover her truth on the grounds that the guru’s knowledge, if passed on to the disciple, would not be the disciple’s knowledge but the guru’s. In fact, here is something that will startle many: there is no word for the verb “to teach” in any of the Indian languages. The emphasis was on learning on the basis of self-discovery. Due to lack of time, I am not going into further details of this fascinating difference in approaches.

But this brings me to a related issue which I will also highlight only very briefly: the role of universities in the destruction of non-Western cultures and the elimination of communities. Universities have functioned as mere extension centres of western cultural ideas, promoting them in inappropriate contexts, thereby causing much harm to the careful assessment of the intellectual traditions of many societies, India and Malaysia included. This is another huge slaughter basket and much of it has been permitted and encouraged on the grounds that traditional knowledge is no longer valid or no longer of use. Both the latter statements are now universally admitted to be incorrect. By being unabashedly and uncritically hitched to the global economy and by providing sum and substance to the legitimacy and expansion of the global corporate economy, the universities have in fact strengthened corporate rule and state-sponsored development programmes which have led to large scale displacement of local communities and their knowledge systems from their inherited spaces and niches.

Having been extremely critical of the dehumanisation process, I know I will be expected to provide specific proposals relating to how we might get out of this totally undesireable environment. Here are some ideas.

1. Firstly, the student/learner has to be a part of the decision-making process in institutions of higher education. After all, it is because someone wishes to learn that a learning institution is set up – and not because someone wants to teach! I think that if one had to ruthlessly examine or justify why certain subjects or study areas need to be made part of the curriculum, one could cut out much of the “irrelevant” aspects of education and replace them with others. Hence student input is vital. What do they want to get out of university? What use do they want to make out of education? For these obvious reasons, students cannot be excluded from the business of education and therefore there has to be a serious involvement of the student community, student bodies and students individually in the discussions and debates surrounding policies, directions and rules relating to university administration, education and research. Present systems do not permit such involvement and most students are kept to student bodies which are given a marginal role in university functioning safely dubbed “extra-curricular.”

2. The second important principle that needs to be emphasized and supported if we wish to make a radical departure from the present situation is that our university should involve students in the creation of knowledge and not focus exclusively, as at present, on the dissemination of available knowledge. It is undisputed that creativity and assembly line production stand at the extreme ends of the learning spectrum. If the university knowledge production is modelled on assembly line production, then the possibilities of creating new knowledge rapidly diminish. Certainly there would be no facilitating environment, creativity would be generally discouraged and in any case since so much of time is required for the purpose of preparing for examinations linked to certification, it would always be at a discount. Examinations have no means of recognising or rewarding creative endeavour in any significant manner. So this issue needs to be examined in a fundamental way if we have to slice through the stagnancy of university culture today. (Creative learning is not to be confused with research which is another conventional task in which universities are involved.)

3. Universities should consider embedding themselves within horizontal frameworks of power rather than vertical hierarchies. There are any number of eminent educators who have taught and practised a co-learning model in which both teachers and students collaborate as equals. The teacher may bring her experience and knowledge of the literature, but the students would provide the creativity, the energy, the aspirations, the needs and the new technological skills that are available including smart phones, social networking sites, internet universities and the like. A good model of a non-hierarchical model is the Islamic School of Arts in Iran which encourages practices that enable the institution to function as a family. The students do not come into the building with their shoes, and faculty and students eat and play games together, all discussions take place in circular settings and both teachers and learners locate themselves together on the learning curve.

4. One way of demolishing the present structure of university teaching is to reduce dependence on text books. All text books by definition convey second-hand knowledge and inhibit creative thinking. I have recommended that text books, if still required, can be generated together by students and faculty and would make much better sense if available instead at the culmination of a course. They would then comprise, for instance, of the theoretical and analytical insights developed pursuant to activities planned during the course. They would also indicate whether the students have mastered the subject and whether they agree with the conventional academic wisdom associated with the discipline.

5. It is not important at all that learning activities take place within buildings or campuses. Taking students out of learning environments and putting them in unlearning situations like sterile class rooms is probably one of the most foolish principles on which modern education is based. Learning cannot be reduced to mere cerebral activity out of context, that too with almost exclusive reliance on rote learning and textbooks. Most impactful learning invariably comes from experience and personal experience is paramount. Universities and schools consider mistakes and errors as a sign of inadequacy, personal deficiency or poor academic inclination or capacity. This is completely contrary to our understanding of evolutionary processes, all of which have unfolded through trial and error. In other words, trial and error and the perception of having made mistakes or come to wrong conclusions are actually an admission that learning has been attempted whereas correct answers will never allow us to conclude directly whether the answer is due to correct thinking or has been made available by rote learning.

6. Finally, several issues have been raised at earlier sessions of this conference in connection with the funding of universities and the rebellion against enhanced university charges particularly tuition. I think that the period in which students could necessarily demand free or low cost higher education should be a feature of the past. It is a fact that all higher education is grossly subsidized (in some countries more, some less) and mostly the better off in most countries are able to access it. Free access or low cost access for persons from the privileged classes to university is not at all justified. Mahatma Gandhi, one of India’s greatest educationists, has written extensively on students earning while learning and had linked learning specifically to training for specific skills which would enable the students during the period of schooling itself to earn a decent wage. If that principle were to be extended to university education, costs would no longer become a nightmare since universities would themselves be able to earn through their students a significant proportion of the tuition that is now being levied on the students instead. Since students would be outside the classroom for these exercises in practical learning, the learning process itself would no longer be seen as a boring and meaningless task. These ideas need to be pursued.

References:

1. Zhou Li, “Colonising and Decolonising Works in Chinese Universities,” Fourth Multiversity Conference, Penang, 2011. Copy of the paper can be downloaded from www.multiworldindia.org

(Presentation before the 3^rd Global Higher Education Forum 2011, 15^th December, 2011, Penang Malaysia)