A conference organized on the occasion of the retirement of a senior professor, set apart a full day for papers and discussion on the options for improving government universities. Of course, most of the audience was from the government universities and having devoted their entire lives to that enterprise, many were not willing to recognize how bad things were. Some discussed how the deck chairs could be rearranged on their beloved Titanic. Many blamed the “demand side” for not knowing how their students were and for using wrong criteria, not understanding that this itself was a symptom of a complacent monopoly. I was, of course, accused of many things.
On April 10th, I delivered the sixth Distinguished Lecture of the Open University of Sri Lanka on the subject of making the university relevant. In an increasingly complex world where difficult decisions have to be made by those in government, there is demand for evidence to support political and policy choices. The university is the default source where one looks for evidence or for those who can generate evidence. But on most occasions, scholars and policy makers do not connect. Demands for teaching and for increased publications results in even less incentives for the conduct of policy-relevant research and engagement with policy makers.
Yesterday, Sriganesh Lokanathan and I spent the day at the inaugural event of a business analytics group, pulled together by the Sri Lanka Ministry of Higher Education and the School of Information and Business Analytics at Deakin University. Seven Sri Lankan universities were represented by faculty as were several Sri Lankan IT firms. When the issue of university-industry collaboration came up, Srinath Perera of WSO2 said that they were already collaborating effectively, including through the three-way relationship with LIRNEasia and University of Moratuwa. Clearly, partnerships are critical in a a field like big data where we are all operating at the frontier of knowledge. The data resides inside firms and government organizations.
The “twittersphere” has been abuzz, with claims of anti-intellectualism and a few admissions of fault since Nicholas Kristof’s philippic appeared. “Political science Ph.D.’s often aren’t prepared to do real-world analysis,” says Ian Bremmer, a Stanford political science Ph.D.
Faculty at the Department of Sinhala and Mass Communication at the University of Sri Jayewardenepura, just outside Colombo, had obtained some additional resources for a two-day workshop to introduce their students to new media and cyber culture. Nalaka Gunawardene, who works closely with LIRNEasia on many issues, was also an invited speaker. It was, obviously, a new subject to the students, but as Nalaka observed in a tweet, they are not emotionally attached to the old media they spend their regular lives studying. My presentation
One of the things that LIRNEasia tries to do in the region is to maintain good working relationships where possible with high-quality universities in the region. The Lahore University of Management Science (LUMS) has been on our radar from the start (with one of its faculty Dr Joseph Wilson working with us as a Research Fellow from the start). However, the return to Pakistan of Professor Adil Najam to assume duties as the Vice Chancellor of LUMS resulted in the interest moving up a level. Therefore we took the opportunity afforded by our agricultural applications event in Islamabad to arrange a visit. It is our hope that this will result in at the minimum a greater involvement by LUMS in CPRsouth and hopefully some joint proposal writing to support research.
The IDRC workshop at which I spent the last two days was on the subject of Universities and Intermediaries in Innovation for Inclusive Development. I’ve been thinking about inclusive development in the context of the summative paper on agricultural supply chains work we’re doing. But then I’ve been thinking about universities much, much longer. Are they the appropriate vehicles for driving innovation in emerging economies, let alone inclusive innovation? The answers would be different if the question were asked about the American model of the university?
If telephony was supplied as it was in the bad old government-monopoly days, we wouldn’t have the current levels of access. It is because the service was reinvented that things changed. In the same way it is necessary to reinvent the university. The writer thinks mobile phones, especially smartphones will have something to contribute to the solution. From South Asia through much of the Middle East and sub-Saharan Africa, it’d be impossible to build schools or train teachers fast enough to keep up with the “youth bulge” that has given humanity more than a billion teenagers either to nurture or tame — the difference depending largely on access to education beyond elementary grades.