Sri Lanka’s state universities have approved positions sitting vacant while institutions complain of staff shortages and students experience the consequences. Prime Minister Harini Amarasuriya has now told vice-chancellors to accelerate recruitment and demanded stronger action over ragging. The more uncomfortable question is why instructions from the Prime Minister were necessary in the first place.
Sri Lanka’s universities need people, have approved vacancies for people and somehow continue to leave a significant number of those positions unfilled. Prime Minister and Education Minister Harini Amarasuriya has now instructed university authorities to accelerate recruitment to approved vacancies, raising the larger question of how administrative delays are affecting institutions already operating under considerable pressure.
The problem is not confined to academic staff. Universities require lecturers and professors, but they also require technical staff, laboratory personnel, administrators and the numerous supporting positions without which teaching and research become increasingly difficult. An institution can possess lecture halls, laboratories and equipment, but none of them replaces the people required to make a university function.
Submit Your Press Release
Get your company news, announcements, launches, appointments and events in front of a wider audience.
Sri Lanka’s economic crisis made the staffing problem substantially worse. Large numbers of skilled professionals left the country during and after the crisis, and universities were hardly immune from that migration. Academics capable of obtaining better-paid international appointments had particularly strong reasons to leave when the rupee collapsed and domestic salaries lost purchasing power.
Replacing that expertise is not as simple as advertising a vacancy. An experienced academic represents years of postgraduate education, teaching and research, and when that person leaves a university can fill the position considerably faster than it can replace the experience. That makes unnecessary administrative delays in recruitment particularly difficult to understand.
If a position has already been approved, funding exists and the university genuinely requires the employee, the process should not take so long that students begin experiencing the consequences before somebody is appointed. The Prime Minister’s intervention may accelerate the immediate process, but a properly functioning university system should not require ministerial intervention to complete routine recruitment.
The Prime Minister has also directed university authorities to strengthen their response to ragging and improve mechanisms through which students can report abuse. That issue deserves equal seriousness because Sri Lanka has tolerated the language of “ragging” for so long that it sometimes disguises conduct which would be described very differently outside a university.
Humiliation, intimidation, coercion, physical violence and sexual abuse do not become harmless traditions because they occur during somebody’s first weeks on campus. Universities have a duty to protect students while preserving the independence and intellectual freedom that make universities different from most State institutions.
The staffing and ragging issues may appear unrelated, but both ultimately raise the same question about administration. Sri Lanka cannot demand world-class academic performance while allowing routine management processes to drift, nor can it persuade talented young people that the State university system represents their future if campuses cannot guarantee the basic conditions necessary for them to learn safely.
The Government is therefore right to demand action, but ministers should not have to telephone universities to make ordinary university administration happen. Approved vacancies should be filled through transparent and efficient procedures, students should be protected through systems that actually work, and academics should then be allowed to concentrate on what universities were created to do.
Teach, research and produce the people who will build what comes next.
