KNDU and the Future of Education

If the Rajapaksa regime sees the current crisis as an opportunity to corporatize and militarize education, progressive actors should see the debate around the KNDU bill as an opportunity to chart a progressive future for our education system. 

The crisis is devastating. Sri Lanka is in danger of defaulting on its international loans for the first time since Independence. From the binge of importing luxuries such as sports cars the country is now cornered into banning even imported fertilizers. Cost of living is beginning to soar, day wage labouring folk are suffering and children may become malnourished. 

The crisis is an opportunity. The Rajapaksa regime has seized this opportunity over the last year; the 20th Amendment to the Constitution concentrates authoritarian power in the executive president and the Colombo Port City Act allows for tremendous financialisation and a parallel economic territory with special governing powers. 
This is the backdrop for the Kotelawala National Defence University (KNDU) bill as it can militarize and corporatize education through a parallel university system that is at its core an attack on free education. 

The KNDU bill has brought considerable attention and resistance. The arrest and forced quarantining of Ceylon Teachers Union General Secretary Joseph Stalin and a number of others protesting the bill has backfired with widespread condemnation of these crass tactics of state repression. Indeed, the bill has awakened a national debate on the future of education. 

Over the last week, the bill was the subject of a University Teachers Association general body meeting at the Jaffna University and a discussion I facilitated by the Social Science Study Circle (SSSC), a forum based in Jaffna that has been a space for dissent over many decades. I draw on such discussions here to address the context and consequences of the KNDU bill. 

Corporatisation

Parliamentarian Harini Amarasuriya has insightfully critiqued the many problematic elements of the KNDU bill. The bill seeks to create a university outside the purview of the University Grants Commission (UGC). The UGC ensures standards for awarding degrees and undergraduate student intake on the basis of merit rather than their capacity to pay. The governance of KNDU will be tightly controlled by the military; including powers to repress student protest and even requiring them to provide information in the interest of “national security”. Significantly, the bill also provides for vast powers to establish or take over other institutions including to train the bureaucracy. The overall thrust of this bill will be to create a parallel militarised university system and in the process undermine the existing universities, particularly through an educational culture and system of top down corporatisation. 
The Rajapaksa regime claims that the large number of students eligible for university education cannot be absorbed into the university system and that many of them seek admittance in foreign universities at great foreign exchange cost to the country. 

Therefore, their solution is to overload existing universities without adequate allocations to increase lecturers and teaching facilities as well as create fee levying universities, which can also earn foreign exchange through commercialised enrolment of foreign students. 

From the time of the Federation of University Teachers Association (FUTA) struggle a decade ago it has been amply clear that successive Sri Lankan governments since the neoliberal turn in the late 1970s spend less than 2%, and sometimes as low as 1.5%, of GDP as state expenditure in education, one of the lowest levels of state education expenditure in the world. 
The FUTA demand for education based on a UNESCO recommendation was for 6% of GDP in state expenditure. It is only a steady increase in state expenditure that can increase meaningful enrollment of our youth into universities. 

Corporatisation of education where students are considered consumers was strongly critiqued at the outset of pushing for free education at the time of decolonisation. Minister of Education C.W.W. Kannangara in presenting the recommendations of the Special Committee on Education to the State Council in 1944, famously said:
 “How much nobler will that be for this State Council when we shall be able to say that we found education expensive and left it cheap; that we found it in a sealed book and left it in an open letter; that we found it the patrimony of the rich and left it the inheritance of the poor.” Sadly, the parliament today may make university education again the patrimony of the rich, and our economically deprived youth will only be able to seek such university education through large student loans and becoming indebted into their future. 

Democratisation

The Jaffna University teachers’ discussion centred on how we can work through FUTA as well as in collaboration with other universities and social movements, particularly to create awareness in the North and among the Tamil audiences on the dangers inherent in the KNDU bill. The online SSSC discussion was oversubscribed, with over a hundred activists, teachers and students wanting to understand how to defend free education. Significantly, there were a large number of hill country Tamil participants, whose concerns were based on the history of educational exclusion in the tea estates. The energy and desire to engage were symptomatic of the ideological foundation of free education and how it continues to shape our ideas about our future. 

If the Rajapaksa regime sees the current crisis as an opportunity to corporatize and militarize education, progressive actors should see the debate around the KNDU bill as an opportunity to chart a progressive future for our education system. Indeed, as Sri Lanka goes through its worst economic crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s, it should be remembered that it was a similar crisis and its aftermath that allowed Sri Lanka to instill free education that has outlasted most countries. However, it must also be noted that the long economic downturn of the 1970s led to the neoliberal regime; which cut the food subsidy to the public and brought in creeping privatisation of healthcare and education through the backdoor. 

During these times of great social and economic upheaval, the struggle against the KNDU bill may well determine the character of education decades into the future. Free education was established in our country on the premise that it was the system of education necessary for democratisation. And it is democratic struggles throughout our postcolonial history that have defended free education. The students, teachers and working people in our fragile country are again being called to defend democracy and free education, and chart a progressive vision of education for our future generations.