Politicization Continues: FUTA Condemns Sacking Anuruddha Pradeep
May 21, 2013
“Politicization, loss of academic freedom and autonomy are grave threats faced by the university community currently. The latest victim of this malaise is Mr Anuruddha Pradeep, Probationary Lecturer from the Department of Political Science, Sri Jayawardenapura University. Mr Anuruddha Pradeep has been an outspoken critique of current government policy on education. His forthright and often piercing criticism on how universities are managed, how funding for education has been systematically reduced and the loss of academic freedom has irked many, including the Minister of Higher Education.” says the FUTA.
Anuruddha Pradeep
Issuing a statement its General Secretary Dr. Rohan Fernando says; “Though Mr. Anuruddha Pradeep had already submitted his thesis to the relevant institution, which highlights the fact that he has almost completed his requirements for permanency, we have reliably learned that the university authorities, through the politicized University Council (majority of the members of the University Council are appointed by the Minister of Higher Education) have taken an irrational decision to terminate his services.”
We publish below the FUTA statement in full;
Termination of Mr. Anuruddha Pradeep Karnasooriya –Lecturer (Probationary) at University of Sri Jayawardenapura
Politicization, loss of academic freedom and autonomy are grave threats faced by the university community currently. The latest victim of this malaise is Mr Anuruddha Pradeep, Probationary Lecturer from the Department of Political Science, Sri Jayawardenapura University. Mr Anuruddha Pradeep has been an outspoken critique of current government policy on education. His forthright and often piercing criticism on how universities are managed, how funding for education has been systematically reduced and the loss of academic freedom has irked many, including the Minister of Higher Education.
The normal procedure to get confirmed in the job for young university academics is to obtain certain qualifications (postgraduate degrees like M.Phil., M. A. or Ph.D) within a stipulated amount of time (8 years since joining the University in the position of a probationary lecturer). If the probationary period comes to an end while the thesis had been submitted but the result have not been released, it is customary to place the individual concerned within the ‘temporary’ position until such time that the results are released and once the results are released the appointment is backdated to the date of submission of the master thesis. There are many in the system currently, including those at the top most rung of university administration who have benefited from this practice.
Though Mr. Anuruddha Pradeep had already submitted his thesis to the relevant institution, which highlights the fact that he has almost completed his requirements for permanency, we have reliably learned that the university authorities, through the politicized University Council (majority of the members of the University Council are appointed by the Minister of Higher Education) have taken an irrational decision to terminate his services. In fact, we have learned that the council was wrongly informed, purposely or mistakenly of the actual date of submission of the thesis. While the actual date of submission of the thesis was 1st of March 2013, which was before due date, the date which had been informed to the council was 20th March 2013. This clearly shows that the termination of Mr Anuruddhap Pradeep was malicious or was based on wrong information. We believe Mr Anuruddha Pradeep was terminated for his outspoken critique of government policy.
Currently, the government is considering absorbing the services of even people who have left the country, many of whom who have vacated their position in the university system. It is in this backdrop that one needs to examine the vile duplicity and the malicious intent of this Minister. This is how teachers who have opted to stay on and serve the country, are treated. This is one of the reasons many university teachers have left the country in the first place. We understand that pressure was brought upon the University Council by those in responsible positions in the government. It is extremely disappointing that the Council succumbed to such pressure. Such Councils have shown themselves unable to defend two fundamental principles on which universities are founded: autonomy and academic freedom.
FUTA in several recent press releases highlighted the importance of university autonomy and academic freedom to the stature of universities. This incident yet again reiterates the despicable situation of governance the university system is subjected to. In fact, we have reports from several other universities of similar incidents, especially in the North and East. Academics in some universities have been systematically silenced so much so that many are afraid to even speak out
openly when they are harassed and intimidated.
openly when they are harassed and intimidated.
We call upon the administration and management of universities to resist political pressure and to work in the best interests of the institution. We urge the management to apply rules fairly and consistently to all and to desist from punishing young academics who challenge the status quo.
Yours sincerely,
Dr. Rohan Fernando
General Secretary/FUTA
Confessions: I’m an American, now almost 70 years old. I spent a year in Vaddukkottai, Jaffna in 1967-68. Technically, at that time I was a “missionary,” though I never converted anyone or wanted to. Impelled much more by adventure and wanderlust than any sense of “calling,” for me it was an “intern year” during (or rather out of) a theological education (Protestant, liberal, etc.): an opportunity (for me) that came out of nowhere after a year spent at the University of Oxford. But I’ll spare you those details. From the perspective of the missionary sending organization, which was a descendant of the American Congregationalist Protestant Christians who had founded Jaffna College in 1823, I was holding open a “visa position” for some permanent employee/missionary to replace me for a full five-year term. So I landed in Sri Lanka (then Ceylon) sometime in October-November 1967, knowing I think only that Ceylon was an island, its capital Colombo, and its fame for tea. I’ve never been the same since.
General Secretary/FUTA
Vaddukkottai Memories: Jaffna In The 1960s
By Glenn Yocum -May 21, 2013 |
Prof. Glenn Yocum
Confessions: I’m an American, now almost 70 years old. I spent a year in Vaddukkottai, Jaffna in 1967-68. Technically, at that time I was a “missionary,” though I never converted anyone or wanted to. Impelled much more by adventure and wanderlust than any sense of “calling,” for me it was an “intern year” during (or rather out of) a theological education (Protestant, liberal, etc.): an opportunity (for me) that came out of nowhere after a year spent at the University of Oxford. But I’ll spare you those details. From the perspective of the missionary sending organization, which was a descendant of the American Congregationalist Protestant Christians who had founded Jaffna College in 1823, I was holding open a “visa position” for some permanent employee/missionary to replace me for a full five-year term. So I landed in Sri Lanka (then Ceylon) sometime in October-November 1967, knowing I think only that Ceylon was an island, its capital Colombo, and its fame for tea. I’ve never been the same since.
I landed in Sri Lanka a lower-middle-class American from Pennsylvania who considered myself extremely fortunate at that point in life to have had six years of what I thought was an excellent post-secondary education: three years at a very good small “liberal arts college,” one year as an “exchange student” at the University of Hamburg in Germany, one year at Union Theological Seminary in New York, and one year at the University of Oxford. At the time I actually thought I was a bit educated; I was young, I was naïve, I was not dumb, but fortunately I did not feel myself entitled by dint of upbringing, education, or accomplishment. Within about two hours of landing at Colombo Airport in 1967, I realized that my six years of excellent post-secondary education had not informed me about the world I was entering (which represented for me, at least in retrospect, at least two-thirds of the then existing world). I suspect this is a familiar story: the 1960s American naif arriving in a non-European country and being “blown away” by what he encountered there. For most Americans (like my spouse) it was a Peace Corps experience (for her, in Turkey); for me it was being the undergraduate chaplain (a totally new, amorphous position) at Jaffna College, Vaddukkottai. We 1960s Americans who were so fortunate (I’m tempted to say, blessed) probably did little good in these “exotic” environments. But our experiences abroad committed us (at least my wife and me–and I think we were not atypical) to lifetime involvement with and study of what we had experienced, of where we had been. Certainly I did not convert anyone in Vaddukkottai; rather, Jaffna converted me.
So, after my year in Jaffna (more about which below), I returned to the U.S., having found my “vocation”: I wanted to go to graduate school, get a Ph.D. in the study of Tamil religions, teach at a small liberal arts college like the one I had attended, and thereby hoped to provide students with a somewhat broader perspective on the world than the one I been given. Well, all of that happily came to pass. But during and after graduate school my research came to focus, not surprisingly, on south India and its religious traditions rather than on Sri Lanka (Tamil Saiva saints and their poems, Saiva temples, Saiva mutts, etc.). Indeed, prior to a quite unexpected, fortuitous trip to Kandy in December 2012, I’d only been back to Sri Lanka once–and then only briefly (two or three days) to Jaffna in 1973. So I’m hardly a Sri Lanka expert. But I do harbor vivid, happy memories of being in Jaffna in the late 1960s.
The Jaffna peninsula in 1967-68–and Jaffna College in particular–were a wonderful place to be a wide-eyed, naïve foreigner. People were invariably friendly and helpful. The pace was slow. The skies were clear. The landscape, though very flat (and I’ve never been very fond of flat) was nonetheless new and appealing with its palmyra palms studding the horizon. I came to love the lanes, the vegetation, and the birds, especially the birds. But it was the people who changed me. How so? Certainly by their openness, patience, and overall willingness to respond to, indeed to tolerate, the constant questions of the ignorant foreigner that I was.
Jaffna in the late 1960s was a very peaceful, relaxed, slow-paced place. I remember riding my bicycle, sometimes on the open (i.e., non-lane) road into Jaffna town, watching the Indian rollers perched on the electric lines and then swooping into the paddy fields–and the beautiful paradise flycatchers rising and dipping across the compound in which I lived. I came to love string hoppers and sambar and red rice, though I did have to learn how to eat with my fingers.
My students were attractive; they were probably much too respectful of someone only a few years older than they were who knew so little at the time about their society and culture. They were overwhelmingly, perhaps exclusively, male. They were mainly Tamil Hindus, but some were Tamil Christians, some were Sinhalese Buddhists, a few were Burghers. My faculty colleagues at Jaffna College were more often Christian than Hindu; all in my memory were Tamils. Sharpness of mind and generosity of spirit were the norm. If the names Silan Kadirgamar, Rajan Kadirgamar, Luther Jeyasingham, Sabapathy Kulendran, Balan Chelliah, and “Bubsy” Arulampalam are familiar to people in Sri Lanka forty-five years later, these are the people I knew best then and from whom I learned the most. There was also the college librarian who was a Tambiah, of whom I was very fond. And, of course, there was a student, more my own age than that of my faculty colleagues, M. Eugene, from whom I gained much in knowledge and outlook.
My memory of Jaffna—and Sri Lanka more generally—is of a peaceful, relaxed, generous place populated by intelligent, well-educated, welcoming people who despite their long colonial history did not hold my western culture and American appearance against me. I was, to be sure, at least somewhat aware of ethnic issues—“Sinhala only,” the status of Indian Tamil plantation workers who were supposed to be repatriated to India, a couple of riots that occurred prior to my year there, the lack of political parties (apart from those of the far left) and other civic institutions that crossed ethnic lines. But at the time those ethnic tensions seemed to me manageable, soluble.
The Ceylon of my experience contrasted markedly with the America of that time: the Vietnam war, the assassinations during the time I was in Jaffna of Robert Kennedy and of Martin Luther King, Jr., race riots, civil rights struggle, and on and on. I arrived back in the U.S. in August 1968 during the height of the Democratic Party’s national convention in Chicago: hippies and yippies camped out in Grant Park by Lake Michigan staging anti-war rallies; the Chicago mayor Richard Daley shouted insults and profanities at Connecticut senator Abraham Ribicoff during his speech nominating George McGovern; the infamous “police riot” by the Chicago cops happened. Believe me, the Jaffna world I had just left seemed a haven of peace and stability compared to the disintegrating American political-social scene to which I had returned. That year in Vaddukkottai was a time that changed me greatly, a year that I will always treasure and for which I’m very grateful. I only wish the years after my stay in Jaffna had been as placid, secure, and happy as I remember my time there having been.
*Glenn Yocum was Professor of Religion at Whittier College in Whittier, California, USA until his recent retirement
