Crisis In Oluvil: The Perils Of Politicisation, Desultory Policies, & Privatisation
By Elijah Hoole –January 5, 2016
Elijah Hoole
The Makings of the Oluvil Misadventure: A Case Study in State Negligence
Following the Z-score fiasco of 2011, the government hurriedly opened up an engineering faculty in the South Eastern University of Sri Lanka (SEUSL),Oluvil, to absorb an additional hundred engineering students. In the subsequent years, two more batches joined the faculty without improvements in human or physical resources to render it commensurate with established engineering faculties.
Despite multiple forewarnings from the students, the authorities concerned failed to arrest the situation. The result was a crisis that threatened the futures of three hundred engineering students and the proud heritage of state engineering education: the faculty largely operated during weekends with visiting lecturers sharing the bulk of teaching duties; the authorities singularly failed in attracting quality human resources; electrical and computer engineering departments functioned without department heads casting an impossible burden on relatively inexperienced lecturers and demonstrators – leaving the students at a loss in a low quality learning environment; lack of links to the engineering industry meant the absence of familiarisation opportunities and exposure for the students. The faculty administration’s inability to run the academic programme to schedule compounded the problem further: parallel batches in other engineering faculties lead by a full year.
The SEUSL engineering faculty had seriously flawed origins and is a case study in state negligence and the callousness with which university education is being treated in the country.
First, the Z-score fiasco of 2011 that led to the establishment of the engineering faculty in SEUSL was the result of a basic mathematical error committed by the Department of Examinations’ – one of treating two characteristically distinct populations as the same when calculating the z-scores – and required the intervention of the Supreme Court for a remedy. Read More