Universities as agents of development

Dr A. M. Choudhury

Photo: Yamin Tauseef Jahangir

A university named KAIST (Korean Advanced Institute of Science and Technology) was established in South Korea in 1971. That was the first graduate school specializing in Science and Engineering education and research. The school's founding was a catalyst for Korea's rapid rise as a highly industrialised country. I had the opportunity to visit KAIST. It is a unique university in the sense that it produced trained manpower in keeping with the need of the country. This helped in the rapid development of the country. It is an ideal university where the teaching curriculum is geared to national development. The University has a big campus with residential facilities. Both teachers and students stay in the campus. As a result, the students can consult their teachers any time. Research in relevant fields forms the core activity of the university. We were also shown other universities in Korea as well as the vast industrial complexes that include ship building and electronics.

Korea was under colonialism like us. Korea was annexed by Japan in 1910, even before the start of the First World War. The Korean War of the fifties left Korea divided into North and South Koreas that brought South Korea's ruination. Bangladesh had a higher per capita income in the sixties than that of South Korea. How amazing is it that just the establishment of a university with the right kind of training for its teachers and students has changed a country. Today Korea is a member of G-20. Last G-20 meeting was held in Seoul, the country's capital where President Obama of USA attended. I asked a Korean friend of mine what is the secret of their success. He said that their one generation worked hard and sacrificed themselves. It has laid the foundation on which they can carry on. . Korea had often been ruled by military dictators, but they did not deviate from the path of development. We also achieved our independence in 1971 amid a lot of sacrifice. We had quite a few universities including an Engineering University. But we could not do as the Koreans did. The Indian Government under Nehru established the Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT) at six different locations taking assistance from advanced nations. These IITs are formidable institutes. Graduates from the IITs do not require an interview to get a job anywhere .These IITs have contributed a lot in outsourcing work. Of course, they have many advanced universities in India. Now they are establishing advanced IITs.

By now we have some 30 universities in the public sector, while 50 others run privately. What is the role of our universities in our development? Of course, they have some role. The country is being run by graduates from these universities. But why is our performance level so low?

The reason is that our education system is not object-oriented. The present government is trying to bring some meaning to our education system by introducing vocational and technical education in schools. But to implement it, a large numbers of instructors are also necessary, which will take some time.

The necessary ingredients of an education system are the instructors, the students and the equipments. All the three elements must work synergistically to produce the result. Our education is a sort of a random walk in a hyperspace. Recently we have seen that our best elementary schools are admitting students by means of lottery and this has been hailed by many. But where is the consideration for merit? In Dhaka University, say, a student appears in many subjects for admission test and by lottery he gets admission in a subject. A good student may have a propensity for a certain field. But it is doubtful whether he might get admission in a subject of his choice. In our time, say 50 years ago, the number of students was much less and it was not difficult to get admission in a subject of one's choice.

Then either in schools or in universities, one foreign academician remarked that what our students learn is applied examinology that is how to get through the exam. There is a set of questions that you can call a question bank. The questions from it are repeated almost in one or another year. If you learn the questions set for a few years which are available as test papers, you are certain to get the top marks. Not that you do not learn anything this way, but this method gives more stress on memorization rather than innovation. In the Cambridge University Mathematical Tripos, it is said that they never repeat a question. The University has been running for hundreds of years and how do they generate so many questions? I found out the secret. My professor--I was in the university college, London--was a graduate of Cambridge University and he used to follow the Cambridge University rules. Though I was registered for PhD, I had to do Post Graduate Diploma in Space Science and I had to appear in written exams in two papers. I examined the questions for a few years and found that though the subject matter was the same, the questions were set in different types.

Sometimes the variables were changed and the answers looked different though they are equivalent. They emphasize the substance of the subject so that there could be many questions on the same topic. My Professor was a Cambridge graduate and he used to follow the Cambridge Method. Then there is the question and you are supposed to answer as many questions as you can unlike in our system in which there are ten questions and you answer only five or six. You can skip few chapters and you can still get the full marks. I did well getting more than 80% in both the papers which were the highest marks.

I give another example of applied examinology in our universities. I was invited as a guest teacher at a Department of the Dhaka University where the teacher in the subject was on leave. As I arrived at the class, the students requested me impart the lesson in a question answer form. I said that I would teach them the subject. There can be various questions of various forms and to give them some satisfaction I shall mention the various possible forms of questions and the types of answers. They have a very poor command over English and I doubt whether they can differentiate between various forms of questions.

I give here another very interesting example. I used to be an external question-setter and examiner of different universities of Bangladesh. In one instance, I found that a question has been repeated though in different forms but the answer is the same. Many students did not realize that it is the same question otherwise they would have carried double marks by writing one answer. I gave marks twice who had answered the same question twice. I asked the university examiners why did this happen. They told me that they set one question from the external and one from the internal and they forgot to verify that there could be a common question. This is the state of applied examinology in our universities. The point is further verified when we recruit personnel for our organizations. Most of the students cannot answer basic questions relating to their subjects. They say that they have forgotten the answer. This shows that they study a subject not to learn it but only to get through the examination. Of course, there may be some exceptions.

According to the Oxford Dictionary, the definition of a university is to impart education in all or many of the more important branches of learning. Here I emphasize the part more important branches of learning. What are the more important branches of learning for us? When we achieved our independence after a bloodbath and a lot of sacrifice, we should have charted a course of learning for our universities to suit the needs of our country, develop ourselves, especially in the light of pronouncement of Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, the father of the nation. And in that historic speech of 7 March,1971, he said that ours is a struggle for emancipation(Mukti).We are still building university after university more or less in the old style of Applied Examinology. But we should better follow the Korean model of KAIST. Not that our universities are not contributing much towards development. In truth, it is time for soul searching. How can the universities contribute more in terms of value addition in learning? We have quite a few Agricultural Universities in our country and we have a Department of Agriculture which has contributed a lot in implementing the Green Revolution. But we have to contribute a lot more in making the country self-sufficient in rice production. For that we have potential. It has been explained in my other article. Do our agricultural graduates have an aptitude for doing developmental work? At SPARRSO where I worked, we used to recruit multidisciplinary people including agriculturists. In one such recruitment, we just wanted to recruit one agriculturist and we got hundreds of applications. We asked why being trained in agriculture they are not using their knowledge in going to the village and develop our agriculture. Most of them said, it is not possible. Thus our education system produces graduates, who want to be' babus' and sit in a chair and a table and abhor all sorts hands-on work Employees in our research institutes want to call themselves this officer, that officer and so on rather than scientists in the pattern of the secretariat officers. I call it Secretariat Science. Excepting agricultural institutes, what is the contribution of our research institutes numbering more than 60.I think we need serious soul searching in this matter.

In selecting teaching subjects, we should give priority to need-based education and research. For example, Bangladesh is one of the most disaster-prone countries in the world. But is there a university where the subjects are taught in a comprehensive manner? Many people perhaps do not know that our two brilliant scientists. Dr Matin Choudhury, who became Vice Chancellor of Dhaka University and Dr S.M.A.Haque, former head of the department of Mathematics had their PhDs in Meteorology from very reputable foreign universities in the 1950s. But they did not develop the subject of Meteorology in any university. They were very brilliant men. The latter chose to become an Insurance specialist. To-day there is a programme called Comprehensive Disaster Management Program where mostly foreign advisers work. Very often they come with the baseless fear (JUJUR BHOI) that Bangladesh will be stricken by a big earthquake. But why don't we introduce the subject in our universities .It should be a continuing venture. It is not that one earthquake will come and it will be all over .It may come again. So there must be serious researches all the time .We are not utilizing our educated intelligentsia for developmental work .It seems they remain unconcerned. Natural Gas was developed in the country in 1950s but during more than half a century we did not venture to develop the industry by ourselves The country is well-stocked with coal, but we are still debating what method to adopt for its extraction .It is about time our universities rose to the occasion and contributed towards development activities of the country. The Basic Infrastructure for development must be built up. When there is the possibility that we will face a severe food shortage in the future because of rising population and climate change, should our graduates in the ivory tower of the universities continue to look at the stars instead of thinking of producing food?

The writer, a climatologist, is former head of SPARSO.