Up Front

with the Editor

A group of Pacific Islands aca demic staff at Suva’s University of the South Pacific, with some of the university’s present and former students, has set up what it calls a “Think Group”. The members will devote a lot of their private time in the next few months thinking out ways in which the next phase of the university’s development can best be carried out.

In Papua New Guinea, there is already a rather special Think Group in the form of a cabinet committee of inquiry which has the job of looking at university development generally, and applying the lessons to the University of Papua New Guinea, and the University of Tech nology at Lae.

This committee is chaired by Dr Gabriel Gris, of Manus island, and from what I heard in Port Moresby recently it is asking itself whether the expensive University of Papua New Guinea in Port Moresby is what a newly independent and under developed country needs, rather than several smaller institutions reaching out into the districts, with extension services and short courses which enable students to get on with the business of earning a living between times. This committee, before it re ports to the cabinet in June, is mak ing a wide tour of overseas uni versities.

Suva’s informal Think Group is chaired by its convenor, Tongan Sione Tupouniua, a lecturer in Poli tical Science at the university and also president of the University Staff Association (he’s brother of Mahe Tupouniua, Tonga’s former Finance Minister).

The USP’s vice-chancellor, Pro fessor Aikman, has recently resigned, and in a letter to council members explaining the establishment of the Think Group, Sione Tupouniua said: “We feel it is now a propitious time for deep thought to be given to a wide range of issues concerning the university and its role in the region.

It has now been going for over six years. Inevitably, as there were re latively few Islands people with very much experience about universities,

and those with that experience were very busy on other tasks, the nature of the university was determined largely by people from outside.

“This was true of the original planners, it was true of the academic staff and it was true of the council to the extent that a number of ex patriate members were appointed from the US, England, Australia, New Zealand, the South Pacific Commission, etc, and by some regional governments. Yet many of the Pacific Islanders who could be appointed under the charter (eg representatives of such interest groups as agriculture, religious organisations, women’s interests, in dustry, etc, which are provided for in the constitution) were not in fact appointed, and some of the Island members have been so busy with other heavier responsibilities that they have not been able to devote as much time to university affairs as we and they would have hoped.

“The first six years of the univers ity’s life has been described as the colonial era. Neither I nor the other members of the committee want to spend time on post-mortems of the advantages and disadvantages of that phase of very heavy dependency and even in some respects, subordination.

“What we do hope to do is to take a very positive look at the future. None of us would want the colonial phase to be followed by a neo-colonial one. Our only wish is to see how the university can serve the peoples of the Pacific more fully and effectively”.

Certainly many questions have been asked lately about Islands uni versities and whether they have been too foreign-dominated, or too tied to foreign models rather than to the realities of the Islands in the 19705.

Myself, I query whether the things that are wrong with Islands uni versities are wrong because of foreign domination, as Sione’s letter appears to suggest. There are lots of things wrong with universities every where.

The universities are no longer a training ground for ruling elites, and by opening their doors wider it was

inevitable that they would have problems. Dr James Perkins, former president of Cornell University, New York, in a recent paper says there is not merely one current crisis in the world’s universities, but five.

These are the crises of numbers, finance, the relevance of the curri culum, the new priorities and the new scepticism.

He says that while experiences differ from country to country, the average number of students entering higher education has doubled in the decade from 1960 to 1970, and this will again double in the next decade.

This is one of the reasons for the shortage of finance for universities, and because there has been an enormous increase in the use of public funds there has been an in crease in public surveillance of aca demic expenditure, which in turn has raised deep problems about the future autonomy of universities.

Relevance of the curriculum, says Dr Perkins, particularly interests the newer countries, where applied knowledge, not abstract knowledge, is needed, and where students and their families who have no back ground of university tradition to pre pare them, insist upon being taught something with a direct connection

with their needs and aspirations. But the curriculum problem is general.

On the question of new priorities, Dr Perkins says that somewhere along the way the intellectuals have shifted their social priorities away from concern for affluence, full employment and peace-keeping by military power, towards a pre occupation with justice for the world.

But the universities have found the new social concerns of its students almost impossible to resolve.

And finally, he says, the fifth crisis is the new scepticism; a general be lief that somewhere in the senses and sensations one is more likely to find truth than in an objective examination of the world around us.

This, he says, denies the possibility of rational thought and seeks to undermine the very basis of the uni versity.

Dr Perkins adds; “No new uni versity organisation chart will be adequate to embrace the considera tions with which the universities must now deal. Statesmanship of the highest order, both in and out of the universities, will be necessary if they are to fulfil their historic mission in our new world”.

Stuart Inder