How smart is it to plead to prove he’s right? – The Island
by Sivamohan Sumathy
When I joined the University of Peradeniya as a trainee professor in 1990, the university was slowly reviving after the period of terror in the south – of course the war resurfaced and continued to influence our political imagination for the next two decades. In my still early days as a college professor, I became the assistant secretary of the newly formed faculty of arts union, PAFTA, sometime in 1991/92. The President of the Federation of University Teachers’ Associations (FUTA) was then Professor Nalin de Silva and he led the negotiations with ACS Hameed, then Minister of Higher Education, on the industrial action initiated by university professors. ‘university. Professor de Silva was a controversial figure, and in turn was targeted by the then UNP regime for harassment and intimidation. The political climate was turbulent and tense. But teachers have come together to form a common front to tackle their problems. Around the same time, three of us women at Peradeniya who were intern and temporary lecturers got together in a loose formation and moved from faculty to faculty giving lectures on the kind. The group consisted of Maithree Wickramasinghe, Keshini Soysa and me; we were sometimes joined by Rani Saverimutthu, Rita Liyanage and others. As new recruits, we were not fully integrated into the university hierarchies, full of spirit, courageous and unknowingly rebellious. We have also been supported by some powerful factions in the male domain, Sumanasiri Liyanage in Arts, Ranjit Wijekoon in the English Language Training Unit (ELTU), V. Kumar in the Faculty of Science, and intermittently a few others in the different faculties.
We begged, cajoled, bullied and used loopholes to hold our sessions and events at the door, to have our say. Ranjit Wijekoon in particular, as part of ELTU, organized sessions for us under the English language program. A few times I was stopped by the head of our department for not following protocol, which puzzled me but not defeated me. Professor Bandula Karunatilleke of the Department of History conducted a comprehensive seminar on women’s issues as part of the now defunct but prestigious Ceylon Studies Seminar in which we spoke, chaired by Dr L. Kobbekaduwa of the Department of Education, both postgraduates. Maybe it was our temerity, maybe it was the fact that we were curiosities, whatever the reason, it must be said that such empowerment must also be attributed to a prevailing left-wing discourse still in universities, and the leisurely pace of Study; less compartmentalization of disciplines, and less bureaucratization of university spaces than in which we find ourselves today.
Today, it would be difficult to entrust a senior academic with the presidency of a seminar for trainee and temporary teachers, unless it is in an audited program linked to “performance indicators”, checkbox. A program, carefully monitored, sharp, and totally useless. We weren’t thinking then of democracy, nor of activism, nor even of the claiming of spaces. We did not know this terminology, but our action was all that and more. That’s what we had to do. It was a small moment, not too important, but significant, of democratization of the university space.
Jumping into the 2010s, FUTA’s landmark labor action in 2011 and 2012 is what I see as a huge milestone in the history of the democratization of university spaces, tasking us with reassessing our role as intellectuals, scholars, teachers and others. The mass mobilization and increased energy and activism provoked by FUTA member unions challenged the then government; and in the post-war period, became a harbinger of a mass struggle at the national level that could unite multiple forces. FUTA’s struggle and the consequences of its activism, nationwide, have been the formation of a historic bloc in the struggle for change. One of its results was the space it created for the change of government, the invincible Rajapakse regime of the post-war years. He widened the space, created momentum and made it national. FUTA’s trade union action was truly national in this sense, for a fleeting moment.
However, unlike the early years, when, as a trainee lecturer, with no political support or ambition, I could attend a meeting with professors and senior staff, with the Minister, ACS Hameed, during negotiations , the action of FUTA in the 2010s, relied on the massive support of the academic base, but did not undermine its hierarchical structure. This is not to say that the previous struggle was not hierarchical – far from it, but that FUTA’s democratization and social justice agenda in 2012 fell far short of its goals in practice. This is the oxymoron nature of FUTA’s historic 100-day labor action in 2011-2012. He promised a lot to the people and his own community and in the end he could neither fulfill it nor keep the dream alive. The political objective of democratization has been supplanted by the demands of the moment, on the one hand. The objectives of a university leadership, the leadership of FUTA, have merged with the objectives of democratization, the request to save public education and the request for an allocation of 6% of GDP to education and have superseded. Of course, there is no net binary here and it should be understood that all of this happened during a time of uncertainty, intense debate, angst and heightened activity.
The 100 Days Labor Action was preceded by a wave of activism that was variously undertaken by different small groups, including the Informal and Ad Hoc University Professors for Dialogue and Democracy (UT4DD). UT4DD was the first to undertake a series of seminars on the quality assurance bill that was sneaked into the system in 2012; the first seminar was held at the University of Colombo; the president of FUTA was in the audience of about 20-25 people, and student union representatives were also present. Subsequently, UT4DD members organized sessions with other union representatives, including teachers’ unions. As FUTA’s struggle evolved into a 100-day labor action, it created space for scholars to engage in grounded research and activism. One of the historic moments of the action was the campaign of one million signatures. Someone at one of the larger FUTA Ex-Co meetings said “Why don’t we do a public signature campaign, a million signatures?” It was almost incidental, but magical. It caught the imagination of the crowd there. The million-signature campaign, in Gramsci’s sense, signifies the action of a vanguard party, not socialist, but not bourgeois either. It represents the action of a collective, emphasizing the democratizing principle
These two instances outlined above, one infinitesimal, carried out in a spirit of adventure, and the other calculated, mobilizing, inter-university, even national, are both historic moments. The first is only a moment of activism and the second, a historical conjuncture, a gathering of forces. However, on the autobiographical level, the second was animated by the visionary and audacious spirit of the first. They both have a different impact on my own political development as a worker, teacher, scholar and activist in and outside the academic space. The forces of historical conjuncture are held together and animated by these small acts of individuals who think non-hierarchically and collectively.
Thinking of the days to come and our difficult future, I reflected on these questions of history, my own and that of others, in order to forge a policy of pedagogy and political activism. The action of FUTA in 2012 had a huge impact on my own sense of belonging to the university. But my own involvement has not been linear, without fights or contradictions. We weren’t always together and the movement was restless. But we came together to demand increased spending on education – the 6% of GDP slogan – in unison, and in doing so we committed to free education in the country. But as we act on a large scale, we must also pay attention to the margins, to the small acts of defiance of hierarchy and justice carried out in the recesses of institutional and social spaces, at the university and beyond.
Sivamohan Sumathy is attached to the Department of English, University of Peradeniya.
Kuppi is a politics and pedagogy taking place on the fringes of the amphitheater that simultaneously parodies, subverts and reaffirms social hierarchies.
