Ragging, striking undergrads
22 February 2017The lead story in yesterday's newspapers was about a ragging story emanating from Peradeniya University. Peradeniya undergraduates, inclusive of all other beneficiaries of free education of this country, ipso facto, owe it to Sri Lanka's long suffering taxpayer for their education.
Taxpayers' money allocated to undergraduates is for them to study and not to indulge in ragging, whether they may be in the form of either physical and/or mental abuse. Ragging is also a criminal offence, which opens the miscreant (s) for prosecution.
As reported in these newspapers, the Police have already taken 15 seniors to custody, while eight of the victims, ipso facto freshers, have been hospitalized. It's hoped, that now that those 15 suspects have been remanded, the Police will take the next step of filing criminal action against the culprits.
Seats of learning, whether those are funded with taxpayers' money or not, or whether those be schools or universities, or for that matter vocational training institutes, should not be tainted by ragging.
Peradeniya University has a notorious record for ragging. It was at this university, some 42 years ago, that a woman fresher, to escape ragging, jumped out from a storeyed building, thereby becoming a cripple for life.
A fresher enters an institute of higher learning to further his/her studies and not to be subjected to ragging, especially if such ragging takes the form of mental and/or physical torture.
In Malaysia, in the 1980s, i.e. in the early years of the Mahathir Mohamed regime and long before higher education was privatized in that country, that sector of education, similar to the current status in Sri Lanka, was a monopoly of the State. However, striking undergraduates used to be sent for two years compulsory military service in Mahathir's Malaysia.
Meanwhile, while taxpayers' money in Sri Lanka vis-à-vis higher education is wasted on strikes and ragging, very little or no punitive action is taken by the authorities to check such instances of misuse and abuse of taxpayers' money, or, to bring to book such offenders.
The previous, blunderbussing Mahinda Rajapaksa regime, drunk with power, went to the other extreme, by adopting a distorted, perverted and perverse model of the Malaysian/Mahathir system in 'dealing' with undergraduates. The Rajapaksa regime made it mandatory for all university freshers to undergo military training, allegedly leading to the deaths of a few of those, as a result.
With the regime change of 8 January 2015, this 'horror' of mandatory military training covering all freshers, regardless of whether they were 'raggers' or' strikers' or not, despite the ambiguity associated with identifying the word (s) ragging/striking, with freshers, came to an end. However, no seeming action was taken by the previous regime to prosecute 'seniors,' who, ipso facto were involved in ragging and/or striking.
Ragging has to be taken seriously by the authorities, firstly because it's a criminal act and secondly, because it's a waste of taxpayers' money. The least that the authorities could do in dealing with such miscreants is to sack them from such seats of higher learning. That will make others, who also want to go down that same perverted path, to think twice.
Hopefully, such a reaction by the authorities to ragging may make ragging a thing of the past in the island's higher education system in the not too distant future.
The other malaise besetting the free, higher education system of this country is strikes. Those too should be frowned upon by the authorities.
It's good if the Higher Education Minister Lakshman Kiriella together with his Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe adopt their school's motto, 'Disce aut discede' ('Learn or Depart'), by making it to be at least applicable to the country's free, higher education system as a whole.
Replicating an a la Mahathir model in dealing with striking students/undergraduates in the country's taxpayer-funded State higher education system may not be a bad idea at all, for a start.
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