Higher education needs revamping

Higher education needs revamping

By Harkiman Racheman

This is the first of two articles on the state of higher
education in Indonesia.

MEDAN, North Sumatra (JP): The general portrait of higher
education in Indonesia today is still appalling. Despite numerous
appointments of different ministers of education and culture and,
hence, the necessary corrective measures they entail, the actual
operation of post-secondary education in Indonesia has not
improved at all.

The fact that there is an increasing number of overseas
universities aggressively holding educational exhibitions here,
in addition to the already-existing cooperation and affiliations
between local and overseas universities (largely for the sake of
confidence building), seems to suggest explicitly our utter
impotence in repairing the badly torn image of the Indonesian
institutions of higher learning.

An interesting survey recently conducted by Asiaweek, the
result of which was later published in its end-of-April issue,
suggests an implication that, from all the existing higher
educational institutions in the country, only a handful of state
universities have been internationally acknowledged. However, due
to their low-level accreditation, these few institutions can no
way be prided upon!

In the multidisciplinary category, for instance, Gadjah Mada
University in Yogyakarta was placed 67th, slightly higher that
the University of Indonesia, which was placed 70th. Diponegoro
University in Semarang and Airlangga University in Surabaya are
respectively 77th and 79th.

Meanwhile, in the science and technology category, the
renowned Bandung Institute of Technology was surprisingly ranked
15th, below Nanyang Technological University in Singapore and
Taiwan University of Science and Technology; that is to say,
still way below Korea Advanced Institute of Science and
Technology or Tohoku University (Tokyo), currently the top two
universities in Asia.

To a certain extent, the findings of this survey testify that
the number of universities proper in Indonesia can be counted on
the fingers of one hand. The rest, however, were not seriously
regarded, especially in terms of their quality of graduates,
lecturers, research output or financial resources.

Now, with the country's ugliest economic crisis still very
much upon us, it is only logical that a great many people,
especially common folk, should be pessimistic and distrustful of
the prospects of our academic institutions.

There may well have been innumerable determining factors as to
why the reputation of our schools of higher learning has been
going downhill all this time. Although it may take time to
identify all of them properly, and this no doubt would involve
detailed comprehensive studies, a few of the most tangible
determinants can nevertheless be discussed in greater detail
here.

To begin with, there is still a disturbing misconception
within society as regards the raison d'etre of institutions of
higher education. Generally speaking, universities, for example,
are still construed as nothing more than training grounds or,
even worse, "job-training centers" the priority of which is to
produce skilled labor.

Most advertisements aiming at marketing these vocational
training-providers, as it were, which overload both our national
and provincial newspapers, unfortunately seem to support that
longtime misconceived idea even further.

By manipulating such misleading cliches as "we train people to
be skilled", to be "ready for immediate employment" and "we will
secure a place in the global job market for our graduates", such
eye-catching advertisements, if any, seem to project only an
utterly unbalanced picture of our post-secondary learning
institutions.

In other words, they only succeed in stressing one-sidedly the
applied segment of the educational training but, unfortunately,
by omitting and sacrificing the entire totality of its spiritual
substance which is all-embodying in its very nature.

It is hard to deny that in one way or another this reality has
a great deal to do with the still-existing tendency of our
educational politics. As it turns out, the government still
blatantly overemphasizes dry scientific and technological one-way
training without attempting harmonious association between the
teaching of science and technology on the one hand and that of
the humanities on the other.

In the 10th Nusantara Writers's Meeting held in Johor Baru on
April 20, 1999, renowned Malaysian writer Dr. Muhammad Haji
Salleh reminded us again of the forgotten urgency to strike a
symbiotic balance between the two poles.

"If we look at the world's greatest civilizations," Dr
Muhammad Haji Salleh said, "such as French, English, Greek and
Japanese, we find that they have become famous for combining the
two of them. The French are proud of Descartes and Baudelaire, of
the Eiffel and Cezanne, or of Sartre and Peugeot cars. In the
same way, the Japanese are proud of their best electronic
products and equally of Basho's haiku and Kawabata's novels."

The oft-misinterpreted "Link and Match" educational
philosophy, popularized when Wardiman Djojonegoro was the
minister of education and culture, seems to have given more
emphasis than is necessary to the idea of educational training as
sheer support to economic and technological processes and growth.

As a result, nonapplied sciences (especially the humanities)
which are undoubtedly essential, especially for their
contribution to human psycho-spiritual development and well-
being, have been excessively marginalized and even deliberately
abandoned in order to give all the room to the domineering
scientific, technological as well as vocational trainings.

It is not surprising, therefore, that universities being the
center of excellence (supposedly treating all branches of
knowledge indiscriminately) have been underestimated and
trivialized at the same time. Their noble mission to enlighten
highly talented people by equipping them with a broader outlook
on life, supported by their scientifically objective attitude and
mature personality, has consequently been thoroughly neglected.

Also compare this analysis with the written objective of
higher education in Indonesia, as contained in Government
Regulation No. 30/1990 on higher learning, which does not in
essence prioritize science and technology over the humanities but
rather deals with them in the same breadth.

Within this regulation, it is mentioned loud and clear that
the objective of Indonesian post-secondary learning is to produce
graduates "with academic and/or professional competence who can
implement, develop and/or invent a body of knowledge, technology
and/or art" and then "who can develop as well as expand ... and
attempt to put it into good use in order to heighten the social
welfare of society as well as to enrich our national culture".

Therefore, in a national education seminar and workshop at the
Bandung Teachers Training Institute (IKIP) on April 21,
educationalist J. Drost SJ reasserted that "At present,
universities have been accused of being sheer vocational
institutions. However, now that this is fully appreciated, there
are efforts to convert them back into the teaching center of the
humanities by, among other things, offering stadium generale, or
basic courses."

The writer graduated from Victoria University of Wellington,
New Zealand. He is currently a Medan-based freelance writer and
university teacher.