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.