Following the measure of ‘free tertiary education’ announced by the prime minister at his end of year speech, Weekly talks to Uttam Callikan, Consultant and former academic at the UoM, about its implications for the students and the country. Callikan draws on his 15 years in academia at the university of Mauritius (UoM) to give us an insight into the education sector as a whole. He also accepts to comment on the political situation in the country. 

The prime minister’s end of year speech surprised everyone with the measure of free tertiary education. Having spent a lifetime in education, what do you think about it?

The strange thing is that it even surprised people in government quarters and those departments and ministries most concerned! Its spirit is incompatible with the NYS Reform and it was obviously not in the last budget which leaves us wondering whether it is the brain wave of some advisor(s) at the Prime Minister’s Office or the Ministry of Finance fishing for electoral gadgetry. Reminds us of the saying about the Greeks and their gifts!

Apart from the obvious political motivations behind it, is it a good or bad measure?

One cannot overlook the political motivations and financial implications. In terms of numbers, excluding the current crop of some 18,000 students already in enrolment and allowance made for phasing in effects, the measure will, in all likelihood, concern some 2-3,000 fresh intakes on an annual basis. If the immediate gratuity is therefore of some impact, over the medium and longer-term, there are and should be more considerations than short-term or dodgy electoral calculus. Government might be wise to factor those in, carefully weigh the risks and dangers associated with such an announced measure and find whatever mitigating answers are called for.

From the purely academic point of view, wouldn’t free tertiary education contribute towards creating a better educated society?

Not necessarily. The measure, in fact, stands somewhat in stark conflict with the Ministry of Education's policy towards prized academies for the elite and questions the usefulness of the latter. It also makes the quest for higher international standards, rankings and visibility for our flagship university something of an irrelevance, and could herald a dispiriting turn towards the minimum effort for our public tertiary institutions.

Our universities are already struggling to make it to the top 200 even in Africa, how much worse can that get?

Shooting for quality, standards and norms, credible international status and visibility are unfortunately rarely the sexy stuff of political rumblings, except perhaps when things are really taking a downturn! One should, however, be aware that different international ranking systems were devised for the Western traditional universities which have two or more centuries of principles, values and practices, with the focus for instance on internet, research visibility or again on international exchanges of foreign students or staff. India and China and the S-E Asian tigers have tried, without much success, to devise one that's more attuned to developing world contexts. Be that as it may, we cannot move forward if we don't adopt one ranking system as a gauge of international standing and as a target for improvement. More particularly, the University of Mauritius should be enabled to challenge itself and draw up a time and resource-bound plan to achieve a respectable international status.

What's your take on the tertiary sector in general?

Many aspects come to mind, but without being too lengthy or overbearing, it should be clear to our legislators and the informed citizenry that universities are not merely some form of glorified teaching colleges for students who have finished their secondary schools. In the UK, Australia and even Mauritius, we have colleges of technical and further education and, here, our newly established polytechnics for such teaching activities. Universities are particular in having a key role to play in providing tertiary education of international standards and should be constantly gearing up their act or extending their comfort zones in those respects. They have to nurture grander designs and ambitions, not so much by horizontal extension of course offerings, as by evolving towards greater academic credibility, abodes that are bustling and pulsating with research and consultancy activities. Those factors, the quality of staff and the supporting research, library and IT infrastructure, the quality and hours of a vibrant campus life, are among the building blocks of quality teaching, interaction with students and international credibility. They should be places that can attract international students through scholarships and visiting professors on their sabbatical or on contract to mitigate the missing international dimensions, as Singapore has done successfully. Unless, of course, our decision-makers are content to have teaching colleges and universities or tuition centres churning low-level outputs to join the queues of unemployed and, sometimes sadly, unemployable graduates. That's the case in many third-world places we would not care to name. Full-fledged, credible, teaching and research universities of some international norms, are costly to setup and operate. So a drop to the easier option of tertiary teaching centres or fully subsidised government departmental structures parading as universities (in name only) is always a risk.

Isn’t that an indictment of the University of Mauritius?

I do not wish to turn a general view into a particular indictment when successive administrations and their boards must have tried to keep the initial aims but universities are about the vision we have of ourselves as a country, of our human talent, skills and resources, of our ambitions in a changing world. One must pay tribute to the visionary SSR, who despite the gloomy country financials and usual scepticism of the haughty of the times, set-up the University of Mauritius with the ambit to maintain free or, at worst nominal administrative fees, while aiming for the highest UK standards. The UoM may have had its shortfalls and tripped up sometimes but all the luminary administrators of the times were steeped in the spirit and generally held up the challenge, forging close ties and regular supervision with the best, whether at Reading, Wye College, Leeds, Manchester or Edinburgh.

Isn’t free tuition going to go in that direction and contribute to a more educated society?

Most countries have a varying level of subsidised fees for students, leaving or inducing the institutions to promote their expertise and resources and seek from private sector or alumni some healthy self-financing through other means. Over here, universities after  SSR's ground-breaking era were designed by the legislator to reduce the burden on the Exchequer and devise more funding from their own means at a time when parents were prepared to fork out hundreds of thousand rupees annually for still reputable university education locally. They accordingly set their own student fees. Even the UoM lately set up the UoM-Trust as a separate entity to tap into a market-driven demand that was heading towards the mushrooming private tertiary sector providers. Sadly, this measure was introduced in spite of the latest shocking audit this month that revealed so many glaring deficiencies. Have we read and heard about plagiarism, about the business of overtime hours swop between academics or the business of those few who supervise simultaneously, on paper, a dozen or more post-graduate students? How many years did we see of obdurate resistance and support for a vacuous nominee before action was taken at the UTM? Are their boards exercising enough oversight and doing some forward planning? Have we progressed on the international quality and standards front with a substantial push or encouragement by polity? Or are our decision-makers more apt at managing the hum-drum, the personnel ambitions and lobbies and the short-term electoral horizon than charting out new ambitions for the tertiary sector as a whole and the University of Mauritius in particular, that being the one that's no doubt closest to having an international status, ranking and visibility?

Isn’t money from the government likely to help towards that?

I don't in any way see this measure as providing more money to the University of Mauritius. It will certainly equalise things for the other universities as their charter encouraged them to go for tuition fees, which they can now simply claim from national coffers. Is it just a matter of more per capita means being injected or are there other factors that we conveniently tend to ignore or gloss over? We can't manage even one internationally-ranked university but we have seven or 10 public tertiary institutions each with its own costly overheads, studiously plodding along. Is it too much to expect the UoM to be consistently among say the 20 best universities on the African continent for starters?

Let me put the question this way: Does the measure announced fit into an overall tertiary sector development strategy?

We have to remain doubtful about that. We were buoyant when the Ministry of Education commissioned a high-level six-member team of Academics from the EU to review our tertiary sector, make recommendations and propose budgetary and implementation time-frames. Now, to all intents and purposes, the plan seems dead and has been discretely buried. So the policy, it seems, is let's pave the way towards publicly-funded colleges of higher education rather than Universities. That way we gain more votes!...

Is it just about votes?

I see no other motivation. Most experienced university practitioners and those conversant with academia's demands know that the risks, the obvious and the less obvious, do not seem to have been fully assessed as yet, nor the mitigation strategies, if any, explained. The populist measures and short-term gains will be followed by an acute hang-over. And, as nothing is really “gratis”, the measure simply transfers tertiary student fees onto our national accounts, already struggling with morose perspectives, youth unemployment, little productive investments and staggering levels of public debt and liabilities yet to be fully uncovered.

How do you think our future free tertiary institutions will evolve?

It is human nature that users of a free service have little regard to its value and end up considering it as a due, an entitlement, like a free beach they will blithely scatter with their left-overs and garbage with no compulsion to take care either of the infrastructure or even the amenities. Nobody would wish that on our publicly funded universities and yet we saw what dereliction took place at the University of Technology Mauritius for prolonged periods… and that was even without the freebie prospect. As for universities having to depend entirely on government funding and queuing up for the negotiations of their annual budgets, we pray the worst isn't coming!

What about the staff of these institutions?

There is no doubt that there may be fewer incentives for academic staff and for institutions themselves to stretch and do that little bit more to raise their levels and seek more outside funding if all they are really measured against are teaching output and hours clocked in. All they really need to care about is queue up at the Tertiary Education Commission or the parent Ministry or Ministry of Finance to find out how much they will be granted for the year on a funding basis that has yet to be explained. If it is on a per head basis as some might want, another unhealthy competition for roping students into public institutions might be on the cards. One has also to assume the conceiver(s) of this ad-hoc measure will have recognised its potential devastating impact on the host of private tertiary education providers, including perhaps even the likes of Curtin and Medine Education Village whose financial plans, investments and forecasts of student intakes may be turned topsy-turvy with the midnight stroke of an almighty pen. That may not matter to us personally but in some way they did act as a stimulant forcing their public counterparts to stay on their toes. Were they to start closing shop as their intake dries up, that would be beneficial to nobody.

At a lower level, the second generation of the educational reform has just left primary schools. What is your take on this issue?

The announcement of free tertiary education, fortuitously or more probably by design, takes the narrative away from the plight of the NYS Reform that was supposed to be government's master-piece educational policy. Remember: the promised end of exam-orientation, the end of competition, the end of the A+ (or 90%) grade, the PSAC spread over two years with a blend of continuous assessment and examination, the end of Form I access to government's network of merit-based National Colleges, regionalisation, the stemming of private tuition,  the laudable attempts to introduce some dose of “holistic education”, the new National Certificate of Examination leading to a prized seat in the Academies, the contraption for the “crème de la crème” as the minister floweringly put it.

Today, many parents and the media have increasingly come to realise that the NYS tree wasn't bearing the fruits they expected. The private and confessional authorities including the SeDEC see no sense in the NCE/Academy Restructuring. Some have perceived it to be a highly selective encumbrance, the cost of which was the breaking up of schools like QEC, MGI, Maurice Cure, JKC and the Royals and the subsequent No Entry sign on their gates. The reform has distorted the playing field at regional levels and has allowed opacity at PSAC. The announcement of free tertiary education has the merit of shifting the storyline.

This year, all political observers will be focused on general elections. What is your reading of the situation?

Wheels are turning full circle and it will soon be time for the MSM-ML alliance with their “transfuges” (turncoats) to present themselves to the electorate with a bilan that looks so poor in fact that they have given the definite impression that any price would do to ward off a by-election, that no disturbing enquiry on the nomenklatura would be allowed to proceed or, if completed, would be sat upon, that the Quatre-Bornes by-election was a prominent appointment deliberately shied from and this year's scheduled district and village council elections had to be postponed. So poor that they gave the impression of shooting the messenger when the respected MCB Focus or the Government Statistics Department lowered the last government 3.8% growth forecast for 2018 down a notch. No really new pillars of the economy have been planned or implemented, industrial policy is an orphan, and the only real winners are the one-off luxury villa sales in smart cities, with a colossal price-tag on the population and the country in terms of fiscal leeway and revenues foregone. As for current account and balance of payments deficits, the ballooning public debt and the huge liabilities in high-profile judicial proceedings against the government (CT-Power, Betamax, BAI-Bramer, and others), there is little to rejoice over and the last country report from the highly respected Economist Intelligence Unit is a far more damning indictment than that of local economists. Growth rates are predicted to tumble further and rather dramatically to some 2.8%.

Is the outlook that bleak?

There are clearly not signs of a confident political outlook and the population, ever so astute at reading tea-leaves, has guessed that, despite all the posturing, the parties in power rely on a joker who will be sorely tempted to extract his political pound of flesh. Even then, such a joker, the MMM, may find it more attractive and less risky going it alone in a triangular election. The sweets and cakes on offer from the MSM, with or without its ML rump, may not be acceptable to the MMM's own electorate. This is how things look today, though as they say, one day is a long time in politics.

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