Postgraduate courses debarred in Jaffna university

[TamilNet, Friday, 13 November 2009, 09:25 GMT]
University Grants Commission in Colombo has ordered the university of Jaffna to stop postgraduate courses conducted at present in its postgraduate faculty, media sources in Jaffna said. Even though the reason is said to be quality of coaching, academic circles in Jaffna believe that Colombo doesn’t want development-oriented courses to be conducted in this university in the Tamil region, news sources further said.

The ban on the courses other than regular research degrees will be effective from January, once the present courses are over.

Weakening social sciences in the departments of the university is a decades-old process.

Even though modern collegiate and professional education, making a name not only in the island but also in far away British colonies, was started since early 19th century by American Missionaries in the peninsula, such institutions were reduced to high schools by the unitary state in the island.

A University was founded in Jaffna with much reluctance only in 1974 and that too was for the political pacification of Tamils for the atrocity of armed forces committed during the International Tamil Studies Conference that took place in Jaffna in January 1974.

The university became successful and pivotal for education and society of Tamils only by the will power of people and never through whole-hearted support of the state, academic circles in Jaffna said.

While potential academic programmes are denied to Tamil region for several decades now, the chances of Tamil students receiving that in other parts of the island in the state’s higher institutions have also diminished.

The response of Chelvadurai Anjalendran to a media interview by Nation a few days ago is an eye-opener to the reality.

The leading architect of the island, a Tamil spent his lifetime in Colombo, was asked: “You are one of the few Tamil architects we have. As a lecturer at the Colombo School of Architecture do you see that changing, are there a lot of Tamil students?”

Anjalendran’s reply was “no, there are not many Tamil students. There are quite a number of Muslim students though, if you take a batch of 4o about four are Muslims and only one Tamil. Its not surprising because many people who would have been interested in a subject like architecture left Sri Lanka in the 80s.”

But everybody knows that it is not merely because Tamil left Sri Lanka.