Bulletin Vol. 4 No. 11 Aug 1968

1. What is the relation of the university to the political and social strains as well as the economic needs of the developing country? 2. Is the graduate school and its emphasis on specialization and the p rior claim of research to the transmission of present knowledge a viable p rio rity in the new university of the developing country? 3. What is the role of the university in creating or reinterpreting a continuing cultural past that is both indigenous and global in significance? I I W ith respect to the first question on the relation o f the university to political and social strains, we may first observe that the universities of the developing countries are fo r the most part creations o f the last 20 years. Indonesia's first national university was established in 1940. Now Indonesia has eight state and many more private institutions o f higher learning w ith a total student body of over 100,000. The growth rate of universities in de veloping countries since 1945 ranges from 1000% in Indonesia to an overall average of 400% through out the A fro-Asian world. The universities of the developing countries today are predominantly in the public domain. They are created by the governments, and are, at the same time, the major or even the sole source of political leadership, of civil servants, and o f the teachers and technologists of government schools and institutes. They are national institutions in an age of A fro -Asian post-colonial nationalism. Here we find one possible definition of a developing country. A developing country is one in which there are more university students attending school than there are university graduates in the community outside the university. In this kind of society, university students are truly the nation's elite with special national responsibilities. These students may be regarded by the masses— certainly they re gard themselves— as the conscience o f the country. A Chinese teacher (Fan Chung-yen) a thousand years ago reminded his students that it is the scholar who must worry "over the problems of the time before anyone else begins to worry about them". In bearing this responsibility, the university is attending to its proper function. But this respon sibility also is fu ll of perils arising both from outside and from w ithin the university: among others is the peril that politics may usurp the proper concerns o f the university, and there is also the peril of pedantry, o f the preoccupation with inert ideas. The two perils are essential equipment in any university's do-it-yourself suicide kit. This responsibility to speak is a special freedom that universities have. But there is an uneasy conflict between freedom and responsibility, fo r it is held as a traditional ideal that the special freedom o f a university to speak is justified only in so far as it speaks as a disinterested seeker of truth and understanding. Its speaking should be in pursuit of its own purposes and not those of others fo r purposes that are not its own. Yet, as we know, universities encounter difficulties in disassociating themselves from members of the community who would tie their own personal and group interests to the activities normal to a great university. We have recently witnessed such difficulties around the world w ith regard to university students themselves. In the developing country the student elites, at a sensitive and eager stage of life, undergo a dramatic conversion from traditionalism to nation alism, scientism and a kind of rationalism as the solemn ceremony of initiation into the community of the elite. They see themselves, though they indeed be the sons and daughters of the well-to-do, as the spokesmen o f the suppressed stratum of the world. They are the idealistic champions of that 60 to 80% of the population of their country of whom they have little personal knowledge and possibly even less genuine interest, namely the peasant farmers. A basic insecurity, frustration, fear and fury infects the elite. The university is the cradle of revolution in A fro -A sia o f 1968. In many cases, the university is the incubator of revolution, re bellion, demonstration and often of violence because o f the conjunction of the inner psychological pre disposition to accept what Max Weber calls an ethic of responsibility and the frustration of external circumstance. A n incubator isolates fo r the sake of efficient generation. Universities are incubators o f rebellions, in part because they isolate young people physically and socially from the routine of adult life w ith its prosaic responsibilities. Student unrest, rebellion and violence are not limited to the university in developing countries. But they are more directly related to crucial political action in Asia than at Harvard, Columbia, London or even Berkeley. Governments have been toppled by the precipitating factor of student action— at least as journalists write history. More careful studies reveal the fundamental predisposing factors and the determinative professional action behind the screen o f student movements. In historical perspective, violence in the university and in the relations o f town and gown may be no more serious in the developing countries of A fro -Asia than in those o f the West. But an active role to be played by university students in the social and political life of the developing country seems inevitable. — 3 —