To operate in this global market, institutions – and especially the lesser-known ones – now frequently turn to agents and recruiters in order to attract prospective students. Many point to the risks of using these third party agents and plead for more regulation or even abolishment.

Abolish or regulate?

In Inside Higher Ed, Philip Altbach, director of the Center for International Higher Education, sheds light on this issue. His viewpoint is clear and unambiguous: “Agents and recruiters are impairing academic standards and integrity – and it’s time for colleges and universities to stop using them.” >> Read the rest of my post at the Nuffic Blog >>

The report is published by the European Commission and can be found here (pdf). Today’s programme was in Budapest; tomorrow, the rest of the programme is brought to you from Vienna. Watch the live stream here.

I recently wrote about a German student, Jacqueline Förster, who claimed Dutch financial support for the period she studied at the University of Maastricht. Now there is a German student appealing for the European Court of Justice in order to be admitted to the Medicine programme at an Austrian University. The case of German students in Austrian medicine departments has been addressed here a couple of times. See the posts on Europeanisation by stealth and the one on more Europeanisation.

Since the last post on this issue, two important developments took place. First of all, Austria got permission to keep their quotas for German students in medicine programmes for a five year period (until 2011). And secondly, the Austrians have abolished the student fees in 2007 – after introducing them in 2000. The quotas are now being contested by the German student. And considering the free education in Austria, universities are fearing an unmanageable rush of German students (‘ein kaum bewältigbaren Ansturm’, as the Vice rector of the University of Salzburg put it).

Of course, the students can’t be blamed for this. They are just exercising the rights given to them. And don’t understand me wrong. I think it’s a good thing that students can make their own choice in the university where they want to study, whether that is in their own country or in another European country. In a European system where higher education is still predominantly publicly funded, and funding is arranged on a national scale, coming from national taxes, this type of mobility however might become unsustainable. That is, if it’s distributed highly unequally.

This doesn’t mean that we have to stop the mobility, but it does imply that we seriously have to look at other funding arrangements. In some countries, like the Netherlands, student financial support is already ‘portable’ for students, meaning that students are eligible for Dutch student support, also if they study abroad. This idea could be extended to student funding.

The portability of student funding within Europe should be a serious option here. In this case that would mean that Germany would fund the German students’ education in the Austrian university. This however would require a common policy, agreed upon by all member states, or at least a large majority of states. Politically it will be hard to reach agreement on an issue like this. But it’s better than the option of doing nothing and letting the ECJ determine the course of higher education in Europe.

Of course it is the ECJ’s job to interpret and observe the rules. But it is about time that the Member States agree on the extent of these rules and put the decision-making process back where it belongs: in the democratic European or national parliaments. The last decades has seen a growth in the higher education related cases brought to the ECJ, especially in the 1980s and in the first part of this decade (see below). This is particularly interesting because formally, the EU has no real authority over higher education. Nevertheless, in these cases, the Court has considerably extended the competencies of the European Union in the field of higher education. And for those that think that this expanding role of the ECJ is just an isolated case for higher education: it clearly is not.

Source: The Emergence and Institutionalisation of the European Higher Education and Research Area Forthcoming in 2008, European Journal of Education  43(4)

Policymakers seem determined to assess the quality of HEIs using standardised tests of student learning outcomes. Yet, Dr. Banta claims that such tests do not provide data for valid comparisons and on top of that, they measure other things than institutional performance:

Comparing test scores sounds easy, but are today’s standardised tests of generic skills capable of yielding data for valid comparisons? Twenty years of research conducted in the US using these tests indicates they are not.

It is however not the use of standardised tests as such that was criticized by Banta, but the use of such tests to compare institutions. Research in the US showed that the scores of such tests were highly correlated with the SAT scores (with correlations up to 0.9). It appeared that 81% of the variance between institutions could be explained by previous schooling. This means that the residual 19 percent is explained by a whole range of other factors (e.g. motivation, family situation, etc.), only one of them being institutional performance!

Bante therefore concludes that:

standardized tests of generic intellectual skills do not provide valid evidence of institutional differences in the quality of education provided to students.

Moreover, we see no virtue in attempting to compare institutions, since by design they are pursuing diverse missions and thus attracting students with different interests, abilities, levels of motivation, and career aspirations.

This provides food for thought for many national policy makers, but also for some international actors. I’ve written a few times about the OECD AHELO project. In this project, the OECD tries to differentiate between institutions on the basis of an assessment of the learning outcomes.

AHELO focuses on an assessment of students’ knowledge and skills towards the end of a three or four-year degree programme. The assessment will be based on a written test of the competencies of students, and will be computer delivered.

The feasibility study is expected to demonstrate the feasibility – or otherwise – of comparing HEIs’ performance from the perspective of student learning rather than relying upon research-based measures which are currently being used across the globe as overall proxies of institutional quality.

AHELO can thus partly be seen as a response to the research-biased rankings and league tables. They are presently working on a feasibility study. Whatever will be the result of this, it’s a sure thing that such a (near-)global assessment is going to be an enormously complex exercise. And therefore a very expensive one…

It’s reasonable to expect that results here also correlate strongly with prior learning, just as was the case in the US. Therefore PISA results might better explain AHELO results than institutional performance does. If the AHELO-assessment results only explains a few percentages of the variance between institutions, comparing higher education institutions will be impossible. And then all that money might better be spent otherwise. I would hope the OECD takes these American research findings into account in the feasibility study.

This conference (Transparency in Diversity – Towards a European Classification of Higher Education Institutions) presented the results from the second stage of the project Classifying European Institutions for Higher Education, a project that might turn out to have a major impact on European higher education policy. This project was initiated in 2005 (see this previous post) and is now supported by for instance the European Commission (DG Education) and the German Hochschule Rektorenkonferenz. It’s run by an international team led by Frans van Vught.

The project can be seen as a response to two trends (at least, that’s my interpretation). First of all, there is the emergence of the European higher education area, the objective of the Bologna process. If there’s one space, we need to know what types of institutions are occupying that space and hence, we need a classification or typology.

Secondly, there is the proliferation of ranking and league tables. As I’ve discussed many times before, these rankings present a very uni-dimensional view of the contemporary higher education institution. Basically they only look at the – science heavy – traditional research university. Through this they neglect the quality of a very wide range of other institutions which might be very good at the things they are supposed to do. Here one can think of mono-disciplinary institutions (e.g. colleges of fine arts; schools of economics and business), teaching oriented institutions (like the American liberal arts colleges) ore more professionally and vocationally oriented institutions (like the German and Austrian Fachhochschulen, the Dutch Hogescholen, etc.).

A multidimensional classification of European higher education institutions can on the one hand create more transparency in European higher education, while at the same time clarify which institutions can be compared with each other (so we can compare apples with apples and pears with pears). If you are interested in how they intend to do this, I suggest you have a look at the presentations of the conference. See Frans van Vughts presentation (PDF) to get a better idea about the background of the project and have a look at Frans Kaiser’s presentation (PDF) for the technical aspects of such a multidimensional classification.

What the classification will look like exactly is not yet clear. If it will remain limited to the web tool and the resulting radar graphs, I expect the effects to be rather limited. The question is whether the various stakeholders related to the project will ultimately define real categories of institutions (like the old Carnegie classification did). This however might give the project a more political character. Even though the project-team stresses that they will not create a hierarchical classification, it is interesting to see whether some categories will be perceived as more prestigious than others.

Nevertheless, the classification project seems to be widely supported by institutions throughout Europe and their representative organisations. The feeling that Europe needs to create more transparency is widely shared and at the same time, many institutions are looking for benchmarking opportunities with like-minded institutions. After all, comparisons with Harvard, Oxford and Yale are not very useful for most higher education institutions in Europe…

In a forthcoming paper for the European Journal of Education I identified the ECJ as one of the main actors in the institutionalisation of the European Higher Education Area. In earlier posts in this blog I discussed recent cases on the German medicine students in Austria and French students in Belgium. In both cases, the principle of non-discrimination plays an important role. The same was the case for the Grzelczyk Case and the Bidar Case, which can be seen as a predecessor of the Förster case.

The Grzelczyk judgment suggests that EU students are entitled to claim maintenance grants when they find themselves in the same situation as nationals of the host Member State. Before the Maastricht Treaty, the Court refused the right to obtain loans and grants while studying in another member state. The Bidar Case changed this. Here, the Court argues that it is legitimate for a host Member State to grant such assistance to students who have demonstrated a certain degree of integration into the society of that State (although the Court made clear that Member States have a right to protect themselves against ‘grant-tourism’).

This ‘certain degree of integration’ is now being tested in the Förster Case. German student Jaqueline Förster went to the Netherlands to study in 2000. She did the minimum number of hours of work in order to be eligible for the Dutch student support. This amount of work apparently provided a substantial enough degree of integration. The Dutch scholarship board initially granted the student aid to her but asked for a partial refund in 2005 because Förster had not worked in the second half of 2003. She took the case to court saying the move was discriminatory as Dutch students do not have to work (see also this article in EU Observer).

An additional issue came up in the Netherlands after Nuffic presented its annual mobility monitor. This showed that the outgoing number of students was lower for the Netherlands than the incoming students and that the largest source of incoming students was Germany. While at least 16,750 German students were enrolled in the Netherlands, only 2,100 Dutch students were enrolled in Germany. A few days later, the ‘Dutch equivalent of the Financial Times’ carried a headline saying that German students cost the Dutch government at least one hundred million Euros. Reason for this is of course the fact that – because of the non-discrimination principle – EU universities can not charge higher tuition fees for foreign EU students than they charge for their own students. Considering Dutch higher education is still heavily subsidised by the government, German students are indeed partially funded by Dutch tax payers money.

Let’s first say that this claim is too one-sided and oversimplified. Obviously, while the balance is negative with Germany, the balance with other countries might be positive for the Netherlands. But most of all, the (future) benefits of these German students for Dutch higher education and for the Dutch economy are neglected in their calculations, partly of course because these indirect effects are more difficult to measure. Nevertheless, this issue again shows the problem of the non-discrimination principle. In a region of nation states – which the EU still is – the prohibition of discrimination on the basis of nationality is simply hard to sustain.

Earlier I already made a comparison with the United States, where discrimination on the basis of state is apparently allowed. Tuition fees for inner-state students are lower than those for outer-state students. So in this respect, the European Union is even ‘flatter’ than the United States. In the way the different countries fund their higher education systems however, the European Union is not flat at all. While some countries do still not charge any tuition fees, in other countries, universities gain more and more freedom in setting these fees. As long as these funding patterns are spiky instead of flat, the non-discrimination principle will present problems. As long as mobility patterns in Europe are fairly symmetrical, these problems can be overcome. But if they are not, the European countries might have to search for other solutions. There are basically three directions in which these solutions can be sought.

The first one is of course a further harmonisation of funding systems in European higher education in order to flatten the field. This then should go into the direction of student based funding instead of institution based funding, accompanied by higher tuition fees. This option will be very unlikely, to say the least.

A second option is to neglect or abolish the non-discrimination principle and make it possible to charge higher fees for foreign EU students. This would basically mean a 180 degrees reversal of decades of European policies in higher education and would seriously risk the willingness of students to be internationally mobile.

A third option is to compensate for the a-symmetry. In principle this would again mean that government funding  would follow students, not institutions. This would actually create a system of portable higher education funding. In this case, the Dutch government would for instance pay the German government for the Dutch students enrolled in German institutions and vice versa. The main dangers of this model are twofold. First of all, it is likely to create a lot of new European bureaucracy. And of course we are not waiting for a higher education version of the Common Agricultural Policy. Another – and maybe more severe – risk is that institutions and countries will no longer stimulate international mobility within Europe or maybe even discourage it.

But not doing anything or ignoring it is not an option either. If nothing is done and both the mobility and the a-symmetry keep increasing, there will be a strong tendency for further privatisation of the sector. Only by privatising the sector, governments can avoid spending tax payers money on foreign students. I’m pretty sure that this scenario is not preferable for most governments either, let alone for the students.

It is thus time to seek a European solution. It would not be wise to let the ECJ determine this solution step by step, case by case, through its individual judgements. It’s better to bring it back into the political arena and decide on the direction democratically.

UPDATE: On July 10th, the Advocate General Jan Mazák presented his opinion on the Case Jacqueline Förster v IB-Groep. The IB-Group (the organisation that administers the student financial support system in the Netherlands) uses as a criterion that students should have been working for five years or more in the Netherlands in order to be eligible for Dutch student support. This interpretation of ‘a certain degree of integration’ is now being contested by Mazák. He argues that:

Thus, whereas rights to social benefits were originally linked to the pursuit of economic activities (in particular in the form of paid employment, which underpins the concept of a worker), they may now also be available to economically inactive citizens on the basis of the principle of non-discrimination. Whereas a Member State was previously required to assume full social responsibility and provide welfare for those who had already entered its employment market and who thus made some contribution to its economy, such financial solidarity is now in principle to be extended to all Union citizens lawfully resident on its territory.[55]

In he relation to the five year requirement he states:

Member States are obviously allowed to some extent to apply general conditions which require no further individual assessment, such as the three years’ residence requirement at issue in Bidar. However, the case-law of the Court also suggests that the condition imposed may not be so general in scope that it systematically excludes students, regardless of their actual degree of integration into society, from being able to pursue their studies under the same conditions as nationals of the host Member State. In other words, the criterion used must still be indicative of the degree of integration into society.[129]

In my view, that is not the case with a five-year residence requirement, since it can reasonably be assumed that a number of students may have established a substantial degree of integration into society well before the expiry of that period. That is especially the case with students who, like Ms Förster, have also pursued occupational activities in the host Member State in addition to their studies. In fact, as has been submitted by Ms Förster, a residence requirement of five years may prevent students who make use of their right to move to another Member State and study there from benefiting from their right to equal treatment as citizens of the Union in respect of study allowances, regardless of the actual link they may have established with the society of the host Member State. That cannot in my view be considered proportionate.[130]

Concluding that:

When a student has already been resident in the host Member State for three years, as in the present case, it would seem disproportionate, even though five years may not have yet elapsed, to refuse study finance if the student can adduce reasonable evidence that he or she is already substantially integrated into the society of the host Member State.

If the ECJ will follow the Advocate General’s advice (as it usually does) this again might have serious implications. Not just for Dutch higher education and its funding, but also for other countries in Europe.

On Tuesday May 12, at around 10.30, thousands of students gathered for a peaceful demonstration on the campus of Trisakti University, located between the airport and downtown Jakarta. On campus, a free speech forum was organised where students, academics and other speakers voiced their opinions. Students were allowed to demonstrate on campus but Suharto had explicitly prohibited all public demonstrations. Nevertheless, the students left campus and marched into the direction of the parliament at 1.30 in the afternoon.

Although most students demonstrated peacefully, the rally turned violent later in the afternoon. The students were blocking the traffic at one of the main arteries of Jakarta. The security forces stopped the thousands of students while they were on their way to the Parliament building. For hours there was a stand off between the students on the one hand and the police and security forces on the other. Somewhere around 5 PM, the students negotiated a solution. They agreed that one row of students would back off for every row of police that did the same. But then suddenly the security forces started shooting with rubber and live bullets to the students who were running back to the campus grounds. At the end of the day, four students lost their lives. Elang Mulya, Hafidin Royan, Hendriawan Sie and Hery Hartanto later became ‘the heroes of the reformation’.

The tragedy remains surrounded by mysteries. There has been talk about infiltrators of the security forces, disguised as Trisakti alumni, who provoked the peaceful demonstrators. Rubber bullets were used by the security forces, but it remains unclear where the live ammunition came from. The fact that the air was filled with teargas only added to the confusion. The Trisakti Tragedy was followed by one of the cruelest events in Indonesian history. In the two days after the events at Trisakti University, thousands were killed in the May 1998 riots. The mysteries surrounding these events and the involvement of government forces also remain unsolved.

Many investigations have been conducted into the Trisakti tragedy and the events afterwards, but many questions remain. Calls upon the Indonesian president Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono and on the Indonesian judiciary to reopen the investigations have until now remained unanswered. Maybe the tenth anniversary of these events would be a good occasion to review this decision…

But university employees tell that the university has been closed because of political reasons, reports Kommersand, Russia’s daily online newspaper. The fire inspection came to the university after deputies of the State Duma, members of United Russia party, and the general Prosecutor’s office had taken an interest in an EU-funded program for training election observers.

The respective three-year program was launched in early 2007 and funded by the EU grant of €673,000. Authorities lashed out at it from the beginning, saying the money was appropriated not for some research work but for creating a net of observers here and viewing it as an attempt of direct interference into Russia’s election campaigns of 2007 to 2008.

Andrei Yurov, a human rights and education expert, said that closing a university for breaching fire regulations looks at least strange. According to him, Russia hardly has any universities meeting all standards of fire protection.

A week ago, Putin placed limitations on foreign election because he perceived it as foreign influence on the upcoming presidential election. This led the OSCE (Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe) to pull out of monitoring the March 2 elections.

“the country’s per capita income had risen by 40% between 2004 and 2007, from RM15,819 (US$4,163) to RM22,345 (US$6,452). The Barisan Nasional Government is confident that we will get the people’s mandate again, based on the improved economic resilience”

A good thing there is something called the internets, where people can voice other truths. Tony Pua over at Philosophy Politics Economics explains:

Nor Mohamed Yakcop must either be completely out of his mind, or can no longer perform simple Mathematics or worse, attempting to insult the intelligence of ordinary Malaysians. Malaysia’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) grew by 5.0%, 5.9% and an estimated 6.0% in 2005, 2006 and 2007 respectively according to the Government’s official statistics.

Based on the above growth rates over the past 3 years, Malaysia’s GDP grew by approximately 17.9% from 2004 to 2007. Therefore, it is completely inconceivable that our per capita income increased by 40% when our GDP grew by only 17.9%. Unless of course, the honourable Minister believes that our population shrunk by some 16%!

But, then again, there will always be people who use blogs on the Internet to criticise the rapid economic growth achieved by the Government.

UPDATE: Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi dissolved the parliament on Wednesday 13 February. The election is likely to be held in early March

UPDATE 2: Elections are called for 8 March. According to the Economist:

No one expects Mr Badawi to repeat his storming debut in 2004, when he led the ruling coalition to a 90% sweep of 219 seats in Parliament. Defeat is unthinkable: the coalition has won every election since independence in 1957.

Although John McCain is very likely to become the Republican candidate, there is still a theoretical chance that Mike Huckabee will be elected. It’s no surprise that Huckabee, the most conservative of the candidates, graduated from a college with a strong religious affiliation. He earned a BA from Ouachita Baptist University in Arkadelphia, Arkansas. The liberal arts university is affiliated with the Arkansas Baptist State Convention. It “seeks to combine the love of God with the love of learning” and “affirms that life is lived most abundantly when it is lived in response to the love of God through Jesus Christ”. After graduating from OBU, Huckabee became a pastor and he was the youngest president ever of the Arkansas Baptist State Convention. The conservative and religious views are very apparent in Huckabee’s positions.

McCain’s educational career is dominated by military education and training. John McCain earned a BS degree from the United States Naval Academy in 1958. After graduating he started a career as a naval aviator. After serving in Vietnam (being a POW from 1967 until 1973), he attended the National War College in Washington DC from 1974-1975. The NWC was a a training ground for higher officers and has delivered well known graduates such as Collin Powell. Although McCain is often seen as surprisingly liberal (for a republican) he is considered a War-Hawk Republican. His support for the military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq war has been consistent.

In the democratic camp, the educational careers of the two remaining candidates show much more similarity. Both have a BA in political science, both attended Law School and both taught in Law School. Barack Obama started his academic career at Occidental College in Los Angeles. After sophomore year however, he transferred to Columbia University where he majored in political science and specialised in international relations. After his graduation in 1983 he worked for some years, but decided to enter Harvard Law School in 1988. In 1990 he was elected as the first black president of the Harvard Law Review in its 104-year history. Obama graduated magna cum laude in 1991 but re-entered academia in 1993, this time as a senior lecturer in constitutional law at the University of Chicago. And he seems to have been very good at it. “He was good enough that students showed up at 8:30 in the morning in the dead of winter for him“. Obama has been ‘on leave of absence’ from the U of Chicago Law School since his election as senator in 2004.

Hillary Rodham attended the prestigious Wellesley College near Boston. Wellesley is a women’s liberal art college “for the student who has high personal, intellectual, and professional expectations“. This is also where her first political activities started, first for the Republicans, later for the Democrats. Her senior thesis was on community organiser Saul Alinsky and has led to quite some controversy during her husband’s presidency of the US. After graduating from Wellesley College in 1969, Hillary Rodham entered Yale Law School. Here she specialised mainly in issues related to civil rights and children’s rights. In 1971 she met her future husband who was also in Yale Law School. After graduating in 1973, she stayed involved in children’s right issues. In 1974, Hillary became a faculty member at the Fayetteville School of Law of the University of Arkansas. Here Hillary served as an assistant professor and director of the legal aid clinic from 1974 until 1977 after which she joined a law firm in Little Rock Arkansas.

So what will the arena look like on November 4? On the right side it is likely to be a candidate with a strong military affiliation and experience. On the left side, it will definitely be a candidate with a background in political science and law from some of the most elite institutions of the US. Whether it will be a Mac or a PC will be decided later this year…

In the reactions to his dead in Australia the second version of Suharto’s legacy clearly was the dominant one (in the main stream media as well as the Aussie blogosphere). It was therefore quite a surprise for me to read an Australian op-ed in the Jakarta Post yesterday (click picture for a screenshot) in which the writer defended the actions of Suharto and criticised the Australian media. But I was even more surprised to see who wrote the letter: “…The writer is former Australian Prime Minister…”.

Isn’t that strange? Signing an op-ed as ‘a’ former Prime Minister of Australia while not making explicit which one of the former Prime Ministers you are? I do have some ideas about his identity though…

Update: I guess it was just a mistake of the JP not to mention the author. The second part of his ‘defense of Suharto’ was published a day later. This time with a name. And yes…I was right…

At the age of 86, Suharto, the former president of the republic of Indonesia has died. Suharto has been in Pertamina hospital since the 4th of January and passed away today at 1.10 PM local time. A week ago, University World News published an article I wrote on the role of student protests in the rise and fall of Suharto. Here is a slightly revised version of the article.

For most, Suharto’s name is inextricably connected with corruption, collusion and nepotism. Only few will remember him as Bapak Pembangunan (the father of development, as Suharto was fondly called in his better days). Among the few bright spots in his dark history is his realisation of near universal primary education. In terms of higher education, his legacy also includes the expansion of the Indonesian higher education system, by establishing universities in all provinces covering the archipelago and by allowing private providers.

However, the activities in and around these institutions became under increasingly strict control of his New Order regime. Students and academics have played a major role in the Suharto Era. Many courageous men and women have given their lives in the struggle for change and independence. First in the movement towards independence from the Dutch, later in the transition from the Old to the New Order that brought him into power and ten years ago in the Reformasi movement that ultimately led to his fall.

The 1960s: Helping Suharto in the saddle

Suharto’s rise to power started with the 30 September movement, an event surrounded by mysteries, even after more than 40 years. The official Indonesian version claims that the unsuccessful coup was staged by the communist party. Other versions point to the involvement of the army and even western intelligence agencies. At that time, the Indonesian student community was heavily politically polarized. The most prominent student organisations were linked to political organisations. The students aligned with the anti-communist parties played an important role in the transfer of leadership from Sukarno to Suharto. The most powerful of these organizations was Kesatuan Aksi Mahasiswa Indonesia (KAMI), a federation of student organisations established on October 27^th 1965.

KAMI, backed by the army and encouraged by Suharto, organised many anti-Sukarno protests and these protests played an important role in strengthening General Suharto’s position. Their demands, known as the Tritura, or the three demands of the people, aimed at lower prices, reform of the cabinet and the abolition of the communist party. Legitimate demands, considering that the population almost collapsed from soaring prices on account of the 600% inflation.

On the 24^th of February 1966, presidential guards killed two student demonstrators outside the presidential palace in Jakarta. Two days later, KAMI was officially banned by Sukarno. But they continued to protest and this ultimately led to the effective transfer of authority to Suharto on March 11 1966 (through the Supersemar decree) and to the legitimation of Suharto’s formal installation as acting president on March 12 1967 and president on March 21 1968. The New Order had begun. And as the New Order consolidated its power, it progressively tightened controls on the freedom of expression…

The 1970s: Rising Discontent and the Malari Riots

In the early years of the New Order there was little campus-based opposition to Suharto. Leftist students and scholars had been purged and those who remained were largely supportive of Suharto’s commitment to opening the economy to world markets. The tightening control of the New Order however, already became apparent in the early seventies. Its hostility to political life, its embrace of foreign investment, and close relationships with wealthy businessmen, began to draw criticism both from some former campus supporters and from a new generation of students.

On 22 January 1970, student protests were banned following a series of demonstrations against corruption. These were sparked by the findings of a Suharto-appointed commission that found that corruption was widespread throughout government. The commission was shut down soon afterwards. Later, in 1971, anti-corruption demonstrations were staged again by the students, this time to protest against Taman Mini Indonesia Indah (a park portraying a miniature version of Indonesia), an extravagant project and a brainchild of Siti Hartinah, Suharto’s wife. Suharto declared that he would use all force at his disposal, against whatever activity geared towards opposition agains the project. In the next years, student protests continued. These protests were aimed at the increased foreign influence, the government’s open embrace of foreign capital (in the early years, largely Japanese) and the poor economic conditions and also to the ongoing corruption. The ‘rice crises’ of 1972 and 1973 pushed many Indonesians back into hard economic times, and led to political instability, expressed mostly again by student demonstrations.

In early 1974, the protests culminated in to the so-called Malari riots (Malapetaka Lima Belas Januari or Januari 15th Catastrophe). During a visit of Japanese Prime Minister Kakuei Tanaka, student demonstrations broke out involving tens of thousands and lead to violence, looting and fires. Students targeted the most visible symbol of the Japanese presence in Indonesia: the showroom of Astra, the local firm which imported Toyota cars from Japan. The riots only were brought under control a day later, after the army troops killed about 11 demonstrators. The Malari riots had far reaching effects, especially for the free expression of critique. As Mackie and McIntyre put it:

“Intra-elite politics was henceforth to be quarantined from the masses. In that sense, Malari marked a decisive shift from the relatively open pluralistic phase of political life under the New Order towards one in which society based forces were to be largely excluded and rendered almost powerless to influence state policies or the distribution at the top.”

After the riots, hundreds of Indonesians (among which were many students) were put on trial and prominent student leaders and several faculty were imprisoned. Critical journalists were also imprisoned and six of Jakarta’s most independent and critical newspapers, including two which had supported Suharto in 1965-67, were closed down. Measures were taken to give the central government greater control over student activity. This included a requirement that students obtain a permit for all on-campus activities and enactment of regulations forcing formerly party-affiliated student organizations to join a single organization controlled by the government. Academic freedom and freedom of expression were gradually called to a halt…

The Campus Normalisation Law of 1978

A major student protest movement emerged in 1977 in the wake of parliamentary elections in May of that year. Public criticism of the government grew at the end of 1977, with critics continuing to attack economic policies which they saw as favouring a handful of wealthy capitalists with access to Suharto. In the run-up to the general session of parliament scheduled to hold presidential elections in March 1978 (with Suharto up for a third 5 year term), student leaders in the major student cities like Jakarta, Bandung, Yogyakarta, Surabaya and Medan staged a series of rallies. They called for the replacement of Suharto and an overhaul of the economic and political system.

In January 1978, the student council at the Institut Teknologi Bandung (ITB) published the Buku Putih Perjuangan Mahasiswa Indonesia (White Book of the 1978 Students’ Struggle, pdf). The editor’s note to the translation states that this white book represents “the first systematic Indonesian critique of the domestic policies of the New Order regime”. The White Book trashes the government for endemic corruption, economic policies which facilitate self-enrichment at the expense of social welfare, repression of independent political voices, and losing touch with the people. It didn’t take long before the White Book was banned and student leaders in Bandung, and other cities where student councils had been active, were put on trial.

The government clamped down on the entire campus community following the 1978 protests. Through a policy formally known as ‘Normalization of Campus Life’ (Normalisasi Kehidupan Kampus) and the establishment of the Campus Coordinating Body (Badan Koordinasi Kampus), the government banned political expression and activity from the campuses and placed all student activities under the supervision and control of the university rectors. Student councils ceased to function, campus newspapers were heavily censored, public meetings on current events were banned. Rectors were made accountable to the military authorities and to the Ministry of Education and Culture for implementation of the policies.

[Picture: There is no democracy without... a revolution in thinking]

The university became an important site of military intelligence operations. Undercover agents attended seminars and campus-based ‘Student Regiments’ increasingly served as a an on-campus intelligence network to monitor the activity of other students. Student rallies were routinely broken up by security forces. After 1978, scores of students were imprisoned for political crimes, many under broadly worded laws criminalizing deviation from the state ideology, disrespect for the president or vice-president, and public expression of hate or insult directed against the government.

The 1980s: Ongoing Repression, Ongoing Resentment

During the 1980s, the entire academic community suffered from the pervasive security presence on campus and the government’s hostility to independent political expression. Pressures on faculty to conform to this control and repression were imposed through a variety of measures, including central government control over promotion decisions, denial of travel privileges to critical professors, monitoring academic seminars, and press and book censorship. As civil servants, faculty at public universities were required to pledge loyalty to the Golkar party, and to wear civil servant uniforms on designated days each month.

The economic growth had resulted in sharp increases in overall enrollments and a proliferation of new private higher education institutions to serve the children of an expanding middle class. At the same time, a wide range of Indonesians (including an important segment of the new middle class) was increasingly demanding greater freedom of expression and the opening of the political system to broader citizen participation. Student activists, who had been driven underground and radicalized by the repressive campus policies instituted in the late 1970s, were an important source of pressure.

Throughout the eighties, students in Indonesian universities formed off-campus discussion clubs where they read and debated political and social theories. The first arrests of students associated with such a study club took place in 1988 when three members of the Palagan Study Club in Yogyakarta were arrested and sentenced on subversion charges to prison terms ranging from seven to eight and a half years.

Those arrests helped spur the student movement, particularly in Yogyakarta, whose plethora of colleges and universities facilitated inter-campus organizing. Students began to join forces with NGOs to defend the interests of peasants evicted from their land for development or commercial purposes and workers deprived of the right to organize. The turn of the decade experienced a revival of student activities. In October 1990, demonstrations broke out in Yogyakarta against the conviction of a Universitas Gadjah Madah student for distributing works of Pramoedya Ananta Toer, Indonesia’s most important writer and longstanding Suharto critic (he was jailed or put under house arrest for most of the New Order Era). Yogyakarta students also staged demonstrations in support of families about to be displaced by the Kedung Ombo dam. Students from Satya Wacana Christian University in Salatiga were detained and questioned in 1991 for distributing a calendar which caricatured government leaders. In 1993, Surabaya students protested against the death of Marsinah, a young female labour activist. And so on…

The 1990s: ‘Responsible Openness’

A new higher education law passed in 1989 and a government regulatory decree issued in 1990 (Peraturan Pemerintah 30) included guarantees for both academic freedom and scientific autonomy. President Suharto himself publicly endorsed broader openness in Indonesian society. On campuses, this was reflected in a decree allowing the reestablishment of campus-wide student senates for the first time in over a decade. At that time, some government officials and campus administrators informally began to allow more room for campus-based activities. Many academics and intellectuals took advantage of the opening to push for more fundamental reform. One of them was Mochtar Lubis, novelist, journalist and intellectual. In a 1990 interview with Adam Schwartz he states:

“There is no time to waste. Indonesians must be allowed to develop their critical faculties so they can understand what’s happening to themselves, to their society and in the world. Not just understand, but be able to analyse and make choices. Members of society are not allowed to be critical so how can they be creative? How can you expect people to create, to think, if there is no climate of freedom? Without fostering our intellectual strengths, which means letting people say what they think without fear, Indonesians will remain coolies in their own country. It’s terrifying to think that just to say common things you have to be so careful. When you reach that stage, and that’s where we are, you have to realize we’ve arrived at a critical situation.”

The government however repeatedly insisted that the kind of openness that it endorsed was ‘responsible openness’ and because there was no real protection for basic rights, citizens never could be sure what the exact meaning of ‘responsible’ was and how far the opening extended.

Faculty as well as students became more active and more vocal on social and political issues in the 1990s. Faculty spoke out on behalf of academic freedom, joined off-campus human rights and democracy advocacy groups, and lent their expertise to NGO campaigns on a wide range of issues, from women’s rights to legal reform. While students and faculty played an important role in the push for greater openness, they also continued to define the limits of government tolerance. The most prominent victim from the academic community was Sri Bintang Pamungkas, economist at the University of Indonesia and one-time member of parliament. He emerged as a leading public proponent of democratic reform but was arrested twice for his actions against the government, first in 1995 and again in 1997.

Public demands for change and openness continued throughout the 1990s. In the run-up to parliamentary elections held in May 1997, students organised the golput (open ballot) campaign calling for an election boycott. The call for reform also increasingly came from social scientists in the universities and even the national research institutes. Political scientist Mochtar Pabottingi for instance (in an interview with Human Rights Watch in 1997) argued that the government’s monopolisation of the truth formed the fundamental obstacle to intellectual freedom.

1998: The Beginning of the End

The monetary crises that raged throughout Southeast Asia in 1997/1998 also arrived in Indonesia. And it hit it hard! The beginning of the end for Suharto really took off in January 1998. The Indonesian Rupiah collapsed and was accompanied by an outpouring of demands for an end to Suharto’s 32 year rule. In early March opposition leaders failed to pose any significant challenge to Suharto and Indonesia’s parliament unanimously elected Suharto for a seventh five-year term. Again, the student protest movement became the nationwide focus of opposition to Suharto.

I happened to be in Indonesia from March until early May in 1998 and the country was moving towards boiling point at that time. The man in the street was disillusioned with politics. KKN (Korupsi, Kolusi & Nepotisme) and the Krismon (Krisis Moneter) dominated the talk in the streets. People were hit hard by the high prices for basic necessities. In accordance with the IMF packages, government subsidies on commodities like gasoline, rice, sugar and cooking oil were cut, and price hikes occurred on a daily basis. The young were angered and bitter, but at the same time they embodied the aspiration for change. All this anger, hope and aspiration came together in the student movement that bubbled up in and around campuses across the country.

Like in 1974 and 1978, the campus-based demonstrations once again rose to national prominence against a background of growing public dissatisfaction with the country’s leadership. The movement involved literally hundreds of thousands of students from hundreds of institutions, private as well as public, secular as well as muslim and christian, in large and small cities. The movement could not be neglected by the country’s leadership, neither could they suppress it. Change slowly became inevitable.

The students were actively supported by many faculty, alumni, and university administrators. Even the university rectors and senior professors joined the students. In April, Poncol Marjada, Rector of Dr. Soetomo University in Surabaya read a statement formally calling on students to participate in the demonstrations to express their concerns. Loekman Soetrisno, professor at Universitas Gadjah Mada declared that “If Martin Luther King could trigger the birth of a new America, you, too, the young people, can create a new Indonesia.”

On April 16, there were demonstrations at 30 campuses in Jakarta and in Bandung, Surabaya, Malang and Semarang. The day after, Suharto threatened to employ his elite troops (KOPASSUS). But student protests were not only staged in Java. University cities around the archipelago were joining the movement. Late April, 5000 students clash with security forces in Medan on Sumatra. Many get injured, many get arrested. Rallies were held in Padang, Lampung, Medan, Ujung Pandang, Denpassar and other campuses. From Aceh to Irian Jaya, rallies were staged, all attended by thousands of students. But the protests reached a climax in May, when students increasingly were joined by non-academics at rallies…

May 1998: The Fall of Suharto

On May 8, one demonstrating student was killed in Yogyakarta. Demonstrations in Bogor a day later, demanded another casualty. The two deaths increased the tension between the students and the army. The 12^th of May was the day that came to be known as Tragedi Trisakti. Four students lost their lives during a peaceful demonstration at Trisakti University in Jakarta. The Trisakti students – Hendriawan Sie, Hafidhin Royan, Elang Mulia Lesmana and Hery Hartanto – were later dubbed the pahlawan reformasi (heroes of reform). Another 18 fellow students were wounded. The next morning, thousands of students gathered at the Trisakti campus for a memorial ceremony. Opposition leaders Megawatti Sukarnoputri and Amin Rais addressed the students at the ceremony.

Around noon, the crowds outside the campus grew and so did the unrest. Around the campus, riots broke out and spread to nearby areas and then to all over Jakarta (with little or no participation of the students). Shops were trashed or set on fire after they had been looted and the Chinese community was targeted in particular. The riots went on all night, and the next day they spread all over Jakarta and Depok, Tangerang and Bekasi, the urban areas around Jakarta. These two days – 13 and 14 May – Jakarta was on fire. The city was in chaos. The material damage exceeded 400 million US$. Over 1000 people were killed…

Meanwhile massive peaceful demonstrations occurred in many parts of the country. After the riots, Assembly Speaker and Golkar party head Harmoko asks Suharto to step down. Suharto appears on TV. He makes clear he will not step down, but that new elections will be arranged in which he will not run. At the same day – May 18 – thousands of demonstrating students occupy the grounds, lobby and roof of the parliament building in Jakarta. On May 20, half a million Indonesians march in Yogyakarta and large demonstrations are held in Surakarta, Medan, Bandung and other cities.

On May 21, 1998 Suharto announces his resignation at 9 AM. Vice-President B. J. Habibie became the new President of the Republic of Indonesia. Suharto died almost ten years later in Pertamina Central Hospital in South Jakarta…

Clearly, a modern history of Indonesia is incomplete without mentioning the role of the brave students that put their lives at risk for the sake of freedom. They experienced not one, but more than 30 years of living dangerously. So what better way to end than resonating the words of writer and activist, the late Pramoedya Ananta Toer:

I extend my highest respect and appreciation to the students and other people who succeeded in toppling the dictator last spring (1998, EB).

It is only their consistent action, to reform the life of the state and the nation, that can rid us of the New Order’s criminal brutality and bring Indonesia to a new life.

_______________

Main sources:

Adam Schwarz (1994) A nation in waiting; Indonesia in the 1990s. Allen & Unwin Publishers

Center for Southeast Asian Studies / Northern Illinois University. SEASITE / Indonesia / Reformasi.

Human Rights Watch (1998) Academic Freedom in Indonesia; Dismantling Soeharto-Era Barriers.

Jamie Mackie and Andrew MacIntyre (1993) Politics. In: Indonesia’s New Order: The Dynamics of Socio-Economic Transformation, edited by Hal Hill. Sydney: Allen & Unwin.

Zulhifly Lubis (1979) The Dilemma of Student Political Forces: A Case of Three Asian Countries. In: Praxis, Vol I, Q 3-4.

He tries to answer the question by exploring China’s economy, its political and legal system, and its record on civil, political and personal rights. Peerenboom’s answer is “yes”. At the forum of the Far Eastern Economic Review, Nicholas Bequelin has a review on the book. Bequelin is researcher at the Asian division of Human Rights Watch, so it’s no surprise that he disagrees with Peerenboom.

I haven’t read the book yet, and neither am I an expert on China. For me the question often pops up in my comparisons between Indonesia and Malaysia. Where some say that Indonesia might be ‘too democratic’, others might say Malaysia is too paternalistic and authoritarian. It seems that strict government control has helped countries like Malaysia and Singapore in creating a higher level of development than for instance the rather chaotic countries of Indonesia and the Philippines. So….is Peerenboom right? I think in the short term he might be. But for the long term, I sympathise with Bequelin’s critique. But let’s read the book first…

On the basis of comparative data from 23 states within the European Union, the article concludes that academic freedom is highest in Finland, Slovenia, the Czech Republic, Hungary and Spain. The lowest levels of academic freedom can be found in countries such as the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Denmark and Sweden. Not exactly what most readers would expect, I guess. 

So how does the author operationalise academic freedom? Basically it is measured on the basis of five dimensions: (i) Constitutional protection; (ii) Specific legislative protection; (iii)Self-governance; (iv) Appointment of rectors; (v) Academic tenure. The first two refer to the question whether freedom of speech and academic freedom are legally embedded in a nation’s constitution and other legislation. The other three refer more to the way higher education in a country is organised and governed. Let’s have a look at both the legal and governance dimensions to explain the surprising outcomes.

Let’s first look at the legal framing of freedom of speech and academic freedom. My calculated guess is the following. Countries with a recent past of suppression and authoritarianism include freedom of speech and academic freedom more explicitly in their constitutions and legislative frameworks. The countries with high constitutional protection of the freedom of speech are Finland, Slovenia, Czech Republic, Hungary, Spain, Latvia, Lithuania, Slovakia, Poland, Austria, Portugal, Italy and Estonia. Most of them are former communist states or states that used to be under authoritarian rule. The high constitutional protection might thus be a logical result of historical events. And, after all, there are also things like unwritten rules and norms in a democratic society…

But more interesting are the three dimensions related to governance. My bold conclusion is that Karran here confuses academic freedom with academic power. The tree dimensions used here boil down to this: collegial governance, academic appointment of leadership and unconditional tenure of academics provide a high level of academic freedom. This seems to be rather straightforward. And indeed, it is also somewhat contradictory to the reforms that have swept countries like the UK, the Netherlands and Denmark (and many throughout the rest of the world). These countries have given increased autonomy to their universities, often leading to stronger institutional leadership (as opposed to collegial, academic governance). But they were given that power to respond better to social and economic problems. Looking at Karran’s ‘ranking’, I would guess that institutional autonomy is negatively correlated with (his interpretation of) academic freedom.

So is academic freedom the same as academic power? If we answer this affirmatively (as the article does, in my opinion), my question would be: is academic freedom as valuable as it is believed to be? I think academic freedom is a valuable good. But at the same time, I don’t think academics by definition have the exclusive right to determine what issues are important enough to be taught and researched. I’m not so convinced they are all capable of that. In my view, students, governments, public agencies, industry, NGO’s and foundations might provide a useful contribution to this process.

Many recent reforms have as an explicit objective that universities become more responsive to societal and economic needs and that  they become accountable to the public (whose money they are spending after all). So if academic freedom is equivalent to academic power, I’m not that worried if some of that power now has to be shared with other constituencies! After all, in a free society, power should be dispersed amongst many rather than concentrated in a few…

My former university – the University of Twente – this week announced that they had rejected a number of Iranian students and that they will not be able to process new applications from Iranian students. Is the University of Twente (UT) getting paranoid? No! They are acting according to a United Nations resolution and a following decision by the Dutch Ministry of Education and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. They had requested universities to give a formal guarantee that the Iranian visa applicants do not have access to certain specific scientific knowledge (read: nuclear knowledge). UT’s president explained:

Students have the right to attend all courses and they should be able to develop freely. We don’t want to exclude students from education and therefore we cannot give the guarantee that the Ministries of Education and Foreign Affairs demand from us. (…) As a university we cannot exclude the possibility that Iranians will be exposed to nuclear knowledge. We can’t control that.

The firm stance (or paranoia?) of the Dutch government and their quick action on the UN Resolution is probably related to an event a couple of years ago. Abdul Qadeer Khan, a Pakistani scientist and developer of the country’s nuclear bomb confessed in 2004 that he had run an illicit global nuclear-proliferation network involving Libya, Iran and North Korea. Kahn had attended the University of Technology in Delft in the 1960s and worked at the Physical Dynamics Research Laboratory in Amsterdam, a subcontractor for URENCO, a Dutch uranium enrichment facility.

Paranoia or justified caution? Whatever it is it raises some interesting questions. Wes Holleman of Education Ethics (in Dutch) asks whether an educational institution is allowed to restrict access to knowledge because of the risk that they will apply this knowledge for the wrong reasons. In cases where criminal intentions are clear this might be an easy question. But how to establish that wrong intentions are at play (think for instance about tax law)?

In considering these questions, he refers to two declarations of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP): the Joint statement on rights and freedoms of students (1967; 1992) and the Statement on graduate students (2000) mentioning issues such as discrimination on the basis of nationality, race and religion and the compliance of academic freedom. Since these norms are also clearly embedded in Dutch constitutional and educational law, Holleman concludes that:

Educational institutions should think twice before deciding not to admit students to their courses on the basis of their ‘evil’ nationality or their wrong intentions. From an ethical perspective they are walking on shaky ground and legally they might face judicial rulings against these decisions.

I agree with his conclusion, but nevertheless, the university’s decision is understandable. Obviously they cannot neglect the demands from the Ministries. They can either admit the students and ‘police’ them so they will not come in contact with ‘dangerous knowledge’, something which is of course sheer impossible and goes completely against the notion of academic freedom. Or they can decide not to accept any Iranian students, even if this goes against their ethics. And the government? Yes, they are acting rather promptly and maybe slightly shortsighted. Probably that’s because they want the avoid the embarrassment of a second Kahn case.