VERONA - The latest episode in Papua New Guinea’s university crisis, where chancellors and council members colluded with lawyers and police to chase out two foreign vice-chancellors, is seen as bizarre from the outside but makes perfect sense from the inside.
For in PNG it is chancellors – ceremonial heads - who think they run the university and have no qualms in de-authorising and overruling vice chancellors, who are the actual appointed leaders.
Another characteristic in PNG universities is that conflict, strife, threat and violence are seen as a normal state of affairs. Dialogue and negotiation to durably solve problems is diligently avoided.
In 2012, for example, in my conflict with the then chancellor and his pro chancellor, the latter, Ralph Saulep, filed a criminal complaint to try to get me arrested. The police came to my hotel in Port Moresby but I was able to escape. (This same complaint was used again in 2018 to arrest me.) Much to his chagrin, I had successfully eliminated his creative use of university funds.
Dissatisfied with my chutzpah, in 2012 Saulep sent his private bodyguard to threaten me, which he did by waving a gun outside his car window. After a short car chase through the streets of Port Moresby, I was able to escape.
In 2018, again, I was threatened with arrest and deportation by lawyer Sam Koim, a respected member of the university council, for no valid reason. Then in May, I was arrested on a trumped up charge of "false pretence", my passport unlawfully impounded and I was held hostage in PNG for over a month under great stress and, I might add, at great expense.
Officially, this case is not finished and I am living in my home place of Italy still on bail. We expect the case to be heard next month and duly dismissed for lack of any evidence that I have falsified anything, especially my PhD.
This story should now go back to 2009 when the PNG government, led by Michael Somare, and the Australian government of Kevin Rudd decided to review the PNG university system.
The independent review was conducted by Rabbie Namaliu (former prime minister and Unitech council member) and Ross Garnaut (eminent Australian economist, ambassador and advisor to various governments).
Their main conclusions were crystal clear: fix university governance; reduce council’s from 30+ members to a more manageable size; and focus on improving academic quality instead of quantity. This report, plus a promised investment in higher education from then burgeoning resource revenues, were important drivers for me to accept the job at Unitech in 2012.
In the six years until my separation from the university in April 2018, I worked with seven different ministers of higher education, three chancellors and three deputy vice chancellors, and none drove this agenda. Policy meant nothing. They were mostly distracted by politics.
Schram's OKThe Unitech council was heavily politicised. In the five years I was on campus there were four politically motivated attempts to dismiss me. At one stage I was expelled from PNG for 14 months and refused re-entry, although still employed as vice chancellor.
So, what had happened since June 2012 when the Namaliu-Garnaut report with its recommendations - and work plan with input from the vice chancellors - was approved by the government?
Well, the short story is that things very quickly changed.
The agenda was just too threatening to the existing power structures. It wasn’t helped by students organising boycotts at which point it was decided the universities needed "strong medicine" for at least another 10 years to stop student revolts.
The Higher Education Act of 2014 encapsulates the change in policy. Apart from creating a department of higher education (instead of an autonomous commission), its purpose was to (unsuccessfully) control the university councils and management.
In fact, the only consequential amendments to the university act have been related to the appointment of chancellors and vice chancellors. The ‘reformist’ law has been mostly about control and political patronage.
So, unfortunately for the government, this new higher education act did not do the job. While I was appointed under the old act directly by council, Prof John Warren was appointed under the new act as vice chancellor of the University of Natural Resources and Environment (UNRE). It didn’t really matter much.
Because of the legacy of mismanagement, high level members of the university community were accustomed to a track record of stealing and general dishonesty. When outsiders like me and John Warren came in, calling a spade a spade and taking action, disgruntled staff went to the council and government and complained.
PNG’s capital city, Port Moresby, is not just a typical policy bubble but an echo chamber of unverified and invalid information. Policy makers are gullible and seem to belief that anything written on letterhead must be proper by nature. They also believe lawyers are truthful. The system is driven by extreme clientelism (in PNG known as ‘wantokism’), where tribal loyalties and status are the main currencies.
I cannot say much about Prof Warren's case, which occurred after my own departure from PNG. As far as I know, like me, John Warren re-established a shared governance, committee based system - not an easy task; it can take a few years.
He implemented some common sense measures regarding the administration and assessment of academic programs and after two years was starting to get changes on the move. But politicians and the council began to get staff complaints, the chancellor was pursuing his own ambitions and this collection of ill-equipped would-be academic gurus decided they no longer liked his approach.
Although Warren and I are Europeans and not Australians, the post-colonial hang-up in PNG played a role in this. When university councils get irritated and can agree on only one thing, getting rid of the expat is that one thing that seems to make sense.
The chancellor at Unitech, for example, seemed to me to take discriminatory decisions in council and privately made remarks which indicated a belief that many – if not most - white people are racists. Neither Prof Warren and I are such; with me it’s very evident as I am married to a feisty woman of Kenya.
In my case, there had developed powerful internal and external forces stacked against me which made it necessary for me to be gone. For the prime minister and ministers of higher education, national planning and foreign affairs it was all about control of the land on which universities were located which it was thought the Chinese could develop with the usual 50% kick-back for construction.
Moreover, funds from ‘development partners’ (those rather stupid foreign government who give the PNG government cash) for infrastructure projects and access to these funds is highly contested because other government spending is so limited.
Other ministers dare not oppose such manoeuvres, embroiled as they are in their own get rich quick schemes. Conveniently, the nephew of the minister of health is now acting vice chancellor of Unitech, although in my view eminently unsuited for the role.
As to the internal forces, the improvement of academic quality and tighter financial management I instituted created great push-back. As chair of the academic board, I got a firm commitment to professional accreditation of the engineering programs, which meant, for example, all subjects had to have their own files. This was broadly resented by Papua New Guinean academic staff, used as they were to being accountable to nobody.
In addition, I got wind of the fact that almost all highland governors were selling university places (straight A high school results) for about $20,000 a pop. Highland politicians represent the largest share of the population and have dominated politics since the fall of Somare in 2011. There were many highlands’ students at Unitech.
As it happened, Unitech was the first university to demand an aptitude test which was administered by ACER (Australian Council for Educational Research) in Melbourne. This allowed us to weed out unsuitable students. But, of course, this significantly reduced the scope for political patronage of the provincial governors
But it was mainly tighter financial controls, fear of downsizing and losing allowances that made me extremely unpopular.
Efforts to rationalise and streamline the university administration, although saving much money to be spent on academic work, ruffled feathers. For example, better financial controls led to savings of over $1 million in 2017, although it had taken some years to get there. Also in 2017, for the first time, Unitech obtained an clean, unqualified audit for its 2015 accounts.
This turned out to be the easy bit.
Human resource management proved much trickier, in particular because in PNG there are few people competent in this area, and almost none in the public sector.
The need to downsize was evident, but no successful downsizing exercise of a government institution had ever been done. It usually led to the sacking of the CEO.
Unitech had four support staff members for each academic. The ratio in industrialised countries is one support to four academics, and even in our neighbour Fiji one to two. Unitech had more than 800 support staff and only 200 academics (of which 50 were expats in key positions).
With the approval of council, I commissioned various reports by consultants to get that ratio under control, but it was never done. Disdain and disobedience.
Then there was the matter of unapproved (and as it turned out) illegal allowances. Before my time, the personnel department had conceived a so-called ‘institutional allowance’ for senior support staff. A study I ordered showed it to be illegal. At the time (2015), as there were only a handful of staff members affected, we decided to regularise matters through natural attrition, mostly retirement.
In my absence in 2013, another allowance was dreamed up - a 15% monetisation of travel entitlements for all PNG staff. Although, for transparency, I favour monetisation in principle, I did not like the way this was implemented.
For a professor, for example, 15% of base salary amounted to $5,000+ annually while for a driver it was $200. These equity musings of mine however were irrelevant because by 2017 we found that the allowance was illegal.
As to infrastructure, I successfully executed over 13 projects maintaining tight budget control, including the building of an earth station for the O3B communications satellite system, which provided reliable broadband internet to the university.
Although all telecommunications companies in the Pacific depend largely on internet connectivity, Unitech was the only university in the world to have this system. Providing all our students with internet access remains one of my proudest achievements.
Nobody who has lived in a developing country can faithfully report that the people truly believe their government – elected or not - governs for the good of the people. The level of greed and selfish obsession with staying in power of the government of PNG’s prime minister Peter O'Neill, however, is hard to match.
For decades, there has been collusion between billionaire mine owners in Australia and elsewhere and PNG politicians to manipulate share prices, sign dubious deals and get richer in the process. As a result, O'Neill and his cronies would already have enough money to fund the 2022 elections just as they ‘bought’ the 2017 poll. And, if they don’t get the numbers they desire, they can always bribe opposition MPs to cross the aisle.
I heard from an Australian friend of O’Neill that he likes to boast he is going to be the first Pacific billionaire. If true, this is an obscene brag. Perhaps there’s a desire to emulate the billionaire leaders of resource rich dictatorships in Africa, Asia and elsewhere who channel their wealth straight into overseas private accounts.
Real universities can only thrive in true democracies with inclusive institutions.
In PNG, institutional autonomy and academic freedom have been eliminated.
We see a different university model emerging (perhaps a Chinese model?), where universities are regarded as an extension of government departments.
Expatriate academics, who do research and educate students to become active citizens and leaders, are ‘fremdkörper’ (foreign bodies) and perceived as a threat to the power of the government.
While in PNG, there is hardly anyone with the experience and qualifications to be a vice chancellor, hiring a foreign vice chancellor will almost certainly lead to dismissal, deportation and perhaps arrest.
The solutionUnitech is now advertising for a vice chancellor having found that the current management seems unable cope appropriately or implement decisions. (Even I have been asked to apply for some of the vice chancellors positions, which I have regretfully declined.)
So what is the way forward?
I would say a process has to be put in place to establish small and independent university councils. Council members need to have a university degree, achievement as directors or managers and must undergo sound orientation in university matters.
Perhaps some general oversight and advice from a foreign chancellor, not necessarily from Australia, should also be instituted, so the council continuously evaluates its performance.
The tragedy of Papua New Guinea is that there are enough good people in the country to do this, but most of them are kept out of these roles by a political system which is utterly corrupt and perceives them as threats.
No comments:
Post a Comment