A research lab at Kano University, in Nigeria.
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Sierra
Leone: a researcher on all fronts
After an extremely
brutal civil war that began in 1991, Sierra Leone is juggling with a shaky peace
process. Chris Squire, a thermodynamics professor at the head of the mechanical engineering
faculty at Fourah Bay College, explains what academic freedom means in a country
at the very bottom of the United Nations Human Development Index.
“I taught in the agriculture faculty at Njala College, 150 kms from the capital,
Freetown, until 1995. When the rebels arrived, life became impossible, so we moved
to Freetown. But we couldn’t get away from the fighting and lawlessness. A shell
destroyed the roof of my mechanics workshop and we were burgled.
“The university—which Fourah Bay and Njala are part of—is now starting to recover.
Njala had 2,000 students last year, up from 900 the year before. While I don’t know
of any teachers who have not been allowed to publish, I don’t know any who have been
able to complete a research project because there’s simply no money or physical resources
to be had.
“I earn $300 a month, paid regularly by the government. But all the teachers know
the university can no longer rely on government funding alone. We have to explore
other paths.
“My department has 300 students and we’re looking for outside funding. We managed
to get some old computers and other equipment from the Food and Health Organization.
More importantly, we’re obliged to run some commercial activities to make money.
We’ve begun making a limited series of doors and windows in the workshop and we’re
thinking of turning out spare parts and household utensils as well. This small-scale
production will also give my students practical experience.
“I’m also part of a social science research team looking into ways to restore peace,
funded by Sweden’s Nordic Africa Institute. It might be very remote from my training
but it’s a matter of survival—for me, because I want to continue my research, and
for Sierra Leone, which has to figure out how to end the fighting. I don’t receive
a regular income from this work and I’ll get paid when it’s finished.
“I’m also involved with another project, in association with a Nairobi-based university
network with NGO status called Science and Technology Policy Research. I want to
see how local farming, health and education can be revived at the local level. The
vicious circle of violence in Sierra Leone has deep political, social and institutional
roots.
“If we want to really set things right here, we can’t just rely on foreign help.
That applies to agricultural production as much as to the future of our institutions,
which survive precariously with scant resources. The university is a case in point.”
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No
trace of slavery ought to mix with the studies of the freeborn man. No study, pursued
under compulsion, remains rooted in memory.
Plato,
Greek philosopher
(428-348 B.C.)
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In many African countries,
academics have found that the threats to their freedom have profoundly changed over
the past decade. Political pressure has steadily given way to economic constraints.
After independence, academic freedom was not a priority for the new states and some
even dubbed it a “bourgeois concept.” A university was supposed to serve the nation
and its development—by working with the government. This very quickly led to repression
of dissent, along with the arrest and imprisonment of many university teachers and
students and, under the harshest regimes, even their murder. Universities, which
had grown from six in the early 1960s to 120 by the late 1990s (excluding South Africa),
became a thorn in the side of the dictatorships.
When
generals take the reins
To
dampen these hotbeds of subversion, subjects considered dangerous were simply banned.
After 1968 student riots, political science and sociology were forbidden in Rwanda
and Senegal. A few years later, law was banned from universities in Mozambique. There
was censorship everywhere, especially in Kenya, Malawi and South Africa under the
apartheid regime.
More recently, troops occupied the campus of Lumumbashi University (in the former
Zaire in 1990), police attacked students in Yopougon (Côte d’Ivoire in 1991),
many dissident Hutu and Tutsi university teachers were killed during the 1994 Rwandan
genocide, intellectuals were murdered in Algeria and Nigeria’s military rulers liquidated
university administrators and replaced them with former generals.
But in the last 10 years or so, African academics have seen their fields of research
expand as governments have embarked on the road to democracy. Their lives are at
risk now in only a few countries, such as Burundi, and censorship is fading.
Other threats have arisen however. At the end of the 1990s, one out of three countries
in sub-Saharan Africa was at war. Many universities were destroyed (see box below
on Sierra Leone) or reduced to virtually nothing. Today, the main threat to academic
freedom in Africa is economic. Badly paid university teachers often have several
other jobs and little time for research. Lack of access to information technology
and other means of research and publishing further marginalize African researchers
from the global academic community.
The universities, which have been “sacrificed” over the past 20 years on the altar
of structural adjustment programmes, are desperately short of money. There are more
and more strikes—often brutally suppressed—and some institutions are trying to work
together to meet the new challenges of globalization. One positive development is
that in the era of the knowledge economy, international funding agencies, especially
the World Bank, recognize that higher education and research can no longer be dismissed
as unnecessary “luxuries.”
Universities
have been sacrificed over the past twenty years on the altar of structural adjustment
programmes
But
universities now have to come up with “productive” results. Applied research now
tops the list of budget priorities and research projects are judged on their “market
value.” Basic research and the humanities have been sidelined. Universities, traditionally
held up as “models,” have become commercially-oriented. Makerere University, in Uganda,
and others raise money by selling services. It is true that academics are paid more
in such institutions, their labs have new equipment and their foreign benefactors
sometimes protect them from local political pressures. But they end up serving the
funding agencies—tailoring their research to these agencies’ objectives and even
becoming consultants for their development projects. Sometimes the academics are
just left to implement the projects and are quickly dropped if they try to have a
say in how they should be conducted. This happened to a group of Sudanese economists
after they protested about an International Labour Organization project.
The market has yet to provide adequate solutions to Africa’s problems. Tanzanian
jurist Issa Shivji neatly summed up the plight of African intellectuals a few years
ago: “You know what you can expect from the state and how to resist,” he said. “But
you don’t know what the market has in store for you. The state lets you know that
it is out to hang you, so you can put up a fight. The market gives you a long rope
to hang yourself.”
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India:
Checks in the System
When India
liberalized its economy in 1991, the expertise and research facilities of the country’s
Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) came to be particularly coveted
by multinationals, especially in the drugs and chemicals sector. Grouping 80 percent
of the country’s national laboratories, the council, which concentrates on industry-oriented
research, found itself before new dilemmas.
Already in 1986, a government review advised that the council would have to earn
a third of its funding from external and private sources. Today, nearly 70 percent
of the council’s external earnings (Rs. 2550 million, or $55 million) comes from
the government sector and about 10 percent stems from contractual research for multinationals.
The rest comes from Indian industry.
As government funding becomes tighter, a new balance is slowly being struck between
companies and academic institutions. “Academics are facing increasing competition
from the fast-growing consultancy research sector, which is less constrained by traditions
of independence and objectivity,” observes Anil Agarwal, chairperson of the independent
Centre for Science and Environment in New Delhi.
But CSIR’s director-general, Dr. Mashelkar, argues that private research—which only
involves two percent of the council’s scientists and seven labs—does not alter priorities.
Critics within the system, however, say that major changes in the research culture
are evident in the seven labs concerned, which include the National Chemical Laboratory
(NCL) in Pune and the Indian Institute of Chemical Technology (IICT) in Hyderabad.
A single project for SmithKline Beecham at IICT, worth $100,000, is said to have
engaged eight PhDs, 12 postgraduates and several technicians for a year. This diversion
of high-calibre scientists from serious research to routine testing and data gathering
for multinationals is a growing source of concern. The pressure to earn money has
led to a decline in new ideas within the institute, insiders say. The average earning
from a contract project today is about Rs 1.9 million ($42,000) as against Rs 0.5
million ($11,000) about five years ago. Dr. K. V. Raghavan, director of IICT, however,
believes that contract research has exposed its researchers to new drug production
methods that could be relevant to India’s future needs.
While Dr. Mashelkar acknowledges the future risk of research priorities being overturned
by foreign contract research, he says that there are sufficient checks in the system
to ensure that it does not dominate a lab’s agenda.
In a recent statement, Agarwal called upon institutional heads like Mashelkar to
“set up procedures to regulate their public-funded scientists as they promote greater
interactions with industry.” He points out that a professor at the prestigious Indian
Institute of Technology in Delhi recently released a study, funded by the Indian
Oil Corporation, claiming that the introduction of CNG (compressed natural gases)
would increase pollution levels in the city. The Delhi government has imposed use
of CNG in public transport. Agarwal, who has waged a long battle against pollution
in the capital, compares research to an iceberg. “The public interest could just
be the visible tip, with private interest being the invisible bulk,” he warns.
R. Ramachandran,
senior correspondent, Frontline magazine, India
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Latin
America: Closed Doors
Like thousands
of other researchers throughout Latin America, Gisella Orjeda left her native Peru
in 1996. After years of effort and frustration, this distinguished 41-year-old biologist
decided exile was the only way to continue the kind of academic career she wanted.
She graduated from Peru’s National Agricultural University and received a grant to
complete her doctorate at Birmingham University in Britain. Orjeda has been working
since last year at France’s National Sequencing Centre (Genoscope), where she is
doing research on the rice genome. Research in Latin America, she says, is “one big
mess,” pointing to scant resources, facilities and coordination. Worse still, it
has no real objectives.
“In Peru, biologists can’t just decide what field they want to work in after graduating.
There aren’t any research institutes, so scientists have only two choices—working
in a university, without resources and sometimes even without a research programme,
or joining the International Potato Centre, a Lima-based body that funds research
in developing countries. As it groups researchers from around the world, it’s very
hard to land a job there. This means you end up working in whatever project has a
vacancy and not in one that you’ve chosen.”
Orjeda was lucky enough to be accepted by the centre, marking a first step in her
international career. Those who cannot get such a prestigious visiting card face
a grim reality. Peru, like most Latin American countries, earmarked just 0.25 percent
of its GDP for research at last count in 1984, according to Unesco. In the United
States, the figure is 2.63 percent but this does not include the huge amount of research
funded by the private sector.
“That makes all the difference,” she says. “There’s no privately-funded research
in Peru. Big international firms don’t come looking for scientists in our countries.
Why should they? They prefer to hire people in rich countries who have worked on
specific projects and published their work. In Peru, there are barely any scientific
journals.”
Orjeda can’t accept that science is such a low priority in many developing countries.
“Putting money into our young minds is the best of all investments, the only alternative
to pull us out of underdevelopment,” she says. She also deplores the fact that what
little the government does spend on research only benefits other countries when the
scientists emigrate.
Would she like a big transnational company to pay her to run a research project in
Lima? “That would be wonderful,” she says. And if they asked her to hand over the
rights to the results of her research? “Hardly any scientists anywhere have control
over their results,” she says. “My contract with Genoscope states clearly that my
research belongs to them. To pretend otherwise is just wishful thinking.”
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