Lecturers at Sri Lanka’s state universities will hold protests during the lunch break on Wednesday, demanding what they call permanent solutions to long-standing problems in the university system, Ada Derana reported.
The Federation of University Teachers’ Associations (FUTA) said lecturers from all state universities would take part.
FUTA Secretary Senior Lecturer Charudaththe Illangasinghe said further trade union action would follow next week if the government failed to address the federation’s concerns.
Two years of talks without implementation
Illangasinghe said the federation raised the state university system’s problems with the government soon after it took office and submitted a set of proposals for resolving them. The government, he alleged, has failed to implement either those proposals or the agreements reached during subsequent discussions.
The federation has also held discussions with the President and the Prime Minister and submitted written communications setting out the difficulties facing state universities, he said.
After nearly two years of talks with the authorities, FUTA has decided to begin a continuous protest campaign. The protests will continue and could be intensified until solutions are provided.
The staffing numbers behind the dispute
The most concrete grievance Illangasinghe set out is the loss of academic staff.
Around 5,800 lecturers were employed in state universities in 2015, he said, when roughly 25,000 students were admitted each year. Annual admissions have since risen to about 45,000, while nearly 1,000 lecturers have left the system.
Vacancies have been advertised for some academic positions, he said, but lecturers are not applying for many of the posts.
Those two figures move in opposite directions. Annual intake has grown by roughly 80 per cent while the teaching establishment has shrunk. Ada Derana did not give a current staff total, and the 1,000 departures are a gross figure rather than a net change — but if few of those posts have been filled, as Illangasinghe’s account of unfilled vacancies suggests, the number of students admitted for each lecturer in post would have roughly doubled over the decade.
“The collapse of the state university system would mean the collapse of the country’s future,” Illangasinghe said, warning that lecturers were prepared to escalate.
FUTA is already in a second fight
The federation is simultaneously engaged in the constitutional dispute dominating Sri Lankan politics this week. FUTA was among the bodies whose delegates gathered at the Bar Association of Sri Lanka on 31 August to sign a joint statement by forty unions and professional organisations opposing the 22nd Amendment, which the Supreme Court began hearing on Tuesday.
Ada Derana did not connect the two, and nothing in its report suggests Wednesday’s protest concerns the amendment. The federation’s stated grievances are sectoral.
What was not reported
Ada Derana did not specify what the federation’s proposals contain, whether the dispute centres on pay, cadre, university funding or all three, or which ministry has been handling the talks. It did not say what form the further trade union action planned for next week would take, whether teaching will be disrupted, or how many lecturers are expected to take part.
Nor did it report any response from the Ministry of Higher Education or the University Grants Commission. No other verified Sri Lankan newsroom had carried the announcement at the time of writing.
