Mei Zhu was far from thrilled the day student protests erupted on her campus. She had arrived for her economics classes at Regional College, on the northern outskirts of this capital city, when she saw her classmates sitting in the streets, carrying placards, and shouting pro-democracy slogans. She calculated the possible outcomes, none of which were good.
The protests -- which spread to other universities in the area -- didn’t turn violent, as they had in the past. The police watched over the commotion, she recalls, but they didn’t do anything. The next day, however, authorities announced that her college, like most of those around the nation, would be shut indefinitely.
The incident, in 1996, wasn’t the first time that campuses in Myanmar had been closed. A bloody precedent was set in 1988, when nationwide student protests prompted the military government to close down colleges after killing several thousand protesters and imprisoning several thousand more -- similar to what would happen in China’s Tiananmen Square less than a year later.
The government, which is called the junta, has been wary of university students ever since. To try to prevent further protests, it has frequently disrupted the academic calendar, moved campuses away from urban areas, and kept tight supervision over the material that is taught. In the process, many experts say, the junta has allowed cheating and bribery to seep into the system, because it has become so afraid of protests that students are allowed to terrorize their professors.
After cycles of closing and reopening for more than a decade, universities in Myanmar, once known as Burma, have operated on a fairly consistent schedule for the past two years. But most observers say the junta’s 14-year siege of higher education has crippled Myanmar to the point where neither students nor professors place much faith in the system. To get an education requires ingenuity: Students go to religious colleges that the regime has left untouched, visit embassy libraries, and take illegal private courses.
Now, six years after the 1996 protests, Ms. Zhu has returned to college and has one year to go before she graduates. Waiting for the campuses to reopen, she put her life on hold for several years, like hundreds of thousands of other students. Besides delaying her career, the wait has also had a psychological toll. “When I started university, I thought I could do anything,” says Ms. Zhu, who, like many students in Myanmar, wanted nothing to do with the protests. “Now I’ve become disillusioned.”
While the higher-education outlook in Myanmar remains bleak, some observers believe that the release of Aung San Suu Kyi, an opposition leader, Nobel Peace Prize laureate, and democracy advocate, from house arrest last month signals a willingness on the part of the junta to relax its repressive policies. Her release may prompt some international aid organizations to start putting funds into the country’s education system, says Min Zin, a founding member of the All Burma Federation of Student Unions, who is now a graduate student at the University of California at Berkeley.
Rule of the Generals
Since a military dictatorship took control of Burma in 1962, the country has become one of the poorest in Southeast Asia. The junta spends 1.1 percent of the gross national product on education, according to the Burma Project, a pro-democracy organization, based in New York, that was started by the financier George Soros. By comparison, the average national spending on education in low- and middle-income countries is 3.3 percent of the gross national product. Human-rights organizations say thousands of Burmese professors, fearing political repression, have fled the country since military rule began. Most of them now work at universities in neighboring Thailand.
The government shifted from a one-man dictatorship to an elite military coalition in 1988, after the student uprisings. And it has become infamous for compiling one of the world’s worst human-rights records, with such practices as forcing rural villagers to become military porters, imprisoning performers who make fun of the government, and locking up its opponents. “Torture is an institution” in Myanmar, Amnesty International reports. Press freedom is nonexistent. Possession of an unlicensed modem is punishable by 15 years in jail.
Professors estimate that universities were open for a total of only a few years from 1988 to 2000. During that time, the queue of high-school graduates who wanted to enter college got longer and longer, with some students waiting four years to gain admission. The junta’s response was to shorten semesters to as little as one or two months; some students have been pushed through a bachelor’s-degree program in less than a year.
Students tell of courses in which lectures are held for a few weeks, followed by a cram period with private tutors that costs around $10 -- a year’s worth of tuition -- before exams. The education ministry has also instituted “correspondence courses” from the University of Distance Education, which, contrary to what one would expect in this technological age, has nothing to do with computers or the Internet. Students there take a final exam after a 10-day crash course and several months of listening to cassettes and reading copied textbooks. “It’s very distant learning -- it’s remote,” says Saw Pawlu, dean of undergraduate students at the Myanmar Institute of Theology.
Because the junta is wary of further protests, professors have been told to give in to students’ demands, creating an environment where cheating is rampant and students have little respect for professors. When students returned to colleges after being away for several years, “they weren’t students anymore” -- they “acted like businessmen,” says one woman who has worked in education in Myanmar for 30 years. “They paid off teachers, negotiating, and they were not keen to learn anymore.” If riots broke out at a university, she says, the government would sack the rector.
In order to supplement their incomes of $10 to $15 per month, professors expect bribes that range from one to a few dollars before and after exams, students say. During the exams, “we can cheat easily,” says a student at the University of Distance Education. “Professors even give us some time during the test when it’s OK to cheat.”
Most campuses have been open since 2000, and semesters have been lengthened to four months. The junta now promotes higher education and has announced plans to add two universities to the more than several dozen it says have been created in the past decade, in addition to the universities that have been reopened.
But the universities that the junta has created have been set up to serve the military, says Maureen Aung-Thwin, director of the Burma Project. “They’ve created their own medical institutes, trained nuclear physicists, trained [people] in diplomacy” in order to maintain power, says Ms. Aung-Thwin, who has been banned from the country since 1993.
According to a restricted government report on higher education published in 2000 and obtained by The Chronicle, the junta, in a four-year plan, aims “to review and revise the curricula of universities ... to be on par with that of developed Southeast Asian countries” by 2004. The report meticulously details investments in information-technology learning, including buying computers, installing fiber-optic LAN systems, and teaching PowerPoint. It records random details of university activity, including a televised message that Gen. Than Shwe, head of the junta, delivered to classrooms in honor of a computer-education initiative. But it neglects the fact that the Internet is still banned. Officials of the education ministry declined to be interviewed for this article.
Civilian universities remain in disarray. The University of Yangon, once the top institution in the country, has become a place where squatters seek shelter. Frowning guards in army uniforms, weary from the midday heat, guard the campus gates. Where grass once grew, dusty, trash-strewn lots are traversed by stray dogs. Poor families have taken over vacant British colonial brick buildings, hanging their laundry from the second-floor balconies.
The university’s classes are restricted to graduate students. To prevent them from organizing politically, the junta has closed the campuses of most urban universities. It has built new campuses in remote districts -- classes at Yangon have been moved to rural areas, near chicken farms and slaughterhouses, leaving the main campus to decay. Students have to commute -- usually by bus -- up to two hours to get to the new campuses, which are kept under guard.
Looking for Books
Once in class, the students must struggle to get information and proper equipment. The University of Yangon’s library has rows of card catalogs, but books are kept behind the counters and are accessible only through a librarian. Many campuses don’t have libraries at all, according to a Burmese librarian.
In desperation, students resort to the libraries at the British Council, an education-outreach agency, and the U.S. Embassy. A doctoral candidate in chemistry used the embassy’s library recently to conduct research for her thesis. “We don’t have anything that’s very technical, but it was better than what they had at her university,” says Ronald J. Post, counselor for public affairs.
The British Council estimates that at least half of the patrons at its library -- generally seen as the best in the country, with a collection of 23,000 books -- are university students, even though the $10 cost of a membership prohibits all but the most affluent from entering.
Internet access is banned at universities and is extremely rare throughout the country. Connections are reserved for government officials, foreign diplomats, and the extremely wealthy. Even patrons at five-star hotels and workers at foreign philanthropies can’t get access.
“I’ve heard of the Internet, but I’ve never used it or seen it,” says Angel, who attended the University of Computing for just one day not long ago. She dropped out so quickly because she was disgusted by the quality of teaching. “I sat in a history class, and the teacher couldn’t pronounce anything she was reading,” she says. Angel, fearing that revealing her real name would jeopardize her chances of going overseas to study, prefers the pseudonym.
Like many other students, she is taking private English courses and the SAT in the hope of going to college in America. But besides the usual challenge of getting a student visa for the United States, Burmese students find it difficult getting a passport from their own government. A passport for men can cost up to $130 -- almost a year’s worth of salary for the average person -- and women must pay nearly $900. The government is afraid of their going overseas to marry or become prostitutes, says a woman who used to work for the education ministry.
Finding Sanctuary
Some students who stay in Myanmar have found refuge at religious institutions. The country is predominantly Buddhist but also has sizable minorities of Christians and Muslims. When public universities became unreliable, some male students became monks and attended Buddhist universities to get a college education.
While public universities were shut down, religious institutions, which were not under the jurisdiction of the education ministry, were allowed to remain open, because they were not seen as a threat to the government, says the Rev. Sang Awr, vice principal of the Myanmar Institute of Theology, operated by the Myanmar Baptist Convention. The institute also is affiliated with the Northern Baptist Theological Seminary, in Chicago.
Several of Myanmar’s Christian universities offer college educations to those planning to join the clergy. Mr. Sang’s institute recently opened an undergraduate program for lay students as well. The institute is generally regarded as offering an education better than those available at the public universities, but the government has yet to recognize the program’s degrees. As a result, most of the theology institute’s undergraduates attend public universities in their spare time. “The institute’s program is the best opportunity for learning,” says Day Moo Paw, a business major at the institute. “There aren’t any real universities. But I still have to go, because I need a government degree to get a proper job.”
Mr. Sang strolls around the theology institute’s small campus in a checkered green longyi, a traditional Burmese skirt for men. The campus is a few miles away from the notorious Insein Prison, where he was once behind bars. A former lawyer, Mr. Sang spent two years there during the 1970s, after helping to write a democratic constitution that the government rejected. Several hundred political prisoners -- some of whom are professors -- are still held there.
Anything but the Government
Mr. Sang points to a four-story building, scheduled for completion this month that will house most of the theology institute’s undergraduate program, which prepares students to enter the secular work force. The program was created last year, in response to the education crisis, says Mr. Sang. In the new program’s first year, more than 500 students applied for 150 spots.
Open to students regardless of their religion, the program is intended to educate them in the hope that they will join nongovernmental organizations, do volunteer work, or go into teaching -- “anything but go into the government,” says Mr. Sang. The first-year class has one Buddhist and one Muslim student among the Christians, but Mr. Sang hopes to encourage more non-Christians to enroll.
The undergraduates must take a liberal-arts curriculum of English, humanities, science, and social-science courses; the remaining one-fifth of classes involves religious studies. The most popular majors are English and business.
The institute expects to have 600 students in the undergraduate program when it reaches full capacity in two years, and has received support from the American Baptist Church and Mr. Soros’s Open Society Institute. But most of the program’s budget is paid for out of tuition, which is about $25 per year. Scholarships are available.
Several of the institute’s administrators and professors chose to return to Myanmar after receiving overseas degrees, including Mr. Sang; Saw Pawlu, dean of students, who received a master’s degree at a Malaysian university; and Anna Maya Saya Pa, the institute’s principal, who received a Ph.D. in religion at Princeton University.
The program’s biggest difficulty is finding qualified teachers, Mr. Sang says. Because many instructors have other day jobs, classes are held on afternoons and weekends. Some of the instructors are professors from local universities, whom the institute pays about $10 a month -- the equivalent of their university salary -- for a few hours of teaching per week. Some students that the institute has trained to become professors have gone overseas for doctorates and have not returned. “They say, ‘I’ll try to come back,’ but they haven’t,” says Mr. Sang, who received a master’s degree from Princeton and could have stayed in the United States to pursue a doctorate.
What kept him from abandoning his country? “It’s very tempting, very tempting,” says Mr. Sang, his face puckering into a sour expression. “Life in Myanmar is about suffering. But it is better to serve the people than to enjoy life.”
http://chronicle.com Section: International Page: A42