Debating the Concept of University in Sri Lankan Space: Uyangoda’s Initiative-by Siri Gamage Source:Thuppahis A recent article published on Groundviews by Professor Jayadeva Uyangoda titled  “Re-inventing the idea of University: Some Reflections and Proposals”  deserves wider attention. Given the fact that the university education sector has not been the subject of critical reviews instituted by the government or universities themselves and there are wide ranging criticisms of the way universities are managed as well as about the university academic culture, the critical assessment of Sri Lanka’s universities and their directions is a timely contribution.    courtesy of Sri Lanka Guardian Contextualising the establishment and decline of universities in Sri Lanka producing graduates with mediocre attributes and skills as well as the move away from liberal humanist foundations to a neoliberal economic management model and ideology are key features of the article. The ideas and assessments included in the article cannot be discarded as another academic piece of writing for ...

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Revisiting Newton Gunasinghe-By Uditha Devapriya Source:Island udakdev1@gmail.com Newton Gunasinghe, easily one of the most brilliant minds of 20th century Sri Lanka, was the country’s first Marxist anthropologist. Gunasinghe’s contributions to the fields of social science and anthropology have not gone unacknowledged. Yet it took some time for his essays and scholarly works to be published: his doctoral thesis on Kandyan social relations came out in 1990, two years after his death, while a collection of his articles followed six years later. The Social Scientists’ Association, of which he had been a leading light and face, undertook the publication of both works. Together with Kumari Jayawardena and a handful of other scholars, he remains an authoritative name for social science students. In his obituary for Gunasinghe, Jayadeva Uyangoda attempted to sum up his contributions to these fields. Uyangoda essentially argues that serious scholarship did not become a high point of local ...

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