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15 ~ I VOL. V. No.4. DECEMBER, 1962 1:;00--------------.---------.----.--.----.------"' VESTES THE AUSTRAUAN UNIVERSITIES' REVIEW LANGUAGE PROBLEMS IN SOUTH-EAST ASIAN UNIVERSITIES T. H. Silcock PROFESSIONALISATION OF FOREIGN STUDENT ADVISERS IN THE UNITED STATES Stewart E. Fraser UNIVERSITIES AND THE TEACHING PROFESSION F. R. Chappell USE AND ABUSE OF EXAMINATIONS Boris Ford JRNAL OF THE FEDERAL COUNCIL OF UNIVERSITY STAFF ASSOCIATIONS OF AUSTRALIA !lCRIPTION: £1 YEARt.Y 5/- PER T!I!lUE. VESTES JOURNAL OF THE FEDERAL COUNCIL OF UNIVERSITY STAFF ASSOCIATIONS OF AUSTRALIA VOL. V. No.4 DECEMBER, 1962 CONTENTS FEATURES: LANGUAGE PROBLEMS IN SOUTH-EAST ASIAN UNIVERSITIES T. H. Silcock 3 THE PROFESSIONALISATION OF FOREIGN STUDENT ADVISERS Stewart E. Fraser 14 UNIVERSITIES AND THE TEACHING PROFESSION F. R. Chapp<1l 20 THE USE AKD ABUSE OF EXAMINATIONS Boris Ford 26 BRITISH UNIVERSITIES NEWSLETTER Our U. K. Corrupontienl 34 A NOTE: AUSTRALIAN UN IVERSITY STUDENT EKROLMENTS, 1959- 1963 R. B. Davis 19 BOOK REVIEWS 39-51 LETTER TO THE EDITOR 52 NOTES AND NEWS 56 FEDERAL COUNCIL: REPORT OF 1962 A.G.M. 58 REPORTS OF N.S.W. STAFF ASSOCIATION 61 CENSURED ADMINISTRATION 64 TASMANIA'S VISITATION AND ACADEMIC TENURE 64 AUSTRALIAN UNIVERSITIES SUPPLEMENT 68 General Editor: Mr. E. L. Wheelwright, University of Sydney Associate Editor: Professor R. H. Thorp, University of Sydney Book Review Editors: Professor P. H. Partridge, Director, Research School of Social Sciences, Australian National University ( U.S.A. and COllada ) .. Dr. Sheila Rowley, School of Economics, Univer­ sity of N.S.W. ( U.K. and Australia). Busi,less MaT/ager: Elaine Mayer, 18 Sofala Avenue, Lane Cove, N.S.W. OB 2055). Vults is a quarterly journal distributed to members of Staff Associations of all Australian Universities. Vestes is also available on subscription. (£1 to Business Manager. Single copy 5/-.) 2 VESTES Worthwhile MELBOURNE books • • • TasDunian Wild Life (Michael Sharland) A beautifully illustrated guide to the animals and snakes of Tasmania. Cloth 25/ -; Pap" 15/- A History of Australia (C. M . H. Clark) Volume I of Professor Clark's masterly history takes the story from the earliest times to the Age of Macquaric. (Second impression now available.) 57/ 6 The Sydney Scene (Birch and Macmillan) The Sydney story from the founding to today. told by contemporaries. 47/ 6 (Also available-the Companion Volume-The Melbourne Scene. 42/ - ) IlDmigration: Control or Colour Bar? A sane and rc::asoned statement of the case for change in Australia's immigration laws. 12/ 6 The SiDlple Fleece (ed. Alan Barnard) This book is a veritable encyclopaedia of the Australian wool industry-a MUST for any private library. 63/ - Melbourne Studies in Education 1960-61 (ed. E . L. French ) The three earlier volumes have established this scries as required reading for all who are concerned with education. This volumc, more than twice as big as the preceding one, contains eleven essays by noted authorities. 47/ 6 Melbourne University Press Parkville, N .2, Victoria, Australia London and New rork: Cambridge University Press Publishers Booksellers Printers 3 LANGUAGE PROBLEMS IN SOUTH-EAST ASIAN UNIVERSITIESt By T. H. SILCOCK* NY foreigner involved in the academic life of Southeast Asia A must often be puzzled at human attitudes to language. Before the war, academic teaching in the area was conducted in four lan­ guages, English, French, Dutch and Thai. Pali, Arabic and Latin were used for religious instruction, and there was some special lan­ guage teaching. Now there arc eight languages of academic instruc­ tion. Dutch has disappeared, though there is probably more technical literature in Dutch about South-east Asia than in any other language. Burmese, Khmer, Vietnamese, Chinese and Malay have been added. In nonc of these, except Chinese, is there enough technical material on most modern university subjects to keep an intelligent undergra­ duate occupied for a year. The very few university teachers available are mostly somewhat halting in these additional languages. No good technical periodical literature is yet produced in any of them. The politicians who have introduced these ch?ilges are themselves nearly all educated in "Vestern language" from which they have absorbed many of their political ideas. T~.ey know that the use of the Southeast Asian languages wi!!, for many years, handicap their peoples, by depriving them of easy access to useful knowledge. Yet they arc not, like the advocates of Welsh or Gaelic teaching, unworldly visionaries, setting the survival of a national poetry above all material considerations. Their dreams are of machines and national income statistics, housing, and perhaps above all, technical education. In every university, worried professors, conscious of their nations' great difficulties in supplying enough new scientists are alarmed at the students' inadequate knowledge of any language with a technical literature. They wonder whether patriotism really does oblige them to create new technical terms for phenomena which both they and their students could explain much better in a foreign language. Though themselves ardent nationalists, they are forced to try to explain to politicians why certain things cannot be done. No material, perhaps, is available in Vietnamese; or no one would be competent to make a Burmese translation of that particular text. Subconsciously they prob­ ably realize that the politicians know this. But the politicians' survival, in competition with others even less well-informed, depends on their making these demands. They must find someone with some prestige, ffhis article is an adaptation of part of a rorthcoming book on Uni.,asitu, in $own·East .Asia. - Emeritus Profeqor of Economic. or the University of ~lalaya, Vi.itinlj: Fellow in the School of Pacific Studiel, AUltraiian Nal.ional Unintsity. 4 VESTES to produce the training and be made a temporary scapegoat. No one responsible to the electorate dares to admit the truth about the lan­ guage issue, or even to appear lukewarm in forcing the popular myth on those whom they know to be telling the truth. Language is not a rational matter. An electorate exists because its members are citizens of a nation. This nation must, to survive, be organized as a nation. Power comes to those who appeal to the forces that make it a nation. So the political situation creates the language issue. Many respond with little to the demand for a national language, but at best they stand aside from the struggle for power; at worst they are cast for the role of traitor in the tragedy of nation-building. Modern nationalism, however, is no mere functionless insanity. It is precisely because they believe that their people's economic condi­ tion results from their former lack of a government of their own, that most educated Southeast Asians consider it urgent to make themselves nations. For only as nations can they govern themselves, without falling under foreign rule. A national language is an important means of fostering a national identity. Ifwe do not understand this we can· not credit the sanity of those who want to train J avanese chemists and engineers through the medium of Malay, a language native neither to thcJavanesc nor to a majority of the people of Indonesia and without a technical vocabulary or literature in these subjects. Malay is Indo· nesia's national language; and no plan of teaching chemistry in English can be tolerated except as a stage on the way to teaching it in Malay. As for teaching in Dutch, which most teachers still speak in their homes, and many students know at least as well as they know Malay, this is wholly impossible even as a technical expedient during a critical shortage of chemists, in spite of the good technical literature in Dutch. A stranger might suppose that the hatred of everything Dutch was so passionate and widespread that teachers' and students' feelings would be outraged. But this also is an oversimplification. The passion is real at certain levels, and hence a useful weapon of nationalism. No one would dare justify teaching in Dutch. Sooner or later he would be passionately attacked politically; in the Indonesian context any vigorous reply would be treachery to the nation; a scapegoat would have to be found, and the person responsible would lose his job. We should not impute lack of courage to university teachers who compromise over la nguage. vVithout themselves hating the western languages, they mostly share the desire for a strong national identity and understand the pattern of competition among politicians. The progress of their countries requires compromise bctween the needs of technical progress, for which they are responsible, a nd those of politi· cally viable universities for which they are also responsible. In some situations the universities fi ght a successful rearguard action against unrealistic haste in linguistic changes. But such successes normally depend on giving active help in other ways to national language and sentiment. The real conflict may be less than the apparent one. National con­ sciousness in most of these countries need not involve a reaction against LANG UAGE PROBLEMS IN SOUTH-EAST ASIAN UNIVERSITIES 5 the main media of international scientific communication. Only in Burma has this reaction gone so far that most university students lack even a reading knowledge of any language with a technical literature. For such conflict as there is, the colonial powers are in part to blame. Their governments, except the American Government in the Philip­ pines,l can all be accused of parsimony and indifference. Metropoli­ tan governments, before the Second World War, failed to make education in the colonies the instrument of aggressive economic and social development which it had become at home. Colonial govern­ ments themselves, responsible not to a local electorate, but to the metropolitan government, could hardly be expected to be very radical in educational policies.

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