TRYING HARD TO GET SMART

We all want to be Clever Dicks – right?                  

It would be funny if it wasn’t such a floundering for relevance

Indonesian universities are staging ‘international conferences’ headlined by overseas academics told to use English even when fluent in Indonesian.  Often they’re addressing a largely bewildered audience.

It’s the response by some campus administrators to President Joko Widodo’s demands that tertiary educators lift their game and make Indonesia a clever country.

That scene has been witnessed by this writer and others, including Dr Nadirsyah Hosen, a senior lecturer in law at Australia’s Monash University. 

Also known as Gus Nadir, the expert on Indonesian and Sharia law told the biennial Indonesian Council Open Conference (ICOC) at the Australian National University (ANU) he’d been asked to present a particular paper on an Indonesian campus.  However when he delivered he found another document had been downloaded “because it was more interesting.”

“It was clear few could understand what I was saying in English,” he said.   “Later when I used Indonesian they came alive.”

Just nine Indonesian universities have made it into the 2020 Quacquarelli Symonds (QS) list of the world’s top 1,000 tertiary institutions. There are about 4,500 varsities in the country.  The government reckons 77 per cent are sub standard; hence the call for help from abroad.

The ICOC organizers said they wanted the two-day biennial event to finish with a message of hope. Good shot, but a target hard to hit.

The bullseyes include growing confidence among Indonesians in conducting research into their country’s history, a move which started following the 1998 Revolution.  

In the past the most respected analyses were by foreigners and published in English.  This was largely the result of crackdowns by the Soeharto administration on the media and intimidation of scholars, particularly those working in the social sciences.  

Another hit:  Last year the President announced opportunities for non-Indonesian lecturers to apply for permanent positions in what used to be a no-go zone. 

Now the fails: This year separate laws were announced worrying academics considering work in Indonesia; these include criminal charges against researchers found guilty of violating visa regulations.

Any outsider who gathers and processes information without a permit could face a fine of Rp 4 billion (US $276,000) and be banned for five years.  The application system is reputed to be onerous; this could tempt some to use social-cultural or visitor visas to conduct short-term fieldwork.

The first to take the risk and get charged would chill the President’s ambitions to promote his nation as a society open for scholarship.

The Indonesian Sciences Academy’s secretary general Chairil Abdini was reported as saying the term ‘academic freedom’ included the right to express facts even though these could “be unpleasant” for political or social groups.

Not that too many Aussie lecturers will be masquerading as tourists when fronting  Bali’s Ngurah Rai immigration desks because the species needs protection, not prosecution.

The problem is a downslide in Indonesian studies.  Professor David Hill, who initiated the non-profit Australian Consortium for 'In-Country' Indonesian Studies (ACICIS) 25-years ago, produced figures showing “a very significant decline in the study of Indonesian culture and language.”

Reasons behind the tumble include the 2002 Bali bombing which killed 202 including 38 Indonesians and 88 Australians.  This triggered Australian government travel warnings which made it difficult to get affordable insurance.  

More recently the huge 2016 protests against Jakarta Governor Basuki Tjahaja Purnama appear to have damaged the nation’s ‘tolerant Islam’ image on the world stage.  

The Christian ethnic Chinese known as Ahok was charged with blasphemy and spent two years in jail.  The case was widely covered in the Australian media.  Proposed ‘bonk bans’ targeting unmarried couples and lese majesty laws have also filled many columns.

Hill and other speakers said the last decades of the 20^th century were the “golden years of student interest in Indonesia.”  It was hoped graduates would create strong professional contacts with Indonesians which would help better relationships between the countries.

At the same time Indonesians studying at Australian universities would return t
o the Republic, joining government and business, and develop lasting ties with their counterparts outside the archipelago.

Some of these benefits are in place, but as conference convener Dr Ed Aspinall of the ANU told the 150 ICOC participants that undergraduate absorption in  the neighbors has become “broader, but shallower”. 

The Australian government’s New Colombo Plan offers a few long-term scholarship grants and thousands of short ‘mobility grants’.  The latter give young people a touch-and-go taste of cultures across Asia in the hope that serious studies might follow.

According to the Australian Association for Research in Education, Australia doesn’t have a national languages policy: ‘Its absence testifies silently to an English-speaking monolingual mindset that continues to undermine support for language education’. 

The assumption that the Great South Land has a mortgage on Indonesian Studies was given a sudden shake by Associate Professor Dr Pan Yue from the School of International Relations at Jinan University’s Academy of Overseas Chinese Studies.

She said about a thousand students across 24 unis in China were currently studying Indonesian with about 4,000 graduates from past years.  Before 2005 only five campuses offered Indonesian majors.

She later told The Jakarta Post: “Indonesian education in China is experiencing a blowout.

“Training methods and direction are increasingly rich, and the field of employment of students is also more and more extensive …  students of Indonesian are choosing to work in Indonesia after graduation.”

According to the Australian Association for Research in Education. Australia doesn’t have a national languages policy: ‘Its absence testifies silently to an English-speaking monolingual mindset that continues to undermine support for language education’.

The discovery that Beijing is moving into territory once considered Australian might be the tectonic jolt needed to get Canberra to hear the alarms.  If nothing changes the Chinese graduates will have the edge in trade negotiations; they’ll be building links with NGOs, business, public servants, universities and individuals.

These are the ambitions long articulated by Australian academics.

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 Firsat published in The Jakarta Post 7 January 2020