The sprawling 1000-plus hectare campus of Suranaree Institute of Technology appears through the haze of a hot season day. That's the Technopolis in the foreground. The faculty office building sits midway up the road to the right with the classroom complex behind it. The modern library (with tower) is in the middle of the picture. |
Click here to read about student life. |
Under the plan, the government would continue to support the newly-autonomous universities financially, but the institutions themselves would have full control over how the budget is spent. At the same time the government would maintain some oversight capabilities, auditing university expenditures, authorising their budgets, and having the final say on a limited set of policy matters through the Ministry of University Affairs (MUA).
It sounds like a reasonably good deal, but there has been enough resistance to throw the government timetable seriously out of whack. It now looks certain that a significant number of Thailand’s 24 state universities will not opt out of the bureaucratic system by the end of this year as planned. Concerns centre over doubts about the government’s long-term commitment to financial support, job security, tuition fees and the commercialisation of higher education as universities seek additional sources of revenue.
There is one state university, however, that is remarkably free of such concerns. Suranaree University of Technology in Nakhon Ratchasima has actually been outside the civil service system since the day it was established in 1990. To find out how it has fared, the Learning Post recently paid a visit.
An insider’s perspective
 Dr Kasem Prabriputaloong |
Few people know the ins and outs of university autonomy better than Suranaree’s Vice Rector for Academic Affairs Dr Kasem Prabriputaloong. Involved with the university since the earliest planning phase, he has an intimate knowledge of what it takes to succeed.
According to Dr Kasem, Suranaree was established as a university of technology during the boom years to help alleviate a serious shortage of engineers and technologists. Given an even more severe dearth of teachers in this area, he says "it would have been almost impossible to be in the civil service and try to recruit highly qualified staff."
With autonomy, however, it was possible for the university to adopt a competitive salary scale. This, together with the modern facilities it was able to offer potential recruits, says Dr Kasem, Suranaree was quickly able to assemble a faculty that was the envy of many well-established universities. Today, almost 70 percent of the teaching staff hold PhD’s with the remainder holding masters degrees, easily one of the best ratios of any university in Thailand.
The new system was not without challenges for the administrators, however. If the concept of autonomy causes confusion today, it was even less well understood when Suranaree was established in 1990.
"When we became the first autononous university," says Dr Kasem, "there was a lot of misunderstanding. The people in the budget bureau, for example, said that it means that you have to support yourself.
"I said that’s silly. We’re not a private university. A lot of people said that when you become autonomous, you change from state university to private university. That’s a different thing.
"Autonomy means freedom in administrative and curricular decisions, but financially when you’re still a state university, you have to be supported by the government. How much the government is going to support is the government’s policy, but if the government does not support at all that means that the students have to support it because the income for the university comes mainly from tuition fees."
Efficiency
Even if government leaders find Dr Kasem’s arguments totally persuasive, the present economic climate has put a severe crimp in the government’s ability to provide adequate funding. Scarce finances are the reality and it is in this environment, says Dr Kasem, that autonomous universities have significant advantages.
"By being autonomous," he says of Suranaree, "we try to utilise all of the resources very efficiently. Ours is a very well planned university from the beginning.
Probably the best example of what he means is the degree to which the university has centralised its resources. Gone are the departmental "empires" that are common to older universities. All faculties share a single office complex and their classes meet in a common classroom complex as well. A single modern library serves the whole campus.
As a result, the university has been able to keep its building and equipment costs low and its non-teaching support staff to a minimum. Even the teaching staff, says Dr Kasem, is unusually low for the size of its enrollment.
"According to the civil service system," he says, "we should have about 600 staff."
In fact, he says, "we employ only 200, only a third according to what it should be and what is normally employed at other state universities. So if we pay double the salary, it still costs less."
But, he continues, "because we pay more, we have to work harder as well." Teaching loads are high, he admits, but by internationally-accepted standards, "it’s not excessive. We have the figures," he says, speaking as a true administrator.
Limited potential
It is apparent from the statements of government policy makers, both past and present, the government is hoping the state universities will increasingly find innovative ways to generate their own revenue. According to Dr Kasem, however, the potential for doing this is limited.
Donations, for example, a lucrative source of revenue for many universities abroad, seldom go beyond funds for scholarships in Thailand. Research grants are a source of income, but, as the term implies, they are intended to support research. University professors can act as consultants to industry, but their primary job must be to teach and carry out research.
For Suranaree, he says, there is some potential in the university’s science park, or Technopolis, located on the site of the 1995 Worldtech exhibition, but that is still some time in the future. "The Technopolis is a dream," says Dr Kasem, "but we haven’t been able to realise it, because it is almost impossible for a newly-set-up university to have enough experts to promote the research and development."
Maximum flexibility
 Dr Songphorn Tajaroensuk |
Dean of the Faculty of Social Technology, Dr Songphorn Tajaroensuk clearly shares Dr Kasem’s enthusiasm for autonomy. A big plus on the academic side, she says, is the university’s freedom in setting up new programmes.
"Usually in other universities, before they want to offer new programmes at the Bachelor’s or Master’s Degree level, they have to ask for permission from the MUA. But for us, our university council has the authority. We then submit copies to the MUA for final approval." Suranaree, she says, has used this freedom aggressively, opening 20 masters level programmes and 19 doctoral programmes in its first decade of existence.
The higher salary scale that comes with autonomy has obvious benefits in the hiring process, she says. "We can be very careful in terms of recruitment, very selective."
What if they get it wrong? Employees can be dismissed for consistently substandard performance, she explains, a process that is extremely difficult and cumbersome in the civil service system.
Promotion, too, is performance based, says Dr Songporn. The teaching staff is evaluated each term – three times a year under the trimester system – by both students and their immediate superiors. Teachers also undergo periodic evaluations by subject matter experts.
In addition, she says, at the end of each trimester there is an all-university evaluation meeting conducted by the Academic Services Centre. The Centre presents statistical information about individual teachers’ performances as well as the performance of the university as a whole.
"Everyone attends," she says, "Everybody can talk and express their ideas. I think by now it has become a tradition."
Coping with the information explosion
Even in the best of times, setting up a library system is one of a new university’s most daunting tasks. This is particularly true for a university with an ambitious graduate programme in technical fields. Faculty and student demands go far beyond traditional books and periodicals to the state-of-the art on-line resources that have been spawned by the information revolution.
 Dr Narumol Ruksasuk (right) consults with the library staff about on-line inter-library communications. |
These are clearly not the best of times. Library costs are enormous and budgets are tight. The solution says Dr Narumol Ruksasuk of the information technology department, is to forgo the traditional ‘just in case’ approach where the library maintains vast and diverse collections of material to meet any possible request.
Instead, Suranaree has adopted a ‘just in time’ approach in which the library commits itself to fullfiling actual requests as expeditiously as possible. This still requires a large store of on-site material, but not nearly as large as it would be with a "just in case system."
In fact, Suranaree’s text resources are near the minimum levels set by the MUA. The library’s book collection is only around 60,000 volumes, for example. On the plus side, as a new university, the collection is more up to date than that found in libraries of many older universities.
One of the keys to the ‘just in time’ system is on-line linkage with other academic libraries. The Suranaree library, for example, makes extensive use of the Chulalongkorn-based Journalink through which librarians can quickly identify where a requested technical article might be obtained within the Thai university system. Once the article is located, the interlibrary loan system comes into play. The article is copied and sent by mail, fax or, increasingly, in a digital format through e-mail.
Dr Narumol also says Suranaree is one of the leaders in a movement to have regional universities coordinate their purchasing of journals and periodicals. A recent study revealed that universities could save up to 30 million baht a year by dividing up the purchases among them and making more extensive use of interlibrary loans. Member universities might realise similar savings, she says, by subscribing to on-line databases as a library consortium rather than as individual entities.
The vast majority of the subscriptions are for English language materials which must be purchased from abroad. But what about locally-produced material? Like other Thai universities, Suranaree is working hard to build up its collection. All dissertations produced at the university, for example, are now kept on-line in a digital format. In addition, lectures in the universities large lecture halls are video-taped and converted to a digital format for easy on-line access from the library or even in student dorms.
Library Director Dr. Prapvadee Suebsonthi would dearly love to see a concerted effort to develop more local-produced information content. "There is a weakness in our educational system," she says, "in which we import expensive knowledge from abroad, but we do not develop our own knowledge."
The solution, she says, "depends heavily on our teachers. They must produce knowledge. They must produce material. It may be based on knowledge obtained from abroad or from their own research." She even envisions a day when research from Thailand could be sold abroad.
terryfrd@ksc15.th.com |
