“Creating New Universities amidst Local Interests and National
Confusion in Post-Panchayat Nepal”

Date and time: 29th September 2015, 14:00-17:00
Place: Room AA447, 4th Floor, Research Bldg No.2, Yoshida Main Campus, Kyoto University

Speaker:
Pratyoush Onta,
Martin Chautari, Kathmandu, Nepal (14:00-15:00)

Discussants:
Yuki Ohara, Tokyo University (15:00-15:30)
Keshav Lal Maharjan, Hiroshima University (15:30-16:00)

Open Discussion (16:00-17:00)

Moderator:
Tatsuro Fujikura, Department of South Asia and Indian Ocean Studies,
Graduate School of Asian and African Area Studies, Kyoto University

Abstract:
For about 30 years, higher education reform agendas in Nepal have
revolved around two main themes. The first of them is the idea of
‘rightsizing’ of the country’s oldest university, Tribhuvan University
(TU, est. 1959), by severing parts of its constituting colleges to
form the seed infrastructure of so-called ‘regional’ universities. The
second is the execution of the multiple university idea whereby eight
new universities have been opened under various pretexts and several
more are said to be in the pipeline. As of now, both of these reform
agendas have not really succeeded. To the contrary, this paper
suggests that their execution pathways have had debilitating
consequences for Nepal’s public universities and the entire higher
education system. As a result, all of the new public universities have
thus far failed to grow as vibrant institutions and Nepal’s higher
education landscape is still overwhelmingly dominated by TU (both in
terms of size and character), an institution many insiders consider to
be almost beyond reform. This paper identifies the interplay between
local interests and national confusion as being at the crux of the
failure of universities in contemporary Nepal. The analysis presented
in this paper also suggests that when it comes to the subject of
building universities in post-Panchayat Nepal, the main political
parties and their counterparts in civil society have not demonstrated
much commitment to plural imaginations for the Nepali university
landscape.

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Co-sponsored by MEXT-KAKENHI “Reconstitution of Society during
Post-Conflict Period: Case Studies from South Asia”/ South Asia and
Indian Ocean Studies / KINDAS International Seminar
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