Since its launch in 2020, the government’s national education breakthrough “Merdeka Belajar, Kampus Merdeka” has shaken formal education practices, especially at universities. The program has disrupted the conventional purposes of learning and learning materials and changed the direction of pedagogy.
Students and lecturers are pushed to go beyond study programs and outside the campus. The centers of learning for students who have been admitted to universities after graduating senior high school are no longer just the campuses of higher education institutions, but also ministries, government institutions and regional state agencies, as they are encouraged to take long-term internships.
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Places of internship also include village and subdistrict offices, printers, publishers, companies, factories, banks and financial institutions, hotels, start-ups, small and medium enterprises, nongovernmental organizations, and social as well as religious organizations.
With this broad internship network program, the “Merdeka Belajar, Kampus Merdeka” (independent learning, free campus) program, or simply Kampus Merdeka (independent campus), is expected to empower the higher education curriculum. It has revolutionized the old model of university teaching and learning programs, which were often criticized as being highly theoretical, too textbook-based and less accommodating of gaining experience in the field.
Paradigm shock
However, when applied in practice, the Independent Campus program appears to be creating confusion and ambivalence.
Instead of encouraging innovative learning that was expected through a "freer space", the policy has disrupted the education paradigm. It has uprooted the typical pedagogical mission of higher education institutions and replaced the orientation of academic education with heavy vocational content. Under the Independent Campus scheme, the pedagogical concept of "learning" has been practically transformed into "work training" in a real work environment.
Field programs such as Bangun Kualitas Manusia Indonesia (Bangkit), or Build Quality Indonesian Humans, and the Certified Independent Internship and Study (MSIB) launched by the Education, Culture, Research and Technology Ministry (Kompas, 7/1/2023) are clearly indicative of an orientation toward the acquisition of applied skills, rather than strengthening the capacity of students to think scientifically.
When applied in practice, the Independent Campus program appears to be creating confusion and ambivalence.
These programs have changed the meaning of "higher education" to simply "work training" and "apprenticeship".
The Independent Campus scheme also allows students to take courses in study programs other than theirs, which is said to develop interdisciplinary insights.
The policy has infringed the ontological boundaries of distinguished expertise in a field of study. It creates chaos in academic insights, given the possibility that a student of literature, for example, is allowed to take medical or mechanical engineering courses. The absence of direction in shifting between study programs makes this interdisciplinary study scheme absurd.
University administrators feel forced to fulfill the Key Performance Indicators (IKU), determined solely by the Directorate General of Higher Education (Dikti). The eight-point IKU is contrary to the spirit of autonomy in higher education. The IKU measures academic performance based on, for example, the number of a lecturer’s publications that are indexed, a university’s capacity to accept foreign students and lecturers, and the number of fresh graduates absorbed in the labor market.
The imposition of the IKU has taken up all the managerial resources of higher education institutions. As a result, university administrators have lost capacity in creating academic innovations based on their institution’s mission and specific needs, as mandated in their statutes and strategic plans.
As the demanding indicators are uniform, the IKU ignores the unique mission and needs of each university. The indicators’ uniformity eliminates the concept of higher education as a process of honing scientific rationality and social sensitivity.
LPTKs and research universities
Institutionally, the biggest shock from the Independent Campus policy has come from "research universities" and higher education institutions that have been categorized as teacher training institutes (LPTKs).
The obligatory pragmatism of the Independent Campus policy leaves research universities with no option but to adopt the highly vocational model of academic operations. The phrases "go downstream" and "applied technology readiness (TKT)" are commonly used as benchmarks to measure the feasibility of a research plan and whether or not the research is worth funding. An example of this scheme is the Kedaireka equal funding program (Kompas, 6/1/2023).
The pragmatic and vocational bent of the Independent Campus program fundamentally rules out research in the general sciences and the traditional field of humanities and social sciences. Among them are linguistics, history, philosophy, archeology, and local cultural studies, such as Javanese literature. Government funding has been thematically prioritized in the last five years for the fields of green energy, blue energy and climate change.
These priorities have distanced the spirit of research universities from the basic sciences and humanities and social sciences.
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Meanwhile, the higher education institutions classified as teacher training institutions are faced with a dilemma over the competencies required for educators. While these LPTKs were established to educate prospective teachers, the Education Practitioner Scheme under the Independent Campus program allows anyone with certain work experiences to become a teacher or lecturer. The government even grants honorary professorships to those outside the academic profession.
With the Education Practitioner Scheme, the LPTKs have been thrown into an uncertain situation as to whether a special teaching program for prospective teachers is still needed. If anyone can have the authority to teach based solely on their work experience without the need to be certified, the Directorate General of Higher Education has violated the law on teachers and lecturers by imposing the Education Practitioner Scheme.
The complexity of these problems shows that the Independent Campus program has shocked and derailed the nation’s education practices. This policy must therefore be thoroughly evaluated. The “freedom to learn” principle must be reinstated in its essence, which is the spirit of creativity and curiosity about learning new things, instead of adding bureaucratic layers through the “go vocational” higher education scheme.
It seems that policymakers need to study education philosophy and the social mission of Indonesia’s higher education institutions, which is to serve the community.
Agus Suwignyo, Pedagogue and historian, Gadjah Mada University
This article was translated by Musthofid.
