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We are excited to start a new series on the Cocoon entitled The Cocoon Goes Global, where we will host guest posts by philosophers who work in countries that are outside of the anglophone western world. We will feature philosophers who work in places such as Germany, China, Singapore, South Korea, Colombia, Chile, Belgium, Turkey, and much more. These posts will give you a sense of what's it like to work in these countries, and also sketch the job market. We will focus on people who work in academic posts (but they don't need to be tenure track positions). If you fit these criteria and would like to be featured, please let us know! Here is our first installment.
Being an academic philosopher in Indonesia, by Tiddy Smith, University of Indonesia.
In 2017, I completed my PhD at the University of Otago. That’s probably when everything started to unravel. Having lived a blissful life of steady study and a paycheck, I was plunged into the abyss, the nightmare, the academic purgatory known as the Real World. I applied for well over a hundred academic positions, and received three interviews, only one of which went particularly well. After this particular rejection, I asked the interviewer how I could have performed better, he simply responded: “You couldn’t have. Someone else just was better.” I had published in premier journals and had a book in press. Yet everyone else seemed to have published in better venues, with a couple of books under their belt, and were probably booked for the next series of John Locke lectures. I decided, at this point, to change tack.
Rewind the clock a decade. I lived in Jakarta. I taught English as a foreign language to rich kids at a private school. During my time there, I became semi-conversational in Bahasa Indonesia, and familiar with all the local hazards (floods, fires, and terrible beasties called “tomcats”. Trust me, google it). Since that time, I have always had a soft spot for Indonesia. I love the food. I love the people. I love the language. It contains some of the most paradisiacal islands of our solar system, and probably the next one over too. After my hundred and somethingth rejection, I began to investigate whether Indonesian universities would be interested in my application. After a year of negotiations, some aspects of which are still in progress, I am now employed as an adjunct professor of philosophy at the University of Indonesia (roughly speaking, this is equal to an adjunct assistant professor position, in US terms).
Indonesia is home to 265 million people, of which 150 million live on the island of Java. The country claims around 4,000 higher education institutions, though most of these are of undeniably poor quality in terms of teaching and research (the government’s own assessment states that 77% of these institutions are substandard). Around 120 of these institutions are state universities, and there are many more private universities. Of these, three universities stand out as both prestigious and productive in research and teaching. These three are the University of Indonesia (Universitas Indonesia, Depok), Gadjah Mada University (Universitas Gadjah Mada, Yogyakarta), and the Bandung Institute of Technology (Institut Teknologi Bandung, Bandung). The University of Indonesia excels in Law and Medicine. Gadjah Mada excels in humanities and social science, and the Bandung Institute of Technology excels in Engineering and Business. All three universities feature in the latest QS World University rankings, and are ranked 296, 320, and 331 respectively.
Until 2018, foreign lecturers could not be directly employed by these universities as permanent members of academic staff. However, law changes by president Joko Widodo (affectionately known as “Jokowi”) have opened the doors for foreign lecturers to enter the academic job market for the first time. Unfortunately, this law change has not been much exploited by the universities in question. Few, if any, have so much as advertised academic vacancies online or in international venues. Part of the reason for this is that the question of just how these institutions should go about employing foreign staff remains a bureaucratic mystery. The visa process is not only complex, but ever-changing, and still more changes are anticipated in the wake of Jokowi’s law change. There is talk of the introduction of a new kind of academic visa, but this seems only to underline the uncertainty and difficulty of the existing process. The problem is also exacerbated by an existing practice within the universities to employ “by appointment”, in a way which can be prone to institutional nepotism. Without any reform to the employment process, the chances are slim that a great influx of foreign lecturers will soon come to the country. In any case, intrepid candidates who are interested in the possibility of employment at an Indonesian university would be most sensible to make themselves known to their department of interest directly. That is what I did.
Now, one obvious impediment to finding employment at an Indonesian university is the fact that, typically, universities use Bahasa Indonesia as the language of instruction. Within the more prestigious institutions, English is the language of choice for a range of courses taught in cooperation with international partner universities. But philosophy remains a discipline that is taught almost exclusively in Bahasa Indonesia. This presents some challenges. First of all, assigned readings for students are often in English, and so only a handful of students confident with the English language end up venturing into the literature to any deep extent. Students, therefore, focus primarily on class discussions, the notes of their lecturers, and the few available readings from Indonesian or translated texts. For this reason also, prospective lecturers would be wise to familiarize themselves with the language before seeking employment. This may sound something of an extreme demand, but the good news is that Bahasa Indonesia is a fairly simple language to learn the basics quickly. It is written in Roman script, has few noun declensions, and verbs are not inflected for person, number or tense. And while English is not the main language of instruction in the classroom, most students have a good enough grasp of English to understand content taught in a mixture of both languages.
The students pursuing a degree in philosophy are tangibly passionate about the subject. Often, students arrive for their first university philosophy classes having already familiarized themselves with a little of the thought of some of the key thinkers in the history of philosophy. Students love to chat after class about their own ideas, projects and interests, particularly on topics relating to democracy, feminism, and environmental ethics. There is a strong feeling, among many students, that a dearth of philosophical knowledge is to blame for the country’s many and varied problems, ranging from corruption to pollution to human rights violations. “This country needs more thinkers and less workers,” is a phrase I have heard more than once from the student body. There is, I believe, a certain romanticism at play here. The golden era of medieval Hindu-Buddhist civilization, manifest in marvels such as the temples of Borobudur and Prambanan, was a time in which intellectual traditions, mediated by Sanskrit as a lingua franca, were traded and debated across an extensive territory. There is a sentiment that the great civilization which might have flourished got lost somewhere along the way.
Some general notes about working in Indonesia: Salaries remain extremely low by international standards. For example, even though my own salary is substantially higher than the average rate in Indonesia, I now earn quite a bit less than a full-time, minimum wage worker in my home country of New Zealand. Of course, this is offset in part by the low cost of living, but makes the servicing of student loan debt and other obligations back home an uphill struggle. Research support in the form of university research grants is available, but minimal within the humanities. However, most lecturers also have attractive publication bonuses available to them. The libraries of the larger universities are rich with historical Indonesian archives and access to the various academic electronic databases is granted to students and academic staff. Most staff work on thoroughly practical problems, and interdisciplinary research projects range across philosophy/technology studies, philosophy/economics, and philosophy/religious studies. Research in pure or first philosophy is somewhat lacking.
Lastly, it is crucial to appreciate the political context in Indonesia and how it influences the shape of philosophy in the university. The independent Indonesian state was founded in 1945 as a religiously pluralistic nation. The country’s constitution is founded on the Pancasila, or five principles, the first of which is a declared commitment to belief in a god. All citizens must for legal purposes identify as belonging to one of the six state-recognized religions: Islam, Protestantism, Catholicism, Hinduism, Buddhism, or Confucianism. Having said that, the country is overwhelmingly Muslim, with a growing proportion of fundamentalists and conservatives, who unfailingly have lofty political ambitions. There exist blasphemy laws which are enforced, and which tend to serve as a means of social control over both the non-muslim minority and political dissidents. Indeed, just last year, one former Universitas Indonesia philosophy lecturer, Rocky Gerung, was interrogated by police on suspicion of blasphemy after referring to religious scripture as “fictive”. In Gerung’s sense of the term, this referred to the sense in which religious scripture, particularly prophecy, seeks to imagine or predict future events, whether or not such events indeed come to pass. He was eventually released from a lengthy interrogation, and the case has since been discontinued. Nevertheless, there are endless examples to be found of political repression of speech deemed seditious to the government or inflammatory to Islam. Thus, any philosopher in any Indonesian university is aware of the sensitivity of their work, and the fine line that they must tread. Most take it as imperative to change the widespread perception among the general public that philosophy is a discipline whose sole purpose is to spread atheism and political dissent. This perception is slowly changing for the better. Indeed, Rocky Gerung has become something of a cult hero in the aftermath of his troubles, and now regularly appears as a panelist and guest on several popular political TV talk shows.
Despite these cautions, there is great potential in Indonesia for further progress in the humanities, and particularly in philosophy. With the government progressively opening the academic market to foreign employees, and with rising youth interest in matters of philosophy, politics, and social justice, there is reason to be optimistic about the future of philosophy in Indonesia. Greater liberalization of employment law in the academic sphere is desperately needed, and a rise in the salary rate for all academic staff is absolutely essential, both to stop the “brain drain” of Indonesian scholars overseas, as well as to attract foreign staff. There are, in addition, serious bureaucratic problems facing researchers who seek to undertake projects in Indonesia in collaboration with local universities. With some real change on these fronts, Indonesian universities could be the beneficiaries of rapid increases in the quality of their teaching and research. There is certainly a ways to go, but watch this space.
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