A conference on “Sufficiency Economy, Participatory Development, and Universities” will be held in Bangkok on 15 – 16 December 2007. According to the conference blurb:
Outside academia, it is interesting to observe the resurgence of alternative thinking and practice–an attempt by people at the grassroots level to search for solutions to problems produced by imbalanced development–with the goal of creating sustainable livelihood. Alternative livelihoods practiced by communities around the world speak to the centrality of ideological commitment to the integral goal of sustainability and the security of human and natural ecology. Currently in the Thai context, the King’s Sufficiency Economy exists in harmony and with strong conceptual links to other alternative strands of development thinking and practice. It has become a movement which provides an inspiration for people from all walks of life, from those whose dreams of wealth collapsed during economic crisis a decade ago, to those whose practices of moderation have long been part and parcel of their livelihood. Sufficiency thinking has re-emerged, igniting all sorts of debates, research and social experimentation. In some Thai universities, degree programs in sufficiency economy have begun. University-community partnership in organizing meaningful and relevant education has taken place, with local intellectual playing an active part in the process. Co-designing sufficiency economy curriculum in higher education institutions with collaborative spirit provides an example of how university can embrace participatory paradigm in an effort to reinvent the structure, process, and intervention of higher education so that university becomes a site of direct and active social engagement and a transformative community for learners, teachers, thinkers and actors to co-exist and work side by side towards a sustainable and inclusive global society.
Some more details are available in this PDF file. A great deal of further information is on the conference website. It has a list of the tentative speakers and panelists. If any New Mandala readers are looking to attend, and would like to write a report on this event, then please get in contact with me.
19 responses so far ↓
1 Srithanonchai // Oct 25, 2007 at 2:00 am
Like in the case of the NIDA conference some months ago, sufficiency economy can obviously only be realized in a 5-star hotel. A special feature of Thammasat-organized conferences (such as this one and the Thai studies conference) is their racist admission fee policy.
2 Kulap // Oct 26, 2007 at 10:28 pm
Well, Srithanonchai, if you did a little study, you’d realize:
“sometimes sufficiency for different people is differently defined.”
Read on for more clarity and simplicity:
“Everyone has talked about sufficiency economy. Some have argued that only applying sufficiency economy is not enough but in fact it is enough if they know how to get sufficient. The problem is that they do not know how to be sufficient, not that the theory does not work,” he said.
3 Sidh S. // Oct 30, 2007 at 1:29 pm
Srithanonchai, maybe the two-tiered admission fees could be viewed as an ‘affirmative action’ so the generally lower paid Thai academics can attend and participate. In effect, the generally higher paid (not always I acknowledge especially if from within the region) foriegn academics are subsidizing the locals. I don’t see how the two groups with common interests can effectively meet otherwise. Just look at Thai studies conferences held in Europe or the US and the relatively low attendance from Thailand-based Thai academics. They just can’t afford both the airfares and/or conference fees unless subsidized in some form.
I have attended international conferences hosted in Thailand and this was always the arrangement (between international organizers and Thai host institution) which I had no problems with. I will certainly not meet my Thai colleagues if they were to fork out an equivalent of their monthly salary to attend the conference!
4 Srithanonchai // Oct 30, 2007 at 3:03 pm
Kulap: If you had bothered to look into the threads on the so-called “sufficiency economy” on this blog, then you would know that your points have been discussed extensively. Besides, in your opinion, is it justified under suffciency principles for Thammasat to use a hotel (4-start, I think, not 5) when the university has a large (very sufficient) number of lecture rooms?
5 Srithanonchai // Oct 30, 2007 at 8:36 pm
Sidh: Will the Thai participants really pay themselves for the fees? I rather assume that their respective institutions will carry the burden (boek dai). And where is a provision for regionally-based academics to pay the Thai rate? This concerns both regional scholars and Farang/Japanese with Thai salaries, and the unemployed. Where is the official statement of the organizers that the fee structure has this reason, and will they provide a public financial statement at the end to demonstrate that this subsidization indeed took place? Re the “monthly salary” Thai lecturers would have to spend for paying the fee: The average fee would be around 2,800 baht. I can’t really believe that the 500 baht difference will make a substantial difference for the Thai participants. I also don’t believe that there are many state-employed lecturers these days whose income (official and unofficial) is as low as 2,800 baht. By the way, the upcoming KPI Congress charges a fee of 3,000 baht, and the participants are almost exclusively Thais.
6 Sidh S. // Oct 30, 2007 at 11:01 pm
I paid USD350 for an international conference in Thailand. A Thai academic at a public university with a PhD earns much less than that per month (so 500 baht does make a difference). I think it will be quite hard to find a Farang/Japanese willing to take that kind of salary Srithanonchai (not to say that there aren’t any).
Why make a public statement to that end? It is obvious as it is. And this also depends on where you are coming from. For me it is “affirmative action”, for you it is “racist”… Things are probably much more ideal in Germany. I dare say, here in Australia, full fee paying international students are ’subsidizing’ the local students (at the very least their fees pays the academic staff salaries who also teaches the local students); international students also pay the full price for public transport tickets while locals pay a roughly half price concession… And the thing is most local students in the old public universities are from private schools and are thus from middle to upper income families. I won’t call this practice “racist” though…
7 Lleij Samuel Schwartz // Oct 30, 2007 at 11:25 pm
Re: Sidh>
Your metaphor concerning “affirmative action” would be easier to digest if it weren’t for reports of the absolutely lavish junkets Thai university presidents and trustees manage to secure for themselves.
I don’t agree with Srithanonchai that the primary motivation for the double pricing is racism. For me, I fell the primary motivation is good old-fashioned greed, with racism merely as a modus operandi.
Regardless of what the mens rea actually is, we can all agree that it’s a crime.
8 Srithanonchai // Oct 31, 2007 at 2:04 am
Sidh, it is not at all obvious, as also Lleij points out. Besides, a PhD-level lecturer at a Thai public university earns between 9,000 to 40+thousand [?], depending on his/her years of service, age, “C” (which is in the process of being outphased), and academic rank. In addition, there is health insurance (if you are still in the state system), and pension, and sometimes subsidized housing. I also mentioned that there are unofficial sources of income, such as research projects, committee memberships, weekend, evening, international curricula, consultancies, etc. I repeat, few of the Thai participants will pay the fee themselves, I assume, for which reason their individual incomes do not matter.
Foreign lecturers earn about 34,000 baht (salary, plus housing allowance, has been this way for more than a decade), irrespective of their degree, age, and family status. And they rarely have the extra sources and fringe benefits as their Thai colleagues can draw on. (More details are welcome.)
I do think that the salary of Thai lecturers from their ordinary salaries is far too low, compared to what you can make in the private sector, and I especially hate the subsidization of academic careers by entry-level lecturers through their parents (turning a number of institutions into negative selection mode by employing those who have rich parents; it would be nice if somebody could do an empirical study on the actual situation). But I was talking about a difference of 500 baht. Under the described conditions, it will make a difference to very few people indeed.
Finally, I don’t think that this double pricing is a crime. Rather, it is narrow-minded and petty.
9 jonfernquest // Oct 31, 2007 at 2:08 am
I wouldn’t call it “racist” but in the end, charging anything at all makes the conference of very limited interest and utility.
The Chulalongkorn international conference on Mon history and culture last month was sponsored and speakers even got paid.
Real progress was made and results are going to come from it. A subject that has been ignored til now, will no longer be ignored.
I’m actively using Mon manuscripts now and not just relying on the Burmese version of events. The foremost French scholar sent me his grammar of Mon which I’ve been religiously studying ever since.
Whatever you want to call it, there are a lot of people who aren’t paid that much, Thai and Farang, who are working in **rural Thailand** teaching **non-wealthy people** (I won’t say poor, because there is some modicum of comfort and stability to their lives despite not having very high incomes), who ***could benefit from various conferences and can’t afford those conferences***.
I observed the absence last year of many rural teachers from the annual language teaching conference that was held in Bangkok who were there the year before when it was held in Chiang Mai. The particular university I taught at, no Thai or Farang attended it for the two years that I worked there, except for two of us who crashed the conference, and no we couldn’t afford it on our salaries. I attended and gave a paper on teaching economics in English at a conference in Chiang Rai for free because I was a Chiang Rai teacher, but when I received the invitation this year it was 2000 baht because I was a Bangkok teacher which I can’t afford, there’s another conference at Chula next month, 2000 baht that I can’t afford. The real question is who loses the people holding the conference or the people giving and listening to the papers.
The even bigger issue is that after the conference, there’s **no follow-up**. So you meet for a few days and talk about a topic, you need to follow up on the conference by meeting in special interest groups and this just does not happen.
10 Srithanonchai // Oct 31, 2007 at 2:26 am
Sidh: P.S.: Most of the years that I spent in Germany, although I grew up there, I lived there as a foreigner, with visa and work permit. I did not have to pay anything more than the Germans.
11 Grasshopper // Oct 31, 2007 at 12:29 pm
“Justification of affirmative action programmes depend on the maintenance of the narrative integrity of the histories of collective hurt.” -Upendra Baxi
I think that maybe articulating a foreign fee there is an admittance of economic injustice which can lead to and fester discrimination, but I don’t think that ‘Foreign’ is being specifically racist toward anyone. Wouldn’t Malaysians, Cambodians, Laotians or Burmese have to pay the foreign fee too?
12 jonfernquest // Oct 31, 2007 at 1:20 pm
That’s a good point. At Stanford and the University of California at Santa Cruz I payed for my education as both a research assistant and a teaching assistant. I worked alongside people who were doing the same from Asia, Africa, Thailand. But when I worked in the educational sector in Thailand, I saw experienced westerners treated like trash and systematically cheated, as if they covertly represented some neo-colonialist multinational foreign interest, as opposed to the humble people who wanted to help others that they actually were. In this respect, the Thai educational sector repeatedly shoots itself in the foot, failing through delusionary pride and misplaced nationalism to exploit the country’s biggest comparative advantage, the relatively free flow of people from all countries and walks of life through the country, repeated visits, people who put down roots, who create a more vibrant fusion culture.
Buying milk for my baby niece will always be a higher budget priority than academic conferences!
13 Sidh S. // Oct 31, 2007 at 4:02 pm
Thanks for all the clarification from the ‘locals’!
Admittedly I wasn’t aware of local conferences that invited foriegn or resident foriegn participants. Now that I think of it, I have been to one – and the pricing, if I remember right, was two-tied (as a Thai working abroad, I paid the foriegners’ rate). As it seems a common practice from what I gather here, it may be something decided at policy level. As Srithanonchai and jonfernquest points out, it is quite a complex issue related to many factors (the parents’ subsidy pointed out by Srithanonchai is not only limited to academia, but all civil services it seem), I still won’t reduce it to “greed” nor “racism”.
I have read a lot of these ‘two-tied’ pricing in postbag (usually for tourists destinations), both for and against and they are often well argued on both sides. To put things in context for myself, I can only think of my experiences in Europe and Australia, where there’s one (relatively expensive for an average Thai income) price for all. Or to India, Sri Lanka and Vietnam – where some locals are out to milk the tourists for all they are worth (not unlike many places in Thailand)! I am also aware that most Thais, unlike Europeans and Australians couldn’t afford to fly (until the recent cheap airlines phenomena) let alone afford the very high visa fees to visit a wealthy country. That can easily be branded as ‘racist’ in practice too – but again, it is far more complex than that…
I am going off on a tangent here, but many valid and important points have been raised by Srithanonchai and jonfernquest that, however difficult, should be addressed for the effective balance, for any conference, between ‘breaking even’ and intellectual vibrancy/diversity.
P.S. Srithanonchai, the once welfare state of Australia used to be like that. Economic liberalization transformed all that, for both good and bad…
14 Grasshopper // Oct 31, 2007 at 7:40 pm
Maybe this doesn’t have anything to do with discrimination at all, maybe it is just to try and encourage more Thai people to take an interest in their national future? Do decisions always have to be loaded with essentialist, reactive rhetoric about determining Thai sovereignty?
Cheaper education would certainly prolong my interest in my nations direction! Why is it that Australian universities are allowed to charge more for foreign students?! Clearly they’re just a bunch of xenophobic, discriminatory, intolerant racists over at the Department of Education!
Maybe this is a necessary discrimination. We live in injustice that tries to be patched up with affirmative action which produces cascading issues of inequality through the affirmative action of one group taking precedence over another without. Do you think there will be more Thai people at the conference as a result of the lower fees? If there are more Thai people there, and there is less apathy and less wallowing in victimization (which from these descriptions seems to be a given norm of Thai identity ?!?!?!?!) – then I think having this pricing policy is surely a good thing. If it really is an insidious attempt at discriminating against Western academics in order to make some sort of petty political statement, then why would all these academics bother turning up to be judged as neo-colonialists!?
15 Srithanonchai // Oct 31, 2007 at 7:43 pm
Sidh: Hopefully, Germany won’t follow suit… There was a major upheaval when some state governments considered the introduction of rather limited tuition fees (education is supposed to be free, including university through PhD). Today, I saw an advertisement concerning the annual conference of Thammasat’s economics association. The conference fee is 3,000 baht, with translation provided for foreigners. But, then, this event might not be designed as an academic conference in the first place since the “tickets” are sold via Thaiticketmaster.
16 jonfernquest // Oct 31, 2007 at 10:32 pm
“If it really is an insidious attempt at discriminating against Western academics in order to make some sort of petty political statement…”
Not a political statement but money.
Rediverted educational budgets are cash, or an asset such as an SUV that the underpaid dean miraculously acquires after a semester of foreign teachers temporarily subsidised from Bangkok, only half of whom got paid the subsidised amount…..etc, etc, corruption is always murky **insidious** and nearly impossible to prove conclusively, but for those who suffer it, it’s real…teachers paid half their salary…or a switch to Phllipinos paid half who never show, pocket the other half of the budget…one soon tires of this treatment and leaves…
I think you really miss the point, the foreign teachers were hired for a reason, for some educational objective to be achieved.
What consistently happens is that these foreign teachers get cheated, abused, and leave, and by extension those objectives are not achieved.
Foreign teachers who are devoted to their work always have other options, if not in Thailand than in other countries.
It’s not an exaggeration to state that what is left over is often the dregs, the chronic unemployable alcoholics, the paedophiles, at the university that I used to teach at the one remaining non-missionary ajaan is a notorious bar owner, and by extension a pimp because bars are places of prostitution, albeit a pimp with a PhD. Does a parent want a pimp with a PhD teaching their 18 year old daughter?
The local YMCA was using volunteer teachers on tourist visas, one of whom was bragging that he was sleeping with his teenage students. The charade really boggles the imagination.
“Som nam na” is in the end the only observation that I can make regarding this system, definitely not Sethakit Paw Piang.
17 Srithanonchai // Oct 31, 2007 at 11:05 pm
“If it really is an insidious attempt at discriminating against Western academics in order to make some sort of petty political statement, then why would all these academics bother turning up to be judged as neo-colonialists!?” >> Cross-cultural endavours and the pretense of an academic community lead to some funny ambivalences, both from the Thai academics towards the foreign academics, and vice versa.
18 Grasshopper // Nov 1, 2007 at 12:36 am
Hmm, thanks Jon.
So how can a system of Western accountability be implemented for our ‘dregs, chronic unemployable alcoholics and the pedophiles’ in a Thailand that is wholly suspicious of Western intentions? Surely it would mean that the Thai education system would be forced to import teachers through Western governments (or like the JET programme), rather than find them looking for an extended visa. Providing our systems of accountability internationally would surely be viewed as arrogant and neo-colonialist though. So what do you suggest? Also, are you saying that Western fees for this conference will help fuel corruption and the Thai fees, because they are substantially less, will not feed the same corruption as much? It’s all corruption to me and I wouldn’t want to give those corrupt the credit of being fantastically more corrupt because of one set of people over another as it would play into their relativist, stagnant and essentialist views of the world where it seems that we are Jane Goodall’s Apes that are deciding who is alpha and then patrolling the territory. It is beyond words that PhD pimps are allowed into these situations, but to get Rawlsian, doesn’t finding a system of justice within situations of injustice only lead to more injustice because one plays into the ebb and flow of feudalistic success?
19 Republican // Nov 26, 2007 at 1:51 am
To me the issue of the different registration fee payments for farang and Thais is secondary.
The more important issue is the professional morality of the academics involved in this conference.
Just over a year after a royalist coup d’etat, in which a royalist dictatorship has forced 64 million Thai people to accept the SE at gunpoint, when almost half the country remains under martial law, when the media is controlled by regime and the former democratically-elected government has been banned by the king’s military, here we have the spectacle of Thai academics (servants of the raja), who will in fact receive a monthly salary paid by the tax-payer for the rest of their lives, providing intellectual support for the king’s SE propaganda.
How can I put this is? The king is not a gifted intellectual. Judging by his writings he has a below-average intelligence but a gift for politics. No-one should take his intellectual pretensions seriously. Especially when he is protected from any criticism by lese majeste.
Yes, there is certainly something to be said for alternative models of development, and yes, alternative economic theories are of course worth exploring.
But don’t mix this up with the royalist dictatorship’s SE propaganda, which has a purely political purpose.
If you salaried academics are serious about SE do us a favour. Resign from your academic positions. Donate your pensions to charity. Live like a villager for two years. And then come back and hold your conference on sufficiency economy.
Then the academic world might take you seriously.
And by the way, I hope your conference can explain the contradiction between the king’s SE prescription for the Thai people and his own accumulated wealth of $40 billion which, based on Forbes’ list of wealthy monarchs, would make the king of Thailand the wealthiest king in the world.
In other countries such a conference might be staged by a literature department under the theme of “humour”. In Thailand economists and social scientists actually take the concept seriously.
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