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LATEST NEWS UPDATES | New Lamps for Old by Supriya Chaudhuri

New Lamps for Old by Supriya Chaudhuri

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published Published on Oct 27, 2009   modified Modified on Oct 27, 2009


The minister for human resource development, Kapil Sibal, is a man in a hurry. His haste would be welcome, if the government’s proposals for higher education were not so scandalous. Amazingly, despite a few distinguished voices of dissent, there has been no national debate on the United Progressive Alliance government’s plans. Existing state and Central universities, likely to be worst affected by the broom of change, seem reconciled to their impending marginalization. They are busy totting up the sops thrown in their way — including higher pay scales for which calculations are as yet incomplete.

The government proposes to set up 14 ‘world-class’ Centrally-funded institutions, called national or innovation universities. “Unencumbered by the history or culture of the past” — I quote that government of India concept note — they will start on a clean slate in their pursuit of excellence. They will be “kept out of the purview of the regulatory oversight of the existing regulatory bodies in higher education in academic matters as well as regulations on maintenance of standards or minimum qualification requirements for appointment to academic posts”. Each university will have a research endowment fund of over Rs 200 crore annually. Expenditure on research or teaching “shall be kept out of the purview of audit scrutiny as envisaged under the Constitution by the Comptroller and Auditor-General. An amendment to that effect shall be made in the Comptroller and Auditor-General’s (Duties, Powers and Conditions of Service) Act, 1971”. Chair professors may receive pay from endowments over and above their salaries, which will be decided through a negotiated agreement. In order to attract “the highly skilled Indian diaspora”, the prohibitions enshrined in the Citizenship Act of 1955 (amended 2003) will be removed. Networks of Indian academics abroad will “source world-wide talent” for the innovation universities, thus converting the brain drain to a brain gain.

A sign at the Dachau concentration camp memorial carries George Santayana’s chilling reminder, “Those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it.” Is it a good idea to be “unencumbered by the history or culture of the past”, as we are advised the new greenfields universities will be? On what are these institutions to base their pursuit of excellence, modelled on the great universities of the West, none of which, we can be certain, would dream of rejecting the past? If they are not to be controlled by the country’s regulatory bodies for higher education, nor required to conform to minimum qualification requirements for appointment, how can we be sure that they will indeed be ‘world-class’ institutions? Who determines that class? If no control is to be exercised over their spending, how can corruption, so endemic in our system, be kept at bay? If chair professors can name their fee, what is to prevent them from milking the Indian State for a few years before returning to their bases in the West? If NRI/POI networks are called upon to source talent for us, what can stop them from declining into cronyism and clientage? Or indeed, starting on such a footing?

Disturbing as these questions are — astonishingly, they have not sparked off a wave of protest — the set of assumptions behind the new proposals is still more worrying. First of all, the total bankruptcy of Indian higher education is assumed. I heard the former director of the Indian Council for Cultural Relations assert this on a public platform in London recently — a sad reflection on the morale of India’s chosen representatives. Secondly, we must accept that our best researchers are abroad, and the academic system here will be magically invigorated by their return. Thirdly, starting from scratch in a new institution with unlimited funds and no checks is the answer to the ills of the old academic bureaucracy. Finally, we must not ask whether faculty and student recruitment will be bound by the same principles of social justice that are mandated in the public education system.

These assumptions are not just dangerous, they are wrong. But they are typical of a new Indian bourgeoisie anxious to climb on to the wagon of globalization, tired of being out-paced by the West and the new East, hoping that money spent on a few showpiece institutions will lure our potential Nobel laureates back and keep the young and ambitious at home. What is never acknowledged in all this brave talk about world-class universities is that the ills of education in India begin at the primary level, with poor school enrolment and high drop-out rates compounded by failures in health and nutrition. Sixty years after independence, the right to education bill has just been passed. While India had set itself (from 1966) the goal of spending six per cent of its gross domestic product on education, it has not achieved more than a spending rate of around four per cent. The present commitment is to spend five per cent of the GDP on education during the 11th Plan. Of this, about 0.37 per cent is spent on higher education (as against 1.41 per cent in the United States of America, 1.07 per cent in the United Kingdom, and 0.5 per cent in China). Enrolment in higher education is between a fifth and a 20th of that in other countries. Can 14 new universities fill that gap?

Over a long period of time, the state-funded higher education system suffered from deprivation and neglect, from lack of funds or bureaucratic obstacles to research and development, appalling infrastructure, poor rewards for faculty, and positive discouragement of earning from student fees, consultancy or private sponsors. Universities were gradually demoted to teaching shops, with more research being funded at specially created institutes (though despite this, the quality and quantity of research was always better within the university system). It is only quite recently that some of these problems have been addressed, infusing new enthusiasm and hope into universities which are beginning to reap the benefits of a more liberal funding environment.

Given the extraordinary constraints, it is better to speak of successes achieved against the odds than a general record of failure. High levels of teaching and research were maintained at many state and Central universities. Undergraduates were generally well taught and proved this by excelling when they went to the top institutions abroad. The Indian institutes of technology and individual departments in some universities like my own acquired international reputations. Belatedly, the University Grants Commission began to recognize this in terms of grants and incentives for research, faculty and student exchange with institutions abroad, and support for academic innovation. Despite funding disparities, state universities like mine repeatedly out-performed Central universities. But these measures, inadequate as they were, have been obliterated (just as the UGC is at risk of being superseded) by a flood of hyperbolic undertakings and promises — world-class universities, foreign educational service providers, new regulatory mechanisms for higher education, new educational hierarchies.

What does the new regime promise? First of all, a ‘world-class university’ cannot be created out of thin (or hot) air. An institution that turns its back on everything of value within the country and seeks only to draw its faculty and researchers from abroad has lost a fundamental point of principle. Funds alone cannot suffice. Even for the new IITs, which are at least mentored by existing institutions, it will take years — as the experience of selection committees shows — to build up human resources. Not all the best researchers are abroad, but even high salaries may fail to bring genuine distinction home to a new university, which can scarcely become world-class without it. We will get a flood of slightly lesser NRI minds, and a leeching of the best from existing Indian institutions. The rest will be snapped up by private universities and by foreign educational service providers, completing the rout of an already threatened public university system.

Education is a meritocracy, and achievement must be rewarded. But the proposed hierarchy will be created, not earned. The innovation universities, with high salaries and research funds, no CAG checks, and dream faculty (all of it?) sourced from abroad, will be placed ahead of the Central universities and IITs. At the bottom of the funding ladder, with lower benefits to faculty, will be the state universities (though some may be the best in India), constantly losing staff and researchers to more privileged institutes. A parallel market will offer teaching shops run by private players and outposts of foreign universities. For students, it may cost money to go where the money is. This depressing future attracts only the economists who have written on this subject earlier in these columns.

In a meeting with vice-chancellors of Central universities held on October 13, the minister reportedly expressed impatience at talk of faculty shortages, given the handsome emoluments on offer. “Upset at the Vice-Chancellors confining their presentations to the measures taken by them to put in place infrastructure and recruit faculty and other staff, he asked them to come up with vision documents charting a road map on how they proposed to turn the new universities into world-class centres of learning.” How indeed? The minister has no answer, and seems to think that the magic phrase, the magic arrival of teachers from abroad, and magic money, can create a few world-class institutions.

‘World-class universities’ do not consist of a few Nobel laureates in their laboratories while the dal-roti teaching is done below stairs. All university teachers are entitled to funds and time for research. They should not be treated as lecturing machines working a six-day week in order to support the research of their ‘betters’. If India wants to create world-class institutions, it must improve the ones it has. It has to reward genuine achievement at home, encourage new initiatives, create infrastructure, and promote the kind of international collaboration that already exists between the best institutions abroad and the best universities in India. Surprising though it may seem, there are many good scholars within the Indian university system who know what is meant by ‘world-class’. They know that excellence is achieved, not bought.
 
The author is professor of English, Jadavpur University, Calcutta


The Telegraph, 27 October, 2009, http://www.telegraphindia.com/1091027/jsp/opinion/story_11640796.jsp
 

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