Myopic policies: creation of world-class universities

The government will create 12 Central universities, adding to the existing 18. This is a mammoth undertaking, for which Rs. 3,280 crore (about $73 million) has been allocated from the budget. Earlier in the year, India announced that it would create 30 "world-class" universities, eight new Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs), and seven Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs) in the coming five years. On the recommendation of the National Knowledge Commiss ion, the Centre is planning massive investment to upgrade and expand higher education. Other plans include enhancing the salaries of college and university academics — by as much as 70 per cent.

[.............]

Just pumping money and resources into a fundamentally broken university system is a mistake. Establishing new universities, especially those intended to be innovative, requires careful planning and an understanding of the weaknesses of the current system. Let us outline some of the problems that need fixing before resources are given.

Bureaucracy without accountability: India is famous for sclerotic bureaucracy, and higher education fits into that mould. Few decisions can be made without taking permission from an authority above, and the wheels of decision-making grind slowly. Fear of corruption or loss of control entrenches bureaucracy. Teachers and academic leaders at colleges and universities have little incentive to innovate higher education — indeed quite the opposite. It is completely impossible to build world-class universities in this bureaucratic context. If the new institutions must tolerate responsibilities to both the Central government and the States in which they are located, the bureaucratic burden will be completely overwhelming.

Location: Great universities need to be located on friendly soil. In general, the best universities worldwide are in or near major urban centres or in places with intellectual traditions and strength. While it is entirely appropriate to have a good university in each State, the idea of a truly world-class university (an institution that can compete with the best in the world) in cities like Guwahati or Bhubaneswar is simply unrealistic. It would be extraordinarily difficult to attract top professors or even the best students, and the "soft" infrastructure, such as most cultural amenities, is missing. High-tech industry is also absent in these locations and would be difficult to lure. No amount of money will guarantee the establishment of a world-class university in such places.

The academic profession: Indian academics deserve higher salaries, and the move to dramatically improve remuneration is a positive step. It would be a serious mistake to simply give more money to the professoriate without, at the same time, demanding significant reforms in the structure and practices of the profession. Indian academics are rewarded for longevity rather than productivity, and for conformity rather than innovation. The most productive academics cannot be rewarded for their work, and it is almost impossible to pay "market rates" to keep the best and the brightest in the universities. World-class universities require a salary structure that rewards productivity.

Academic culture and governance: Indian universities are enmeshed in a culture of mediocrity, with little competition either among institutions or academics. Universities are subject to the whims of politicians and are unable to plan for their own future. Academics are seldom involved in their leadership and management. Bureaucracy governs everything and holds down innovation. Without essential and deep structural changes in the way universities are governed and in the culture of the institutions, there is little possibility for improvement. An additional challenge is that some of the world-class universities are to be created by improving existing State universities. This will be extraordinarily difficult since these institutions, with very few exceptions, are mired in mediocrity and bureaucracy, and are hardly amenable to change and improvement even with the carrot of additional resources.

Corruption at many levels

An element of corruption exists at many levels of the higher education system, from favouritism in admissions, appointment to faculty positions, cheating in examinations, questionable coaching arrangements, and many others. Damaging at all levels, corruption destroys research culture and makes a world-class university impossible.

Meritocracy at all levels: World-class universities are deeply meritocratic institutions. They hire the best professors, admit the most intelligent students, reward the brightest academics, and make all decisions on the basis of quality. They reject — and punish —plagiarism, favouritism in appointments, or corruption of any kind. Much of the Indian academe, unfortunately, does not reflect these values. Some of the problem is structural. The practice of admitting students and hiring professors on the basis of rigid quotas set for particular population groups — up to 49 per cent — however well-intentioned or justified, virtually precludes meritocracy. Deeply ingrained in Indian society and politics, the reservation system may well be justified — but to have successful world-class universities, meritocracy must be the primary motivating principle.

Role of research: World-class universities are research intensive. All highly-ranked universities in the world exhibit this characteristic. India faces several problems in developing a research culture. It is fair to say that today no Indian university, as an institution, is research-intensive. India's universities can claim a small number of departments that have a high level of research — and many highly accomplished professors work in the system. And some institutions, such as the IITs and some non-university agencies like the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research and AIIMS, produce impressive research and are respected internationally. The creation of a research-intensive university is mandatory to achieve world-class status.

Resources: Rs.3,280 crore for the 12 new Central universities, plus the other impressive amounts announced for related projects, sounds like a lot of money. In fact, it is very inadequate. A world-class research university that can play in the best international leagues is an expensive undertaking — to establish and then to sustain. As an example, one large research-intensive new Chinese university cost around $700 million to build and has a total annual budget of close to $400 million.

Conclusion: The challenges facing the creation of world-class universities are daunting. Indeed, if India is to succeed as a great technological power with a knowledge-based economy, world-class universities are required. The first step, however, is to examine the problems and create realistic solutions. Spending large sums scattershot will not work. Nor will copying the American academic model succeed.

(Philip G. Altbach is Monan professor of higher education and director of the Center for International Higher Education at Boston College, U.S. N. Jayaram is professor and dean, School of Social Sciences, Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai.)

http://www.hindu.com/2008/10/23/stories/2008102355501000.htm

Reform needs some 'vested interests'

The same week that Singapore hosted the first Formula 1 race under floodlights and on its city's streets, Indian newspapers carried more depressing reports and photos about the state of the roads in Gurgaon. Yet, this satellite city to national capital New Delhi was once touted as the Singapore of India, a claim that is truly laughable today.

The difference between Gurgaon's roads and Singapore's — in fact, almost no Indian road would stand up to comparison — is also a measure of the distance India has to travel to bridge the gap in corruption, and, importantly, how little India's political system has perceived the true benefits of economic reform.

Since it is unfair to compare Singapore — the size of a medium-sized Indian district — with a country as large and diverse as India, the analysis here has been restricted to Gurgaon. Gurgaon's administrators seem to perceive no benefit in improving the quality of life and of doing business in their city. Singapore's rulers and citizenry are almost obsessive about the optimum delivery of public services. They are attuned to this way of thinking because they have clearly enjoyed the benefits of vibrant business activity.

http://business-standard.com/india/storypage.php?autono=336162

Why Europeans are getting taller and taller-and Americans aren't

When Vincent van Gogh was thirty-one years old, in the fall of 1883, he travelled to the bleak moors of northern Holland and stayed at a tavern in the village of Stuifzand. The local countryside was hardly inhabited then—"Locus Deserta Atque ob Multos Paludes Invia," an old map called it: "A deserted and impenetrable place of many swamps"—but a few farmers and former convicts had managed to carve a living from it. They dug peat, brewed illegal gin, and placed poles across the marshes to navigate by. Any squatter who could keep his chimney smoking for a full year earned title to the land he cleared.

There is little record of what happened to van Gogh in Stuifzand—whether he got lost in the marshes or traded sketches for shots at the bar. When I visited the village, the locals mentioned him merely to illustrate an even greater national obsession: height. At the old tavern, which is now a private home, I was shown the tiny alcove where the painter probably slept. "It looks like it would fit only a child," J. W. Drukker, the current owner, told me. Then he and his wife, Joke (a common Dutch name, they explained, pronounced "Yoh-keh"), led me down the hall, to a sequence of pencil marks on a doorjamb. "My son, he is two metres," Joke told me, pointing to the topmost mark, six and a half feet from the floor. "His feet"—she held her hands about eighteen inches apart—"for waterskiing." Joke herself is six feet one, with blond tresses and shoulders like a Valkyrie. Drukker is six feet two.

http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2004/04/05/040405fa_fact?currentPage=all

Echo of Moscow

In the land of the Soviets, the voice of the Kremlin was everywhere, an omnipresent reality-via-radio that long preceded Orwell's dystopia. Lenin and Trotsky fomented revolution primarily in print—in the commanding editorials of Iskra and Pravda, in the frenzied leaflets passed around in St. Petersburg meeting halls and later reprinted in "Ten Days That Shook the World"—but the leading instrument of enculturation and inundation under Joseph Stalin was a broadcast technology called radio-tochka, literally "radio point," a primitive receiver with no dial and no choice. These cheap wood-framed devices were installed in apartments and hallways, on factory floors, in train stations and bus depots; they played in hospitals, nursing homes, and military barracks; they were nailed to poles in the fields of collective farms and blared along the beaches from the Baltic to the Sea of Okhotsk.

The radio day commenced at 6 A.M.

First, the Soviet anthem, then "Govorit Moskva . . ." ("Moscow speaking").

If someone in a communal apartment shut off the radio, he was considered suspect, defiant, a potential "enemy of the people." The broadcasts issued the edicts of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, announced the details of the Five-Year Plan, declared the latest triumph of the Soviet Army and the perfidies of the capitalist West. In addition to the news, there was classical music and readings of classical Russian literature, along with "radio meetings" of village workers and soldiers' mothers. The Soviet people rarely heard Stalin's actual voice—halting, dry, with a thick Georgian accent—but through the radio they absorbed his pronouncements, his view of culture and the world, his implicit message of paternalism and threat. It is hard to imagine now the totality of the instrument and the perverse imagination required to conceive it, but radio-tochka existed for decades, as present as water and electricity and twice as reliable. It was such a successful tool of propaganda that when, in 1942, Hitler visited occupied Ukraine he expressed his admiration for Stalin's methodology and bemoaned the fact that the German people were still listening to shortwave broadcasts from the BBC.

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/09/22/080922fa_fact_remnick?currentPage=all

India: Banana democracy

The Olympics proved China is a dictatorship that achieves, Singur shows why India remains a curio to the world.

As coincidences go, Sunday, the 24th of August 2008 will always stay in mind as perhaps the most revealing. It made it clear to me, and to all who cared to notice, in a dramatic way and in the course of just one evening, why China shines so brightly despite being the world's largest dictatorship and India remains in the shadows despite being its largest democracy.

As the last fireworks were dying out in Beijing, at the end of a spectacular ceremony closing the 2008 Olympic Games, several thousand followers of Mamata Banerjee's Trinamool Congress were preparing to sleep out in the open on Durgapur Expressway at Singur, a national highway (NH2), having occupied it by force and closing it off to all traffic to launch a protest aimed at derailing the Tatas' Nano small car project.

There, in the heart of Beijing, the Bird's Nest heaved and swayed to the steps of thousands of dancing feet, and a Memory Tower rose toward the sky and burst into amazing colourful patterns in a staggering display of human synchronisation. Here, in Singur, Mamata strutted and fretted upon her dharna manch, seething in anger, wildly gesturing and screaming, as fans turned NH2 into a private preserve and the line of stalled inter-state trucks got longer and longer, throwing traffic over a large area into total disarray. Nobody bothered. The police stayed away for fear of stoking a major conflagration.

http://www.business-standard.com/india/storypage.php?autono=334067