Bureaucratisation comes to JNU
Arun Kumar
CESP/SSS, JNU.
The Hindu, December 17, 2011.
JNU, one of the few Indian institutions
of higher education resisting bureaucratization is on the verge of giving up. Its
Academic Council has recently approved the implementation of the UGC dictated points
based system of evaluation for faculty recruitment and promotions. Why is the
UGC imposing such a system on the universities?
There is talk of reaping the demographic dividend of India’s
young population given that the developed world has a rapidly aging population.
Trade in Education under WTO is seen to give a natural advantage to India
Another strand of this strategy is to encourage foreign
institutions and the Indian private sector to set up educational institutions to
improve educational standards. It is argued that the prevailing standards in
most existing (largely public sector) institutions are poor and that they lack the
resources to rectify the problem. In this context, financing of higher
education is crucial but that needs another piece.
Globalization today involves a race for knowledge
generation. Whether it is software, nano technology, manufacturing technologies,
climate change, trade negotiations or financial institutions and so on, one who
generates better ideas would dominate in the world. Higher education which is
expected to generate ideas then becomes crucial and perhaps this is more
important than reaping the demographic dividend.
While enrollment in higher education has increased,
quality is a concern. Only a handful of institutions produce world class talent
which the press plays up every year by highlighting the six figure salary
offers they get. At the cutting edge, we have a shortage of manpower because we
produce little of it and also most of it is lost through brain drain. Many
bright students also leave the country because they are unable to get admission
to good institutions.
The need for high quality institutions is obvious. MHRD
is trying to replicate the success of elite institutions, like, Central Universities
Premiere institutions face a 30% shortage of faculty. With
the opening up of more of them, the shortage has only spread, threatening the
standards in the existing institutions. In many private institutions and open
universities quality of faculty recruited is indifferent, resulting in poor quality
of teaching. Institutions that would hardly be accepted as universities in any
country have come up as Deemed Universities.
There are reports of corruption in setting up many of the
private institutions. They not only charge high fees, they also extort
capitation fees. At times, these institutions are set up to buy real estate at
concessional prices and make a quick buck. To get recognition, apparently the
officials from the regulatory authority (UGC or AICTE) are bribed - no wonder some
of the heads of these bodies have been accused of corruption.
Higher education passes knowledge from one generation
to the next and can help society advance by generating new knowledge. The
former enables routine tasks to be carried out while the latter equips society
to move beyond its present stage and to meet emerging challenges. Copying ideas
from the developed world is often inappropriate since they may not be relevant
for our stage of development. The two roles require imparting high quality training
to students which in turn necessitates high quality faculty. Mr. Jairam Ramesh
suggested that the IITs, the most elite institutions in the country, lack world
class faculty and he was attacked all around. Not that he was wrong but he hurt
the sense of false national pride of many.
Quantity is important but by itself it cannot ensure
quality since that requires special efforts. A hundred indifferent lectures can
only kill the interest of the students while one inspired lecture can ignite a spark,
make learning fun. It is that which motivates academics to become good teachers
and high quality researchers - not bureaucratic fiat.
Unfortunately, many of the academics produced by our
present system have themselves hardly understood their subject. They dictate
notes in class, killing the interest of students. Often, education is less
about learning and more a burden which has to be endured to obtain a degree to get
a job. Examinations largely test a student’s capacity to reproduce mugged up
notes and not the knowledge acquired. The emergence of `Kota
Authorities are aware of these
deficiencies but they lack the understanding of what higher education needs. UGC
has introduced one scheme after another, often at the instance of the Pay
Commissions. Like, the Mehrotra Committee in 1986 suggested the creation of Academic
Staff Colleges to train teachers – to upgrade skills. Since then, promotion of Assistant
Professors under Career Advancement has been contingent on attending these
colleges. To promote research, academics with M.Phil. and Ph.D. degrees are given
increments in pay. To make faculty work harder, hierarchy in academia has been increased
so that academics face a selection committee more often. NET examination was
introduced to ensure minimum standards amongst teachers in higher education.
These schemes involving huge expenditures have hardly
impacted quality leading to the current state of affairs. Rather than
understand that the failure of these schemes is in-built since they are divorced
from the needs of higher education, the bureaucrats governing higher education
have gone for more of the same. Disinterested `academics’ have found ways of
beating the system. Today there is a flood of M.Phil. and Ph.D. and NET
qualified students without improvement in quality. Academics go through
Academic Staff Colleges but with little impact on skills. The reason is that none
of these measures ignite the desire to learn. One can take the horse to water
but cannot force it to drink.
Now, the UGC, in an attempt to improve the quality of
faculty, is enforcing a bureaucratized system of evaluation of faculty, under
`UGC 2010 Regulations’, based on a numerical system of indexing merit (API). It
would lead to `paper chase’. How many papers or books written, conferences attended,
projects completed and so on? All these can be churned out in large numbers
with little originality and that will help indifferent academics accumulate
points. Already, there is a mushrooming of `refereed journals’, national seminars
and publishers who charge money to print books. High quality research requires
years to produce and in the new system this would get few points. Producing
critiques that challenge authority opening new vistas are not easy to publish
and hence would be considered worthless under the new rules. The quantum of
work done by an academic is important only to the extent of its quality.
Education is not like a normal homogenized product,
like, soaps or same size shiny red tomatoes. An institution of higher education
is not like a factory or an office where time and motion study can be used to
measure productivity. In fact, there is a need to let a hundred flowers bloom
and celebrate dissent as the essence of higher education. Unfortunately, to the
education bureaucracy (often including academics) this is anathema.
The short sightedness being displayed by the UGC and
to which the academic leadership is succumbing is the result of both poverty of
thought and insecurity. Army generals, civil servants and net-workers are often
appointed to the top positions in educational institutions not because of their
academic quality but due to their closeness either to those in power or to the
moneyed. The objective function of such people is to serve the interest of their
benefactors rather than that of the academic body or society in general. Hence their
focus becomes smooth management rather than cultivation of an environment to
encourage knowledge generation. With the recent AC decision, JNU is sliding
down this path and caving in to adopt bureaucratized standards of performance.
Its academics are failing to stand up to the bureaucratization being imposed by
the UGC. A University, expected to give a lead to other institutions is letting
down both itself and the nation.
In brief, the bureaucratized UGC while ostensibly promoting
excellence has been systematically undermining it for long since it thinks
standards can be achieved through standardization little realizing that often the
latter is the anti-thesis of the former.
arunkumar1000@hotmail.com
