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 with its young and English speaking population. To realize these goals, MHRD and UGC obviously believe that the changes they are imposing on the universities are necessary.

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, AIIMS, IITs and IIMs by setting up more of them. In addition, new private institutions in professional disciplines have emerged, like in, medicine, engineering and management. But can buildings turn into institutions of excellence so mechanically?

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 schools’ and coaching institutes that train students mechanically is a natural corollary. No wonder, book shops around the universities largely stock mug books for competitive examinations – medical, engineering, civil services, banking and so on.

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