Why higher education is devoid of quality

The Government wants to set free the best of our universities. We don’t know how the Prime Minister’s promise to rid them of government control will pan out in practice, but even to talk of such freedom is a revolution of sorts.

I spent more than 20 years in Delhi University when it was in the pink of health. I also saw my university wilt and droop. What I saw was destruction of value that had been so painstakingly created. Delhi is not alone. The story is the same across the board. If we want to set the clock back, we must understand what went wrong.

Leadership was the hallmark of DU in those years. Physics, chemistry, economics, sociology and the natural sciences were led by scholars of repute and integrity. The heads of departments were the real power centres. They could award fellowships, appoint teachers, frame syllabi and manage the academic business with a free hand. Even the vice-chancellor could not override a powerful head.

The university had its bureaucracy and so did the UGC. The bureaucrats cornered all the scarce resources. Every assistant and deputy registrar had a phone line which even the director of the Delhi School of Economics did not have. Babus lived on campus while teachers lived in rented pigeonholes. But in matters academic, the head was supreme.

They used their power to promote scholarship. Research was the key. Without research and publication, you were headed for the dustbin. The established dictum was that you could not be a good teacher without being a good researcher, certainly not at the postgraduate level. Without research you were only dishing out what the books contained, and students didn’t have to attend your class to know that.

All this changed when the university decided that headship had to rotate. The baton had to be passed on every three years according to seniority till the last man or woman was reached. All this was done, supposedly, to democratise the university. But it succeeded in dismantling leadership. It was a matter of time before headship passed on to people who could not inspire either as teacher or as researcher.

Another process of value destruction was afoot simultaneously. Faculty appointments began to be made through promotion rather than selection. In earlier times, no one could become a professor until a position fell vacant either through the departure of an incumbent or the creation of a new post by the UGC. The first step towards the dismantling of this arrangement was merit promotion, whereby teachers who had merit were promoted as professors even if there was no vacancy. With time, this degraded into time-bound promotion based on years in the job.

University departments gradually began to look like inverted pyramids with plenty of professors, a few readers and hardly any lecturers. Teachers whose publications could not fill the back of a postage stamp became professors, and in time, heads of departments.

The result was the death not just of leadership but also of research. The only benchmark for judging the quality of a university is the quality of its research. And our universities are woefully short when it comes to research. Our prized management institutes are no exception.

The outcome of this mediocrity is that our children have to go abroad for education. According to a survey by the Tata Institute of Social Sciences this costs us ₹45,000 crore annually. It is not just the rich who go. I live in a village and I know of ordinary folk putting together money to send their children to China.

PC Mahalanobis, who founded the Indian Statistical Institute, is reputed to have said that there are only two ways to run an academic institution. You appoint the 10 best scholars and give them the best of facilities and the ultimate in freedom, and you will find that two of the 10 blossom while the rest waste away. The second option is that you choose the 10 best scholars and subject them to every form of control, and the result will be that all 10 waste away. Our politicians and bureaucrats have followed the second model. I don’t know if they chose the 10 best scholars, but they certainly excelled when it came to meddling. It is now time to follow the first.

The writer is a labour relations and HR consultant

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