Needed: a new lease of life

As more and more academics move to centres of advanced research, university students lose out on quality education. SUPRIYA ROYCHOWDHURY writes on ways to resolve the crisis.

THE majority of universities in India reflect the broad pattern of institutional decay that has become a characteristic feature of our public life. But nothing symbolises the university's erosion, and at the same time contributes to it, as much as the increasing distance between the professional academic and the university.

For example, if you were a graduate in a science or engineering discipline from one of the IITs, then went on to do a doctorate in an American university, added a few years of post doctoral work to your vitae, and then contemplated returning to India to pursue a career in research and teaching, would you consider applying to one of the universities for a faculty position?

For the small number of Indian academics who fit the above description, the answer would be unqualifiedly in the negative. This is not to suggest that our universities are languishing because qualified academicians no longer choose to work in them. The causal connection, if there is one, would possibly be in the opposite direction. The decay of universities in India is a complex phenomenon, beyond the purposes of analysis in the present article. The university-academic distance reveals some specific dimensions of this decay and highlights the potentially destructive impact of this phenomenon on a larger societal scale.

In the last few decades, due to waning State support, there has hardly been any expansion in the size of departments in universities and colleges, except in a few, handpicked ones. Given the imbalance between this stagnation and the rising number of job seekers for teaching positions, faculty recruitment processes in universities have become highly politicised arenas of patronage distribution. This process has naturally diminished the importance of merit in faculty recruitment, and has contributed greatly to the erosion of quality in teaching and research in university departments.

In the sciences and engineering disciplines, the vacuum created by a degenerating university system has been filled in, partially, by the institutional alternative provided by the prestigious Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT), the Indian Institute of Science (IIS), the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) labs, and a sprinkling of other institutions of advanced research, such as the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR), the Mathematical Sciences Institute and a few others. From the start, the higher salary scales, superior infrastructural facilities, and research funding available in these institutions set them apart from the universities. Designed to be specialised centres of advanced research, institutions such as these provide the science academician what the universities fail to do: a more or less reasonable, non political recruitment procedure, a work environment relatively free from non academic interference, and access to the cream of the student community.

Similarly, through the auspices of the Indian Council of Social Science Research (ICSSR), social science research institutes have been created, spread over most of the States in the country. Many reputed social science scholars have chosen to work in these institutes, rather than in the corrupt domains of the university system. However, due to financial constraints, there has been very little expansion in these institutes and some of these today are largely dependent upon external funding from private or international sources - via research and other projects.

Additionally, over time, many of these institutions have become victims of local political pulls and pressures in their recruitment and other processes. Thus today we have a situation where many talented social scientists need to work independently and increasingly look to international funding for their livelihood as well as for their research. And, in fact, the most current emerging scenario is for the establishment of centres of research, funded by international agencies, and manned by social scientists unable or unwilling to find a foothold either in the university system or in the ICSSR institutes.

The effects of these processes are many layered in our society and culture. The shift of qualified personnel away from the university to institutes and centres of advanced research has had, expectedly, a highly dampening effect upon the ways in which undergraduate and post graduate teaching is perceived.

Today, college teaching is no longer the worthwhile and prestigious profession that it was even perhaps three decades ago. Many see it as an arena for the middle and lower rungs of the academic hierarchy, while the first rung are busy doing advanced research in the institutes and centres. There is a complete absence of recognition of the fact that undergraduate education constitutes the foundation of the higher education system, and that therefore the best talents in academics need to be drawn to the university system.

Except for the IITs, scientific research institutes teach only masters and doctoral students, and in some cases only doctoral students. The teaching programmes in these institutes are small and select. Consequently, the cream of the scientific research personnel are completely disconnected from the large number of young students pursuing undergraduate or post graduate degrees in science in the colleges and post graduate departments of the universities. Thus students who wish to study for a science degree at the undergraduate and postgraduate levels do not have access to the best minds and the best trained in their respective disciplines.

As university and college departments have rotted, through lack of government attention in terms of funds and failure to attract quality faculty, the image of sciences and liberal arts as worthwhile disciplines to be studied and careers to be pursued has largely disappeared. Most often these are the only options for students who do not qualify for a professional course such as engineering or medicine. Given low levels of teaching in colleges and university departments, graduates and postgraduates emerge from the university system with astonishingly low levels of learning. It is from this pool, then, that present and future teaching personnel in schools, colleges and universities would be drawn, thus completing the cycle of low quality education.

In most societies, particularly in the west, it is typically in universities that different disciplines, across the sciences, engineering, humanities and social sciences are taught, and researched. A shared professional habitat in a framework of continuous intellectual exchange provides the context for much of the social questioning and critical debates which occur within the university's space, an indispensable anchoring to any healthy democracy. In a context where the university system no longer attracts the best talents in the country, there is much erosion in the university's role as the harbinger of critical engagement with urgent social issues.

With the emergence of exclusively science/engineering based institutions, the scientific community has come to inhabit what could be described as a professional island. This island is busy in its own life, frequently interspersed with international research collaborations, foreign conferences, summers and sabbaticals spent abroad. There is of course nothing intrinsically wrong with this orientation. But given the disconnection of the cream of the scientific academia from the broader community of students and from the university system, in a sociological sense this academia looks more outwards, than inwards, for its sustenance and recognition. One partial impact of this is that scientific knowledge and education have come to be defined predominantly within a techno-instrumental framework. For the most part, the research and teaching conducted in scientific or technological institutions take place outside of the framework of debates, for example, over the critical linkages between technology and development, or, the implications of globalisation for the Indian economy and society. In any society, but particularly so in a developing country context, where massive inequities continue to characterise social and economic structures, the disconnection of the scientific endeavor, from its anchoring, via institutions like the university, to the reality of larger society, must be seen to be an essentially negative feature.

Unfortunately, the social sciences are also part of this trend. As more and more talented social scientists shift away from university and college teaching towards internationally funded projects and consultancies, the search and competition for sponsored funding becomes a benchmark of professional success. In this process, the role of the academic gets redefined in ways which may not necessarily be healthy. First, facing a classroom, learning from teaching, dealing with conceptual and theoretical issues become far less important than identifying what is next on the funding agency's agenda.

Second, in a context where the largest amount of research funding is emanating from the United States and the wealthier European countries, the ideological and political priorities of these countries would naturally define, to a great extent, the parameters of academic projects, and consequently of intellectual discourse. Thus, for example, currently enormous amounts of funds are being spent by international funding agencies for studying/ promoting institutions of decentralised governance (panchayati raj), whereby the emphasis on studying political institutions - ostensibly designed for equality - effectively detracts attention from economic institutions -such as the market in some contexts - which promote inequality. Comparatively speaking, there is much less, if any, focus on the part of foreign funded projects on studying themes such as the relationship between marketisation and the informalisation of labour, to take a single example.

Finally, a certain unacknowledged imbalance is written into the institutional relationship between the international funding agency and the researcher. Officials of international funding agencies, located in developing countries, most often are professionals in the field of development, broadly defined. Their role as funding agents provides them with the authority not only to set the broad parameters of research on development, but also to act as evaluators of research in developing countries. It is not uncommon today for funding agency officials to be present in academic seminars and conferences as evaluators of research. Western scholars have for a long time spoken authoritatively on matters Indian, whether it is our history, society, culture or politics. On the other hand, the number of Indians who study the West, for example European history or American culture, could be counted on a few fingers. Given this continuing imbalance in this exchange, the presence of the foreign funding agent in our intellectual lives - institutionalised through sponsored research - represents a continuing intellectual tutelage. The point of course is that these imbalances become accentuated in a context where academic research is unanchored in a socially grounded university structure, and is crucially dependent on international funding.

On these and related matters, one could not hope to turn the clock back, even if one wished to. But we would at least stress that the institutional anchoring of higher education needs to be reshaped and revitalised such that universities can be brought back to the centre of academic life. The rejuvenation of the university system must take place with the aim to once more attract talented minds to these spaces. If research institutions exist to do specialised research, universities must provide a location where teaching is taken seriously, where academics are accountable to a broad community of students rather than only to a small group of co-researchers or funding agencies, and where the research environment promotes a closer engagement with broad theoretical issues which question rather than assume the truth of ongoing international orthodoxies.

Finally, while the structure and culture of universities need to be improved, academicians also perhaps need to redefine the place of teaching in their academic agendas. We may want to remind ourselves that in the western world - which in any case remains our model in most things of life - undergraduate education constitutes the core of the higher education system. Whether it is Oxford or Cambridge, or any of the Ivy League universities in the U.S., no faculty member, however exalted a researcher, can get away without doing a stipulated quota of undergraduate teaching. And one's performance at this level is measured, as a yardstick, on a par with one's performance in other academic activities. This culture needs to be restored to our academic practice and values.

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