West Bengal cannot afford to have modernity passing it by. Higher education must therefore ring out the old and ring in the new. So thinks the state's higher education council. The old, in this case, means 'conventional' subjects like history, political science and the other traditional humanities disciplines. The new or 'modern' subjects - or courses, as they are called - are computer science, micro- and molecular biology, and business administration. This change will radically alter the nature, focus and funding of Bengal's undergraduate colleges. Cutting out the council's inflated clichés on sweeping scientific and technological change, the point of all this is to tailor undergraduate studies to the job market. This is 'new generation' policy-speak at its most confused. Endorsed by the government and working largely through the regulation of funding, it could have a profoundly damaging effect on the notion and standards of academic excellence in the state. The confusion exists at two levels. First, there is a gross and misguided levelling of undergraduate education to suit a hardboiled utilitarianism. This is founded on the idea that modernity renders the humanities and social sciences quite useless in the face of inexorable scientific and technological progress. Second, the council seems to have confused centres of academic excellence with colleges offering practical or vocational courses for the job market. It imagines the state's undergraduate colleges to be somehow combining both functions, thereby ensuring support for the one at the expense of the other. Colleges will be encouraged to increase the fees of their useful courses, making them self-financing to relieve the burden on the government. But the conventional subjects will have to charge the usual lower fees. This will, of course, create a disparity between the quality of teaching in the humanities and social sciences, and that of the other subjects. No centre of excellence could hope to describe itself as such if it actively fosters the rapid decline of the humanities. There is also the larger, and more alarming, question of what kind of modernity Bengal would be nurturing if it endorses this facile distinction between the useful and the useless. By enforcing this change of outlook in the colleges, the government hopes to lose fewer promising young computer scientists, biologists and business administrators to the more progressive states. Yet Bengal drives out some of its best minds to centres of excellence in the humanities and social sciences elsewhere in the country or the world. Historians, economists, anthropologists and literary critics also have a vital role to play in any modern and progressive society, and much of Bengal's intellectual dreariness could be attributed to the state being increasingly unable to provide sustenance to these disciplines in its institutions of higher education. But the state government is not the only culprit in this. The university grants commission must have been inspired by a particularly crass vision of modernity when it suggested recently that West Bengal's universities should teach history 'as a tourism product' in order to draw more tourists to the state.