As I heard the long-awaited good news that a bill to make Presidency College into Presidency University was in the offing, what came to mind was my 20 years at Presidency as teacher in the Fifties and Sixties and then barely keeping in touch from distant Delhi in the decades following. The Fifties to the Seventies was when Presidency’s economics department was in full bloom. I was recently going through (with some self-satisfaction and pride too) what some of our students spreading over almost 30 years — not all Economics honours students — have been writing about us. They, in many cases, have been attributing the undeniable good health of the department over that period to a body of good teachers who were bunched together and stayed together in the economics department. To set the record absolutely right I must add here one rider to an implicit proposition that went with such an assessment. Presidency in my time had several highly distinguished professors in physics and other science departments. There were great teachers in the other Arts departments too. I am talking here only of my own experience in the department of economics (or rather economics and political science).

Those of our teachers found bunched together were assembled more by accident than design, and they were bunched, at least in economics, together with students of astonishingly high academic ability and great academic ambition. They contrived their own self-teaching plans sometimes taking the teacher into confidence. Our credit, as Bhabatosh Datta often used to warn me, lay not so much in teaching them high theory but in not leading them astray. In course of my rather longish life in teaching youngsters I have learnt that what Bhabatoshbabu said was absolutely right but it was a very tall order to follow.

I deny nothing to the participants of those exceptionally successful teacher-student joint ventures. But had that phenomenon in the case of economics and the cases of several other departments just happened, without premeditation? My answer would be yes, but with the rider I have already hinted at. The undeniable success stories were not necessarily destined to be one-off cases: there was a method to what was happening over that period which we have not fully worked out. We the professors, and the students who came out and rose to be professors in their turn, somehow, somewhere, failed to carry on business as usual when we found, as the Americans say, it was too hot in the kitchen. To change the metaphor, we simply missed the bus. But I like to think it may not be too late to recapture the habit of producing students like yesterday again. In any case, even the lessons not learnt should be interesting to the builders of today.

All this is mere prolegomena to what I really wanted to say. Some of us at the Presidency of that period had been trying to say this to the rest of the world over a period of at least three decades. How and when does a good college with good teachers become a good university? The answer to the question has to be uncompromisingly unequivocal. A good college is not necessarily in the same state in all its departments. The teachers of some of its departments might be accepted by the academic fraternity as equals of well-known university teachers. But this is a recognition that cannot be doled out officially by any designated authority even of universities or recommended to the government by the University Grants Commission (whatever its act might say under Section 3).

Great teachers like a Susobhan Sarkar or a Bhabatosh Datta were accepted as great by their students first. Then the good news spread and they were talked about within the teaching communities that some of their students had joined as teachers after college. Else they migrated to other universities in the country or abroad. Their reputations within the international academic community were mostly gained not only through publications, citations and so on. The legend grew with the passage of time.

We have to remember that authentication by students and fellow academics did not always depend on the publication of books and papers — important as these are. In our own department, I remember Nabendu Sen was universally regarded as one of the very best in the area we called Indian economics — without his publishing many significant papers. He was shy and also not a great orator. But some of our students who had travelled to MIT or Harvard or other centres of academic distinction and were, in my perception, choosy and even highbrow, reported again and again that they had met none better than Nabendu Sen in his field. I also remember how very firmly Bhabatosh Datta had to speak in front of the Public Service Commission before they conceded and Nabendu was selected as an assistant professor at Presidency. I do not blame the government for this. I only blame the system that set down that a government or a commission composed mostly of non-experts was best suited as an agency to dispose of academic matters and decide who should be given a university teacher’s status and who should be left out.

There is a second question involved that has to be squarely faced. If Presidency does not want to shift gear and turn from being a very good undergraduate college (remember once it was India’s best) into another easy-going and indifferent university, it will have to introspect and take a number of hard steps — otherwise the whole point of the exercise and of our dreams will be lost. I will end by mentioning one step that I consider to be absolutely crucial. Presidency must use its autonomy and whatever money it can lay its hands on to revive undergraduate teaching and take it to the highest level possible. To be a world-class university at the postgraduate level in all subjects will remain a distant dream for a long time. To be one of the world’s better universities with a very strong undergraduate section engaged in basic studies and laying the foundations of basic research in the arts and sciences for the country as a whole is not an impossible task for Presidency.

There is no reason why Presidency cannot be as good as Trinity or King’s or the London School of Economics in its undergraduate programmes under the best and the highest-paid professors it can recruit. Postgraduate studies and research will come as a consequence and gain attention from the rest of the world in its own good time. The fame of LSE, Cambridge and Oxford is still basically built on undergraduate teaching in their BA or BSc programmes.

I will end by another of my usual anecdotes. Professor Dipak Banerjee was noted for championing the “Presidency University” cause. It was also he who pointed out to me once that we wrongly thought our system of university education was based on the British pattern: we never followed the pattern of Oxford, Cambridge or London with their great colleges. I remember when I was a member of the UGC I too had strongly advocated university status for Presidency. One day, I heard him say quietly, “I hope you and I are not fighting for turning the best college in the country into its worst university.” He had been talking, of course, before the days of the hundreds of “deemed” universities.