The education system grows like a tree. In India, over the last few years, the University Grants Commission has relentlessly dug up the soil around its roots. The four-year bachelor’s programme, launched and soon withdrawn once earlier, has been reimposed throughout the country. The new curriculum should be planned as an integral whole. Yet most universities have commenced first year classes without thinking through the subsequent course content.
This lack might be made good over time. More organically problematic is the structure of the programme. In the old system, the main honours subject occupied eight of the dozen or so papers and carried greatest weight in assessment. This was rightly criticized as limiting the student’s horizon from the start. In its over-anxiety to redress the balance, the new programme has plunged to the other extreme. Now a student need only obtain 50% credits from her major subject. If she chooses a double major, the less than lucid explanation indicates that another 40% must relate to the second subject — that is, covering even less ground.
Even the single-honours student will thus learn much less of her subject than the honours student of old. Yet by completing a research project in her fourth year, she can proceed straight to a PhD. This cannot but dilute the standards of doctoral research. The only corrective would be intensive pre-doctoral courses, effectively going back to square one by prolonging the run of taught classes.
This curricular structure makes an outward shy at the American pattern but lacks the focus of the latter. The American student, after some basic drill, devotes her entire time to substantial courses in various subjects, gradually zooming in on one of them for her major; but they are all full-fledged subject courses leading to majors in other disciplines. The Indian student, on the contrary, will have half her time diffused between no fewer than five categories of scrappy ancillary courses besides a minor subject. It is futile to claim that in the other half, she will attain “in-depth” knowledge in her major subject, still less “interdisciplinary” command over several. Nor will a 9-credit “multidisciplinary” course meaningfully enable her to change majors in her second year and acquire even a rudimentary grasp of the new subject.
Similar issues surface in the UGC’s latest salvo, circulating in draft for public feedback, about “Minimum Qualifications for Appointment and Promotion of Teachers and Academic Staff”. This document lays down guidelines for recruiting all academic staff from assistant professors to vice-chancellors. It is a politically loaded document that has predictably started a nationwide storm. But the real issue is the consequences for education and research.
In some matters, the draft notification adopts a valid stand but raises apprehensions nonetheless. Where a prospective teacher’s earlier degrees differ in subject from her PhD work, she can now apply in either field. Countless past scholars of proven worth have been rejected on this score even where the subjects are patently allied, like mathematics and physics. Problems also arise with subjects seldom taught at the undergraduate level, like film studies or comparative literature. Dispassionately viewed, this is a reform one should wholeheartedly accept — if one could count on its dispassionate application. In the present scenario, there is grave reason to fear that dubious appointments might be pushed through the gap, especially by evoking factors like Indian knowledge systems or, unfathomably, startup creation “successfully raising funding through government, angel or venture funds”.
The fear increases because of an apparently similar but intrinsically different provision. An applicant with degrees in a particular subject can apply to teach another by passing the National Eligibility Test in the latter. The NET today comprises two 90-minute papers, only one of them in the subject, consisting entirely of multiple-choice questions. It is fantastic to imagine that someone clearing the test through intensive cramming in a supposedly ‘soft’ subject could possibly have the expertise to teach it.
Similar doubts relate to the new guidelines for selecting vice-chancellors. They need no longer be academics, provided they have “a proven track record of academic or scholarly contributions”. That is a highly porous barrier. Yet in many countries, eminent experts from other professions have successfully led universities. We may compare the rationale of the recent UGC provision for ‘professors of practice’, appointed for their standing in a relevant profession. In my own university, outstanding technologists from planning and industry have adorned the faculty of engineering. All this makes sense. Yet the provision might be grossly abused, especially by appointing bureaucrats from a related department or undertaking.
Above all, there is clear scope for mischief in the new constitution of the search committee for vice-chancellors. Two of its three members will effectively be nominees of the Central government, ensuring Delhi’s stranglehold over state-run universities. The Opposition states have already cried foul: their governors are also chancellors of the state’s universities. There have been many collisions already.
West Bengal might face the first impasse. A sordid political wrangle between the governor/chancellor and the state government has all but paralysed Bengal’s universities. Among other blows, they were all left without permanent vice-chancellors. A Supreme Court order has finally yielded a list of names approved by the state government: the governor must choose from them with limited scope for demurral. He took three months to clear 17 of the 34 names. The court sanctioned more time to process the rest. If the UGC regulations appear in the interim, we can only pray to avert an unholy tussle between court order and UGC rules, consigning 17 universities (including Calcutta and Jadavpur) to indefinite entropy.
Academic guidelines must be flexible, adaptive, even imaginative; yet this makes them open to abuse. Ultimately, it is a matter of faith in the system and the good intentions of the people running it. The current course of Indian education does not inspire confidence that the rules will be applied in good faith for purely academic benefit.
Sukanta Chaudhuri is Professor Emeritus, Jadavpur University
