Expansion and division games

But while the committee8217;s mandate excluded consideration of more sensible policies of affirmative action, some had still hoped that it might leverage this opportunity to recommend fundamental reforms in higher education. But far from initiating those changes, its purely statistical approach to the issue will exacerbate the problems, not solve them. To begin with, it is high time we acknowledged that the size of institutions here is a real obstacle to their quality. IITs and IIMs admit barely a few thousand, but they are fundamentally designed this way. One of the committee members asked that if MIT admits 5000 students, why can8217;t each IIT? But this analogy is dubious because MIT is more like a university and has the entire gamut of programmes a university offers. The real Achilles heel is the universities. Universities like Delhi, Mumbai and Osmania already have over 1,50,000 students. They cannot respond to developments in knowledge simply because their structure has to be created through negotiation with thousands of teachers and pedagogic techniques do not cater to individuality and excellence but to homogenisation and standardised exams. It is absolutely amazing that we think that we can expand institutional capacity by 30 per cent without first adding hundreds of new institutions. Do we want to invest all new resources into expanding current disciplinary matrixes? Shouldn8217;t expansion mean reconfiguring knowledge systems rather than blindly expanding encrusted disciplines? Rather than think of a new architecture for universities which makes them more nimble, the committee has been formulaic in its approach. Expanding current institutions is like making immovable giants even more immobile.

The second recommendation that should alarm is this. There is much truth in the charge that given modern life spans, our ages of retirement are too low. So the possibility of retaining talented faculty even up to the age of 70 is not altogether unwelcome. But the haste with which we want to expand will ensure that almost all current teaching staff will get extensions. Given the proportion of dead wood to active faculty in current institutions, this will only ensure continued mediocrity. The honest truth is that many Indian universities need a VRS before there is any hope of quality expansion.

The third suggestion that will be disastrous is this. The committee is apparently going to exempt largely research institutions like TIFR from the ambit of reservations. But in other institutions, faculty is going to be offered incentives to teach more, possibly do even double shifts. There is no doubt that the physical assets of universities, like buildings and labs, are underused. But unwittingly this strategy is an even more insidious way of destroying institutions. For one, it reinstates a distinction between research institutions and universities/teaching institutions that has been fatal to higher education. You cannot sustain good teaching institutions in the long run without vibrant research.

Much of the recent discussion has been around reintegrating teaching and research. But the drive to mindless expansion, where you convert even your good institutions into teaching shops, where faculty is pressured to take more classes rather than do research, will make these universities even less vibrant than they are. While the committee talks of attracting good talent, the truth is that even that self-selected group that would like to go into academia is deterred from doing so because of its appalling research environment. In current university budgets, there is very little money for anything other than salaries, and this expansion will enhance that trend.

It is reported that the price tag for this expansion will be at least Rs 16,000 crore. The travesty is that the right to education bill is languishing and being further watered down for fiscal reasons. Strange is our conception of social justice. Higher education needs to expand and requires public investment. But it would have been prudent to first come up with a financing strategy, a rationalisation of fee structure, regulatory reform to allow new entrants into the system, making the setting up of universities easier, allowing quality foreign players to fill in crucial investment gaps and promote competition, and fundamentally alter the current perverse systems of accountability. With the current institutional architecture, with the scourge of identity politics already vitiating campuses, will we attract good talent into academic life? It is doubtful that quantity will turn into quality. The more likely outcome, to borrow another phrase of Hegel8217;s, is that we will experience a dumb, deedless expansion.

The writer is president, Centre for Policy Research, New Delhi