The recent chaos in the stock market, the war in Iraq, and recession are some consequences of the globalization process. For centuries, the West waged war for colonies in a process that ended with the Second World War. Afterwards, it was considered better to control the poor countries by using sophisticated tools of international finance.
Terror groups changed this equation by bringing war to America. The Bush administration has responded by the occupation of Iraq. But the costs of policing and running a far-away land will soon compel the US to revert to the policy of indirect control. The focus will shift back to the contest between the US, Europe, and Asia for economic supremacy. Educational preparedness will be central to this contest. At the end of the current transitional periods, much shuffling in the relative powers of nations would have occurred.
The technological advantage that US and Western Europe possess hastens globalization at terms beneficial to them. But this change is driven not just by military might but also the relentless shift of economic power to Asia. India is already the world's fourth largest economy – China and Japan are the second and the third largest -- and it is destined to influence world change in a vital manner.
Although development is measured through the index of economic prosperity, it means the capacity of people to make reasoned, independent choices and corresponding action. It means a development of the spirit out of which emerges material development and this requires an excellent system of education.
As an aspiring technological Great Power, India must be prepared also in the fields that lie at the intersection of technology, society, and commerce. The decisions by those who understand the dynamics of technological change are often as important, if not more, than those who implement the technology. In the West, universities have pioneered these studies, helping America to dominate science and technology for over fifty years.
The best place for the study of this interface between technology and society are the IITs and the universities, but they are currently doing a good job only in undergraduate education, being ill equipped to deal with research for a variety of reasons. The Indian system of centralized control makes it impossible for them to plan in a visionary sense. The situation of the IITs has reached a crisis point, mirroring what happened to the older universities about 30 years ago.
The Indian higher education faces the intertwined problems of system and content. The system is bad because the bureaucrats who run it don't know better, and the contents are unsatisfactory because the universities do not have the capacity to update and adapt.
If one were to begin with small reforms at the IITs and the universities, I would recommend:
- Forbid the hiring of the institution's own Ph.D. graduates for a period of 5 years after the award of Ph.D. degree. At present the universities suffer from massive inbreeding that chokes new ideas and encourages sycophancy.
- Increase the faculty salaries to more competitive levels at the IITs and the research universities. Currently, fresh graduates can earn more than a senior professor. There should be additional incentives for professors who are good at research. On the other hand, standards for promotion in the professorial hierarchy need to be raised.
- Have each IIT and major university develop a vision plan to become an internationally recognized centre in postgraduate studies and research. Short-term and long-term goals, and the strategy to achieve the goals, should be clearly articulated. This exercise must be done both at the departmental and the university levels.
- The British introduced a scheme a few years ago for ranking of research colleges and universities by an independent agency to determine the level of funding from the education ministry. This scheme has worked well in UK and given that India has a similar system of funding, it should be adopted.
The openings for advanced degrees must be increased. As a typical example, Delhi University (with more than a 220,000 students in its undergraduate –12 + 3 -- programs) has only about 120 openings each year for the MA program in economics, and similar numbers in other disciplines. This is too low. If you have wondered why there are many Telugus in the US and very few people from UP and Bihar, one reason is that Andhra Pradesh has more than 150 engineering colleges whereas UP and Bihar have less than ten each.
The IITs are good in the teaching of the mainstream engineering specializations. This may have been fine in an age of complete bureaucratic control, as was the case with India before the reforms of 1991 when not much was happening in the economy. But now many sectors of the economy have been privatized and technology is changing society in unforeseen ways. In such an uncertain world, the education sector needs to be nimble, questioning received wisdom and creating new syntheses.
Now to the question of content: The Indian universities ape the West, with no reference to India's own cultural and scientific heritage. The approach is a barely concealed program to represent Indian culture as the “backward Other” to the “progressive” West. It is ironic that Indian education should uncritically extol the West at the same time that the West is in a crisis of faith related to its institutions of culture and education. With mounting problems of drug addiction and teenage pregnancies at high school, existential hopelessness in middle age, and dysfunctional social organization that makes a virtue of greed, wise people are asking if the West should not learn from the East.
The Indian crisis is not a fault of our tradition; it is a consequence of India's unfortunate historical experience of the past few centuries. Writing about a hundred years ago, Sri Aurobindo described the problem in the following words in his Call to the Youth of India:
The most striking instance [of our incapacity and impotence] is our continued helplessness in the face of the new conditions and new knowledge imposed upon us by recent European contact. We have tried to assimilate, we have tried to reject, we have tried to select; but we have not been able to do any of these things successfully. Successful assimilation depends on mastery; but we have not mastered European conditions and knowledge, but rather we have been seized, subjected and enslaved by them. Successful rejection is possible only when we have intelligent possession of that which we wish to keep. Our rejection too must be an intelligent rejection; we must reject because we have understood, not because we have failed to understand. But our Hinduism, our old culture are precisely the possessions we have cherished with the least intelligence; throughout the whole range of life we do things without knowing why we do them, we believe things without knowing why we believe them, we assert things without knowing what right we have to assert them, - or, at most, it is because some books or some Brahmin enjoins it, because Shankara thinks it, or because someone has so interpreted something that he asserts to be a fundamental Scripture of our religion. Nothing is our own, nothing native to our intelligence, all is derived. Little have we understood the new knowledge; we have only understood what the Europeans want us to thinks about themselves and their modern civilization. Our English culture - if culture it can be called - has increased tenfold the evil of our dependence instead of remedying it.
More even than the other two processes, successful selection requires the independent play of intellect. If we merely receive new ideas and institutions in the light in which they are presented to us, we shall, instead of selecting, imitate - blindly, foolishly and inappropriately. If we receive them in the light given by our previous knowledge, which was on so many points nil, we shall as blindly and foolishly reject. Selection demands that we shall see things not as a foreigner sees them or as the orthodox Pandit sees them, but as they are themselves. But we have selected at random, we have rejected at random, we have not known how to assimilate or choose. In the upshot we have merely suffered the European impact, overborne at points, crassly resisting at others, and altogether, miserable, enslaved by our environment, able neither to perish nor to survive. We preserve indeed certain ingenuity and subtlety; we can imitate with an appearance of brightness; we can play plausibly, even brilliantly with the minutiae of a subject; but we fail to think usefully, we fail to master the life and heart of things. Yet it is only by mastering the life and heart of things that we can hope, as a nation, to survive.
How shall we recover our lost intellectual freedom and elasticity? By reversing, for a time at least, the process by which we lost it, by liberating our minds in all subjects from the thralldom to authority. This is not what the reformers and the Anglicized require of us. They ask us indeed to abandon authority, to revolt against custom and superstition, to have free and enlightened minds. But they mean by these sounding recommendations that we should renounce the authority of Sayana for the authority of Max Muller, the Monism of Shankara for the Monism of Hegel, the written Shastra for the unwritten law of European social opinion, the dogmatism of Brahmin Pundits for the dogmatism of European scientists, thinkers and scholars. Such a foolish exchange of servitude can receive the assent of no self-respecting mind. Let us break our chains, venerable as they are, but let it be in order to be free, - in the name of truth, not in the name of Europe. It would be a poor bargain to exchange our old Indian illuminations, however dark they may have grown to us, for a derivative European enlightenment or replace the superstitions of popular Hinduism by the superstitions of materialistic Science.
The problem of Indian education has become worse since the above lines were written. The bureaucracy is now more entrenched. A single authority, a product of Indira Gandhi's Faustian bargain with the Communist Party, controls the writing of textbooks with disastrous results. Unfortunately, the present regime has not addressed the question of systemic reform. Much political capital has been expended on the matter of the revision of the textbooks. But lacking a proper objective process, the next government will throw out the current books.
Reform of education is a mighty challenge given the hostility to it by the entrenched bureaucracy. Perhaps, the way out is to legislate the creation of private research universities. The small steps already taken in this direction are not sure-footed: just an ad hoc approval of privately controlled and largely unregulated undergraduate colleges. Lacking vision or thought to excellence, these colleges are only one notch above cram schools.
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Ha Ha Ha! Nicely said Narayanan! Looks like this McBool guy is a desi who is desperately trying to prove some wacko points.. must be a gult.. because no one can know of Guntur so easily..
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As I understand, dear mcbool, universities are set up to educate people, not to produce people. Baby-making technology is available elsewhere. :)
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One more comment: The best administrator I have met is probably Mr. Kurian, the IAS officer who initiated and led the effort to build the Kochi International Airport at Nedbumbassery. He told me he was a "generalist", but I could see that he was aware of, and understood very well, all the issues related to a very complex technical, economic, administrative and political undertaking. Against the immense "nah-nah-nah-nah!" cynicism and obstruction of Kerala, and the obstruction of assorted "Bombay lobbies" etc., that airport is operating, and growing. And that is primarily due to the genius of this one man. It turned out, of course, that he had a biology or biochemistry degree from - u guessed it - an Indian university !!!! In a "perfect" world with a "relevant" curriculum matched to industrial demand, he would have been recruited straight from school to work in the depths of some Research Lab!!!! Its a wonderful world. :)
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Professor Kak's main points are: 1. "As an aspiring technological Great Power, India must be prepared also in the fields that lie at the intersection of technology, society, and commerce. The decisions by those who understand the dynamics of technological change are often as important, if not more, than those who implement the technology." 2. The IITs for example, have focused on undergraduate education, but have not attained prominence in graduate education - and perhaps research. 3. Curricula should perhaps be constantly revised for relevance. 4. Faculty hiring should promote intellectual diversity. 5. The proliferation of engineering colleges has helped the mobility and success of people. 6. The UK rating scheme.. *********************************** Excellent points. A few comments: 1. I don't agree that UK is an example to follow - but that may have a bit to do with personal feelings. Right now, my experience is that graduates from the premier German or French engineering institutions leave any UK graduates I've seen, in the dust. The best from the IITs are as good or better than these, but as I mentioned before, there is no need to assume that the present-day general IIT product is uniformly excellent. Never was. The best from PRC or Japan are also superb. All in different ways. But anyway, UK is not an example to emulate. 2. In the past (and present) Indian curricula have suffered from the equivalent of the Indian Rope Trick - the Indian system provides this climbing rope where students must focus their attention from Age 4 all the way to Age 22 on exams, more exams, books, "tuition", more exams... and then??? The graduate wakes up one fine morning, feeling at the top of the world for having got excellent "marks" in this British-inspired system, and discovers that there is no workplace demand for the knowledge so hard-earned. One result is that most Indians one sees, in any profession, appear to have basic science or engineering degrees. Pressed in arguments, they demonstrate quite a vast knowledge of technical matters - but the integration of that knowledge "clicks" into place only when they are given the chance to see where it applies. It has been well-demonstrated that students who graduate from Indian quantitative programs like science and engineering, have the BASIC knowledge to excel in nearly anything, be it engineering, medicine, management, law or anything else. Only our politics seems immune to quantitative logic or analysis. But all this may be changing with the advent of massive investment and opportunities for quantitative-knowledge-based industries in India, so there may be no "saving" needed - there is enough internal pressure to revise curricula at the undergrad level, to become relevant. One thing we've never lacked is competition to drive innovation. 3. The IITs and graduate research. The answer here is very simple: $$ and opportunities, plus an utterly humiliating, benighted system. The former points are obvious - a professor in a major US engineering school may make, say, well over the "middle class" income level, more than the salary of almost any engineer in any industry or government organization. Only VP-level execs make more. Can you say the same about India? If not, why would those who spend their lives striving to beat worldwide competition, not aspire to win at this too? The solution is not to match US salaries in India - but salaries for top professors and researchers should be de-linked from "central" or other payscales, and be set to compete without restraint for the best people. The other side of this coin is that in the US, a university does not really lose anything by giving its professors big $$ - the expectation is that Professor X must "bring in" around 3 times his/her salary in external $$ every year. In the "top-ranked" places, the expectation is more like 4 to 5 times. That's not "consultancy" that goes in the professor's pocket - but research funds with "overhead" at some 50 to 60%, so just the overhead easily pays the professor's salary with plenty left over -and gets his/her courses taught for free. Once this model is adopted, of course, the price paid is the inattention to undergraduate education - as is seen in US universities. In the best places, the "solution" for this is simply: "Don't tell us how busy you are with research, or how you bring in all those dollars, or how internationally famous you are. We all do the same, so, hey, you WILL teach 3 or 4 courses per year, and advise a lot of undergrads, and you will NOT delegate teaching to your assistants etc." I won't claim that this system is great - just that it works, well, about as well as it works in US universities. Someone should also look at the death rate of professors from heart attack and blood pressure to see the other part of this. No more "summer vacations". No more "sabbaticals". As for artificial constraints on faculty hiring, the best universities long ago discovered that such things are counterproductive, while the medicore ones stick to such ancient notions of "pedigree" and "Our Way of Doing Things". Look at the faculty of, say, MIT. Dominated by MIT PhDs. And why not? Would you reject the best grads of the best place in the world, and instead bring in someone who would probably not have got admitted as a student there? The best California universities (Stanford, Berkeley, CalTech) simply exchange graduates. No great "diversity" in hiring is achieved by that, but it keeps down the noise. The REAL issue in hiring one's own graduates is that it may create "centers of political power" inside individual schools. That again is a function of the school's culture, and the excellence of the senior faculty. One solution is usually to make clear to the new hire that continuing to work in the same old area is a sure way to be denied promotion and tenure, however "unfair" that may sound. It is not such a great idea to suggest that someone that good is "inbred" or cannot "bring in fresh ideas". Every PhD at a really good institution is completely different from any other - that's why they get PhDs for those efforts. If there is anything cloned from the professor in those efforts, its the culture of being different, and of adapting the best ideas from anyone, worldwide. Obviously, there has to be some balance... , and even the MIT appears to be beginning to recognize, rather belatedly, that one should never hire someone whom one does not plan to nurture to lifelong success. A dog-eat-dog environment simply breeds cannibalistic dogs and rat races breed rats. So - maybe Indian universities don't need "saving" so much as they need ongoing processes for encouragement in directions which are decided by careful, well-reasoned discussion. Best regards narayanan
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My earlier comment appears to have vanished. I wanted the author's or others' comments on why privatizing IITs is a good idea. I can't see the logic there. The IITs have an unmatched record of national impact, with a very controlled size of the graduating class, inside a very few years - there is almost no other institution which can come close in comparable impact per graduate, or impact per $$ spent. In the US, I look at the latest "US News & World Report" ranking of programs. True, the M.I.T. and Stanford, both private entities, rank right up there in many engineering/science categories as well as in business. BUT.... at a tuition cost which is stratospheric compared to most State institutions. What is interesting to me is how close several state universities and institutes of technology come - with fees less than a tenth of what MIT and Stanford charge, and with compulsions to admit a far wider spectrum of students. There is no doubt in my mind that the old IIT tradition of picking students based on sheer merit is excellent. (OK, I'll admit to serious concerns about this criterion since the advent of "Brilliant Tutorials"..). A system where the Director's son could not get in.. and no power or wealth or influence mattered one bit. In India, are there comparable achievements by private institutions? Can BITS, for example, cite similar achievements? I don't think so. Given the above, I would suggest emulating the IIT system in many more colleges, with the same tough insistence on quality, respect for merit, and unstinted support for resources, as well as total freedom from political meddling. In turn, these institutions must develop their own demanding, but absolutely fair, systems for admission, hiring, tenure, promotion and retirement. Private institutions bring their own huge baskets of problems.
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Satish Shenoy: Nicely said. But unfortunately, I'm seeing that scenario in the corporate world even in the US. Other than companies which are involved in cut-throat technological innovations, most of the normal companies are infested with the so-called managers who other than carrying a bunch of project plans and ticking and tallying the totals, do nothing. They have a great talent of adhering to their seats and somehow blaming others for everything that goes wrong. This type of people are particularly seen in groups like MIS/Support/Product Management wherein the job load is usually less or monotonous than in other departments. Sometimes it is depressing to know that a talented individual is just wasting his/her time because of all this corporate politics. After seeing that, I stopped blaming only politicians for the playing politics.. even sportsmen, corporate kids and movie starts play it very well:)
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While Universities, including the IITs should be overhauled to place emphasis in higher education and research, we should not forget the need for reform in the corporate world. How many times have we seen brilliant people from the IITs or other institutions, stagnating intellecually, once they land up jobs in the corporate sector (public or private). Who can blame them? The Indian corporate world is infested with paranoid and ego-centric managers, who cannot tolerate the slightest hint of 'disrespect' from their juniors, both real or imagined. As a result this mindset, a junior professional who comes up with an innovative idea, keeps it to himself, for fear of stepping over the toes of his bosses. Even the smartest graduate from the IITs has to rely more on his skills to 'ji huzoor' rather than on his professional expertise, if he hopes to make it to the higher echelons of management. Your subordinate, who comes up with that briliant idea, could at least end up stealing the limelight, if not displace you. Thus, we have a system where innovation is not neglected - it is penalised. If we have to be in the same league as the West, we will need to shed the mindset, where individual egos are considered more important than the welfare of a corporation or nation or a society. The public sector can take the lead by shortening the corporate pyramid, thus placing more responsibility at the junior levels. Also it may help if we ape the US in certain matters, like doing away with age limits for civilian jobs. This step, besides giving vibrancy to the job market, will unleash a vast pool of talent.
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I tried to read the comments on this thread to see what was being discussed about Indian universities. I should have known better. Here's a sample - of course from the great Educator "McBoob" or "McFool" or something like that. I doubt that the postor is an Irish Catholic, but he/she/it may fancy itself as being the intellectual equal of a hamburger patty. A Paki madarssa PhD, in other words. ********************************** ""PROJECT MANAGER " HIB visa WE are cancelling your stay you know .. Which 3rd clas quality company for sake of 1/10 th cost CUT ..give nincompops like you a JOB ..not wanted like the communicable diseases in india aids leprosy tb malaria hepatitis ...cesspool of ill health !!!!" It should be perfectly clear that this is a person whose brain, if any, is seriously infected with hatred towards all civilized society. A sure sign of a Paki terrorist. From "we" and "H1B visa" I assume that this postor infests the USA. I am requesting Sulekha personnel to please support law enforcement and prevent a future tragedy by finding out who this postor is, and reporting the same to US Homeland Security. Its easy to find the addresses where you can do the reporting. The US is infested with tens of thousands of criminal Paki terrorists - and the authorities are trying their best to find these while causing minimal harassmant to the 3 or 4 law-abiding Pakistanis also living here. Your help will be appreciated by all. The lives you save may include your own. Thank you. It continues to be a shame that Sulekha's discussion fora are suffering the equivalent of the "SoBig" virus cluttering up every thread. If this is not stopped, I guess its time to quit wasting time trying to participate in discussions here.
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McBool Ji Please write when you are sober again. Till then, you can let the poor keyboard rest - you neither have control over your fingers as the typos show nor over your mind as your comments show... Thanks
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Translation not good.. Self-translation by McBool sucks!!!You better make Pakistan your home, son.
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