Our temples of doom
Falling Standards
Our universities were once important centres of higher education. Today, however, there are few who will vouch for the quality of our university education or research, writes Ira Pande
The year 2007 marked the 150th anniversary of the First War of Independence and in the ensuing celebrations to commemorate that landmark event, we all forgot that the year 1857 marked another momentous occasion.
It was historian Ramachandra Guha who first reminded us all that 1857 was also the year when the universities of Calcutta, Bombay and Madras were founded and that in terms of the impact they had on the future of India, it could be said to have heralded the birth of modernism in India.
In fact, he called these three universities the ‘crucibles of modernity’ because they were, in every sense, the petri dishes on which exciting experiments would be performed.
India pre-dates most civilisations in the field of education and pedagogy. One of the earliest accounts of their reputation is available in the Chinese pilgrim-scholar Hieun-Tsang’s glowing description of the high level of discourse and debate he saw in Nalanda. However, internal strife and repeated foreign invasions left our ancient guru-shishya tradition and the gurukul systems battered and bruised.
The final blow was delivered by the British Raj and the Macaulayan diktat that there was nothing worthwhile in the ‘native’ educational systems and literature. Thus, by the nineteenth century, university education was available only to those fortunate Indians who had the means to acquire it abroad.
After the new universities were set up by the British in the Presidency towns, they quickly led to others being set up in other parts of the country. Allahabad, Lucknow, Banaras and Aligarh, to name just a few in North India, became important centres of higher education and had a dramatic impact upon the regional social and economic condition.
A possible reason for this may have been the fact that for the first time, these universities offered an equal opportunity to Indians, of whatever caste, to pursue higher education. Not just that, the establishment of special colleges for women and minority communities brought education to those sections of our society that had traditionally been excluded from it.
The new universities also brought in their wake laboratories and research facilities — both sadly inadequate in our vernacular forms of higher education — to introduce modern scientific theories.
Yet, even more important than all this was the fact that the universities ignited the first stirrings of nationalism as Indian students were exposed to theories of modern law and political thought.
It is now widely believed this had a profound impact on the national movement and on young minds aching to be free of foreign rule as these institutions planted the seeds of democracy, bred a feeling of respect for different faiths and beliefs to open up the country as never before.
Although it is important to remember this glorious history, it is equally important to question what has happened in India to the state of higher education in the six decades or so since independence. Today, there are few who will vouch for the quality of our university education or research and fewer still who would want to choose to study in an Indian university if offered a chance to study abroad.
Speaking of my own alma mater, Allahabad University, reminds me how proud I was once to claim I attended it. Today, I sound almost apologetic about having studied there because — like so many other universities in the country — it has become little better than a mofussil degree college where small-town hoodlums and goons hold sway. They have no interest in pursuing anything other than their brand of Munna-bhai tapori politics and revel in the fact that the teachers quake when they enter a class.
So, how did these glorious temples of learning get converted into temples of doom? First, when universities opened the gates for a dangerous erosion of their autonomy. This happened when they began to pander to narrow parochial interests and allowed regional politicians to meddle in their affairs.
Appointments to faculties were now often made on the basis of caste, creed and crony connections, rather than on the basis of merit. Self-styled experts were imported to further this nefarious plan. Today, one can name several departments that have been shamelessly taken over by various members of a single family — husband, wife, children and their spouses. Naturally, when standards of excellence are lowered, the level of teaching suffers as well. Yet, even more dangerous than this kind of nepotism is the ideological restructuring foisted on our university syllabi by successive political regimes.
In this matter, no party can be given a clean chit. The Right, the Left and the so-called liberal secularists, have all been guilty of stuffing their departments with ‘people like us’. This academic inbreeding ultimately led to a closure of debate and dissent so that today we are confronted with a situation where courses and syllabi are made in party headquarters rather than in faculty rooms. The recent case of the ban imposed on an essay on A K Ramanujan’s essay on the Ramayana is a perfect example of this attitude.
The rot did not happen overnight: the sad truth is that we allowed it to go unchecked. In the 1960s and 1970s, when brain-drain became an alarming fact and our brightest students and teachers left India for foreign universities, the government sat on the proposal to enhance the salaries of university teachers to attract these bright minds to come back and teach here.
I joined as a research scholar in 1975 and the scholarship offered to me was the princely sum of Rs. 350 per month, while a lecturer earned roughly twice the amount. Staff quarters were seldom available, so that house rent, transport and sundry other expenses were an added burden to the modest salary given to university teachers.
I began to notice how no faculty member encouraged his or her child to join this noble profession. Mind you, their children were always at the top of each class but every one of them went on to study at professional colleges, such as the IITs or a medical college and then either joined the civil services or went abroad for further studies. Naturally, few ever came back.
The result was that most university teachers — particularly in the smaller towns — suffered from a crippling sense of low self-esteem and a vicious cynicism. They were never given the respect or social position that they craved and this drove them further into a cynical disdain for their own alma maters.
University teachers, for the most part in several universities, were seen to have drifted there because they lacked a ‘better’ option, so second-rate minds trained third-rate students. No wonder the glorious universities of yore became centres for mass producing degrees that had little or no worth outside a small range of jobs.
Another important factor is often not spoken of and it is this: that peer groups are essential for raising the tone of educational institutions. An important factor in the IITs or our premier educational institutions is that they attract the crème de la crème of our students.
Anyone who enjoyed the campus scenes in the film Three Idiots will testify to this fact. When, in their wisdom, our politicians insisted on caste reservations beyond the realm of acceptance they punctured a hole in this as well. As percentages for admissions were raised to ridiculous levels, it was not surprising that anyone who can afford to do so, sends his progeny abroad for studying.
It was said that the great renaissance of American universities was wrought by the Jews who came there after being hounded from Europe and it is a fact that they were the scholars who won Nobel Prizes for the Ivy League universities of the US.
Today, this can be said of Indian scholars in the same universities: the list of Indians at the forefront of science, economics, sociology, history and medicine in foreign university faculties runs into several pages.
Virtually every well-known university faculty in Europe and the US boasts of an Indian who is in the same league as a Hargobind Khurana or an Amartya Sen. Sadly, they will never come back here and we have to resign ourselves to the fact that this ‘missing generation’ is a vital link in the downward spiral of higher education in India now.
Those who wish to reverse this trend will have to apply their minds seriously to how we can improve the quality of our university education. Tinkering with the semester system or syllabi can no longer work. Increasing the number of universities is not the solution either, nor is inviting foreign universities a panacea.
Radical and bold steps will have to be taken to weed out the non-performers and inject fresh blood. Our demographic dividend is an ideal opportunity to start thinking in this direction. For if we miss the chance to better educate our young population, we can expect a mob of uneducated and angry people who will one day storm the streets and become a demographic nightmare.
