Practice may make perfect but not a professor

Bringing 'practice' in academia is good but cannot be done at the cost of reason and rational knowledge

Universities and higher education institutions are seen as islands in themselves. They are often held responsible for widening the gap between theory and practice. They are also accused of being archaic and far removed from good governance and best practices.

Rarely taken into confidence, they are at the receiving end of the new policies, programmes and schemes that are belched out at regular intervals. The new National Education Policy, NEP 2020, has become a good pretext and a harbinger of many new initiatives. The latest in the series is to enable universities and colleges to appoint ‘Professors of Practice’.

The name suggests that academia and the academic world lack hands-on experience and are not practising the teaching and research professions well enough. It assumes that academia has been disconnected from the world of professions and industry and that roping in people from there would be necessary to promote industry-academia connect.

There has never been a moment in the history of either colonial or postcolonial education where it was stressed that those with experience are not better off than those with ‘reason’. The new-found love for ‘experience’ as a method of knowing is more about disdain for reason and rational knowledge. It is to craft a new wedge between educational institutions and society by fanning the Harvard versus hard work debate.

NEP’s overemphasis on multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary, and trans-disciplinary approaches without finely combing differences among them also has led to the belief that academia is not for practitioners. It failed to recognise that practising any theoretical-rational framework necessarily required engagement with other disciplines.

There is no denying that certain vocational and practice-based disciplines may benefit from professors of practice. They can add value to domains like music, acting, management, tourism, hospitality, engineering, technology, coding, agriculture, and many other disciplines that evolved in the twentieth century with the long historical civilisational interface between practice-theory-practice. These disciplines may benefit from engaging people with long years of practice, but the way the ideology of the people in power dominates the decision-making process, this idea may be misused immensely. Will we be attracting the best of the best professionals? Recent experiences suggest that it may end up as an instrument for packing institutions with certain kinds of people.

It is good that the scheme provides autonomy to higher education institutions in fixing the remuneration and honorarium of ‘professors of practice’. Yet, it could be suggested that a non-partisan structure would have been better.

The professors of practice, with experience of 15 years or more, will be placed at the highest echelons as professors, and to believe that this will not affect the already structured hierarchies of associate and assistant professors will be naïve.

Theoretically, the idea may be appealing, but there is every possibility that it might turn out to be appalling in practice. With no formal qualification, teaching and research experience, and publications, it might further accentuate the relevance of degrees and academic rigour. It is also likely to impinge adversely on the ranking and accreditation of higher education institutions because they grade and rank institutions on many parameters that have been waived under the scheme.

These professors of practice could be appointed for a year and then have a maximum of three more extensions. They shall thus serve a maximum of four years, which sounds so similar to the Agnipath and Agniveer. Consequently, this would bring in one more structure of ad hocism in the academic world, even though it is well established that ad hocism has harmed academics and academic institutions.

India has the single largest system of higher education found anywhere in the world. With over 1,100 universities, 40,000 colleges, and 11,000 stand-alone higher educational institutions, India has no match in terms of the number of higher education institutions. With higher education enrolment exceeding 3.8 crore, India is simply the second largest system of higher education. As a whole, the system employs 15.03 lakh, faculty members. Sadly, over a third of the faculty positions remain vacant even in premier higher educational institutions like the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs). The National Institutes of Technology (NITs) have been reporting that 40 to 47% of their faculty positions remain vacant. In central and state universities, the faculty vacancies could exceed 50%.

The basic argument that universities and colleges churn out graduates lacking employable skills and thus compelling industry to re-train them to make them job-ready is equally pernicious. One must not ignore the difference between a university and a polytechnic, an IIT and an ITI. Universities are not supposed to reproduce labour with market-friendly traits. Instead, they should be a place to deconstruct and decode these relationships. They must provide for evolving market-industry systems that are oppression-free and more egalitarian, rather than shaping people to suit these crafted hierarchies.

In his Idea of a University, Cardinal Newman argues that universities should teach and work such that knowledge should be pursued for its own sake to cultivate (wo)men in liberal education, which must not be servile, physical, or mechanical in nature.

The discourse of education, after a long struggle with teacher-centric education, has arrived at a learner-centric approach in which the learner’s socio-economic background, her learning abilities, the context of pedagogy; curriculum, and evaluation play an important role. Practice alone may make one perfect in their vocation, but to be a professor, one needs to be aware of the above concerns, which are not ‘practised’ in any other field but academia.

(Sharma teaches in the Department of Education, Central University of Himachal Pradesh, Dharamsala and Furqan Qamar is a professor at the Faculty of Management Studies, Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi.)