[Assam] How to Build Harvards

[baruah at bard.edu]

Indian Express

How to build Harvards

Pratap Bhanu Mehta

Posted online: Tuesday, August 26, 2008 at 0025 hrs IST


The proposal to create a dozen new so-called world-class universities,  
in addition to 16 new Central universities, seems, at first sight, to  
be an important step in expanding quality higher education in India.  
There is also something encouraging in the fact that at least some of  
the right phrases are being dropped in discussions of these  
universities: commitment to excellence, new norms for faculty  
compensation, commitment to attract talent from abroad, introduction  
of a credit system, some departures from governance as usual and so  
forth. But unfortunately, there is good reason to believe that these  
laudable ideas will eventually be subverted; and that policy-makers  
have less than a clear grasp of what it takes to build excellent  
institutions.

The first indication of this is that they simply have not got the  
trade-off between quantity and quality right. There is, correctly, an  
emphasis on keeping the universities relatively small by Indian  
standards, with an average size of about 12,000 students. Most  
world-class institutions that manage to strike the right balance  
between the teaching and research requirements of the faculty have a  
student-faculty ratio of no more than 1:10; often it is even lower. If  
you build 14 new universities, you are looking for at least a thousand  
faculty members per university over the next five to seven years. Even  
if you managed to attract huge quantities of talent from abroad, this  
is a tall order. The rapid expansion of the IITs is a warning of what  
might happen; they are struggling for faculty, and in fields where we  
are relatively well-placed. If any private institution would have said  
that they will simply run classes out of another existing institution,  
the AICTE would have cried foul. But we have allowed this for our  
flagship IITs. Of such stuff are aspirations to excellence made.

Policy-makers have also not understood the advantages of agglomeration  
effects and the disadvantages of the dispersal of talent. Suppose, for  
argument?s sake, you can attract 30 to 40 world-class faculty in a  
particular discipline. If you disperse them over a large number of  
institutions, it will have two consequences. First, they will be  
surrounded by mediocre colleagues and hence unable to set their stamp  
on the institutions. Second, the crucial missing link remedying the  
shortage of faculty is the quality of PhD programmes. These are the  
programmes that both determine your ability to be a knowledge producer  
in the long run and ensure the supply of good faculty. We are facing  
an acute shortage, because our graduate programmes are in a state of  
complete meltdown. Good quality faculty, dispersed over a large number  
of institutions, will not be able to create and control the quality of  
PhD programmes as they could if they were concentrated in fewer  
institutions. Those institutions could in turn produce quality PhDs  
which, over the long run, would service new universities. Therefore,  
there is a case to be made that if the government wants to get into  
this enterprise, it should start with two or three really good ones,  
than labour under the illusion that it can create dozens together.

The mismatch between ends and means is also reflected in financial  
outlays. Since the number of universities being planned is large, the  
average outlay per university will not exceed three to four hundred  
crore over the entire period of the Eleventh Plan, and there is no  
provision yet for recurring costs. To service just the salaries of a  
world-class university is more than three to four hundred crore per  
year. It is not an accident that most universities that are globally  
competitive in teaching and research require initial investments of  
upwards of three thousand crore. The state is simply misleading itself  
if it supposes it can get what it wants with the budgets it has  
allocated. Doing fewer well would be better than doing too many badly.  
These universities will have huge negative externalities on existing  
ones: deplete their faculty even further and starve them of resources.  
The moral is that our requirements are so huge that properly  
deregulating the system is important; and the state needs to  
prioritise rather than expand.

The right slogans are being dropped. But there is reason to be  
sceptical of whether this will come to pass. Autonomy has many  
components: institutional, financial, academic, pedagogic. Our old  
university acts give universities a lot of autonomy; but in the  
absence of financial independence, these institutions have been  
corroded by the deleterious sovereignty of the UGC. It is difficult to  
imagine that the same UGC will now acquire the capacity to imagine  
what it takes to create world-class universities. It has already  
proposed centralising admission criteria, an issue that certainly  
requires more debate.

Bureaucracies can never design great institutions. Even in our great  
phase of institution-building, the core requirement was this: finding  
young men and women driven by creative ideas and a passion for  
education; being intellectually secure enough to attract good talent;  
making good judgment calls and not succumbing to pressure; and having  
a commitment to institution-building that went beyond merely a  
mercenary scramble for position. In retrospect, it is also amazing how  
young many of those early institution-builders were; how much of a  
sense they had of having to live with the consequences of what they  
were building, that universities are fundamentally about the  
cultivation of intellect and not short-term needs. In our  
hyper-politicised academic culture it is difficult to envisage how we  
will empower such individuals.

But apart from the leadership of these institutions, there will have  
to be an enabling environment where good teams can be put together:  
think of the number of instances where good individuals have been  
selected for an institution, only to be subverted by the quality of  
those nominated to their governing councils. It is difficult to  
imagine what these new vice-chancellors would do when the norms in the  
surrounding regulatory structure, HRD, UGC, are so deleterious to  
morale. The state can, under right conditions, create good  
institutions. But at the moment it is deeply deluded about the  
financial, regulatory, political, institutional and leadership  
preconditions for creating such institutions. It is not even clear yet  
how identity politics will shape these new universities. Under the  
present scheme of things, despite some right noises, the expansion  
seems more like an elaborate job-creation scheme, a temptation to  
appoint huge numbers of vice-chancellors, than it is about creating  
excellence.

The writer is president, Centre for Policy Research, Delhi  
express at expressindia.com