There was a time when you could not get a place in Madras University- let alone Oxford or Harvard- if you wrote a single nonsensical sentence in an essay.
Sadly, those days are long gone. This is what C. Raj Kumar, Vee Cee of O.P Jindal University, has written in the ToI.
The National Education Policy 2020 has heralded a new imagination for the Indian higher education system.
Either a thing 'heralds'- i.e. comes before to announce the arrival of- another thing or it does not. If the author means that the Policy in question represents 'new imagination' then he has used the wrong word. On the other hand, he may be slyly hinting that there is no 'new imagination' in the Policy. That may come later but it is severely lacking now.
But this begs the question- why say 'heralds' rather than 'may herald'? How can the Professor be sure the 'new imagination' will turn up?
As a matter of fact, the Professor isn't saying something snide about the Policy or the third rate Babus who drafted it.. He simply used the wrong word.
It has created an inspiring vision that has the potential to build and nurture world-class universities and higher education institutions (HEIs) in India.
But uninspiring visions have the same potential. Indeed, the thing could happen without any vision whatsoever simply because India has an absolute and comparative advantage in Higher Education- viz. lots of poor high I.Q kids who can be cheaply fed while getting on with cutting edge instruction which has itself become much much cheaper to deliver through the internet.
However, this vision depends on our ability and commitment to the pursuit of systemic, systematic, synchronous and sustainable reforms as envisaged in the policy.
No. A vision does not depend on anything at all. What the Professor means is 'making this vision a reality depends on such and such'.
Why does the Professor distinguish between systemic and systematic reform? If the thing is systemic it must be systematic. Synchronous simply means that the thing has to actually happen at the same time as people say it is happening. Why mention it at all? Reforms which are not sustainable are not reforms. I believe the Professor's taste for alliteration has gotten the better of his judgment. This is a school-boy fault.
An equally important aspect of the higher education vision can and should be is what the Honourable Prime Minister of India has envisaged – the evolution of what he has called, “Atmanirbhar Bharat”.
This is not a grammatical sentence. The thought behind it is nonsense. A self-dependent country reforms itself because that is what self-dependence means. These aren't two different things or aspects. There is only one thing.
The Honourable Prime Minister, Mr Narendra Modi has said “Aatmanirbhar Bharat is not about being self-contained or being closed to the world, it is about being self-sustaining and self-generating. We will pursue policies that promote efficiency, equity and resilience.” The Union Minister of Education, Mr Ramesh Pokhriyal “Nishank” has underlined the inextricable link of our aspirations to build a world-class higher education system with our commitment to developing an Atmanirbhar India. He has already begun extensive consultations with higher education leaders with a view to implementing the NEP in a time-bound and efficient manner.
Reading between the lines, we immediately see that this is 'mere puffery'. Nothing will happen. Grant minority status to every Hindu sect and then you will see some progress. Privatize failing Public Universities. Raise standards for PhD dissertations while allowing freer choice of subject. Close down fraudulent or criminal infested Campuses. In other words, stick your neck out and wait till the andolanjeevis chop your head off.
It is important that the Indian higher education system pursue the following 10 public policy reform initiatives to fulfil the vision of an Atmanirbhar University.
No it isn't.
Empowering universities with greater autonomy
So they can get shittier and shittier. Look at the Indian School of Business which was ranked 7th globally by Forbes a couple of years back. It has autonomy because it isn't accredited in India. But such accreditation doesn't matter at all- if you are good at what you do. But why be good if your competition is rubbish?
The vision of a ‘self-sustaining’ and ‘self-generating’ higher education system needs Indian universities to be freed from the existing shackles of regulation.
But so long as the taxpayer funds them, or so long as competition can't put them out of busines, they will only get shittier because of 'greater autonomy'. There is little point blaming 'regulations' in a country where it is easy to evade them.
The Atmanirbhar university has to be autonomous and should be able to seek internal agency, innovation, experimentation and institutional leadership to promote new initiatives without regulatory constraints.
Any University can already do this simply by ignoring 'regulatory constraints' and bribing concerned officials to look the other way.
Ensuring regulatory freedom
Why bother when regulations aren't enforced or you can drag the thing through the courts endlessly?
The Atmanirbhar university needs regulatory freedom to evolve.
No. Evolution happens when the fitness landscape changes. Regulation is irrelevant in a 'soft state' where evading them is easy.
The state, central and specialised subject-based regulations imposed on HEIs can limit their creativity and innovation.
So, just ignore them the way everybody else does. The only thing that matters is competition. If it gets stronger then the fitness landscape is more unforgiving. Another way to say this is that Indian Universities will take off as and when the Demand and Supply of their services becomes more elastic.
Freedom from regulatory barriers will be based upon the recognition of trust, responsibility and accountability.
Why not just get rid of all Law and trust instead in everybody being very responsible and accountable and nice and sweet and kind and compassionate?
The recent effort to promote online education hadn’t adequately fulfilled a vision of regulatory innovation.
No. It has fulfilled a pessimistic vision in this regard.
We need to move beyond the existing imaginations of online education and degrees to realise its true potential and keep up with the digital advancements in the world of higher education.
Fuck 'existing imaginations'. Just keep abreast of what the competition is doing. Then try to compete in a higher league.
Why not get rid of Law as an academic subject? Have a course in 'Imagining how nice everything could be if everybody was nice'.
Enabling the university to raise significant financial resources
The aspiration to build an Atmanirbhar higher education system requires
utilizing existing resources more efficiently so as to improve competitiveness
excellence, which comes at a price.
What is the point of saying to be self-sufficient we must be excellent? Why not say 'to be rich enough not to be dependent on working for somebody else or selling stuff to other people, we must be very wealthy?
The makings of a world-class university including infrastructure, faculty, internationalisation, career opportunities require huge financial investment.
No it does not. Making something world-class means first competing at the local level and then using that localized 'rent on ability' to fund a move up the league table to compete on a regional level. Only after that should you be competing at the world level.
What this guy is dreaming about is oodles of money to replicate an Ivy League oasis in a country which can afford no such thing. Furthermore, smart people want to get away from most parts of India whereas America is a great place to live. Still, some big Cities can host first rate Institutions of a specialist kind.
To build the desired institutional capacity, an Atmanirbhar university needs significant capital infusion, whether it is publicly or privately funded.
So a self-sufficient X needs lots of money to be self-sufficient. Wonderful! If you just give me a billion dollars, I will be completely self sufficient- growing my own food and generating my own electricity and flying around in my own private jet.
Energising the university for innovation, entrepreneurship and collaboration
Most universities in India are isolated from the wider society, industry, government and even the community.
Yes. We hire security guards to keep those thugs away from our homes or places of business.
Universities should become avenues for innovation and entrepreneurship.
They should be incubators- true enough. Some are to a greater or lesser extent. Most are utterly shit and are happy to remain so.
While there have been a lot of exhortations to the HEIs and universities from the regulatory bodies to collaborate with all stakeholders, it will take significant public policy reforms to enable this.
Nonsense. If the thing is profitable, it happens regardless of 'public policy'. India is a very poor country where contract or regulation enforcement is difficult.
Globalising the Indian university
The Indian civilisation heritage had imaginations of global and multidisciplinary education in the form of Nalanda, Takshashila, Vallabhi and Vikramshila.
Nonsense! These were Buddhist seminaries attracting a few foreign Buddhists. Why not mention Benares or Navadvipa? Is it because we think of Hinduism as confined to India?
India’s aspirations to build an Atmanirbhar globalised higher education system requires reimagination of the Indian university to recreate our own future.
No it doesn't. Imagination can't do shit. Responding to sharper competitive forces- because you die if you don't- is what is required.
India offers a diverse and vibrant democracy,
which is as poor as shit. India has half the number of Income tax-payers that Britain does despite the tax threshold being half that of the UK and the population being more than twenty times as large.
an intellectually engaging society,
Rubbish! Look at Pratap Bhanu Mehta or, indeed, this author. Their brains turned to shit in India.
an affordable education.
No. Useful education- e.g Medical College- is unaffordable for most which is why so many Indians ended up going to China. There are only 100,000 medical students in India. 20,000 had to go to China. That is scandalous. We have an absolute and a comparative advantage in this field. Our cost of living is lower and labor is much cheaper. Why are we being so stupid? The answer, of course, has to do with politics. Our politicians want to cut up the cake before it is baked.
It is time that the world sees India as the global destination for higher education that it is.
Regional- maybe but it is losing market share. Global? Not so much.
Developing strong international collaborations
The NEP has focussed on internationalisation with the vision for international university campuses in India. While this could promote internationalisation, we should focus on making our universities Athmanirbhar and create internationalisation within our own ecosystem.
Also we must have our cake and eat it too. By strengthening our commitment to reimagining pie-in-the-sky, we can all become Atmanirbhar.
However, we need regulatory reforms, which could provide Indian universities the space to develop different forms of collaborations with universities around the world in form of exchange programmes, dual-degrees, joint conferences and research collaborations.
And wasting lots and lots of money on essentially cosmetic, or downright fraudulent, shite. The current system- whereby foreign Universities can very cheaply cream off India's best and brightest has worked well for them. Sure, some second rate places may do tie-ups- bogus 'campus within a campus' deals which charge an arm and a leg to wealthy cretins whose Mummies and Daddies don't trust them enough to let them go off to Amrika unsupervised.
Focussing on excellence in research and publications
The lack of a culture of research, scholarship and publications in Indian HEIs
arises from the stupidity and ignorance of its Department Head level savants. A bright guy has to go abroad to work on anything worthwhile.
has limited our performance in global rankings.
being shit does have that effect.
The vision of an Atmanirbhar university should focus on research that can impact the development of the society at large.
Development policy should do that- but Indian Development Econ shat the bed long ago. Our savants think India should develop by
1) equitably dividing the fruits of Development before there is any fucking Development whatsoever
2) talking worthless, verbose, shite and virtue signaling till the cows come home
It should be able to address the problems of society through innovations in STEM, social sciences, humanities and medicine.
We should be able to address the problem of our being unemployable cretins through innovations in Nanotechnology and Quantum Computing.
Building strong state and local level institutional capacities
The larger narrative of Indian higher education, unfortunately, remains urban in its orientation.
We must reimagine our forests and mountains as containing Rishis who can impart advanced training in Nanotechnology and Quantum Computing.
Atmanirbhar India needs to expand its scope beyond urban locations and a few cities to build a strong state and local level institutional capacity for higher education in rural India.
Very true! We need a Nalanda International University in every Bihari village!
This will require innovation in rural transformation,
e.g turning cow-sheds into CERN type Large Hadron Colliders. This can easily be done by reimagining narratives.
including building of civil, transport, telecommunication and digital infrastructure to match world-class standards.
Many elderly Bihari landless laborers are not having a radio telescope or even a rudimentary particle accelerator! How can we match world-class Institutions under such barbaric conditions? Instead of building toilets, we should be providing Large Hadron Colliders to elderly landless laborers in rural areas. This is easily done just by reimagining narratives re. MNREGA.
Enabling Atmanirbhar rural-based HEIs will play a leading role in creating a knowledge society.
Very true! Everybody will want to go and study in some village which has a sufficiency of Large Hadron Colliders and Radio Telescopes. You may say- 'Young people want to live in exciting, cosmopolitan, places- not rural shitholes'. My reply is 'at the same time that we provide Large Hadron Colliders to rural shitholes, we will also set up plenty of Starbucks and Ice Skating rinks and hot nymphomaniacs with tight bods and state of the art nightclubs benchmarked to International standards. I tell you, each and every village will have a larger population of super smart and super sexy young people than London or New York! All we need to do is reimagine narratives re. MNREGA and Swach Bharat.'
International rankings and global benchmarking
We need to recognise the importance of international rankings
No. They are misleading and lead to bad policy choices- e.g. increasing the number of PhDs even in worthless subjects or increasing the number of journal articles published, even if the journals are shit, etc. etc.
and move beyond the myopic vision of celebrating our success and dismiss the rankings when we don’t do well.
This is not a 'myopic vision'. It is merely a blinkered vision.
We must not be threatened
It is rational to say 'there is no threat here- don't feel threatened'. It is also rational to say 'there is a threat here- don't be intimidated'. It is not rational to say 'we must not be threatened' when what determines whether we are threatened or not does not depend on us. Sure, if we are very strong, we may make it a point to kill any one who threatens us. In that case, to say 'we must not be threatened' means- 'we will kill you if you try to fuck with us'. But this only works if the threat emanates from a weaker party- not objective, inanimate, facts.
about our institutional capacity to achieve excellence
there are multiple threats to this. We should recognize them.
and develop strong and substantive institutional policies that will align the individual university rankings’ aspirations with the larger national approach towards international rankings and global benchmarking.
Fuck does this mean? We should work together to fudge the numbers? How is that a good thing? Sure, India can ensure that every unemployable cretin gets a PhD and publishes a dozen papers every year which every other such cretin is obliged to cite in their own worthless papers. This may artificially inflate our ranking- for about a month. Then the ratings organization will simply change its methodology. People around the globe will laugh at us.
Breaking the public-private university divide
There is an urgent need for breaking all barriers relating to public and private divide in HEIs.
No there isn't. The public sector will remain as a subsidy to the well connected though a few poor people too may benefit.
The NEP has suggested a need for reimagination in this regard. With nearly 70% of HEIs in the private sector and over 70% of students studying in private HEIs, we must recognise the significance and impact of the private HEIs.
In other words, there will be limited privatization- if there isn't a big enough political backlash. But this was already the case.
The Way Forward
The Indian imagination of an Atmanirbhar university will be successful, if the vision of NEP is implemented in letter and spirit.
The Indian imagination of everybody being rich and safe will be realized if the vision of VEP- Vivek's Economic Policy- is implemented in letter and spirit. This requires everybody inheriting a billion dollars from their future descendants and then being very very nice and Atmanirbhar and Parmatmadilbhar.
We need to implement the following 5 initiatives to implement the NEP that will also help us implement the 10 public policy reforms that I have proposed:
Why not just implement VEP?
Establishing the Prime Minister’s Task Force on Higher Education Reforms
But it will be as useless as the Niti Ayog.
Establishing the National NEP Implementation Committee with select Vice Chancellors, Chaired by the Union Minister of Education
Because such Committees have been such a roaring success in independent India that we have overtaken Amrika and Yurop- in our imagination.
Empowering the “Institutions of Eminence” to become India’s Global Universities
By changing their name to 'Institution of Global Eminence'. Why stop there? Why not 'Institutions of Galactic Eminence' benchmarked against the highest standards that prevail in Andromeda.
Constitution of the National Education Ministers’ Council with Education Ministers of all states and UTs to seek reforms in the state education sector to align with the NEP
Because India is economically and socially homogeneous- not diverse at all.
Constitution of the National Higher Education Philanthropy Council to promote private sector participation in the development of HEIs
America has plenty of 'private sector participation' in this field. Does it have a Philanthropy Council? Nope. Americans aren't stupid.
The vision of an Atmanirbhar University and an Atmanirbhar Higher Education System in India is truly inspiring.
No it isn't. This guy is lying so as to curry favor with the ruling party.
It combines the vision of John Henry Newman’s ‘Idea of a University’
No it does not. Newman said- ' religious truth is not only a portion, but a condition of general knowledge. To blot it out is nothing short … of unravelling the web of university teaching"
with the Humboldtian imagination of the modern research university
which failed spectacularly. Fredric Althoff, 'the Bismarck of the German University system' took a very different course. Only after the Second War did Germans start babbling about Humboldt. This was because Von Harnack and Spranger could be seen as 'having clean hands' wrt to Hitlerism and they used to gas on about Humboldt who was a good scientist- for his period. But Scientific investigation had to embrace mathematical methods to advance. Newman and Humboldt represent a cul de sac on the way to modern academia.
to create the new Global University, which is multidisciplinary, democratic, inclusive, aspirational and international.
and leaves you unable to write a cogent, not utterly vacuous, sentence in any language- if you spend long enough there.
India needs to accept that we can fulfil this vision, only if we are prepared to take the full responsibility of what it takes to become an Atmanirabhar Bharat!
Everybody needs to accept that they must take responsibility for fulfilling anything they can actually fulfill. Nobody needs to accept full responsibility for 'what it takes' to fulfil something. This is because 'what it takes' is exogenous. It is objective. It is not something you have to take responsibility for. What it takes for my becoming bigger than Beyonce is
1) plastic surgery
2) intensive training in song and dance
3) lots and lots of talent.
I don't have to take responsibility for the fact that I can't get any of these things. It is simply a fact about the world.
Why can't a guy who studied at Oxford and Cambridge not write a single correct, non-vacuous, sentence in the English language? The answer has to do with Indian HEIs turning to shit because, in the absence of an existential threat arising from competition, they become less and less tightly focused on outcomes. The fact is, smart people become stupid if they linger in such places. They get into the habit of talking rather than thinking. But what they say soon becomes utterly meaningless.
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