Philip Altbach- the world's leading expert on Universities- and Pankaj Jalota (of Indraprastha) write in University World News
It is true to say that India in 2020 does not have any world-class research universities.
So what? What matters is if world-class research, from which India benefits disproportionately, is done somewhere- whether or not it is done on Indian soil. Research done in Mexico, because of certain unique geographical features it enjoys, may change the live of millions of Indian farmers. It is a good thing for India if Indian agronomists- like Sanjaya Rajaram- take Mexican citizenship and work there.
Germany pioneered both the research university and the research institute. The latter were more successful and prestigious. However, it appears that as R&D budgets rise, German research universities can hold their own. But a lot of this has to do with Germany's ability to attract and retain smart people from elsewhere in Europe.
India, because of fiscal constraints and a dysfunctional bureaucracy, is looking at autonomous Research Universities which can grow and attract talent and funding more easily than existing Institutes- some of which have degenerated completely.
Sadly, it appears that some policy makers are still obsessed with fooling rating agencies into thinking India has first class research Universities purely as a matter of satisfying vanity.
This sort of fraud harms Higher Education.
Universities can waste money on what looks like world class research- or even put one or two academic super-stars on the payroll for cosmetic purposes- but this harms students and wastes resources.
What determines whether research is done is the reward for innovation. Where it is done depends on comparative or absolute advantage.
Should India go in for Research Universities? No. More competing specialist Institutes is the way forward. Why? What worked in the past, will work in the future. What failed in the past will fail, ceteris paribus, in the future.
It does have several outstanding research institutes in various scientific fields.
Why? Because they are tightly focused and can keep out the riff-raff.
Speaking generally, Research should be kept separate from teaching unless you are training really smart kids who can start doing original research in a couple of years. But it should never be credentialised. Freeman Dyson didn't have a Doctorate. Plenty of cretins do. But Dyson could transform a field of which he had no previous experience and to which he arrived quite tangentially.
The Indian Institute of Statistics, Mahalanobis's baby, is the only 'Developing World' establishment which became the model for one in America. Sadly, its influence was, on balance, baleful for India's economic development. Research is a double edged sword. It can make stupidity seem a higher type of intelligence. Indeed, Indian Higher Education has often been an exercise in 'double-think'. This is useful if sycophancy is going to be your ticket to the gravy train.
It also has some excellent technology and management institutions – the Indian Institutes of Technology and the Indian Institutes of Management. And a few outstanding public institutions, such as the Indian Institute of Science, and some excellent private initiatives such as Manipal, Ashoka, and a few others.
But none of these are comprehensive research universities
Which is why they aint utterly shit.
To succeed, do more of what you already do well. Imitate what other similarly placed countries do- if you can. India can't do what China does- viz. beat woke nutters and chase them off campus. Also, don't create Nalanda type white elephants.
that can compare with the best universities globally – or which are recognised by any of the global higher education rankings.
India can be easily recognized as a shit poor country. Why should it compare itself with wealthy countries?
But India is not yet a scientific or research power. For India to be fully successful as a global scientific and intellectual force, it needs research universities.
No it does not. It needs professional Research Institutes which compete with each other and which try to take market share from foreign Institutes. One reason for this is that 'brain drain' is less likely where un-credentialized Researchers are locked into their existing Institute.
Education and Research are completely separate activities. You can pretend otherwise by simply putting up a Research Institute under the umbrella of a University- but who are you actually fooling?
This requirement has finally been recognised in several of the impressive initiatives proposed by the Government of India – most importantly the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020, approved by the government in August, and programmes such as the Global Initiative of Academic Networks, the National Institutional Ranking Framework (NIRF) and several others.
India is, yet again, doing stupid shit. But it will soon run out of money so the stupid shit will get discontinued.
A differentiated academic system
Research universities are necessarily a small but central part of a differentiated academic system.
They are unnecessary. Most 'research' at Uni is utterly shite. Delhi School of Econ turned to shit after it joined Delhi University. The Institute of Statistics resisted this urge and thus is less shite.
India, which now has the second-largest student enrolment in the world, has a highly complex but poorly articulated academic system.
It has a shit system because it is as poor as shit and policy makers are as stupid as shit and Indian students, quite sensibly, don't give a shit about research or academic excellence or anything else which doesn't actually put more money in their pocket than they would otherwise get.
It is important to recognise the importance of having research universities at the pinnacle of that system,
Why? Altbach won't tell us.
but to understand that the number of such institutions is a small part of the total – and that choosing which universities will be research-intensive is quite important.
meaningless gibberish. One could say 'It is important to recognize the importance of having super-duper Universities but also to understand that the number of super-duper Universities will be small'. The fact is, if a Uni is super-duper it will have real smart peeps who will find funding for research which more than pays for itself. But the same is true of any bunch of super-duper peeps- be they part of a faculty or part of a Cult.
The NEP suggests that about 100 universities be identified as research universities in the near future.
Coz Amrika has R1 Universities and so, if we have R1 Universities, we will become American and say 'Howdy' to each other instead of 'Get the fuck out of my way you fucking dehati retard'.
These universities will focus strongly on research and doctoral programmes, in addition to having high quality education at bachelor and masters degree levels.
Also there will be plenty of unicorns with rainbows coming out of their assholes wandering the grounds.
The rest of the more than 900 universities will be teaching universities, which will mainly deliver high quality education.
and the ability to give yourself a b.j.
These universities are also expected to do a modest amount of research and have small doctoral programmes.
So, they will be R2 Universities. Why not just rename India the United States of Almost America?
This differentiation is extremely important, since without carefully articulating this, all universities try to do both research and education without adequate resources or the quality of faculty that is needed for high quality research, meaning they will end up being mediocre at both.
This is hilarious. Altbach is saying 'it is important that shithole Universities say 'we are shithole Universities'. If shithole Universities don't keep saying this, they will inevitably end up trying to set up a Large Hadron Collider in the cowshed. This will piss off the cows.
How the research universities will be differentiated from the rest must be done in a transparent manner
Hang a big placard from their necks which says 'I am a shit University. Don't come too close to me. My stupidity may be contagious'.
using a sound classification framework (like the Carnegie Classification in the United States) that uses a few important measures of research, such as the size of doctoral programmes, the number of research faculty with doctorates, the level of research funding, publications and citations, among others. (The Carnegie framework was adapted for India in a paper published in Higher Education last year, which identified about 70 universities from the top 200 in the NIRF as research universities).
32 of them are engineering colleges. Foreigners may need this type of classification. Indians don't. We know which tiny portion of which University isn't wholly shite. The problem is, if you look a bit closer, most of that research is shite and what isn't shite is better pursued abroad- unless the thing isn't being done at a University at all.
Some have argued that India needs to develop its own university model.
This happened long ago. Why pretend Indian universities are based on a foreign pattern? One or two may have started out that way. But they had to adapt to Indian conditions. On the other hand, Defense Research may well be done along similar lines to other countries. But we don't know much about this.
While a research university, or any academic institution, must take into account national realities, the basic model of the research university is well established and necessarily reflects the patterns followed by the best universities globally.
The best universities are ones that can keep out the stupid and the woke. Indian Universities can't do that for political and legal reasons.
China, which has been quite successful in developing a number of successful research universities by, among other things, spending vast sums of money on the effort, talked about “universities with Chinese characteristics”.
China took the opposite course from India back in the early days of the Republic. Instead of degree mills, they aggressively pursued excellence. Unlike the Latin American 'Cordoba model' they didn't give a fuck about 'inclusivity'. Elitism pays off- though, like Japan back in the Sixties, an overly selective Secondary School system means a lot of undergrads slack off and are allowed to get away with it. I believe that trend has already reversed itself in China- so they will continue to rise.
Unlike China, India had produced one or two first class mathematicians and physicists prior to 1920. After that, politics took over. Bose of 'boson' fame did nothing but agitate for this or that. Harvard educated Kosambi turned into a loony-Leftist crank publishing ludicrous proofs of the Reimann hypothesis. The Chinese entrenched themselves in American Universities at an earlier date to the Indians. This meant that after Chinese growth took off, they could target a large diaspora with cutting edge skills and get them to 'return to the motherland' on attractive salary packages and generous research funding. It remains to be seen whether China will overtake the US or, where it has already done so, maintain its lead.
In fact their successful universities follow established, mainly Western, models.
Also, Chinese people wear trousers and shirts on the Western model.
Indeed, the main elements that are ‘Chinese’ are negative – limitations on academic freedom, restrictions on access to some information and too much bureaucracy – and actually slow down progress.
Suppressing the fuck out of students turned out to be a good idea for China.
Thus, successful Indian research universities will inevitably resemble the best universities worldwide.
In every sense, except that of existing in reality. Even if a research Uni in India is as good as one in America, the best and brightest will want to go to America. Why? It is a pathway to a Green Card. Fuck Excellence. We want greenbacks.
Pathways to excellence
India has traditionally taken the path of creating small and specialised institutions in areas like engineering, medicine, law, social sciences, business and others – the best known of which are the Indian Institutes of Technology.
Globally, however, most research universities tend to be multidisciplinary. The reason for this is that, in the modern world, where the main challenges are multidisciplinary, high quality innovation and research require institutions to have multiple disciplines in the same university.
Coz physicists really need to rap with sociologists. Chemists like talking to experts in Gender Studies.
The High Table at some elite Oxbridge College may have created 'synergy' in the past. Nowadays, the internet brings people together even more easily. Universities are ceasing to matter. Indeed, COVID may bring about fundamental changes in the way they operate.
The NEP, in keeping with this globally successful approach, expects all research universities to scale up and become multidisciplinary, each having up to 25,000 students.
The NEP is as stupid as shit. This is a recipe for bogus research and 'citation cartels' and bogus research journals and lots of people researching ' Dalit contributions to Quantum Physics' and 'Cow Urine as superconductor' etc, etc.
If the existing top Indian institutions and universities can expand in size and add more disciplines, this will provide them with the scale and disciplinary diversity needed to be included in the world’s top research universities.
Till people spot the obvious fraud and the index is reconstituted to do its job- viz. flatter those who pay for it.
It may also be possible to merge some existing institutions, as has been successfully done in France recently.
Merge Jamia Malia with JNU and you'll still have a shit-show.
India has several important advantages as it emerges as an academic power.
But it had them in a comparatively greater degree even as it declined as an academic power. In 1950, India was better at Stats than most American Unis- as Hannan records. But Americans didn't want to come to India to study whereas an Indian blessed his stars if he could get to the States.
The widespread use of English means that India is immediately part of global scientific communication.
This is increasingly irrelevant thanks to much improved machine translation.
India also has a sizable cadre of accomplished academics and researchers – both within the country and as part of the diaspora. Creating a productive academic environment for the most talented academics requires careful attention, good organisation and adequate funding.
Conversely, letting those researchers obey the invisible hand of the market may be even more beneficial if the Knowledge they produce is 'non-rival' and 'non-excludable'. It is mere vanity to worry about League Tables if the great mass of your country is very very poor. On the other hand, if research is 'excludable', and if it can generate rapid economic growth, then it can be well-rewarded indigenously- provided political interference is ruled out and only profit is pursued.
Involving the diaspora is quite important as the talent pool is immense – a significant number of Indians currently serve as university presidents and provosts of, for example, American universities, and could contribute knowledge about building research universities, even if they do not actually return to India.
If they speak with one voice- perhaps. But the very fact that they left India would call their motivation into question. Why should India subsidize a brain drain from which America would ultimately benefit?
Similarly, Indian professors in the diaspora can contribute to building research capacity by participating in collaborative research and other initiatives.
Some do so already. Those who don't won't just because we say 'pretty please'.
The research universities need substantially expanded resources for research.
Whereas Indian citizens need food and shelter and medicines.
Current levels of funding for research in universities is dramatically insufficient – India has consistently underfunded all aspects of higher education in the past.
Because it is as poor as shit and because education hasn't really raised productivity very much.
The NEP has correctly identified this as an area to be developed and has proposed establishing a National Research Foundation which will have significant funds for supporting research in four areas – technology, science, social science and arts and humanities.
Social Science? Arts? More wokeness of a soporific type!
The NEP also suggests that the different ministries should set aside funds for research, increase investment in research and enhance linkages of universities with the economy and society.
Ministries will fund research which establishes reasons, however bogus, as to why the Ministry should get more money.
Overall, if these measures are implemented well, it will enhance the level of research in universities while making them more relevant for society and more globally competitive.
Rubbish! The thing will be a shit-show.
Research universities also need full autonomy – they are too complex to be governed in any other manner.
But they don't want autonomy. Why? Because then the Vee Cee will constantly be being attacked by agitated students and taken to court and so forth. Only if the guy is an out and out gangster would he want autonomy. A better solution is to let every Hindu sect open a 'minority' Institution.
That is why even the publicly funded institutions in most developed countries enjoy almost full autonomy, with little or no direct involvement by the government in the management or governance of these institutions.
But the moment 'woke' nutters start running amok demanding statues be decapitated and Israel be boycotted and so forth, the Government has to intervene. Anyway, 'autonomy' can mean the Vee Cee gives herself a massive pay-rise and then a few years down the road, the University goes bankrupt. Freedom means being free to fail.
The NEP has recommended making research universities fully autonomous, with self-perpetuating boards having a very limited representation of government people or government appointees, with the board selecting and appointing the chief executive.
Cool! The Ruling Party will be able to entrench itself for all time in the case of public sector projects whereas, private universities will become a tax shelter for Corporates.
This would be a dramatic change from current Indian practice where the government appoints top leaders and controls the purse strings.
The dramatic change is that the guys the Government appoints get to appoint their successors even if the Government changes. What will be the result? The lunatic or gerontocratic fringe of the ruling party gets entrenched on a Campus which will then keep alive the shibboleths of a long dead ideology in a more and more ludicrous form.
These changes in the board structure and appointment of the chief executive, in addition to increased funding, could usher in a new dynamism in public research universities in India. The NEP also recommends full financial autonomy for universities.
Does any Vee Cee really want to be in the position of raising hostel fees and cutting back on shite Departments? Sure- if they get paid mega-bucks. Otherwise, as is happening at JNU, the research budget is cut to the bone so that the Vee Cee has plenty of security guards to keep the students away from him.
The stars are aligned for India to play an important part in the global knowledge system
Coz Indians are into astrology, right?
and to build world-class research universities.
Abroad. Don't do it in India. If you have to set up in India, then be like the Indian School of Business- don't register as a University.
The talent exists, the need is clear and there are some promising initiatives from the government.
But Governments will always prefer to grant bigger and bigger quotas at such places.
The challenge is no longer a lack of ideas
The challenge is that all the ideas these guys come up with are utter shit. We need more Medical Colleges & Research Institutes. Will we get it? No. Instead vested interest groups will talk up Research Universities though you don't have to conduct any very complicated survey to discover they are worthless.
– it is sustained support and effective implementation. But in the Indian context, these are indeed significant hurdles.
Indeed. Indian politicians have long preferred to divide up an imaginary cake rather than actually bake it. In the public sector, there will constantly be new rules on reservations and then appeals to the Supreme Court during which hiring will be frozen. Furthermore, funds for Research are the first to go when more money has to be spent on security. The private sector faces a different 'boom-bust' cycle. At times, genuine laboratories are expanded. But then cheaper 'Social Science' research is substituted for the genuine article and students realize they are stuck with obsolete equipment.
Suppose India had an excellent bureaucracy and a really smart judiciary- then it might have excellent public sector institutions. Equally, if it had an excellent private sector and really smart investors- then it would have excellent private sector institutions. Lacking both, it will have shitty institutions though no doubt for purely demographic reasons some tiny islands of merit might be visible.
Consider India's Cinema industry. There is plenty of competition so the thing is pretty good. But it isn't world class. By contrast, the South Koreans make movies which are remade by the Americans and the Indians and so forth. Who in their right mind would remake an Indian movie for a foreign market?
Let Indian Universities be like Indian Movies or Indian Music. Let competition flourish so that standards go up. But don't expect the thing to be globally competitive. After all, Indian preferences aren't the same as those of richer countries. Some Indian Research Institutes are a better choice for really smart Indians than any foreign University. What's more, there are a lot of things which can be done immediately to create synergy by collaborations which, at a later point, can become the type of interdisciplinary field which generates cutting edge results.
No comments:
Post a Comment