The commoditisation of higher education has many advantages and perhaps raises some questions for me?an economist who gets his pension from a national research and teaching institute set up in collaboration with a state government and with a hefty corpus collected by the last of the Ahmedabad Jagat Sheth types. I used to joke with the late HM Patel that I never forgave him for making me a professor at the age of 28, and while I worked in every senior capacity in Delhi, I never resigned my professorship and went back to my office in Ahmedabad. I did so because the men who funded my retreat were only interested in good education and research and had no other views apart from judging outcomes.
The interesting part of the current debate is that there is no discussion of what good education is all about. The focus is on the needs of parents who very legitimately want to send their children abroad. Senior civil servants, high profile politicians who left teaching decades ago and entrepreneurs and geeks who know everything also want foreign education. This is good because it is the purchasing power that matters. And those who don?t know their customers suffer.
Knowing the market is important not just for making money in education as some benighted deemed universities are finding out, but more important to respond creatively to network with the current and emerging needs.
But there is also a supply side, and good education emerges from the cultural values of a society and also from support of those with a long vision. I keep on parroting this to a non-existent audience: whenever a good educationist has come to us from any good university in the world, he or she has said things to that effect, and to be fair we give them a hearing, but we forget it.
There are two characteristics of good education. It is a long haul business, so if I start today, I may have to wait for five to ten years before the product comes out. Second, it is not a standard assembly line product like a sausage. You can?t sit on a teacher when he reads, writes or lectures, so you may judge him or her only by outcomes.
So, you need a vision and you need accountability and autonomy. The accountability is, of course, of teachers and karamcharis, but also of educational administrators and the babus and netas who now, alas, administer them. Sukhdeo Thorat was asking for that accountability with his charter of reforms, internal grading, financial responsibility, semester systems and so on, but he paid the price for also asking for the autonomy of the actors, for everybody else who matters apart from teachers knows the answers. In this system foreign universities can play a cutting-edge role. They will bring in best practices, but we will find out that good professors will not come simply because we have passed a Bill. In fact, in a training process where we paid through the nose for the best universities, we found that even the paid for promised big names didn?t come.
Universities all over the world are globalising, so a foot in the expanding market of India is good, but in the so-called missions, it is the business types who call the shots with an NRI professor or retired dean tagging along to give respectability. Our negotiating skills will be tested when we take this business seriously. I am, of course, assuming that we will screen out the charlatans and the crooks. Otherwise we will repeat the story of the national institute that accommodated a ?highly recommended? Malaysian franchisee of a prestigious economics school, only to have the fellow make them spend a few lakhs on facilities and disappear.
The only real way we can make the best in the world bond with us is to make Indian academia professionally exciting to them. That means reform at home. It means encouraging the best and the brightest. It means giving autonomy to institutions of higher learning at home and making them achieve mutually accepted goals. It means letting the best here pair up with the best abroad in research and teaching. It means rewarding them if they perform and punishing them when they don?t.
Nobody is talking of this. A university teacher of arts is suspended without due process, his student is arrested and not allowed to complete his exam and his results are still not declared after three years. A defeated politician is made chancellor of a university for a lifetime. We will have to build firewalls to stop all this before we can use the best elsewhere.
The author is a former Union minister