l All universities must be teaching cum research universities. All research bodies must connect with universities in their vicinity and create teaching opportunities for their researchers.
l We must prevent isolation of study of engineering or management. We should look forward to the day when IITs and IIMs also produce scholars in areas like literature, linguistics and politics. Institutions must be given the freedom to expand and diversify as they see fit rather than thrusting an uniform diktat on all institutions.
l All syllabi should require teachers and students to apply what they have learnt in their courses, on studying a local situation, issue or problem. There should be sufficient room for the use of local data and resources to make the knowledge covered in the syllabus come alive as experience.
l Minimum set of occupational exposure to be made compulsory for all students, irrespective of discipline, in the form of summer jobs or internships, with evaluation of the students on this front.
l Need to expose students at the undergraduate level to various disciplines like humanities, social sciences, aesthetics, irrespective of the discipline they would like to specialise in subsequently.
l Teacher training for all levels of school education (from primary to higher secondary) must be carried out by institutions of higher education. The absence of university-level interest in teacher training has resulted in poor academic quality.
l We need to build strong bridges between different fields of professional education and the disciplines of science, social sciences and humanities, All professional institutions must be part of a comprehensive university in a complete administrative and academic sense. We must abolish intermediary bodies that have been set up solely to issue licenses to professional colleges alone and inspect them. This will also help new interdisciplinary courses and research to evolve in the comprehensive universities.
l All vocational institutions must also be part of universities.
l All private universities must submit to a national accreditation system. Private degree-granting universities must not be confined to select areas like technology, medicine, management, finance etc.. They must
be required to be comprehensive universities covering the arts and social and natural
sciences too.
l Granting of Deemed University status to be put on hold. All existing Deemed Universities to be given three years to shape up (to have strong research programmes, and become a comprehensive university as defined in this report) failing which their Deemed University status is to be withdrawn.
l National tests like the GRE must be organised round the year. Students from all over India must be allowed to take the tests as many times as they like and their best score can be sent to the universities for admission. Currently the CBSE and the state board exams are a means of normalising school level competencies ? this can be done by the national tests.
l Urgent measures are needed to attract good people who enjoy teaching and research back to the university and offer them a positive and motivating environment. Resources in terms of libraries, laboratories and research assistance as well as competitive remuneration will need to be provided to retain good people.
l Student assessment of teachers needs to be instituted. Students can provide an experiential assessment of the quality of teaching. Parameters of student feedback can be drawn up to avoid distorted assessments by students. Teachers whose feedback record remains poor in successive years should be required to face formal procedures which might allow a university or college to shed them.
l We need a De Novo regulatory body – the National Commission for Higher Education and Research (NCHER) under which the various functions of the existing regulatory agencies would be subsumed. The new body would also take over the powers vested in the existing regulatory bodies in terms of creation of new institutions as well as their content/sylallbi.
l The 13 existing professional councils created under various acts of Parliament may after divesting their existing regulatory functions to NCHER look at conducting tests for practicisng professionals affiliated to the councils, prescribing syllabi for such tests and leave it to the universities to design their curriculum based on such syllabi.
l The NCHER should galvanise research in the university system through the creation of a National Research Foundation. The NCHER should identify the best 1,500 colleges across India to upgrade them as universities, and create clusters of other potentially good colleges to evolve as universities.
