Avoid the fast track to reform

By Apoorvanand, Ayesha Kidwai, Farida Khan, Janaki Nair, Romila Thapar and Satish Deshpande

February 21, 2015 

the manner in which the state is intervening in higher education is causing widespread concern.

With nearly 30 million students, India’s higher education sector is larger than the population of Australia. But what makes it notable today is the scale of the social revolution it is effecting. In the 21st century, China and India are enacting one of the most dramatic instances of the democratisation of higher education, as millions of families send a child to college for the first time. As teachers, we are mindful of being part of this momentous process. It’s also heartening to see the Indian state taking the initiative to enable the entry of hitherto excluded groups by making significant investments. However, the manner in which the state is intervening in higher education is causing widespread concern. A striking similarity between the unlamented UPA 2 regime and the current Narendra Modi government is their authoritarian impatience to introduce wholesale changes without careful preparation.

Some of the proposed changes include the introduction of a common syllabus for all Central universities, a common entrance test, faculty and student mobility, and credit transfers. A series of nationwide schemes — like Gian, Kushal and Swayam — are being planned, along with e-libraries, online courses and other technology-driven proposals. Some of the justifications offered are enhanced employability, skill development and seamless nationwide student mobility. The measures don’t address the most urgent problems and seem poised to repeat earlier mistakes. A common entrance test works well only for narrowly defined technical disciplines, such as engineering or medicine. It’s unlikely to work when disciplines and institutions cover a wide range and have divergent requirements.

If the proposed common curriculum is intended to address the uneven quality across institutions, it ignores the root cause, which is not the lack of “model” curricula but the ability to implement them. Diversity is not the enemy of quality, and high standards need not imply standardisation. Heeding historical and regional specificities is an imaginative alternative far more likely to succeed. While it may have many common features, “reform” need not, and should not, mean the same thing for universities in Varanasi and Vadodara or in Hampi and Hyderabad.

If the purpose of standardisation is to enable student mobility, we must be clear about what we mean by “mobility”. What factors prevent students from moving? Why do they wish to move? How would a common curriculum and transferable credits help? There is no evidence these questions have been answered, or that policymakers have learnt from controversies dogging the Bologna Process, a programme to boost mobility and employability across European universities that has sparked student protests and criticism. Judging by their borrowed vocabulary, our reforms may be trying to solve an Indian problem (shortage of quality institutions) with a European method (mobility). In India, merely enabling students to move is pointless because the institutions they would choose are already overcrowded.

Two generic features of the proposed reforms are particularly worrisome. The first is the blind reliance on technological fixes like Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs). This ignores the global experience that MOOCs cannot replace face-to-face learning. The second is the imposition of unviable timetables, with “one month” as the typical deadline. Such haste inevitably invites authoritarianism. By contrast, there are important areas left unaddressed. The most vital is language. Historians of a later era will no doubt be astonished at the extent to which English continued as the gatekeeper of higher education decades after Independence. Progress on this will have the largest impact in widening access to higher education, and yet, it has not been addressed with the urgency it deserves.

The difficult question of devising mechanisms for enhancing the accountability of teachers and administrators is yet to be tackled. The anxiety over rankings and the search for more transparent systems for evaluating academic performance have led to a self-defeating preoccupation with quantitative indicators. Any system of evaluation must recognise the equal validity of multiple systems of knowledge.

Perhaps the ultimate reason for the mismatch between official initiatives and ground realities lies in an overly narrow view of higher education. Technical skills and a notion of employability cannot by themselves constitute education. Training alone is far from sufficient because it only enables the efficient reproduction of what is already known. Education is about acquiring the resources and the imaginative ability to tackle the unknown, an ability upon which rests our collective future.

The writers are teachers at the University of Delhi, Jamia Millia Islamia and JNU