Academics Archives - Page 2 of 3

The Importance of Being Open

Should scholarly publications be absolutely freely available, or should they only reach those who have the funds to pay for subscriptions to the journals where these articles are published? There are as many nuanced opinions on this question as there are scholars, but with the ubiquity of the internet and the rising costs of journals, the issue is one that merits some thought and discussion.

Almost all the research that is typically done at the University is publicly funded, through the Government of India via various ministries, or by other public funds. Should the results of such research not be made available to as many as possible? These questions are central to a book that I reviewed in Current Science (Bangalore) some years ago, “The Access Principle. The Case for Open Access to Research and Scholarship” by John Willinsky. Parts of the review are excerpted below.

At the heart of the book is a simple idea, that ‘a commitment to scholarly work carries with it the responsibility to circulate that work as widely as possible’. This is in part so that knowledge that is created can be disseminated in a manner that the largest numbers of people have unfettered access to it, but there is more to it than just that…

The issues that Willinsky deals with have wider ramifications. For instance, who ‘owns’ knowledge? The scholar who creates it through research, or the funding agency that funded it directly or indirectly, or the commercial publishing house who owns the journal where the research was reported? And how best can it be used for public good, while ensuring that all involved parties do not go unrewarded or unrecognized?

The […] digital revolution is upon us all in a way that demands that such issues be thought about afresh since the modes of preservation of information and the modes of dissemination of knowledge have changed radically in our lifetime. For one thing, most journals of any quality are now online. Furthermore, many of them are ‘open access’, namely the articles they carry can be viewed without a subscription. However, the majority of academic journals have been in existence for a long time now and date back to the pre- digital era. The digitization of this legacy is a related issue, and the manner of the digitization and its consequent costs is relevant.

But issues are more complex in an era of impact factors and journal citations. The most prestigious journals, at least in terms of their perceived rankings, like Nature and Science are neither open access nor are they purely digital. It will be a long time before their influence will wane, so it is important to understand the totality of the access problem.

Today it is commonplace that the majority of scholars in any part of the world access academic information primarily in an electronic manner, and not through the pages of a printed journal. This revolution is similar to that wrought by Gutenberg, who through the printed page freed humankind from the purely oral tradition by offering mass producible books that anyone (with enough money!) could obtain, keep, learn from, and use to advantage.

And it is the complex nature of this revolution that ‘The Access Principle’ addresses through its extensive research. The 13 chapters of the book examine issues ranging from the history to what is copyright, the politics and the economics. Willinsky, like many of us, believes that openness is ‘better’ in an abstract way – at the end of the day its not clear from which quarter the fundamental advances are going to come, and so its best not to deny anyone the requisite opportunities. The more people who have access to knowledge, the more one can maximize the probability of any one of them using some part of it in a fundamental and future altering manner.

The first journals appeared only in the 1600s. The Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society grew out of the publication of the correspondence between the members of the society thanks to the efforts and foresight of Oldenburg. Despite the reputation for secrecy that surrounds his name, one of the earliest articles was a letter from Newton on ‘the theory of light and colours’. Newton appears to have held the opinion that public exposition of his research was both a duty and a privilege, and in that sense, scientific journals offered an intermediate space between the public book and the private letter.

But journals offer more than just exposure. The process of peer review, the validation, and with time, the prestige of publication – and the vanity – have all contributed to making the dissemination of science a fairly substantial business. And in the details of how this business is run lie some of the more contentious problems of the open access paradigm. Willinsky is quick to emphasize that open is not free – someone, somewhere has to invest in providing access. He lists 10 flavours of open access to underscore this point. For instance, scholars can post articles on their homepages, submit them to e-print archives, or pay a journal to allow open access to their articles. Journals, on the other hand, can subsidize access (as many Indian journals, notably those of the Indian Academy of Sciences, do), use their print versions to subsidize the online versions, allow delayed or partial open access, have a subsidy model in place, and so on. A cooperative movement such as JSTOR has played a very important role in developing tools to digitize old journals in a manner so as to make their content digitally searchable, and the access they allow is not free, but by having a flexible policy as regards revenue, they enable access in a significant manner.

The different chapters of the book are devoted to a variety of issues such as copyright and its consequences, the role of scholarly bodies and their publishing models and imperatives, the economics of open access, the role that this can play in development, and so on. The digital revolution holds within itself considerable promise. Universities, colleges and schools that did not build up physical libraries can, given enough resources, build up essentially a complete repository of the knowledge generated by humankind since whenever. Anecdotal evidence on this count is abundant and genuine, particularly in countries like India where the public investment in libraries is limited.

As a scholar who has devoted the better part of two decades to such matters, Willinsky argues the case for increased openness in scholarly publications with vigour and with wisdom, and without oversimplifying the issues at hand. The commitment to the cause is most evident in his chapter on Rights, where he proposes that access to knowledge is a fundamental human right, one that is closely related to the ability to defend other rights. The argument is tenuous but offers an interesting perspective on the ability of increased access to knowledge to have an impact beyond the areas envisioned by the creators of that knowledge. To some extent, the Right to Information Act in India has had a very similar effect – information on one aspect of public life can have consequences on other aspects.

In the end, the most compelling aspect of this book is the simplicity of the basic argument. Scholars should see that their work reaches the largest number of people and should make all efforts to ensure this. This is their dharma. Academic administrators should see that scholarly work is supported in a manner so as to have this wide reach. And this is their karma. In the long run, inclusivity is clearly more in the public interest than exclusion in any form, especially in a globalized world, and the Open Access movement can help us along this path.

The karma of the University administration can be fulfilled with just a little effort. Along with the Gapps crew, we are setting the subdomain archive.uohyd.ac.in where scholars can upload their working papers, conference papers as well as their near final preprints in a UoH Archive which is an OAR (Open Access Repository). This is simple enough to operate- anyone with an @uohyd.ac.in account can upload a document which can then be accessed by anyone, inside the University or across the Universe…

The scholarly world is a-changing. This week, October 21 to 27 is International Open Access Week 2013. Celebrate! Upload a paper onto the UoH Archive!

PS: For the moment, send contributions to qohe571tigi@post.wordpress.com as an attachment. Watch this space for updates…

Turbulence

The other day, at a book release at our neighbouring Central University, MANUU, I heard the chief guest quote Allama Iqbal. Apparently (or so I gathered) when his son was setting off for higher studies in London, the great poet said to him: … خدا تجھے کسی طوفان سے آشنا کر دے کے تیرے باہر کی موجوں میں اضطراب نہیں (Khuda tujhe kisi toofan se ashna kar de, ke tere bahr ki mojon mein iztirab naheen).

I’ve looked for translations, and while none of them captures the nuance of the Urdu, the closest I could find is May God grant you a storm! The voyage of your life is on too placid an ocean…

Literally, though the verse reads in translation, “May God bless you with some storm, because the waves in your ocean (of self) are devoid of agitation (turmoil)”. There is the resonance with Shakespeare, when Brutus talks of the “tide in the affairs of men.
Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune; […] And we must take the current when it serves“, as well as the famous Chinese curse, May you live in interesting times!

The appositeness of the advice is something I have had occasion to reflect upon, as we pass through these interesting times. We at the UoH have such great privileges- our campus, its freedoms, its autonomy- and one cannot but feel that we should be doing something more. More what, one might well ask, so to turn the question around, is what we do enough? Just enough, barely enough or well enough? These are questions for which there are many answers, so all things considered, I think it is preferable that we have the occasional iztirab, a little anxiety, a little uneasiness. A state when we are not too comfortable is more conducive to self-examination, and thereby one hopes, to more discussion, creativity, and thereby to evolution.

But not too much discomfort, though! In the fluid case, in some ways the most interesting situation is that of intermittency, when there is smooth flow much of the time, interrupted by staccato bursts of turbulence. As much as we need the iztirab to evolve, we also need some undisturbed period to think, and to consolidate… But that is not a luxury one can always be assured of! There are enough forces at work and play both inside the University and outside it, that make this an ongoing challenge.

The images of the turbulent waves above are by artists whose work has been very inspirational: the iconic and familiar print by Hokusai and closer to home, the wave by Krishna Reddy, the great printmaker who lives in New York and who taught for many years at NYU.

Scenes from a collaboration

An exciting and ongoing partnership project between our Department of Theatre Arts in the S N School of Arts & Communication and the Wimbledon College of Arts at the University of the Arts, London is on Scenography in a digital age: a comparative study of the impact of new media on contemporary Indian and British performance practice.

Bringing together nine people, four from their side and five from ours, this project is a great opportunity for all of us, particularly the two students involved. The project leader from the Indian side is Professor B. Anandhakrishnan, Dean of the SN School who says the prime objective of the project is to develop a trans-national, inter-disciplinary discourse that will enhance understanding of contemporary performance culture in India and the UK. And, incidentally, a cross-fertilization of ideas: the image above is of the props from a scenography workshop at the UoH, done on the campus by one of the Wimbledon college students.

This partnership will investigate the impact of ‘new media’ on performance in India and the UK. It brings together two recognize centers of excellence to create a cross cultural research platform at the interface of fine art and theatre. In the UK, lines between these two approaches to performance have already been breached as new technologies blur the boundaries between established traditions. Increasingly in India, plays and fine art installations use video and digital projections that merge the theatrical and the experiential under the umbrella of performance. This project seeks to conceptualise and understand how these new mise-en-scenes are affecting traditional ways of making and viewing performance in our respective nations.

Rustom Bharucha (in his book Theatre and the World, 1993) argued at the end of the twentieth century, ‘[at] this point in time, one can say that technology has not yet co-opted the ‘visionary’ possibilities of seeing assumed by our spectators…’ . Does this still hold true at the beginning of the twenty first century?

Describing the viewing habits of European and American audiences, Arnold Aronson (in The Power of Space in Virtual World in Performance Design) says, “The increasing ubiquity of the World Wide Web and its particular visual aesthetic is what most spectators associate with performative imagery’’.

Using the ‘scenographic’ as a frame of reference, a broad term that encompasses all the elements that contribute to the composition of performance, this joint research will compare how digitalisation and electronic media have been absorbed into our respective performance cultures and begin to develop a set of criteria with which to analyse and respond to these changes. By sharing perspectives on this new materiality of performance, this partnership will contribute to a better understanding of the way each culture views the other and, in the long term, build capacity in our institutions through the development of joint masters and new PhD programmes.

The project is for 18 months and during this period there will be four seminars and a series of practice sessions focussing on digital arts and scenography. Two events will be organised by both the institutions. The first is going on now, from the 9th to 16th September 2013 at Wimbledon. Two of our students will be staying back at Wimbledon to work with colleagues there.

Great opportunities here, thanks to the UKIERI– this project is one of the select ones funded by them as a Thematic Partnership. And congratulations to the SN School on being Wimbledon champions!

Welcome! and Welcome Back!

The start of an academic year is a good time- things seem fresh, even if we have been here before, and its a time for new beginnings. The rains have really washed things clean, and the whole environment looks and feels special. So before anything, welcome to all the new students, and welcome back to all the returning students! The campus has not been the same without you… Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.

And what better way to start than with the announcement of the Chancellor’s Awards. From this year onwards, the University has instituted five awards for younger faculty, for teaching and research. Nominations will be invited later this year, and the awards will be announced at the convocation in October by the Chancellor, Prof. Hanumantha Rao. This is one small way in which to recognize excellence, and all of us will have a say, both the students as well as other colleagues.

There is a group of happy campers who have been setting up some new resources for the campus. These are in development, so no criticism please, at least not just yet, but here is a list.

All courses that are offered at the University will find their way to the Courses Page: http://courses.uohyd.ac.in

There are way too many gaps, but we also need volunteers to put up the information. Write in and offer to help if you can.

The University needs a place to engage in discussion, and soon we will have a Connect UoH site, where all can post comments, raise issues, get information, and so on…
A job portal, both on G-HAN, as well as more specific to the University.

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And, starting along with the semester, the conference season gets going as well! Perspectives in Nonlinear Dynamics, is a meeting that we are organizing along with the TIFR, Hyderabad, from 15 to 18 July. This edition of PNLD is the fourth in a series, and the aim of the meeting (that is being held in the Science Complex) is to focus on the open issues in nonlinear science and to identify the directions in which the field is developing. The themes that are being explored at the conference include Chaos, Nonlinear Phenomena in Engineering Sciences and Applications, Nonlinear Phenomena in Biological and Medical Sciences,Synchronization, Bifurcations, Time-delay systems, Extreme events, and so on. All are welcome!

G-HAN, जी हाँ !

The city of Hyderabad is home to many academic institutions- and an amazingly diverse set at that. No fewer than three Central Universities- apart from the UoH, there are MANUU and EFLU (the only other city with more is Delhi that has DU, JNU, JMI and IGNOU), and several state universities- OU, Telugu University, technical universities BITS Pilani, JNTU, IIT and IIIT, several CSIR laboratories, several defence laboratories, NALSAR, the Indian School of Business, the Administrative Staff College of India… The list is long and very very varied.

Navigating through the academic landscape can be hard. Admittedly most of us don’t need to do it often, but if one did want to know where one could study a specific topic or degree, there is no easy way to get the information. Some time ago, when then Human Resources Minister of State, Dr. D Purandeswari visited our campus she asked many heads of institutions to come together to discuss, among other things, how we could network. It was quite an eye-opener, both as to what expertise there was in the city, and how little mutual information was shared.

And how little resources could be shared. For a brief while, there was some talk of the “meta university” concept, some sort of virtual coming together of academic institutions in cyberspace. But like all virtual enterprises, that too evaporated- one of the biggest difficulties in making things like this a reality seems to be economics- it is just impossible to do this on a nonexistent budget.

Nevertheless, we thought that it would be possible to go part of the way, and this is GHAN, the Greater Hyderabad Academic Network. This is a website where we have brought together information on all the academic institutions that are located in the city of Hyderabad. This is interpreted somewhat generously to include as many as we can, even if distances between the outermost entities are nearly 100 km.

To begin with, G-HAN is a collection of introductory information pertaining to all organizations devoted to various aspects of higher education and research. Given the fact that these are scattered in the Greater Hyderabad area, forming several clusters, this site is an attempt to give the visitor a quick introduction to,

where an institution is located
what it is about, and
what expertise is represented there…

As of now, there are about 100 institutions listed on this site, but this is just the beginning since we have started with the governmental (both central and state) and semi-governmental sectors. There is a FaceBook page for GHAN as well. We hope to be inclusive and therefore we will be adding privately funded institutes and laboratories. If you have suggestions of what more should be there, please write in to the GHAN Team at ghan @uohyd.ac.in.

One small step, but hopefully a useful one, जी हाँ !

PS: Read the Indian Express story about GHAN-

The Four Year Transform

This post has been a while in the mulling, and several news items in yesterday’s newspaper (The Hindu, 11 May 2013) that seem to be of considerable importance as far as we are concerned has prompted me to write.

One item focussed on the comment of the Visitor, the President of India, who said at the convocation of the Babasaheb Bhimrao Ambedkar University in Lucknow, that he was unhappy with the education given by Central Universities. His drawing attention to the quality of the education, the employability of the graduates is germane, and since he comes hierarchically at the top of the pyramid of all Central Universities, it is necessary for us to take cognizance of the comment. The report adds, editorially, that higher education must be made affordable for students, especially from economically weak background. It should be brought closer to the population by innovative techniques and knowledge-sharing.

The need for innovation seems to be at the heart of a second news item, on Delhi University’s ambitious four-year undergraduate programme that is apparently now a reality with the Executive Council on Thursday approving all the courses, examination schemes and amendments to university ordinances that are required to introduce the new structure from this July onwards. July 2013, that is. This move has also prompted a number of academics and organizations to ask the Visitor’s intervention in this matter, since DU’s decision to implement a four-year undergraduate programme has far ranging consequences.

The central issue is the nature of undergraduate education in India, its form and shape in the near future. Since this has quite obviously an impact on the nature of graduate education, on employment and employability, there is a need for all of us to be engaged in the debate, and not just leave it either to politics or to the powers that be, no matter where they be or what they are.

As is quite well known, the four year format is the norm in the US, and the merits of a flexible curriculum in the US university system as a whole is well documented. Having the youth enter the workforce at the age of 22 or 23 is also desirable, so a degree that would enable the majority to get jobs at this age would be quite welcome. However, the US system has its own internal consistencies, its own system of checks and balances that have been worked out over a long period.

Even in the Indian context, the four year undergraduate programme is not new- the various academies of science have a Science Education Panel that has this structure as an explicit recommendation, and indeed the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore has started a four year programme in the sciences last year. However, the numbers involved are, at the moment, small, and what is offered is a B. Sc. (Honours) degree.

A third news item on the same day, reported that the Government “would not interfere in the Delhi University’s decision to introduce a four-year undergraduate course, but would look into the concerns expressed by some sections. Any decision on deferring the programme by a year would be taken by the University, which was an autonomous institution, it clarified.“

My concerns are less about the nature of the four year programme at Delhi University, and the voices of doom that assure “chaos and academic disaster” at Delhi University if this is implemented from July 2013, and more about what it means to the rest of the country. There have been many op-eds in the papers recently that are specific to the DU experiment, as well as many other blog comments and it is clear that the overall curriculum is not as well thought-out as it might have been. There have been as many voices on the side of change and that is really an internal debate.

When a large and influential university such as DU- and as Indian universities go Delhi University is one of the largest (about 4.5 lakh students) and very very influential- makes such a fundamental change in the structure of it’s undergraduate programme, the MHRD, and more importantly, the University Grants Commission, should be concerned. Very concerned.

There are many ways in which this affects all of us in general, and the UoH in particular. DU students will not get the B. A., B. Sc., B. Com. (or their Honours variants). Instead, the exit options that are being chosen for the Delhi University students is at the end of the second year is that of an Associate Baccalaureate, at the end of the third year, a Baccalaureate, and after four years, a Baccalaureate with Honours in his/her major discipline subject or a B.Tech. degree.

When the Minister for HRD says that “We should not be seen as dictating to them or questioning their wisdom. If they feel comfortable to go ahead, we do not want to come in the way,” one wonders why this coyness? Why not question the wisdom? And is the comfort really as widespread as it is made out? When the Government is so deeply involved in the functioning of Universities- most notably by the manner in which funds are given, or to the point, not given in time- why should the HRD ministry not comment on what is surely one of the more revolutionary moves that has been proposed in the Indian University system? Especially one that appears to be as hastily implemented as this.

It is not about university autonomy and whether the Delhi University academic and executive councils have followed procedures while endorsing the programme. As the President has remarked, for the majority, a University education is really about employability, and the various degrees that DU has put on the platter do not appear to offer any advantage over what exists now, while it does promise to increase the costs of a degree by at least 33%, if not more. And the cost of additional infrastructure (that does not exist in most colleges as of now) is another factor that should be viewed in the context of the low funding that most colleges have in the first place. It is therefore inexplicable why the UGC, which certifies all degrees, has not entered the debate so far.

The change in the school educational system from the 11 year pattern to an 10+2 pattern was an equally momentous one, and while it was generally good for education all around, one system that did not benefit from it was the network of polytechnic institutions in the country, which remain to this day a poor option for those that pass Class 10. I mentioned this in my talk at the Sundarayya Vignana Kendram, at the recent Centenary Celebrations India Today: Looking Back, Looking Forward conference when I had to speak in a session on Science and Education, and was asked specifically to focus on Science, Education and Research: Problems and Prospects. I mentioned that this has resulted in very poor inputs into the industrial and manufacturing sector. Similarly, the introduction of new and poorly conceived degrees should be viewed with some concern, and the employability of persons with two years of college seems, at this time, to be in considerable doubt.

This also impacts two issues that affect us more. The mobility of students has been viewed in recent times as highly desirable and indeed necessary from a purely academic point of view. This move by DU will make it very difficult for their students to move to another university for their subsequent degrees. At the UoH we have greatly benefited by having DU undergraduates enter our Masters programmes. Where the Bac. (Hons) or B. Tech. are going to fit in our system is a moot question. And would they come? And vice versa, when our Masters’ students go to DU, where do they fit in? And even later, will we employ them? Will they employ our graduates?

More to the point, what does this say for undergraduate education in the country as a whole? It is not generally feasible to have parallel systems that are radically different when the numbers involved are so huge. (The business schools are, on this scale, minuscule, and it hardly matters if one institution offers certificates and another offers diplomas- in the end, they both offer brand names and enable very lucrative jobs.) The move by DU will naturally affect all other universities directly or indirectly. Our own five year Integrated Master’s programs are continually being reviewed, and one question that we have been asking is whether there could (or should) be an exit after the third or the fourth year. Maybe it is time to factor in the ongoing changes in the rest of the country into our own discussion as well.

… and this

I was asked by the Dr. K V Rao Scientific Society to be at their annual meeting and also to give away their annual awards on the 13th of the month. Founded in 2001 by the friends and family of Dr. Rao (who retired as Superintendent Chemist at the Geological Survey of India) the KVRSS seeks to actively promote and encourage young scientists. This is a rare entity, an orrganization devoted to science promotion at all stages, including the grassroots- they run a number of programmes to nurture talent at the district level as well as recognising the work done in institutes of higher learning.

It was therefore a very good feeling to see that three of the awardees this year were students of the UoH, Pidishety Shankar of the School of Physics, Supratim Basak of the School of Chemistry, and M Hanumantha Rao of the ACRHEM. It was equally heartening to see a number of young students from all across the state receive commendations, and the confidence with which all the awardees spoke was very reassuring.

Another achievement of the student body is the victory of our University Football team in the Fourth Inter-state A. P. football tournament that was held at IIIT-H. As one of the team members and vice-Captain, Achyut Kulkarni wrote in a mail to me, this is a first for our University, and a feather in the captain, William Haokip‘s cap! The team came by my office along with the Physical Education Officer and their coach-

The team members are, in addition to William Haokip (Captain) and Achyut Kulkarni( Vice-Captain), Kedar Kulkarni, James Tuglut, Kunga Chongloi, Joel, Asif Ali, Bujair, Sai Abhinav, Muanpuia Tlau, Mesevito Terhiijah, Subhash Nayak, Nrusingha Behera, Sense Alaji, Leon Dailiam, and Yunus Bava.

It was such a pleasure to have all that energy in the office that day- a nice change from the usual goings on. Thanks for coming by, guys, and keep the UoH flag flying high!

Radical Visitor

Karoline Pershell is Assistant Professor of Mathematics, University of Tennessee at Martin. She is spending a semester with us at the University as a Fulbright-Nehru Teaching Scholar. After coming across her blog, Radical India (its a math joke, see the image on the right) I thought I would request her to do a guest post on this blog, to tell us about her experience at the UoH. She was kind enough to respond positively (Thanks, Karoline!), and here is her post, titled

Hearty Thanks.

When I applied for the Fulbright-Nehru Teaching Scholar position in the summer of 2011, I had never considered where in India I would be placed. With so many universities and IIT’s in the country, it was serendipitous that my online searches from the other side of the globe showed me the Mathematics Training and Talent Search Programme, with the founding organizer at the University of Hyderabad. A few email exchanges later, and I told the US consulate that I would like to go to U of H. I arrived on December 28, began classes on January 2, and it has been an exciting semester!

Based on student comments, I think I have demanded a lot from them on a daily and weekly basis, but my students in the Integrated Masters of Science program have risen to the challenge! I am impressed by their questions, by their participation, by their enthusiasm for the material in class, and excitement for their studies outside of class.

My students have made my time here extremely rewarding. Through them I have learned about Indian culture, Hinduism, holidays, festivals, customs and even visited some of their homes. I have learned about their career ambitions and attempted to help in whatever way I can, by passing along opportunities or just encouraging their passions.

I have taken advantage of so many (too many??) things UoH offers, like plays and festivals, lectures and conferences, and sports! (Yeah…I didn’t know what a wicket was when I came here. Silly Americans.) I have traveled outside of Hyderabad as well, in an attempt to get to know a little more about India (Jaipur, Delhi, Agra and Kochi), while spreading the love of math. (See photos of doing math on an elephant… )

It was strange to find myself amongst a group of all Americans at a recent conference in Kochi for the Fulbright-Nehru scholars, researchers and students who are in South and Central Asia. I greatly enjoyed hearing about the work that Fulbrighters across the subcontinent are pursuing and excited that I am lumped together with such amazing people.

Besides sharing research, I believe many Fulbrighters used this time with other Americans to commiserate, to look at someone from your own culture and have the person validate that you have had a rough go during the year, as travel always requires compromises.

However, I can’t complain.

Everything has run so smoothly for me since before I arrived that I assumed other Fulbrighters were having similar experiences. I had taken for granted the incredible work that Professor Kumaresan (Dean of the School of Mathematics and Statistics at the University of Hyderabad) and Prof KPN Murthy (Director of the Center for Integrated Studies) have done.

From my health to my living arrangements, from my transportation to my course load, Prof Kumaresan has brought me to Hyderabad as his guest and given me the autonomy to run my course as I deem appropriate. Profs Kumaresan and Murthy are passionate about the students learning to problem solve for themselves (as opposed to regurgitate on exams). I think I convinced the mathematics chair that I feel the same way, and as such he had enough faith in me to: teach a required course for the majors; adjust the grading scale to place emphasis on the homework and outlines (things which are necessary to learning the material, but often are not given any allotment in the grading scheme); and to require daily writing from the students.

Like Kumaresan, I believe we need to teach the students to think, and that may mean stepping back and showing them how to teach themselves. As my semester is winding down, I realize how far from the norm my class is, and appreciate the opportunity that the Department of Mathematics and the Center for Integrated Studies is giving me to share my passion with the students, and expose the students to possibly a different teaching style.

Finally, I would like to highly recommend the University of Hyderabad as a location for future Fulbright placement. The opportunities at the university for a professor to teach or do research are probably similar to other universities throughout India, but the level of assistance, respect and freedom in the classroom that is given to professors far exceeds that of anything I have heard from other Fulbrighters.

Being dropped alone in a foreign country can be daunting (see sign of poisonous snakes on campus), but the reception I have received in Hyderabad has made me feel at home.

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Thank you for this opportunity and I hope that I have given back to UoH at least a fraction of all that UoH has given me.

Cheers,

Karoline

PS: Please notice that I am a Fulbright-Nehru Scholar: the exchange goes both ways! Please consider applying for a Fulbright-Nehru position for Indian citizens at http://www.usief.org.in

REPUTAT10N

THE
The big news for us in the past few days is of course that we are No. 10 in the Times Higher Education World Reputation Rankings of Academic Institutions in India. Just so that it is clear as to what this means, I went to the THE website and learned that this ranking is from data compiled by Thomson Reuters. The ranking is based on responses from around 16,300 leading peer-reviewed academics from across the world who were asked to nominate no more than 15 of the best institutions in their field of expertise.

39% of responses were from the Americas, 26% from Europe, 25% from Asia Pacific and 12% from the Middle East, North Africa and Central Asia; 18% of the respondents were from the physical sciences, 21.3% from engineering and technology, 22.1% from the social sciences, 15.4% from clinical subjects, 12.7% from life sciences and 10.5% from the arts and humanities.

Who were the other 9 in the top 10? IISc, five of the IITs (Bombay, Kanpur, Delhi, Madras, Kharagpur). AIIMS. Along with us, the other universities are Delhi and Aligarh. One can critique methodology, analysis and inference all one wants, but still its nice to be up there in the list, although most of the others in the top 10 are so different from the UoH, one wonders about the nature of the ranking… Reputation is such a tenuous (and ephemeral) thing, and as Iago realized, so valuable.

And value it, we do. What we seem to do with much less felicity, though, is to ask the right questions (as the THE people seem to have!) and when (or if) asked, our answers are often wanting… I had actually started on this post a while ago, sparked by some concern on the poor flow of information on campus, almost as if we have an informal DADT (Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell!) policy on all issues. But that’s really for another post.

Which finally brings me to what makes a ranking that is based on the opinion that other academics have of us. In no specific order, this would probably have to include

Research papers, which is where most others read about our work
Books that our faculty and students publish
Seminars and Conferences, where they may have participated…
Scholars on campus, who they have heard of
Alumni, our best ambassadors
Visitors to our campus who talk about us…

There doubtless are many other factors, of course, but like I said it’s good to be on the short list… And it also gives us an idea of what we need to work on to get higher up there…

Gang aft agley

Recent events, more of a personal nature than public, brought Robert Burns’ To a Mouse to mind. The University lives, as it were, from plan to plan, and like those best-laid schemes o’ mice an’ men in the poem, they don’t always work out quite as one wanted. The plan above should really be Plan with the capital P, referring to the Five Year Plans that are overseen by the Planning Commission. We are now into the twelfth (XII) of the Plans that started on April 1, 2012, the date being quite a cruel joke on all of us.

The UoH did well in the XI Plan. Well, in this context, is really in the money that was granted to the University via the UGC and other funding agencies, the total being about Rs. 210 Cr, and one should also count the additional grant that came as a result of the OBC expansion, Rs. 154 Cr. This really enabled the University to dream big, building new hostels, new buildings, new major equipment, new infrastructure, and so on, and the results are there for all to see.

For the XIIth Plan, the UGC and the MHRD initially asked us to dream even bigger, and keeping the then rate of growth of the Indian economy in mind, the Central Universities were asked to project plans that were three or five times the grant we got in the XIth Plan. That’s serious! But that was also at a time when the body politic seemed robust and secure, and also not in a state of limbo as it has seemed to be in the recent past…

Anyhow, we rose to the call and made a XII Plan Proposal that was commensurate with these ambitions. Big plans. But now, when it has come to the implementation stage, there have been subtle (and not so subtle) indications that the budget allocations will be nowhere near as generous as they (or anyone) had hoped… The economy has not been so good, there are massive cuts, everyone is suffering, one “reason” after the other. But more to the point, ten months after the so-called start of the new Plan, we still have no clear idea of what the UoH has been allotted, not in terms of money, not in terms of positions, and not in terms of programmes.

The fact of the matter is, a five year plan period does not really make much sense anymore, least of all for the higher education sector. The world changes too fast in five years, and so do priorities. And five years is not a natural timescale on which anything particular happens in the world of academe, so why quantize it that way? There is no logic to it, and the fact is that by the end of every sacred Plan Period there is always unspent money. (And that accounts for something like Rs 65 Cr out of the 210 that we got in the entire Plan, which comes to nearly one third of the total amount!) I think it would serve us far better if we made proposals for shorter periods – it would help us project our needs better, it would help us to adapt to changing scenarios, and it would help the University to stay competitive instead of locking us into a firm commitment that may eventually evolve into something unrealistic over five years…

One plans and plans, and plans so… and then! Being at a University should prepare one for such uncertainty though. As it happens, I find myself admiring Burns more with the passing years, and seeing through his eyes and words, more of the universality of the human condition. The next stanza of the poem captures perfectly the angst of the moment,

Still thou art blest, compar’d wi’ me
The present only toucheth thee:
But, Och! I backward cast my e’e. On
prospects drear! An’ forward, tho’
I canna see,
I guess an’ fear!

So what’s Gang aft agley? Och, the sorry fate of the best-laid plans of mice and men…