Education Archives - And then...

The Burning of Lyons

letters-from-a-stoic-original-imaefcp7sbhzqx68 I have stopped relying on serendipity; this has been replaced over the years by a firm belief in the hidden hand that unbeknownst to me puts things in my way, gives subtle signs, and guides me forward.

A case in point was a chance reading of Seneca’s Letters from a Stoic, an unlikely book for me to pick up early on a winter’s morning. Of course it might be said that a cold, foggy, and bleak morning is precisely the time to read about stoicism, but flipping through the pages, I came across his Letter 91, On the Lesson to be Drawn from the Burning of Lyons. The power of his writing aside, I am sorely tempted by the allegorical these days where everything is a metaphor for something else, something more immediate and more relevant.

The burning of Lyons so many centuries ago … the arson attacks on our public institutions … the erosion of trust, the destruction of edifices constructed with so much effort … all as one.

The value of reading Seneca is not just to draw moral lessons from the stoic philosophy, to control anger and passion in the face of so much provocation, but also to draw upon that wisdom and the hopes infused in that letter, written so many years ago.

The calamity, the fire that has wiped out the colony of Lyons, becomes in these days the calamity that has destroyed a great University, a great public institution. As Seneca says of the burning of Lyons, “Such a calamity might upset anyone at all, not to speak of a man who dearly loves his country. But this incident has served to make him inquire about the strength of his own character, which he has trained, I suppose, just to meet situations that he thought might cause him fear. I do not wonder, however, that he was free from apprehension touching an evil so unexpected and practically unheard of as this, since it is without precedent. […] Fortune has usually allowed all men, when she has assailed them collectively, to have a foreboding of that which they were destined to suffer.“

Somehow, we have all been just as unprepared for an evil so unexpected. So many great schools, to rewrite the Senecan text, any one of which would make a single institution famous, were wrecked in one term and with so little foreboding. And the strangeness of it all, the obscurity of purpose, adds immeasurably to the weight of this calamity, the death of a University.

Of course I talk of our public Universitites, JNU in particular, of which I have talked earlier, and am not able to not talk about either. I continue to be surprised by the rapidity with which the spirit of the University has been crushed. Not for this institution, arguably a fine and great creation, “to be granted a period of reprieve before its fall.”

And the effect of this conflagration will last long – those who remember the old Lyons will not forget those who helped burn it down. And they, the ones that burn it now will not be able to forget what they have done. chance

As Seneca says, “nothing ought to be unexpected by us. Our minds should be sent forward in advance to meet all problems, and we should consider, not what is wont to happen, but what can happen. […] Chance chooses some new weapon by which to bring her strength to bear against us, thinking we have forgotten her.”

Stoicism therefore seems a wise strategy to follow. In the past few years, every time one has thought that the worst was over, some new horror has been thrust upon us. We should, as Seneca notes, therefore reflect upon all contingencies, and should fortify our minds against the evils which may possibly come.

Like Machiavelli’s or Kautilya’s, some of Seneca’s writings are lessons in leadership, notably his advice to Nero, On Mercy. And there are bits of this essay that advise leaders, as well as others. Commenting on the rapidity with which disastrous changes can be wrought, his observation that Whatever structure has been reared by a long sequence of years, at the cost of great toil and through the great kindness of the gods, is scattered and dispersed by a single day is a timeless warning against hubris, a warning that the present dispensations might well heed. And others as well.

untitled Seneca’s own life was so filled with contradictions that he was quite attuned to the fickleness of fortune and very sensitive to the whims of successive Roman Emperors, at least two of who – Caligula and Nero – who had ordered him to commit suicide… Therefore let the mind be disciplined to understand and to endure its own lot, and let it have the knowledge that there is nothing which fortune does not dare – that she has the same jurisdiction over empires as over emperors, the same power over cities as over the citizens who dwell therein. We must not cry out at any of these calamities. Into such a world have we entered, and under such laws do we live. If you like it, obey; if not, depart whithersoever you wish. Cry out in anger if any unfair measures are taken with reference to you individually; but if this inevitable law is binding upon the highest and the lowest alike, be reconciled to fate, by which all things are dissolved.

There is also hope in the stoic outlook. Already there are signs that some changes are afoot. Like Lyons, which eventually was rebuilt, “to endure and, under happier auspices, for a longer existence!“, maybe we will bounce back, and the JNU of the future will be an even better University. Inshallah!

Sinning by Silence?

Weltenangst. German somehow seems the right language to use in the present context and if this word is not already a part of the general vocabulary its high time it joined weltschmerz in describing the present global collective and perpetual sense of disquiet that does not seem to let up no matter where or when one looks, home or abroad. There is, in a way that has not earlier been quite as sharp, a distinct sense of the binary: us/them, right/left, right/wrong, in/out… One yearns for a world where the distinctions are recognizably blurred, where the blacks and whites give way to more shades of gray, where one can be more definitely unsure… when one is more willing to learn, and to change.

But since that is not to be, this post is about the need to speak out, inspired by a friend in New York from whom I learned of Ella Wheeler Wilcox‘ poem Protest, written over a century ago. In words that are truly timeless, and as pertinent today as when they were written, she says:

To sin by silence, when we should protest,
Makes cowards out of men. The human race
Has climbed on protest. Had no voice been raised
Against injustice, ignorance, and lust,
The inquisition yet would serve the law,
And guillotines decide our least disputes.
The few who dare, must speak and speak again
To right the wrongs of many.

The poem itself is longer, but this post is about the last two lines from the excerpt above, “The few who dare must speak and speak again”. And it is essential that those who do not speak should at the very least, support those who speak for us, for the values that we hold dear.

The heart of one of the crises we are presently facing, the breakdown of communication between the UGC and the rest of the universe on the matter of admissions to the Ph D, is a matter of perceptions. The UGC believes that a system that works in the US or elsewhere should work here. The here knows that the system that would work elsewhere does not work here, and the proof of the pudding is in its eating… To give complete weightage to an interview would tilt the balance in favour of the more articulate. Who also, typically, have had many of the advantages that make them more articulate in the first place… It is simply not true, as Mr Javadekar asserts, that “UGC regulations on MPhil and PhD admissions are as per the best practices of the world. It is being implemented healthily in all universities. The problem is there in one university.” His statements reflect an imperfect understanding of what the best academic practices are, and what that one university has been trying to do all these years.

To start with, the MPhil is a dying degree that should be allowed to become extinct as per the best practices of the world. And as for healthy implementation, the healthiest implementation of admission to the PhD is through the GRE Examination and applications, with no weightage at all for an oral examination… US university admissions committees know full well that their brightest graduate students (typically those from Asia) may not speak English well enough when they enter, so using performance in an oral entrance examination as a yardstick would serve them badly. They do what works well: Administer a good written examination and choose the best from the written scores. Of course they do it intelligently as well, using a combination of measures, but an interview is typically not one of them.

The UGC would best serve the University community by restricting itself to be a regulatory body as far as curricula are concerned (if at all) and stay away from prescribing admission rules and procedures. There are mechanisms aplenty to identify those who do not follow fair practices, and instead of finding routes of exempting them from fair play (such as declaring them to be INI‘s or Institutions of National Importance), it would serve us all better if the UGC would step in and insist on an even playing field for all.

leaky

To make the point further, the real responsibility is to ensure that all have an equal – or equitable – access to higher education. And one of the reasons for this is that the workforce, especially for skilled jobs, should have a balanced representation. Gender imbalance, for example, at the hiring stage reflects to a large extent the gender imbalance at earlier stages, that of admission to the qualifying degree for example. This is what has been termed the leaky pipeline in the context of gender representation in academic careers, but it is clear that the leaky pipeline idea operates just as well for all other groups, particularly those that have been excluded for one or the other reason.

The human race, Ella Wilcox asserts, has climbed on protest, and indeed we have. And protest we must, at these ill-argued, poorly considered fiats decreed by a body that has lost its relevance, the UGC which should also heed that students of all persuasions are now are opposing this move …

And not just this. It appears that the idea of a university is lost on the very group that needs it most, the government. In the abstract, the government of the people, by the people and for the people, should use those very people it has invested in to help it think through and devise a better future for the rest of the people. And arguably, that is one of the jobs our universities should undertake – take our country into its future. At least that is what, again in the abstract, each modern nation does. It is 2017 after all, and one of the blindingly obvious truths is that any government needs to use the best minds that it can muster, not just the best brawn. To disregard uncomfortable thought is more than just another mistake… Minds are terrible things to waste.

In the past three years, especially in higher education administration one has seen a relentless and uncompromising policy of choosing complaisant and available mediocrity for purposes of ideological resonance. This is a big mistake, one that we really cannot afford, not least because there is saner counsel available.

In a journal article that is available on the net, David Roy Smith of the Department of Biology, University of Western Ontario (DOI: 10.15252/embr.201643750) points out (passionately, one might add) that by democratically electing a person who openly mocks science and what one has learned from science (in the USA) puts both the basic sciences and our planet in danger. To quote from Smith’s article, “The situation is looking equally dire in other parts of the world, with nationalist, anti-immigration, and big business interests taking precedence over the preservation of our planet, its natural resources, and its ecosystems and species. To be an environmentalist, an academic, or a scientist of any kind in this polarized and pernicious political landscape risks being labeled an elitist, a liar, an ultra-leftist, and someone who is out of touch with the average person.”

That is something that those of us who teach at this one University are quite familiar with. Being at JNU is equated in the public (post-truth coloured!) eye as being ultra-leftist and all of the other things Smith says. We see this again and again: To be an academic of any kind in a polarized and pernicious landscape is a major risk. To whit, the following:

copy-2-of-southasian-map-by-himal We are taught – those of us who have learned of the physical world – that there is no special place in space from which one should derive all our coordinates. There really is no preferred sense of direction other than by convention and by legacy. For many years now, I have had the Himal South Asia magazine’s unusual map hanging in my office and have had innumerable discussions (of a non-political kind) about how it helps to change one’s point of view about our country, whats up south and down north and so on. I must say that learning to see this map every working day (and learning to refer to it in as normal a fashion as possible) has also been instructive in its own way, and it seems more natural now to draw a line from Kanyakumari down to Kashmir rather than the other way around. To have any sense of nationalism hinge on a completely arbitrary definition of up or down is to have a somewhat unhinged sense of nationalism.

che And speaking of ultra-leftist, another thing that hangs in my office is (what I consider) a superb poster, a telescopic image of Ché Guevara on the South American continent… something I picked up forty years ago when it was fresh and new, and another thing I have had to explain to any number of visitors who eventually all come down to “Ah… JNU, what else can one expect?” But this is just one poster, and it is more about the kind of aesthetic I cared about at some point in time rather than some ideology that is indelibly tattooed onto my soul.

By discrediting academic values, one discredits a rational approach to governance that might see dissent and protests as part of a process that is, in the end, enriching because of its argumentative nature. And we must therefore support the few who speak and speak again.

Talking about Science

Several strands of discussion came together in my mind recently, sparked first by an email from the Vikram Sarabhai Community Science Centre, asking for Science Communicators, and then by two op-ed articles in the Hindu, on whether or not scientists should be responsible for communicating their science to the general public, apart from some ongoing discussions in FB and on Twitter on the same issues.

There is no gainsaying that this is an important matter, and a difficult one to address in a wholly satisfactory manner, especially in a multilingual country like ours, one where the general level of education is not as high as one would like. Nevertheless, one must laud efforts that have a non-negligible impact, and the Science Express is a brilliant example of how things can be done right. This is a unique collaboration of the Department of Science and Technology, the Science Museums and the Indian Railways who have come together to make a science exhibition train that travels across the country, and has been doing so since 2007, and by now it has traveled over 142,000 km and welcomed more than 1.56 crore visitors. It has become the largest, longest running and most visited mobile science exhibition in the world. Now the DST wants people to man this remarkable science museum. They would like

Young science postgraduates/graduates or equivalent. Education or experience in science communication, science education, environmental science, environment education, life sciences or related disciplines will be given preference. Excellent communication skills and knowledge of multiple Indian languages is desirable. Candidates should be self-motivated and medically fit for the long and continuous exhibition tour.

Self-motivation is indeed required, and the ad spares no punches: The job involves work without off days and continuous travel on the train.This being a mobile exhibition, changing location frequently, the candidates should have ability to quickly adapt to different and challenging local conditions. Consolidated salary in the range of Rs. 20,000 to 24,000/- per month…

As the photo above (taken from the SE website) shows there are people who will bite, though one does wish that the job would be more remunerative- what the train does seems so valuable, and in a country like ours, so severely necessary.

Coincidentally, and somewhat ironically, one of the op-eds in the Hindu pointed out the lack of science communicators or more accurately, the lack of a critical mass of science communicators in the country. That of course is neither here nor there, since there is the glaring lack of a critical mass of persons from almost any discipline (or of persons of discipline for that matter) in the country. But Gautam Desiraju makes other points when he asks “Are scientists responsible for communicating their work to the general public?” Both his write-up as well as the counterpoint by R. Prasad, whose rejoinder simply points out that ‘There is a huge price to pay when scientists remain in a cocoon’ are charmingly illustrated with images of scientists communicating with non-specialists!

This morning I had occasion to talk with a younger colleague about these viewpoints, and both of us recalled how influential (in our own lives) some popular books by well-known scientists had been: What is Life? by Erwin Schrödinger, Stephen Hawking’s Brief History of Time, or James Watson’s Double Helix, not to mention some truly popular books (in their times) by some of the greatest scientists, The Origin of Species by Darwin and Cybernetics by Norbert Wiener. I only learned very recently that Wiener was persuaded to write up his ideas in order to communicate them to the public by a French publisher – and given the prolixity of the language used, it is a wonder that the book reached as far and wide as it did. Nevertheless, as we use cyberspace to communicate our ideas today, our debt to him is obvious. And the very readable What is life? resulted from a set of lectures to the general ‘lay’ public in Dublin in the war years.

The importance of communicating one’s ideas to whatever audience that shows an interest cannot be overstated. I’m not sure I want to get into whether it is a scientist’s moral obligation or duty to do so, but it does seem to me that the value of most things we do is enhanced when the communal nature of our activities is explicitly recognized. And the effectiveness of the work is directly related to the size and width of the community that is aware of or is made aware of it.

Investment in research or in scientific activity is ultimately a community decision – and given our political system, it is reflected in the way in which the budget for science is decided. Which in turn is determined by the party (or parties) we vote into power. The bulk of research in the country is therefore publicly supported, and one of the issues at hand is whether the results of publicly funded research need to be shared with the public that funded it. [The argument has been made very forcefully in the west, where research is funded both publicly and privately. When private companies fund research, the results are guarded zealously for possible patents, but many have argued for full public access to publicly funded research – and this has formed the vanguard of the Open Access movement. But of that later.] One can take the point of view that the public in question do not have the required sophistication to appreciate the nuances, the finer details of most areas of research, and there is some truth in that. But the same argument would hold for, say, music, or cuisine, or poetry or any number of things that we enjoy as a community and appreciate as individuals. Each of us may hear the notes we wish to hear – or can hear, for that matter – and make of it what we will. We may get a sense of the larger scheme of things, whether the finer points of raga Anandabhairavi or the crucial role played by the p53 gene in each of our cells, or any number of the other wonders that we have created or discovered, and there will be those among us for whom even this vague sense will provide the catalyst for other avenues of exploration and discovery.

71hz53cqn-l There is a sense in which the privilege of being invested in to pursue publicly funded research is very much an expression of the trust of a society. By acknowledging this as part of a social contract, almost the very least one can do is to pay back to society by talking openly (and clearly) about what one does and the results one has obtained. If one doesn’t, there is always the danger that someone else, less able and less articulate might well do so, and other than writing bitterly about X’s misrepresentations, one will not be able to do much else. Science communicators (as a tribe) play a different role. At their best, their function is to integrate many approaches in an analytical manner, and present this in a format that is sometimes easier on the eye. (In this genre, and from my own area of interest, there are few books that compare with James Gleick’s Chaos: Making a New Science, a hugely popular and hugely influential description of chaos theory and nonlinear science. And accurate as well.)

The friendship and the intense discussions between Goethe and Humboldt, for instance, as Andrea Wulf discusses in her brilliant The Invention of Nature, were mutually very influential, with Humboldt’s detailed reports being inspirational not just to Goethe, but also to Darwin, Wordsworth and John Muir among others. One can argue that the state of science, and the state of the world, was very different two centuries ago, as it surely was. Card-carrying scientists were fewer and the language that scientists used was not as forbiddingly jargon-filled as it can seem today, but there is good evidence that the lay public flocked to hear Humboldt and his descriptions of South America, much as today’s audience might well be glad to hear from a specialist, of the unexplored vistas of string theory or human behaviour or the brain.

Hearing about a subject from someone who has contributed greatly to it can be much more than just inspirational: the authenticity of experience transmits itself in a very unique manner. It is quite another thing to have someone else talk about it, though there are exceptions, of course- some science journalists are very effective communicators of the big picture, in a way that a practitioner who is focused on some small portion of the puzzle may not be. And of course, this is their forte, putting together a narrative that can grip a reader in a way in which an individual’s very personal story might not. But authenticity has a separate value and cannot be substituted…

Which is why it might be good to occasionally worry about communicating just what it is that one does – science, poetry, or philosophy – to a wider and larger audience. The process might well be beneficial to the quality of what one does in the first place! And today there are many different ways in which this might be done. Through a blog, for instance, or a YouTube channel, through books and articles, or by public lectures, the tradition for which is sadly absent in most of our cities.

Does this, namely taking the time to communicate one’s work to others – even if one doesn’t have to – take away from the presumably more important task at hand, of doing the science in the first place? To which one might well ask why do science at all then. And in any case, it is an unrepeatable exercise. What other work would Gamow have done if he had not written 1, 2, 3… infinity? Or what other vistas might Richard Dawkins have explored, had he not spent his time writing The Selfish Genome or The Extended Phenotype. I prefer to think that this, in itself, was the essential task, to write the books that would go on to influence others.

newsfeynman One can go on talking about talking about science… but in the end the basic points are few. There needs to be much more about scientific matters in public discourse, particularly in this day and age, when almost any aspect of our daily life is so influenced by the scientific advances of the past few centuries. It has always needed science communicators (who may or may not be practicing scientists) to do their bit, to bring out the significance of the work, and to see where value can be added. But hearing about any field directly from the ones who have contributed to its advance – in whatever way – has a charm and value all of its own.

Self-organized Mediocrity

In the late 1990’s Per Bak, a vastly talented theoretical physicist, wrote a book titled How Nature Works: the science of self-organized criticality. The title of this blogpost is more than a little inspired by him, and could well be How Universities Work: the process of Self-organized Mediocrity.

Sadly, there is really no attempt on my part to be tongue-in-cheek. The process of self-organized mediocrity is all too evident in department after department in institution after institution in the country, especially the less endowed ones.

As for self-organized mediocrity, or SOM, once one has give the phenomenon a name, what more is there to say? But like T S Eliot might have said, giving it a name is a difficult matter, it isn’t just a holiday game… And like the wonderful idea of Gross National Happiness one might equally well say that there is not much more to the concept than the name, but indeed there is… It makes sense to draw attention to the fact that a country benefits more from the happiness of its people than what it produces for others.

Nevertheless, SOM will bear some elaboration even though the “effanineffable” name itself conveys much of the basic concept. There is a long-standing in-joke among academics, that academic politics are so vicious because the stakes are so small. Variously attributed to Henry Kissinger, Woodrow Wilson, Wallace Sayre and others, the basic sentiment apparently goes back to Samuel Johnson, in whose times, the universities had very different structures. But in some sense the joke rings somewhat hollow these days, particularly for the Indian university. The stakes are not really all that small at all, and the internal politics at most academic institutions can be vicious. Regrettably, its also not just the internal politics- the world outside the campus walls has a way of sneaking into academic affairs and in many of our institutions, the (external) political positions inform and guide the internal.

This is a particularly difficult time for higher education in India. There is not enough money, the resources are stretched almost to breaking point, and there is little appreciation of what higher education truly entails. In some sense, the old model has exhausted itself: it is simply not possible to educate the large numbers of students (at present and in the future) with the tools and techniques of the 1970’s and 1980’s, which is what is extant at most institutions at present. And the style of the 1980’s differs too little from that of the 1950’s, while the youth of today are light-years apart from those of the 1980’s or the 1950’s, in mentality, in preparedness, and in motivation. Apart, not ahead.

Universities tend to succumb to inertia, and public universities inevitably succumb to an inertia fueled by public cynicism and low expectations. The demand for high quality higher education at negligible cost is a hangover from colonial times, regardless of how it might be dressed up as a state responsibility to provide good education to its people. This has resulted in our country creating small enclaves of privilege where a few can indulge, at state expense, in scholarship without having to pay for these privileges by having to teach others. Some find asylum in such enclaves (and then proceed to educate others on the need to respect “merit”) while others who gravitate to universities find the environment plagued by excessive political interference and few resources.

And what little is available is bitterly fought over. The crab mentality in academic institutions is well known the world over – one does not mind not having something so long as one’s colleague also does not have it, and one can do a fair amount by way of machination and petty politics to ensure that nobody does better than oneself. Except that in pulling others down, the only denouement that is ensured is that all are at a uniform low level: this is the self-organized mediocrity. And Departments will do the same to other Departments when it comes to space, students, or any other resources, gradually driving institutions into mediocrity…

[I should here acknowledge the inspiration behind this nomenclature. The theory of self-organized criticality or SOC has been around and quite influential for almost three decades now. It deals with systems whose dynamics – without external impetus – drives itself to a critical state and maintains it there. The archetypical example is a sandpile depicted in the charming illustration above: adding more and more sand beyond a point leads to a sandpile that maintains it’s shape by letting off sand in avalanches. The picture is, of course, incomplete without another denizen of the beach, the crab.]

I recently found that one of my heroes, D D Kosambi said something to the same effect in an autobiographical piece he wrote towards the end of his life. In the early 1960’s, K. Satchidananda Murthy and K. Ramakrishna Rao of the Department of Philosophy at Andhra University in Waltair invited a number of thinkers to contribute articles on their personal philosophy as researchers. This collection eventually appeared as Current Trends in Indian Philosophy, a book that was published in 1972 by Andhra University Press. One of the articles therein is by DDK, titled Adventures into the Unknown. This essay runs to some twenty pages and has been excerpted, bowdlerized and re-published as Steps in Science in the DDK commemoration volume, Science and Human Progress.

DDK-pic2 — D D Kosambi in his mid-twenties

Both versions of the essay were published posthumously (Kosambi died in 1966) and they largely overlap, except that the more widely circulated commemoration volume, Science and Human Progress, has been somewhat sanitized. The wit of Kosambi is largely missing in this autobiographical piece, and given that the original is very articulate on some of the more difficult aspects of Kosambi’s life, it is a pity that the editors of the latter felt the need to remove these bits. (I hope to discuss the articles and the changes in a subsequent post on this blog; I have my theories…)

One bit that was not excised in the second essay was on Kosambi’s perceptions of the working conditions for the scientist in India: The greatest obstacles to research in any backward, under-developed country are often those needlessly created by the scientist’s or scholar’s fellow citizens. The passage of time has not done much to change the appositeness of this observation even if it was deeply coloured by the personal tribulations that Kosambi had faced towards the end of his life.

One of the sadder aspects of self-organized mediocrity is that it is both not inevitable and is really quite unnecessary. And at the same time, the academic landscape is littered with universities that were great, departments that had seen better days, all described with more than a tinge of “what might have been”, and regrets for what was not achieved.

I have been mulling over the present post for some time now. In part it is occasioned by responses to an earlier post on the Department of Chemistry at IIT Kanpur. A comment made by more than one of my friends was that successful examples of institutions in India were uncommon enough that one needed to analyze just why they were successful while others were not. But that would require the efforts of a gifted analyst of the sociology of institutions, or maybe an institutional historian and archivist.

When the School of Physical Sciences was just established at JNU, well-wishers told those of us who were there at the time that twenty-five years was the half-life of most departments in the country. Its been nearly 30 years now, but from the inside one cannot easily tell if the half-life has been crossed or not. But one thing that has become obvious in recent years is that the present funding pattern of the UGC makes it very difficult for universities to achieve any kind of excellence. In fact, carrying out the routine tasks of teaching and research (at whatever level) can take all one’s effort-

But to get back to Chemistry at IIT-K, one of the things it seems to have done was to evolve with the times. As an IIT, the institution was also insulated, by and large, from the sickness of poor funding. And regardless of what the internal dynamics might have been, the Department has always stood as one. Regrettably, this does not happen in most other academic departments, and the consequences are out there in plain view for all to see…

The Fellowship of Those who Wait

Fellowship is heaven, and lack of fellowship is hell

When William Morriss wrote the words Fellowship is heaven, and lack of fellowship is hell in his 1888 novel, The Dream of John Ball, he could hardly have imagined that this aphorism would resonate so strongly among the graduate students in India in the present decade.

Of course the Morriss quote meant something quite different in its context: the Fellowship is a brotherhood, and the lack thereof, the hell, is professional isolation. Nevertheless it is telling that the quote applies so appositely to the manner in which Ph. D. studies are supported today in our system of higher education.

For the most part, Ph. D. scholars need institutional support. For one thing, at the age when most enter the Ph. D. programme, they can scarcely rely on others financially. And furthermore, research scholarship is a national need: across the world, governments support their research scholars. Except that in India, this support is intermittent for the most part.

The intermittency is most evident in the manner in which the funds finally reach the research scholars. Without exception, what unites Ph. D. scholars across the length and breadth of the country is a continuous concern about financial support, waiting for funds to arrive, paperwork to be done, and the fear that for some new reason, things will be delayed… again. Except in research institutes where the fellowships are given directly by the research institutions (and where it must be acknowledged, the numbers are fairly small), and in the IITs and IISERs.

The problem is not unsolvable, but as the years pass and the number of national scholarships increase, it seems that they get more and more difficult to manage. There was a time when the fellowships were only given by the UGC, and then by the CSIR, and then… Today, the DST, DBT, CSIR, UGC, ICMR, ICHR, ICSSR, ICPR… There are many more agencies involved, each with their own modus operandi, their own scales, entitlement and so on.

As research supervisor, I have frequently seen university students suffer- support does not arrive for months together, and then there are months of plenty. Years of famine, years of abundance, so to speak. Contingencies are not paid for years, and then they vanish altogether. And the sheer indignity of it all, having to prove time and again and to various officials, that they are bonafide students. Research is difficult enough without these hurdles to cross.

And this is not a problem that is easily solved by university administrations either. Over the past few years, funds have indeed dried up. The problems and delays are quietly transferred to the administration’s doorstep, and for the most part, this is a body that is ill-equipped to deal with it.

So in the spirit of trying to find a solution, here is a Modest Proposal for Preventing the Research Scholars From Being a Burthen to Their Parents or Country, and for Making Them Beneficial to the Public.

1. Have a single scale for the Ph D scholarship. No disparities between the different agencies, no disparities in ancillaries such as contingency or house rent allowance.

2. Have a common code. If a Ph. D. takes five years on average, fund for five years. Not for four (as the UGC non-NET does) or for any length of time (as many institutes do). Or have a proper (and uniformly applicable) funding protocol: Rs. N1 for the first year, N2 for the second, and so on. Put a ceiling: one may be entitled to state support for a research studentship for M years at most.

As it happens now, there are many different levels of funding operational in one institution- some get funded for four years, some for five, and the amount of money can vary widely, even when it is the same funding agency! The point here is that there is a common source: our taxes. And some sensible planning should make it possible to respect all disciplines and fund them equally well.

3. Link the fellowship to the individual in a more transparent manner. Have them register with a unique ID- some state governments use the Class X mark sheet- and monitor the entitlement directly. Each person should be able to avail the support only once. (Today, there are many examples of people hopping between fellowships in an unmonitored way, simply because Agency X does not talk to Agency Y.) So if one takes the fellowship for 2 years at one university and moves to another, one can only draw on the balance number of years (M-2), not the full M again.

4. It might be simpler if the funding agencies would communicate directly with the student. They fund, and they should trust, or at least learn to trust. And also to take a breach of this trust as a serious and punishable offense. As it happens there is a small number of students who will abuse the privilege of being supported for the Ph D by not taking the enterprise seriously in one way or the other- not working with integrity, not completing a study, or by willful fraud. And a similar small number of research supervisors are culpable as well. However, to tar every scholar with the same brush and put in place a tortuous set of rules is a case of agencies being unnecessarily overzealous. Ultimately, this has hurt the cause.

5. Universities could take some of responsibility as well. Today, given the level of funding of the public universities, once students are admitted to the Ph D program, they are left to the not-so-tender mercies of the funding agencies that can take a year or more to simply “verify” papers. University funds are also typically insufficient to cover an “advance”, especially when it not clear when or if the agencies will pay up: the amount of monies owed by the agencies to our public universities are fairly substantial.

The fact of the matter is that research needs to be supported publicly, and it should be supported well. Not just in the declared amount of fellowship, but in the manner of its delivery as well. The present methods adopted by the funding agencies almost conspire to ensure that none but the most dedicated will pursue research in a public institution. I’m sure the above proposal – modest or otherwise – will not find public favour, but it is worth making all the same. Today’s research translates into a better tomorrow, and we need to recognize and respect that.

Digital Colonizations

The internet has gradually thus assumed an epistemic role, one that does not just dominate the process of scholarship and knowledge creation today, but in many cases, determines its course.

I was dipping into Ryszard Kapuściński’s The Soccer War, struck again by the brilliance of the writing, the reporting of revolution and coups in the 1960’s onwards, as colony after colony tumbled, and independences were gained and regained. His insights retain their acuity well after the passage of so much time and little seems to have been lost in translation. In writing about Algeria, he says Colonialism fosters social chasms […] Colonial policy elevates a class of ‘cultured’ and ‘reliable’ natives while pushing the rest of society down on a stratum of poverty and ignorance. Different continents, different circumstances, but there is a familiar ring to it… And elsewhere, “… We knew exactly as much as they wanted us to know. Now it’s hard to change”.

Epistemic colonialism, the policy and practice of a power in extending control over others specifically in the sphere of knowledge, might well be the most insidious consequences of the different periods of colonialism that we have experienced. Our educational system is a consequence of this and is still Macaulayan in essence, retaining the imprint of our colonial history in its every aspect- the structures and bodies of all our universities, the subjects that are still taught, the degrees that we earn- all carry a mark of what and how much we were required to know. And it is proving very hard to change…

MTI3NTgyMzkzMDI3NTM3NTM5 — A visualization of routing paths through a portion of the Internet. (Photo: The Opte Project/ Wikimedia Commons)

My concern in this post is in the evolution of epistemic colonization through the internet or more generally how the new media is used for its establishment, propagation, and growth. A catalyst for the growth of these concerns is the recent discussions, including the very public debate in our Parliament, that have made the issue of net neutrality, namely the principle that all Internet traffic should be treated equally, very relevant. The rhetoric, however, elides an important fact: the internet is intrinsically not a neutral space. In terms of value, or in terms of perceived value, the net is most certainly not neutral. And, in addition, not isotropic, at least not equal in all directions. This asymmetry plays an important role in the manner in which information is transmitted, and through that, the way in which knowledge moves around and is valued in the academic sphere.

Commentators have often pointed out that (as a body) we tend to respect knowledge and information that originates from or is validated by agencies that are located typically in the west. A consequence is that we also respect our own scholarship only when it is published and/or otherwise validated in the west and not in India. In fact, we even learn more willingly from sources that are western or that are trained in the west (an exception might be made for the notorious three-author kunjis that are required reading for passing university exams, but even they are usually poor copies of standard western texts).

The above issues have changed in the time of the internet through a process of digital colonization: spatial location is unimportant, historical connection is almost irrelevant, the immediate beneficiaries could well be unknown, and it happens faster than ever before. The colonization, such as it is, is complete- in all essential aspects- accelerating and exacerbating the already well-known issues of self-esteem that confronts academics in our country. What this does to our internal compasses- cultural, intellectual, or even moral- is a matter that should concern us, especially since the internet and social media is all pervasive and (for these times, at least) permanent.

Given that the preponderant language of internet discourse is English, and that the overwhelming majority of innovations in hardware or software occur typically in the west or (at the very least) in the global north, there are similarities to our historical past, but I should make it clear that this is not a rant against the evil west. For one thing, that is a bit dated anyhow, and we are, for better or worse, part of a global consciousness that counts both Plato and Einstein as one of “ours”, as much as we do Ramanujan or Kalidasa.

Image (courtesy Wikimedia Commons) of model neural connections.

However, the internet has become central to many of the fundamental ways in which we value or evaluate scholarship. If information is not available digitally, it is invisible. If meta-information is not available on a document, it is not just invisible, it is unimportant. Indeed, epistemic value is almost synonymous with how easily an object (or idea) is located by a popular search engine such as Google or whether it has its page on Wikipedia, or some similar measure of relevance.

Much of our scholarship in India therefore suffers from invisibility, most obviously when in languages other than English, but also work that appears in journals that may not have internet presence. The argument that the responsibility for this is ours cannot be countered, but the barriers that need to be crossed can sometimes seem very high, and are often growing higher. Wikipedia, for example, does come in many Indian languages, but many of the pages tend to be translations, and in any case, would be missed by most search engines.

The search engine is undeniably a major tool in contemporary research. Google, in particular, has changed so much of the way in which we retrieve information. Whether Google or any other, all search engines employ algorithms to search for information and display them in an order than depends on various criteria that include, among other things, the importance of each page as determined endogenously. A piece of work, regardless of its intrinsic quality, is effectively invisible to the vast majority when it does not appear on the first two pages in response to a search query.

Over the past few years, many of the leading journals in the world have also gone digital- there are no print versions, so that accessing them is only possible via the internet. Many high quality journals (such as the Public Library of Science family) are born digital, and many of the older and highly prestigious journals have expanded, adding additional specialty offshoots that are purely digital (such as the various new members of the Nature family). This not only changes the way in which scholarly papers are read, namely online, but it also decides, indirectly, who reads them. Even though several of the new online journals are “open access” and there is a significant movement to support open access publications of scholarly articles, the fact that access to scholarship is only possible via the internet induces an inherent asymmetry. At the same time, the impetus to publish in online journals has increased. In part this is because getting into some of the more prestigious ones can ensure visibility, and in part, the proliferation of purely online journals has meant that more than ever before, there is a journal for each article.

Visibility matters, not just for the obvious reason that every scholar likes her or his work to be read, understood, and appreciated, but it matters for career progression and for reputation. Publications have always mattered for academic promotions, especially in higher education, and today, there are several metrics that help academic administrators decide a candidate’s worth: the number of citations, the h-index, the impact factors of journals, and so on. These indices eventually can substitute for the value of the scholarly contribution; getting published in a specific journal becomes the goal, regardless of whether the original research objectives might have been subverted in the process.

The internet has gradually thus assumed an epistemic role, one that does not just dominate the process of scholarship and knowledge creation today, but in many cases, determines its course. That this still manages to leave us intellectually colonised in world that is otherwise relentlessly globalizing is one consequence, of course, but it is a consequence that we accept, and more often than not, regrettably, one that we seem to expect.

The Matter of Degrees

Many changes need to be made urgently to the pattern of higher education, to rationalize the degrees and to ensure that university education is of value. A new and modern Education Commission is essential to bring these changes about.

We have not wings, we cannot soar;

But we have feet to scale and climb

By slow degrees, by more and more,

The cloudy summits of our time.

When it comes to Indian universities and the degrees they give, where should the discussion even begin?

To be sure our Universities are about learning and teaching, but equally important is certification. Indeed, one would not be blamed if one thought that for the most part, the main aim of our Universities seems to be to hold examinations and then award (or deny) degrees. At the (somewhat limited, I now realize) universities I have taught at, the degrees were few: Ph D, MA, MSc, M Phil, M Tech, MPH, MCA, MBA, MFA, BSc. Maybe a few more. I don’t know if there is this level of bureaucracy in other countries, but the link on the UGC website of the list of recognized degrees is instructional. (As is their list of Fake Universities, but that is grist for another post!)

As a matter of fact there are more than 160 different types of degrees (and many many more if one includes the varied flavours of specializations) that are awarded by our 700 Universities. Some of the nomenclature is fascinating and revealing of the deep love of minutiae that our academic administrators have. The 3 year degrees BHM (Bachelor of Hotel Management) or BHMTT (Bachelor of Hotel Management, Travel and Tourism) is distinct from the 4 year BHTM (Bachelor of Hotel and Tourism Management), for instance. And one can even earn the MHRD, the Masters in Human Resource Development in 2 years, but it can take 4 for the Masters in Optometry.

There is a serious need to rethink much of this. Love of diversity apart, there is no reason to have such a set of whimsical and distinct degrees. For one, there is inconsistency in the durations. Bachelors degrees can take 5 years (e.g. Planning), 4 years (BMM, Bachelor of MultiMedia, Bachelor of Clinical Optometry, or the BHTM mentioned above), 3 years (the bulk of them, BA, BSc, BCom, etc.), or even 2, as the newly restructured Bachelor of Education will be. Masters level degrees are even more of a zoo- while most do take 2 years like the MA, MSc, or MCom, there are the 3 year MSc Tech. degrees and the 4 year Master of Optometry, MO.

Careers should have primacy when these degrees are being thought about- quite frankly most of us do not have the luxury of doing degrees that do not lead to a real qualification, namely something that makes a real eligibility for a job. The degrees that lead to nothing except the next degree are the worst offenders, and of these, the M. Phil. is by far the least enabling. Once upon a time (and it does seem like a fairy-tale) the M. Phil. had consequence and meaning, but today, for the most part, it is not much more than “time-pass”. There is no job that requires an M. Phil. and nothing more, and the only thing the M. Phil. makes one eligible for is the Ph. D. But admission to the Ph. D. does not need the M. Phil., making it a sufficient but quite unnecessary degree…

There are other degrees in fringe subjects given by mainstream (or any) universities. Can one still get a degree in Oriental Learning? Who does, and where? Is there really such a thing as a Ph. D. in Astrology? What would the point be? It is telling that the bulk of these unusual subjects get taught in one or the other of the “Deemed-to-be” Universities, but there are still many, like the Bachelor of Homoeopathic Medicine and Surgery or BHMS, for instance that is taught at at least one major central university and many state universities. Homoeopathic Medicine is bad enough, but Homoeopathic Surgery? And a Bachelor of Technology in the Humanities? Really?

These degrees sound like subtle ways of trapping the gullible. What jobs are the holders of such degrees entitled to at this time? This is something that the MHRD and the UGC need to seriously think about. But more, why should it take a minimum of 8 years to become an Masters level qualified optometrist, and only 5 for an MBA or an MBBS? And 4 to be a qualified Engineer, or 6 if one wants an M. Tech.? And why should anyone who wants to be a schoolteacher have to now spend 5 years (three years for BA/BSc/BCom + the two year BEd) when earlier it was 4? Rather than number of years, it would seem better to ensure that the person is properly qualified through a reliable certification.

In a more responsible setting, university degrees should not need to carry a warning label or a “best before date”. But reputations take a while to grow, and the public at large need not always be vigilant. I have had close friends fall victim to spectacularly fraudulent instances like that of the Rai University that finally hit the newspapers, but there are scores of other examples of degrees that have little or no value and institutions that advertise extensively have a way of attracting clientele who find out much too late if at all. There is something to the plea of the Minister for HRD that they should be allowed to close down institutions that are of poor quality.

As I remarked in an earlier post, there is nothing very Indian about our Universities, so adopting some of the practices of others might serve us well. Especially since those practices come after a sufficiently long period of incubation and evolution. One practice that needs to become more widespread is to focus more on outcomes (rather than what the certificates say) by having an independent qualifier. Even our much vaunted technical education is wanting in this regard: just three years ago, 83% of our engineers were found through a survey to be “unfit for employment“, unfit in communication skills, confidence, presentation, problem-solving capabilities and generic abilities. And who can guarantee that holders of other degrees are not similarly wanting, especially when there is no attention being paid to the effectiveness of either the teaching or the learning.

There is an argument that for most Indians, entering the workforce earlier is preferable. By age 24 rather than 25 or older. And given that school leaving is at 18 for the bulk, it would make sense to keep outcomes in mind rather than just the degrees and their historical antecedents. There would be some merit, therefore, in merging, as far as possible and across the board, bachelors and masters degrees and shortening the overall duration, while ensuring that the training quality is independently assessed.

In the past few years, there has been some public debate on these issues, largely as a consequence of Delhi University’s decision to first introduce and then withdraw a four year undergraduate program, the FYUP. Given the fact that the bulk of the undergrad programmes in DU were for 3 years and many of these had related Master’s level courses for 2 years, shifting from a 3+2 scheme to a 4+2 scheme put in an additional strain on the infrastructure, not to mention an additional financial burden on students. Making the Masters just 1 year after the 4 year undergraduate degree was unacceptable to even DU dons, and in any case it would kill movement between Universities. The obvious solution, which is to make the Masters redundant by merger of the bachelor and the master degrees was not even considered. This would have been truly innovative and would have been widely supported if done properly.

Whims, as a Professor of History from DU wrote in a recent op-ed in The Hindu, be they of vice chancellors, or of teachers, or, as was true in this particular case, one mandarin and his minister, should not rule the fate of university education. The running thread of irony apart, there is much to agree with in the editorial, but the suggestion that “it is time that an Education Commission consisting of experienced and respected academics and educationists was set up to take stock of the state of our universities and to seriously deliberate on what needs to be done to improve the quality of education that they impart” is too little, although not too late.

The higher education landscape is changing faster than ever, what with widespread access to the internet, MOOCs and so on. Degrees may well become redundant soon- when students can learn specific subjects on the net, and from teachers across the world. Whether these offer solutions to us or not, the present policies of higher education do not appear to recognise the existing realities, or for that matter, to respect them.

The verse quoted at the beginning of this post is from The Ladder of St Augustine by Longfellow (an additional benefit of my Catholic schooling). In closing, the poem’s final stanza is apposite:

Nor deem the irrevocable Past

As wholly wasted, wholly vain,

If, rising on its wrecks, at last

To something nobler we attain.

What are Indian Universities for?

The recent (and ongoing) discussion on the irrelevance of the UGC, the University Grants Commission of India, and fears of what might well happen to higher education in the country in the wake of the Hari Gautam Committee report brought this question to mind yet again. And coincidentally, a recent issue of The Economist is all about University education, although the take there is that too many people across the world are aspiring for a university education, and they (The Economist, that is) worry that this may not necessarily be a good thing. (Which leads to my knee-jerk reaction that in that case it surely must be!)

Experiences at the University of Hyderabad apart, I have had this concern for a longer time, at least since I came across Stefan Collini’s What are Universities for?, an extremely thought provoking book, more germane to our situation than the formidable The Great American University by Jonathan Cole, both of which are probably required reading for any academic administrator. Probably also for any academic, at the very least to provoke cogitation along the trammelled path of “why are we here and where are we going?”.

The basic question can be phrased in many ways… What(ever) are Indian Universities for? What are Indian Universities for? What are Indian Universities for? In any case, there is nothing particularly Indian about our universities- they are for the most part, imitations of a very western model and are by now some mix of the English, European and American university ideal. What they are for, ostensibly, is also clear- education of our youth. But just how they do this, what they do in the process, and how effective they are- these are all issues that need an extended discussion.

To begin, some background. There are something like 700 institutions that are classified as universities in India. Some are Central, some are State, some are Private, some are Deemed. (The last category inspires the not so tongue-in-cheek remark by a now retired Professor at an IIT, that if some are deemed, then there are others where the education is dumbed down, their future is dimmed, and in general they are all damned and in the end, all these institutions are doomed.)

Regardless of the classification all are regulated, and some quite strictly, by the UGC. One could argue that without governmental intervention, all of education would be at the mercy of the market, but it is clear that in the sixty plus years that the UGC has been in existence, its role and status has dwindled to the extent that neither does one have respect for the institution as a setter of standards or as a watchdog for quality in education. And yet, because of the way in which governmental funding is channeled through the UGC, almost all Central and most State Universities have to pay obeisance at its portals. And because of its regulatory role, all others- the private and the deemed- must similarly fall in line as well.

But there are other guardians of quality. All professional degrees are, for instance, regulated by specific bodies. The AICTE for all technical education, including business management, the Bar Council for law, the MCI for medical education, not to be confused with the INC for Nursing, and so on. I counted them once and tallied about 17 in all, and finally understood why we really don’t have comprehensive universities in the country. It is simply impossible to be answerable to so many regulatory authorities, especially since each of them in one way or the other prides themselves in being statutory bodies with the responsibility of establishing and maintaining high standards of […] education and recognition of […] qualifications in India. It registers […] to practice in India, in order to protect and promote the […] of the public by ensuring proper standards in the practice of […]. (This manifesto is taken from the MCI and made subject neutral-one can fill in the […] by appropriate nouns and adjectives.)

Oftentimes these regulators can be in conflict with each other as well. Their intentions are noble and important- any profession is valued only when there is certification, but the background against which these councils operate in our country is one where standards and safeguards are flouted with impunity- not to mention extortionate fees for some subjects, inadequate levels of teaching and often a complete disregard for quality, and so on. But when a council requires that teachers of its accredited institutions should be fingerprinted- however necessary that might seem- one gets the feeling that one has reached a nadir of some sort as far as education management is concerned.

The idea that the proof of the pudding should be in the eating is, regrettably, not that widespread. Looking at outcomes is not that common in our country- more attention is given to getting into the system than looking at what comes out. One’s JEE rank is finally quite a bit more important the grades one might have earned at the IIT, or for that matter how good an engineer one actually is. (One has to eavesdrop on any conversation among IIT graduates to realize the truth of that…)

There are exceptions, most notable among them being ISB, the Indian School of Business. A strong desire to not be subject to such regulation, without necessarily being unaware of quality or standards has made the ISB shun a formal degree (which would have brought them under either the UGC or any one of the 16 other councils or commissions that regulate higher education in India). The value of what students are taught there, as well as the high costs involved have together made the ISB a brand (and an expanding one, at that) to reckon with, one that competes with and often surpasses the IIMs. (Caveat: The ISB example cannot apply to many areas of study and is therefore singular, and there are flaws in that model as well, being accessible to a vanishingly small fraction of the population.)

To my mind there still is a lesson here. For the most part, the purpose of education at this time is employment, and degree or no degree, if that objective is served, this is a measure of the success of the system, howsoever limited that might be.

But there is a much more important part to education, the part that helps create a scholarly ethos. It is that as a society we need a place where one can discover, invent, archive, catalogue, train, explore, think- in short, a place where we can do all the things that are possible at a modern university. There are more uses of the university life, but above all, it is one place where we can invest in our futures in a somewhat abstract way and very consciously for the long run.

The question in the title invites a more extensive exploration, one that will occupy subsequent posts in this blog. The future of the Indian higher education system is something that concerns us all very deeply, and its future is inextricably linked with our future as a nation and as a people.