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P. Sreekumar of the Department of Dravidian & Computational Linguistics at the Dravidian University in Kuppam, AP, sent out an anguished email on the University Grants Commission (UGC) that has lifted a two-year ban on distance M Phil and Ph D courses.

The move comes after widespread protests by various universities. Many Open Learning Universities like IGNOU were protesting the ban on the ground that their respective laws, passed by Parliament or legislatures, allowed them to offer such courses.

Speaking on the development, IGNOU vice-chancellor Rajasekharan Pillai said, “We will follow the rules but our regulations are already stricter than those of the UGC.”UGC held a meeting on the issue last month, deciding to lift the ban. “An open university may be permitted to conduct MPhil/PhD programmes through distant education mode subject to condition that it does so strictly as per the provisions of the UGC Regulations,” said the minutes of the meeting.

Although, UGC has lifted the ban but it has put another condition for Phd — the principal guide should be from the open university. The UGC had clamped the bar by notifying a rule — the Minimum Standards and Procedure for Awards of MPhil/PhD Degree Regulation — in 2009 saying research courses in the distant mode were of poor quality.

The regulations had put a question mark on the future of nearly 10,000 students pursuing such courses across the country.“There should not be any blanket ban on MPhil or PhD in distance mode. If institutions meet the required quality parameters, they should be allowed to offer such courses,” said academic M. Madhava Menon, who has been asked by the HRD ministry to draft a policy on distance education. He said he would submit his report next month.

Inadequate infrastructure of many open universities is also a concern for carrying out research work. A UGC official said the commission’s regulations were silent on the facilities, and a panel headed by academic S. P. Thyagrajan had been set up to suggest the requirements. “We will meet on September 15 to lay the guidelines,” Thyagrajan said.

Well, its one step from here to so-called Universities like those Internet Academies that offer you a Ph D for $725. As one of these advertises,  In order to get your desired degree, you can start now by getting registered with W**d University. Once you get registered, your email address will become your log-in id for future use and you’ll always provide the same password as you are doing at the time of registration. This information will allow you to return anytime and continue with the process of getting your desired degree from W**d University.

We wish you good luck and thank you for choosing W**d University to start your journey towards success.

I believe the similar facilities are offered in various bucket shops in Ameerpet. You can easily purchase “original” theses in any subject of your choice, and at any level you desire… from the M A/ M Tech upwards, to the D. Phil. And submit them to any UGC University of your choice.

A personal sampling,  a few of the few.

Much of the last week was taken up with conferences and conclaves, meetings in Delhi and Washington. I am only slowly getting familiar with the routines, the ceremoniality of it all, the somewhat studied smiles and pauses. The speeches. But in the midst of it all, there are things that stand out, as did an excerpt of what one of the senior administrators at Stanford said last week, when talking about quality.

In his book, Rabi, scientist and citizen,  John Rigden tells of when Dwight Eisenhower was President of Columbia University, and Isidor Rabi (picture on the right) was awarded the Nobel prize for Physics. As Hans Bethe (another physicist and Nobelist) recounts, Eisenhower met Rabi and said “Professor Rabi, I congratulate you on the Nobel Prize, and besides, I am always very happy to see one of the employees of the University…  So Rabi drew himself up to his full height of five feet five inches and said,” Mr President, the faculty are not the employees of the University. They are the University!“

I don’t know what else I got out of that talk, but this made a great impression on me, as I imagine it did on Bethe, or on Rigden, or for that matter, on Eisenhower. The sense of identification, the sense of authority, or the sense of responsibility. This so defines a teacher, and in the end, this so defines a University.

The next few days in Washington were an eye opener in more ways. Visits to the University of Maryland in addition to The summit with Mr Kapil Sibal and Mrs Hilary Clinton. The U of M is one of the “land grant” universities, having 1250 acres given by the state for the purpose of education (sound familiar??). They started in 1857, so that is quite a headstart on us, but still… they now have about 3000 faculty, 39000 students,  a similarly impressive number of departments and subjects. Given, as I learned, that our (by which I mean the country’s) placement deficit with respect to the US is 100,000 student seats, it make one think again of where we should be positioning ourselves at UoH. On the size front, we are a tenth of the faculty and a tenth of the student body but at the same nominal area. But we serve a population that is at least 10 times as many… Without making unfair comparisons, I still think it should be possible for us to do better on the numbers game.

But more. A serious question as to how we should increase numbers is on the cards. First off, we need better infrastructure, both for teaching and for student hostels. And for faculty housing. But after that. What should we be teaching? What are the areas where we should be investing intellectually? What is important for us, as academics? What is of interest to us as a nation? What subjects, what areas of human enquiry are of relevance?

None of these are unloaded questions, I realize, but we do need to start thinking along some lines. The 12th Plan is upon us, and if we want this to be a plan in any sense of the word, it is important that we start thinking. Among the foci of discussion at the summit were issues of skill development, of community colleges. And yes, the usual dual degrees, twinning programmes, semesters in India and other intersections were talked about but in somewhat tired voices. What was really urgent is the final realization that in India, we will soon have about 200 million young men and women in search of an education, and it will be our lot to educate them as best as possible to take their place, not in India, but in a world that is even more borderless than we see it now.

How will we prepare ourselves for the challenge of providing a skilled workforce to the world? One thing is for sure, we need new strategies for educating more people, in ways that they want, and in ways that are effective, using methods that may not exist… yet.

What will the University of Hyderabad be like in the year 2024, when we are 50? I suppose that is up to us to determine, now.

Some years ago, Prof. Shalini Urs of the University of Mysore made a concerted effort to aggregate one aspect of Indian scholarship through the Vidyanidhi project. Vidyanidhi (Meaning ‘Treasure of Knowledge’ in Sanskrit) is India’s premier Digital library initiative to facilitate the creation, archiving and accessing of doctoral theses. Vidyanidhi is an information infrastructure, a digital library, a portal of resources, tools and facilities for doctoral research in India. Vidyanidhi is envisioned to evolve as a national repository and a consortium for e-theses through participation and partnership with universities, academic institutions and other stake holders. Vidyanidhi enhances access to Indian theses and enlarges the reach and audience for Indian doctoral research works.

The UoH convocation is scheduled for October 1. Since we mark October 2 as our Foundation Day, and October 2 will always be a holiday in India, the suggestion that October 1 henceforth be the “University Convocation Day” has some merit. It would, for one thing, greatly help in scheduling.
The convocation speaker this year will be Dr Anil Kakodkar, eminent nuclear scientist and former Chairman of Atomic Energy Commission, former Director of the BARC, Mumbai. A man of many parts, Dr Kakodkar is known for being unabashedly self-reliant on matters nuclear, while also calling for more stringent safeguards, particularly in the wake of Fukushima.
One of the highlights at the Convocation is the speech by the chief guest, and while its not certain what Dr Kakodkar will talk  about, I was thinking about the Vonnegut Commencement speech that made the rounds of the internet some years ago. For those who will graduate this year, and will be too young to have known about it (or who would not care, anyway) in the late 1990’s, a speech was circulated (largely by email) purporting to be the text of the Commencement Address by Kurt Vonnegut Jr at MIT. This was a hoax- the speech was written by Mary Schmich under her own name in the Chicago Tribune, but viral spreading through the internet brought it a certain amount of fame and some unwanted notoriety. In any case, the speech, while not particularly deep,  has many nice parts to it, and for those who may not have come across it before, here are excerpts (taken from Andrea Wesseleyi’s site where a fuller description of the whole story can be found).
Ladies and gentlemen of the class of ’97: Wear sunscreen.
If I could offer you only one tip for the future, sunscreen would be it. The long-term benefits of sunscreen have been proved by scientists, whereas the rest of my advice has no basis more reliable than my own meandering experience. I will dispense this advice now.
Enjoy the power and beauty of your youth. Oh, never mind. You will not understand the power and beauty of your youth until they’ve faded. But trust me, in 20 years, you’ll look back at photos of yourself and recall in a way you can’t grasp now how much possibility lay before you and how fabulous you really looked. You are not as fat as you imagine.
Don’t worry about the future. Or worry, but know that worrying is as effective as trying to solve an algebra equation by chewing bubble gum. The real troubles in your life are apt to be things that never crossed your worried mind, the kind that blindside you at 4 pm on some idle Tuesday.
…
Don’t feel guilty if you don’t know what you want to do with your life. The most interesting people I know didn’t know at 22 what they wanted to do with their lives. Some of the most interesting 40-year-olds I know still don’t.
…
Get to know your parents. You never know when they’ll be gone for good. Be nice to your siblings. They’re your best link to your past and the people most likely to stick with you in the future.
Understand that friends come and go, but with a precious few you should hold on. Work hard to bridge the gaps in geography and lifestyle, because the older you get, the more you need the people who knew you when you were young.
Accept certain inalienable truths: Prices will rise. Politicians will philander. You, too, will get old. And when you do, you’ll fantasize that when you were young, prices were reasonable, politicians were noble, and children respected their elders.
Respect your elders.
…
Be careful whose advice you buy, but be patient with those who supply it. Advice is a form of nostalgia. Dispensing it is a way of fishing the past from the disposal, wiping it off, painting over the ugly  parts and recycling it for more than it’s worth. 
Addendum: A reader of the blog told me that this “speech” was set to music by Baz Luhrmann so maybe many of you would have heard it before. In case you haven’t, here is the Youtube link.

Ratan came to the University after having done an Engineering degree in Mumbai. We are all shaken by his tragic and very untimely demise, and while offering our condolences to his family, we share their grief.

There was a meeting at 11 this morning in the SN School where teachers and students remembered Ratan and mourned his demise. We are the poorer…
TOI link

No, this is not about the Von Stroheim classic, though it could be…
A couple of weeks ago, the Department of Political Science had an afternoon discussion on the Lokpal bill where, among others, Jaiprakash Narayan was present. One of the M Phil students, had made a presentation on what UoH students understood by ‘corruption’, and how it came about. One respondent traced it to just this: Greed.
There is this amazing scene in the Von Stroheim film. I saw it years ago (in the days when I was catching up on early cinema and sitting through Potemkin and other such silent greats, and when I should of course have been more gainfully employed). There is nothing really left for the protagonists to fight over- they are in Death Valley, with desolation stretching for miles in all directions and there is no possibility of survival. So no benefit to the man who takes, nothing really to lose for the man who loses. And yet, greed, more the pity of it.
The person at the Pol. Sci. seminar was quite right- so much of corruption that we see around us is due just to greed plain and simple, though not always as pointless as in the movie.

The University Grants Commission has invited online applications for the award of Post-Graduate Indira Gandhi Scholarship for Single Girl Child for the academic session 2011-13 with the purpose of supporting post-graduate education through scholarships to such girls who happen to be the only child in the family.
Candidates (under 30 years of age) admitted in post-graduate first year regular non-professional degree course in any recognized university or a post-graduate college during the current year i. e. 2011-12 are eligible.
The value of Scholarship is Rs. 2,000/- pm for a period of two years only namely for the full duration of a PG course. Applications should be submitted only through ONLINE mode latest by 25th September, 2011: See this site.
Please make sure that all eligible persons you know apply in time!