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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!

A comment that was submitted by anonymous@gmail.com to an earlier post that talked about corruption reads “Want to make some good money? Try to get a contract job with HCU. Be prepared to bribe everyone from the gatekeeper to the top guy. HCU is a filthy corrupt place.”
Other than adding a ? I have done no editing, but I thought that rather than simply approve the anonymous comment, I would highlight it to request that if you are going to be a whistleblower, then (a) please be specific and (b) share your name, even if privately- I can assure you that I will respect confidentiality.
Specificity is useful if you want some action. In the above, the implication is that the guards (who, for the most part are Group 4 employees) all the way to the VC are taking bribes. Since I do have some knowledge of at least some part of this chain, I know that this is not true, even though I have been told that there are some areas in the University where there is serious cause for concern… Unless by “top guy” the writer means someone else, in which case it would be useful to know who.
About sharing your name. Anonymous letters are difficult to take seriously. I have got my first one, a typewritten page that is filled with half truths, untruths, and improper allegations (not just about me, about any number of people) and plain inaccuracies. What does one do with this other than discard it totally? I know that the person who wrote it must be aware of this- and may well read this post, so here is an offer I hope you cannot refuse: If you are serious about it, engage in a dialogue and I will guarantee both privacy and confidentiality. Write to me here.

Public life, it is widely considered, mirrors private realities. The events of the past few weeks around the Anna Hazare movement suggest that perhaps finally we- as a nation- are ready to begin to tackle the menace of corruption that so plagues our public life, including our private life, if truth be told.
Its best to be direct. If we are, as a nation, willing to tackle corruption at the highest levels, then as individuals, we need to be able to tackle corruption at the lowest level: the personal.
And since this blog  primarily addresses things concerning UoH, introspection is best begun at home. There are many individuals within the University’s system that indulge in petty corruption… the kind that vitiates the workplace, the work ethic, and the sense of commitment that most of the others have. Some of this is financial corruption- construction, procurement, allotment. This is clearly the worst since the amount of money we are granted is finite, and anyone who steals directly or indirectly, steals from us. This can hurt only others among us, others within the system. Some of it is a corruption of values. An earlier post has asked serious questions regarding Academic Quality. Indeed, where does one begin? We know how to count the ways, but all too often, we desist from confronting such matters directly.
There is no need for us to be so bashful, or so fearful. If we do not wish to accept public corruption, we should not accept private corruption either.  
We have the examples. Now we need to live the life and raise the bar of accountability at UoH as well…

When  I was to speak at the Orientation for new students a few weeks ago,  I was looking for something that would best describe what I wanted to convey…  I feel that all of us here at the University, are on voyages of our own. UoH is as much a port of call as it is a destination for many of us, and Constantine Cavafy’s poem ‘Ithaka’, struck me as the most appropriate.
The poem talks about a journey. It talks about striving for the destination, but also making the most of the journey – something all of us at the University should do.
And as it happens, I came across the poem only quite recently, so I decided to share it for those not familiar with it. There are many translations available, and this is one by Keeley and Sherrard that you can find on the  Cavafy Archive website.

Ithaka

As you set out for Ithaka
hope the voyage is a long one,
full of adventure, full of discovery.
Laistrygonians and Cyclops,
angry Poseidon-don’t be afraid of them:
you’ll never find things like that on your way
as long as you keep your thoughts raised high,
as long as a rare excitement
stirs your spirit and your body.
Laistrygonians and Cyclops,
wild Poseidon-you won’t encounter them
unless you bring them along inside your soul,
unless your soul sets them up in front of you.
Hope the voyage is a long one.
May there be many a summer morning when,
with what pleasure, what joy,
you come into harbors seen for the first time;
may you stop at Phoenician trading stations
to buy fine things,
mother of pearl and coral, amber and ebony,
sensual perfume of every kind-
as many sensual perfumes as you can;
and may you visit many Egyptian cities
to gather stores of knowledge from their scholars.
Keep Ithaka always in your mind.
Arriving there is what you are destined for.
But do not hurry the journey at all.
Better if it lasts for years,
so you are old by the time you reach the island,
wealthy with all you have gained on the way,
not expecting Ithaka to make you rich.
Ithaka gave you the marvelous journey.
Without her you would not have set out.
She has nothing left to give you now.
And if you find her poor, Ithaka won’t have fooled you.
Wise as you will have become, so full of experience,
you will have understood by then what these Ithakas mean.
Translated by Edmund Keeley/Philip Sherrard (C.P. Cavafy, Collected Poems. Translated by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard. Edited by George Savidis. Revised Edition. Princeton University Press, 1992)

A couple of weeks ago, the National Assessment and Accreditation Council (NAAC) in Bangalore called a few of us from the UoH for a meeting. I decided to attend, mainly since we are rated 3.89 out of a maximum of 4 by the NAAC, and are therefore the leading ranked University in the country.
The reason I retain the adjective ranked in the sentence above is that it is perhaps meaningless to say we are the leading University in the country- since that can convey different things to different people. I know we are good in many ways, but I think- and I know that this feeling is shared by many of you- that we have a way to go before we can say we are “No. 1“.
The NAAC does a great job, given the rather variable landscape of higher education in the country. Of the 571 Universities in the country, there are many categories: Central, State, Deemed, Private… And these vary in size, from behemoths like Delhi University with 4,00,000 students, to the Central University of Tamil Nadu with something like 200… Not to mention that there are huge differences in quality, from the Homi Bhabha National University (TIFR in another guise) to Universities that exist in desk drawers if nowhere else….
Like many of us, I don’t take the No. 1 tag that seriously. Our strengths are obvious, as are our weaknesses. I therefore requested some colleagues who did attend the same meeting to put down on paper what we can learn from the NAAC exercise. And, more importantly, what we can do to make our University better.
I would greatly appreciate feedback and discussion on this topic. Please do write in, either in response to the post, or via email to rr @ uohyd. ernet. in. Thanks.
Here is their note:

Internal Quality Assurance: What the University of Hyderabad Can Do?

While national level organisations such as the NAAC carry out their role in upholding academic standards in the domain of higher education in the country, it is imperative that we at the University of Hyderabad come up with our own set of goals, standards and benchmarks. Quality Assurance is ideally tested by a set of internally verifiable mechanism as well as an evaluation expertly [and transparently] carried out by the peer group outside the University.
An effective quality assurance must fulfil, among others, the following requisites. It must be:

• Comprehensive
• Integrated
• Purposeful, and
• Ongoing.

Similarly, the assessment indicators would include, among others, the following:

• Curriculum aspects
• Teaching / Learning, Research Supervision
• Research, Consultancy and Extension
• Infrastructure and learning resources
• Student Support
• Innovative [administrative and management] practices.

The four components at our University comprise the Administration, Teachers, Students and the Non-Teaching Staff. While due attention is paid (or ought to be paid) to the quality of the Faculty in terms of their teaching and research capabilities, our University community regrettably does not articulate with sufficient firmness and clarity [perhaps due to a lack of political will] the role and responsibilities of the Student body, the Non-Teaching Staff and the University Administration. It should be our collective resolve therefore to see that along with rights, we should also have in place a protocol of duties and responsibilities fashioned by the Students, Administration and the Non-Teaching Staff themselves entirely by their own volition.
It may be added in this context that student centred education in our University and elsewhere has largely remained a concept rather than a practice, since we do not sufficiently insist that learning ought to be primarily done by the students themselves. What passes as seminars and class presentation, it must be admitted, have become largely a ritual rather than creative pedagogic tools. Further more, over the years; there has been a gradual decline in student performance. Indiscriminate monetary support regardless of performance or economic needs of the taught, relaxed standards and grade inflation due to face to face teaching and allied factors have been some of the features that might help explain the decline in the academic standard here. Periodical tests and term papers / class presentations have gone hand in hand increasingly with academic plagiarism and easy access to computers and audio-visual media. The latter have often become a substitute for true learning that believes in the acquisition of insights rather than a mere reproduction of information based on rote learning of a mechanical kind. Application of insights in an imaginative and creative manner in real life situations is what education ought to truly envisage. Is the education that we are imparting at the University of Hyderabad, at a premier institution of learning, serving this fundamental goal , we may ask.
Our search for excellence must also take into account the diversity of the student body, their composition in terms of class, caste, ethnicity and regional affiliations. While identities politics could be empowering, powerful interest groups on campus could also act at times against excellence by demanding separate turfs and exclusive terrains that militate against a truly integrated and inclusive approach that seeks to harmonize group interests. In other words, the question we must answer is : how do we reconcile the search for excellence with the equally important need for social equity? What kind of politics would motivate and empower the entire community here rather than serve sectional interests?
There are a few other aspects that merit our urgent attention. These may contribute to our thinking with regard to quality assurance in this university

1. The pursuit of quality and excellence, as has been stated earlier, must be internally driven, especially in a relatively well-endowed central university like ours. [This need not prejudice assessment by an external agency like NAAC whose methodologies are yet tentative and evolving.] The internal goal-setting for the purpose, however, must be faculty-specific. This is because the needs, aspirations and constraints differ systematically across humanities, social sciences and sciences. While the idea of common guidelines across disciplines may have considerable appeal, we need not be bound by a straitjacket of uniform yardsticks or a set of procedures against which all the faculties would be judged.
2. Each faculty/department may evolve and place in the public domain its own vision statement that informs its teaching/training programmes, research interests of faculty and demands for infrastructure. Globalisation of the kind we are going through seems to challenge our curricular designs in many disciplines and offers the potential for Indian universities to be leaders, rather than meek followers, of the Anglo-American centres.
3. Courseware must be in the public domain. Very often, one colleague does not know or care about what others are teaching. While the individual teacher may be doing justice to his/her own course, his/her commitment to the philosophy and objectives of the teaching programme as a whole seems to be missing. Vision statements of this kind would vastly improve the way the University’s Annual Report would read.
4. There is an urgent need to integrate all the stakeholder groups of the university. Such a vision of synergy and integration would help make students, teachers, staff and the alumni active partners in ushering in the kind of campus life we want. The new approach would privilege healthy conventions over paper laws in campus life and day-to-day running of the university.

Finally we should be able to come up with a check list for the four wings here:

• For the teachers: Are they regularly taking classes? Are the lectures prepared well? Do the lectures have publicly verifiable contents? [Traditionally teachers used to have a lesson plan! Seems to be given up increasingly]
• Do the teachers give adequate time for student consultation? Is there regular monitoring of the students’ progress, or lack of it?
• How many teachers supervise the research work of weak students?
• Are the teachers available for administrative work? Or do they disappear after their class?
• Are they present in the department for a specified number of hours or do they come to the department on the days of the class?

We need to ask similar questions regarding the, Administration, the Students and the Non Teaching Staff without fear or favour. There are other important aspects that we need to consider. These include the importance of impact study, selection and training of staff and complaint handling mechanism.
Clearly, the questions that we need to ask regarding internal quality assurance are many. It is time we made a small beginning.

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