Edu excellence in India? Forget it

 

Our hopes of building a world-class educational industry are wildly misplaced

Alok Tiwari

American academia, until recently the envy of the world, is in turmoil. Some of the best-known names are being buffeted by political forces unleashed by President Donald Trump. Some, like Columbia University, have caved in. Others, like Harvard, have decided to fight in courts of law and public opinion. All are off balance as to what will happen next. Some in India see this as an opportunity of a lifetime for Indian Universities. Many academics and media commentators have called upon Indian institutions to seize the moment and emerge as global centre of excellence that attracts students from across the world. This, they say, is possible because India itself supplies a significant chunk of students to world’s best universities. By themselves they can constitute a base on which to build on. In addition, given that US is doing everything it can to make life difficult for international students, a good chunk of those can be attracted to India.

On paper, not a bad idea; in reality, laughable. There is no polite way to put it. We do have hundreds of universities and thousands of colleges. However, they remain far away from any kind of academic excellence. There is a lot that is wrong with our school education, yet it at least gets the basics done. At least the private and some state-funded schools do.

It is the institutions of higher learning that fail us comprehensively. They mostly comprise a plethora of state-run universities that supervise private colleges of various streams. If they have achieved anything other than produce an army of largely unemployable degree holders, we are yet to hear about it. Beyond that there are mushrooming private universities whose main purpose seems to be to make money. They charge in lakhs even for ordinary courses. They provide nice buildings and infrastructure but have little to show by way of academic work. The entire focus seems to be on placement and that too is questionable.

At the very top are the institutions we are supposed to be proud of—the NITs, the IIITs, the IITs and the IIMs. They get the best of our students and are not short of resources. They have been good for producing employable students but little else. This is hardly the base on which to build a world of academic excellence. While most students may go to colleges to equip themselves for the world of work, the higher education is about much more than that. It is about producing and nurturing new ideas, challenge established notions, expand the horizons of knowledge. It is here that Indian academia draws a big zero.

It is not the fault of just universities and colleges. It has to do with culture of the larger society. Just see why the famed American education sector appears to be under siege today. It is because the culture of freedom that allowed it to thrive all these years is fast vanishing. The Universities are under attack for what their students and faculty say and believe. They are being asked to change policies that the government does not agree with. They are being asked to remove leadership that is out of step with the majoritarian point of view. Students who speak out against powerful lobbies are being punished or sidelined.

Remember how the JNU, the only university in the country with a semblance of academic freedom, was and has been under attack in the last few years. It is almost as if the Americans have borrowed the Indian playbook. There is no surer way to finish higher learning than to extinguish the freedom around it. That is the reason you will not find a university of note in an authoritarian country. Despite having all the resources in the world there is no Saudi Arabian Harvard. Students will not make a beeline to study in North Korea. Okay, these are extreme examples, but look at Russia, a nominal democracy but with none of the freedoms associated with it. It may have good medical or technical schools, pretty much like our IITs and AIIMSs, but there is no institution like Oxford or Cambridge or the American Ivy League. These can only exist in truly free countries.

There is a reason for it. Freedom is sine qua non of academic excellence. It requires going wherever the pursuit of knowledge takes you. That often means treading on toes. It requires faculties that encourage students to think truly out of the box. It needs students to feel secure when they do that. Truly seminal minds are not bound by norms and do not care about what others, even if they are in majority, think. Historians may come up with hypotheses that hurt what rest of us revere, sociologists may come up with wrongs in society, writers and artists may produce work that is deemed heretical by many. Best Universities in the world are usually home to such people.

We are a country where a social media post can land a respected academic in prison and get a student arrested. Here the government will ban a book or a movie to appease a mob. You can be jailed for years for merely having some literature on your bookshelf. It is churlish to even think about having world-class academic institutions here. Academic culture is not built by having great halls, campuses, and powerful computers. It is built by free and questioning minds that can do their job without fearing the consequences. It is time we asked why, decades into having IITs, they have not been able to produce a single Nobel laureate. Why is not the world following management theories produced in our IIMs? Because there have not been any. We do not have an environment that will foster academic freedom, rigour, and discipline. I am not sure we even want it.