In today’s The Chronicle of Higher Education,
published from Washington DC, USA, I came across an interesting article
entitled, ‘In Search of India’s Missing Professors,’ by P Pushkar, who is a
research fellow at the Institute for International Development at McGill
University. The article would have one believe that alarm bells are
ringing in Indian higher education. ‘There are reports,’ says Pushkar, ‘that
India faces a shortage of 300,000 faculty members in its universities
and colleges. It is estimated that the shortage will increase at the rate of
100,000 each year. These are big numbers even for a country of one billion-plus
people and counting. What is remarkable is that the faculty shortage is serious
not only in poor-quality public universities and colleges, but even at the
world-class Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) and the Indian Institutes of
Management (IIMs). The truth is that, with some exceptions, higher education is
in deep rot. India simply does not produce a sufficient number of high-quality
PhDs. Not surprisingly, the IITs and the IIMs are trying to recruit Indians
from abroad to fill faculty positions. It remains to be seen, however, how many
will actually take up such jobs. Here in North America or in the UK, there is
no dearth of Indians with Ph.Ds who distinguish themselves in teaching and
research. Few, however, want to teach in India, not even at the IITs and the
IIMs. The motto for Indians abroad–certainly those in academe–is still
“anywhere but India”.’
Pushkar raises an interesting question:
‘How has such a large and populous country, and one where education is highly
valued, reached a point where it cannot find faculty members for its most
venerable institutions?’ This is his answer: ‘The problem is in part about
salaries. According to a study by Philip G Altbach of Boston College
and Jamil Salmi of the World Bank on academic institutions around the world,
salaries at the IITs are “ridiculously low” compared to IIT graduates who go
into the private sector. They could have added that salaries are also
“seriously low” compared to salaries in Western or world-class Eastern
universities, even adjusted for the lower cost of living in India.’
This is how Pushkar concludes his article:
‘India’s political leaders do not seem to appreciate the extent of the faculty
crisis. Mostly, there is a lot of talk and ambitious plans about reforming
higher education. They need to first try and change the way Indians think about
the profession. That and better salaries, especially to attract qualified
faculty for the IITs, IIMs, and the all-too-few other quality institutions.
Until then, Indians will prefer to teach on North American, British, and
Australian campuses.’
Except for the sensational
headline ('In search of India's "missing" professors), the article is
a fairly accurate picture of the abysmal situation in India. Jairam Ramesh's
observation about the so-called excellence of the IITs and the IIMs was not a
tongue-in-cheek remark; it was a perceptive observation which the minister had
the courage to articulate, even though political compulsions made him retract
it later. Several decades ago, one of the Indian Vice-Chancellors, V V John,
who never minced words, put it even more bluntly: 'There is nothing high about
our higher education.' 'It cannot be brought lower,' he might say if he had
lived to see the abysmal depths to which higher education has sunk in India
over the past quarter century.
I think it is not just better
salaries and better living conditions that have forced talented people to
emigrate to countries like the USA, Singapore and the Gulf. Indian higher
education doesn't just have the environment in which self-respecting people can
breathe easily. One of my friends who is teaching abroad once said, 'I would
not go back to teach in India even if they doubled my pay.' And he gave two
reasons for not going back to India: political interference and a hierarchical
atmosphere in which the head of the department or the Principal acts like a
feudal lord. There is room for all this in our academia because it consists
predominantly of lowbrows. At the lower rungs of the higher education ladder,
where you find State-funded universities and colleges, the situation is much
worse. As a teacher in one of those colleges who rejected an opportunity to
work in a foreign university early on in my 30-year-long career and stayed
behind, I have often been a victim of thuggish brutality for standing up for
intellectual freedom. About a decade ago, I was forced to resign as the
Head of the Department of English in my college, and, a few months ago, I was
abused ("Bloody fellow!" shouted a lecturer, advancing menacingly
towards me) by some of my colleagues at an official meeting in my college and
threatened with violence. This is by no means an isolated incident;
colleges and universities have by and large become a haven for idle gossip,
calumny, slander and what have you.
Research, which Pushkar’s
article talks about in passing, is one of the sordid aspects of Indian higher
education. Some years ago, I spent a few days with Professor Helen Christiansen
from Canada who was an authority on second language acquisition and who was a
research examiner for some of the prestigious Indian universities. When I asked
her about her perception of the state of research in India, she told me with no
hesitation that, without a single exception, the PhD dissertations she had
received for assessment from India were third rate. And she took pains to justify
her remark.
Helen was blunt. And what she said hurt my national pride. But the
fact remains that we, Indians, are a nation of third-rate researchers. Much of
what goes on in the name of research in our universities cannot stand up to
close scrutiny. The recently-reported case of plagiarism in Indian academia is
just a tip of the iceberg. I have refused to evaluate several MPhil and PhD
dissertations and asked the universities which had sent them to spare me the
agony in future.
I shall conclude with an
amusing anecdote which can demonstrate how appallingly lowbrow Indian academia
is. Once I attended a scholarly lecture on research methodology which, I
thought, was brilliant. The audience consisted of college teachers most of whom
were engaged in either MPhil or PhD research. Behind me was a row of lecturers
who launched into an hour-long natter minutes after the lecture began. In front
of me were several rows of teachers, some chatting, some snoozing, and some
with a bored expression of their faces. My own row was kept awake by the loud
snores that came from a senior lecturer seated beside me!
