Social Entrepreneurs in higher education: wake up

This is a time to introspect and act.

There is need for positive social entrepreneurial energy to be channelled into India’s higher education sector. There is little public discourse on higher education since it is too rarefied and beyond the non-specialist’s reach.

In simple terms there is too much government in higher education.

Government has to move aside and allow good private players to make a difference.

We can readily see two types of private players in this space. One, the politically connected treating education as a means of generating abnormal returns, and another, a group of social entrepreneurs who think there is a better way to conduct higher education. May the latter thrive!

The society has to now understand that higher education in India has over time been reduced to:

1. Maintenance of a subservience-oriented legacy system: The current university has its roots in Thomas Macaulay who brought in the affiliation-based “university of London” model. Note that he did not bring in the University of Oxford or London Models.

2. Destruction of what should be trans-disciplinary universities to specialised ones: In India we even have universities for folklore studies! No disrespect meant to folklore. Just pointing out how universities are spawned to create advantages to those who create them. Imagine a university system where folklore and rocket science or music and geometry coexist in harmony!

3. Perpetration of political appointments in leadership positions in the public universities.

4. Spending huge tax payer money on govt-funded central institutions that have largely remained “exclusivist”: The leadership in these institutions are constantly called upon to spend their energy in protecting autonomy (and diabolically, exclusive privileges) rather than be supporting good knowledge work.

5. Creation of research funding councils: This model is in consonance with Macaulay’s philosophy of education. According to this, universities exist merely to teach (perpetrate the subservience model), not develop an intellectual class that can cerebrally challenge existing unfair power structures or generate new knowledge.

6. Licensing private institutions and having them work under syllabus and examination diktats that promote the status quo: Everyone thinks that license raj left the country in early1990s. This is not true of the education sector. Along with this is the continuance of institutions to control, equivalents of which have long been dismantled in UK, whose legacy systems India suffers from.

7. Creation of so-called quality systems like accreditation by multiple agencies (without clear idea why so many exist) that are poor copies from the West with least understanding of how they ought to work: For instance, the entire accreditation system in the US (and now adopted by UK) is based on self-regulation. Here in India it is based on bureaucratic controls set by the government.

8. Creation of system where students are forced to be super competitive: This system has the students internalising one single objective, viz., cracking the entrance exam. Much later in life they suffer the disjoint between their deeper interests and the jobs on hand… Poor students.

9. Generation of academicians for whom professorship is failure: Being at the highest stage of knowledge work is equivalent to anonymity. Money and power are enjoyed only if they are on the bureaucratic career lane.

Isn’t it time to change things! My sense is that the feeling of alienation that students in public institutions of higher learning is reason enough to rethink how we conduct higher education in India.