At the outset, the title of this write-up might seem to some people provocative, but as I proceed, I believe many people if not all will agree to a great extent as to why it is so. Universities all over the world have a vision and mission which these institutions pursue through different means at their disposal. As of now, India has more than 900 universities; state, central and private. All these universities are set out in the pursuit of some grand objectives. However, given continuous dismal performance at different levels in the pursuit of these objectives, most of these universities have failed to achieve the fundamental target. It is not that we measure the performance or credentials of different universities with the same label when we say universities are failing. Of course, there are some good universities but, unfortunately, they are very few, whereas majority of these institutions are mediocre, sometimes even lacking the very semblance of a university. I believe the kind of circumstances we are in; it won’t be unrelated to ask some fundamental questions about the performance of our universities. It is imperative that our universities should introspect the deepening crisis and the ensuing failure to achieve the objectives of creating tolerant citizens for the society. It merits an impartial intervention that when universities all over the world, like Oxford, are working day in and day out to prepare a vaccine for the deadly virus, which has actually brought the world to a grinding halt, our universities are only struggling to decide how to conduct the defective examinations, save a barren, empty academic year from going waste, and practically never bothering about the quality production, distribution and consumption of knowledge.
There is a widely held belief that universities are the repositories of knowledge and they continuously work to improve the condition of the existing world order. When we are passing through one of the most difficult phases in human history and when there is an absolute necessity of some great ideas to see us through this unprecedented pandemic situation, our universities have sadly entered a cul-de-sac. Why is that in normal circumstances these institutions of higher learning claim to be the beacons of light and source of intellectualism and suddenly run out of ideas in challenging situations like these?
We believe that universities are supposed to be open and inspirational and try to address big questions challenging the very possibilities of human existence on earth. The fact of the matter is that many of our universities have become uninspiring and have failed to hold the interest of the young. Not to talk about answering the big questions, they are not even able to solve the problems of their stakeholders, especially the student community. It has been observed that scholars are being harassed on one or the other pretext. They are structurally coerced to shape their outlook in accordance with the wishes of their supervisors. The so-called professors in some universities have become demigods who consider it their duty to humiliate and harass their scholars without engaging with the scholars on merit. It is time these people are put to some scrutiny so that our young minds get an opportunity to breathe in free research environment. Though we also believe that there are many good teachers too.
The most important stakeholder in our universities is our student and he/she doesn’t seem to be satisfied with the kind of education we are imparting. This is probably one of the reasons that between 2000 to 2009 the number of students moving out of India for education purposes grew by 256 percent. For the academic session 2015 alone 1,65,918 Indian students were enrolled for higher education in US. What does this tell us? Perhaps, it should help us realize that the aspiring young minds have lost the confidence in our own education system, especially the universities. On just the first notice, we can fairly understand the inadequate management of our universities both at national and state level. We must acknowledge that the defective governing/regulating mechanism is one of the factors responsible for the failure of our universities. One- size-fits all, is a mantra which I believe is not working. All universities are governed by a single agency like UGC which keeps tight control on these institutions through different changing regulations, giving only less opportunities to different universities located in different parts of the country, to make changes and innovations as per the circumstances surrounding an institution. Usually we assume that universities have a unique ability to nurture the critical ability of its clients especially students and help them in developing critical thinking but in reality we could see rather than developing these skills, our universities are killing these abilities by resorting to undemocratic and traditional ways of teaching learning. There seems to be no space for any debate and discussion at different forums like executive councils, academic councils and in the classrooms too.
The quality of a university largely depends on the quality of the people working in the institution, their academic as well as administrative credentials. How an institution should try to achieve its vision largely depends on the kind of leadership it has. The selection of a leader defines the goals and direction of a university. Although leadership at different levels in a university is important but owing to the over centralization in university organizational structure, Vice Chancellors are at very important positions and have veto powers in almost all decisions of the university without any fair amount of accountability. We believe that V. C’s as leaders of our universities need to have some basic competencies like academic brilliance, fairness, integrity and more importantly the administrative acumen. The fact of the matter is that many times we find those individuals in these positions who don’t possess any of the above qualities and still find themselves on these top positions. It means either the process of selecting the leaders for these positions is flawed or these positions are awarded only based on some influence. To my humble understanding, this is one of the main reasons why our universities are failing. If we put an average mediocre person in charge of an institution, it is bound to fail miserably and at the same time it is also demotivating for some brilliant persons working in same institution, to work under an average V.C.
To conclude, I believe our universities need to come out of the cocoon and try to be a part of solution rather than part of a problem. It is time our universities nurture young and aspiring scholars and reward merit rather than mediocrity. For the leadership positions no compromise should be made if we wish to reach global standards, and there is a need to give complete flexibility to academic institutions to develop and design their own courses. And finally, if a university wants to make a mark it has to attract the best of the available talent for which robust mechanism should be in place with no space for favouritism and nepotism which usually is the case.
Author is Assistant Professor, Government Degree college Ganderbal Kashmir. Views are personal.