The Government must fund educational institutions consistently and maintain a minimum acceptable academic standard
The primary governance reform required to close the quality gap of Indian universities is to strengthen internal accountability to the student and move from the current practice of external process and content regulation to product-performance testing.
The responsibility in awarding degrees to around 20 million students who graduate in India rests with about 700 university level institutions, the University Grants Commission and about 15 other professional regulators overseeing the quality of professionals and their registration. While the UGC has a mandate of standardising the quality of teaching and organisation of programmes across the country under an Act of Parliament, the other professional regulators have statutory powers to regulate academic programmes by auditing physical facilities, teacher quality, content and method of imparting education and even the examinations and assessment of students.
The plethora of regulators bring the respective graduate and post-graduate courses in the Indian universities under the unprecedented control of multiple agencies. It is in total contrast to the situation in advanced countries where the professional regulators regulate quality only from the entry of the individual to the profession, his professional conduct, periodic upgradation through continuing education programmes implemented with university participation and maintenance of requisite internal discipline. For instance, the Bar Regulatory Councils of United States or United Kingdom do not inspect facilities or prescribe course contents of the professional degree in law. In India the various professional regulators enjoy prior sanctioning and inspection powers over academic programmes, which are counter-productive for many reasons.
The practice of the respective professions requires the maintenance of a minimum academic accomplishment for the novitiate and his commitment to periodic upgradation of his skill and maintenance of a high ethical standard. When professional councils attempt to reform curriculum from outside or conduct entry examinations into professional courses, they rely on faculty of various universities to operate these collegiums. While the preoccupation of these councils is to elicit a yardstick of a minimum standard, the purpose of higher education in the discipline is to explore the horizons deeply and strive for excellence.
From the experience in the West, particularly the US Ivy league, overall standards in any academic programme tends to move upwards once the focus of the programme is to achieve competitive excellence. One of the key drivers of excellence is to continuously innovate in curriculum and methodology. To cite an example, when a professional regulator insists that a particular course may have certain hours of theory classes and practical and that is left unchanged, use of technology like web-based learning and multiple video conferencing cannot be applied to extend the benefit of the professional programme to a wider audience, as the regulator invariably insists on contact classes and resists any adoption of modern technology. Some professional council who have a mandate to revise syllabus attempt it usually once in 10 years and this is found to be far too infrequent in the current scenario.
In contrast, the Western universities do not entertain any external raid on their exclusive terrain which is the maintenance of quality standards of their programmes. In fact, their resistance to any external analysis of quality standards borders on the ferocious. Any attempt by legislature or Governments to audit university programmes are resisted legally and through strong public opinion.
One difficulty in India is the need of the Governments at the Centre and the States to fund the universities consistently and also maintain minimum acceptable academic standards from graduates joining regulated professions like lawyers, doctors, nurses and engineers. In advanced countries the universities are left free to formulate their best strategies in designing a competitive programme and also continuously changing the contours of individual programmes to the best of their genius.
The primary difficulty constraining the Indian universities from attaining excellent standards is that the university governance in India is geared through compositional weaknesses and orientation towards stark mediocrity. The multiplicity of regulators operating within the university has not helped matters. The academic sovereignty of the university needs to be preserved in preference to invasive regulation of diversity of content and methodology by statutory bodies restoring the primacy of the concerned competent Board of Studies. Conversely those Boards who are seen to be inert to syllabus changes must be held accountable. The internal accountability system of the universities needs to be geared to handle the pressures of complete academic autonomy.
(The writer is Vice Chancellor of Kerala Veterinary and Animal Sciences University. The opinion expressed here is his own)