Sunday Posts

The surprising popularity of Liberal Education Just as Liberal Arts colleges are closing in the United States, in Asia, Liberal Education is the new hot thing.  Most surprisingly, in India, a country where university education was created as a gateway to government jobs and where students, especially male students, pursue formal education for the sole purpose of employment, Liberal Education is suddenly very popular. Private universities, whose fortunes are closely tied to their students' earning potential, are surprisingly keen on liberal education, as they seek to follow the example set up by Ashoka (and a few others), an US-style High-End liberal arts college set up at great expense by a group of Indian entrepreneurs. One could say that this is not surprising and India is following a path China has followed for some time. Or, for that, even Japan. It may be a common trend that (as in Japan), Engineering and other disciplines draw most high calibre students in a poo...

Perhaps this is a distinctly unfashionable question, particularly when so many new universities are being built all over the world and more people than ever before are going to the university. However, unless one belongs to that rare group of people who think that the government - governments, in this case - knows better, this is a question worth asking, as public money is being poured in, either to build greenfield universities or to pay for students attending private, profit-making, ones.  The university leaders usually treat the purpose of universities as self-evident truth and exempt, conveniently, their own institutions from the critical examination they claim every aspect of life should be subject to. However, given the importance of universities in the contemporary cultural life - they are deemed to be the creators of individual worth as well as its judge - some questions are worth asking. To do so, it's important to start at the very beginning, and ask - what are thes...

At the time when the expansion of Company state in India brought about political, economic and social changes that led to a rapid transformation of Indian education system, the idea of a University was also rapidly undergoing a change in Europe and North America. Curiously, the history of Indian education has been conventionally analysed without reference to these developments, except for the obvious parallels between the newly established London University and the University of Calcutta, as the latter was based on the model of the former. But even such a parallel was conventionally used to highlight operational similarities rather than philosophical ones. However, the discussions in Indian higher education during the formative years of the Company administration was always global, as the British policy-makers brought with them the ideas and practices of the mother country, British parliament sought to influence policy in line with its ideological persuasion and educated Indians l...

I wrote about the case for allowing foreign universities to be allowed to operate in India. In this connection, I mentioned the Foreign Higher Education Providers Bill, which has appeared in different names and versions since the 1990s before the Indian cabinet and parliament and never went anywhere. I argued that though the foreign providers have more or less given up on the Indian government providing a workable legal framework and settled for various expedient semi-legal arrangements with politically influential education barons, the jobs and skills crisis should force Indian policy-makers to rethink the approach.  However, even if this conversation is reopened in the new parliament in 2019, simply passing the bill as it was proposed wouldn't get us anywhere, and this point is worth belabouring. Several reasons for this, including that the bill in its current form is unattractive for any foreign provider, and it is unlikely that anyone would prefer to operate withi...

 The conversation in India has now turned to liberal education. About time, one would say, to recognise a major problem - that the education became too vocational, too narrow and too focused on jobs that don't exist anymore - and do something about it. As the great Indian engineering machine that produced millions of graduates with an overtly theoretical training and pushed them into various IT services companies doing process jobs stuttered, the desperate search for alternatives led to the discovery of liberal education. Like all Indian 'education thought', this idea of Liberal Education came from the vocational angle, imported from North America in style and content, and without much thinking about its purpose and context. Only now, when the graduates of the new Liberal Arts colleges reaching the job market, and endorsements from leading corporations and celebrity intellectuals making it an attractive proposition for private investment, which is driving the expansion ...

For the last year or so, I was trying to achieve a balance between my academic and commercial work. I am lucky in a way because I love the work I do, so it's more than the usual striving for balance between what one loves and what one has to do. Though I get paid to do it, my commercial work is exciting - global, touches many lives and involves ideas. On the other hand, I see my future - few years from now, perhaps - in teaching and writing, and hence, the academic work that I am doing is more than a hobby. Though it still remains a balancing act, I don't necessarily see this as a dichotomous relationship - one or the other - and believe I should do both well. This brings me to the update: That, while I have prioritised on commercial work in the last 10 days or so, I have also made significant progress in focusing my mind on the subject of my research: A history of Calcutta University! In a way, it is obvious: This is the first modern university in India, which happens to...

Charles Wood, 1st Viscount Halifax That the Board of Control of East India Company, the parliamentary body supervising the affairs of the East India Company from London, sent a famous dispatch - dubbed the 'Magna Charta of Indian Education' - in 1854 to Lord Dalhousie, the Governor General of India, proposing the establishment of three Presidency universities in Calcutta, Madras and Bombay, is well-known. Lord Dalhousie largely ignored the despatch, and its recommendations were implemented later by Lord Canning, Dalhousie's successor, as a part of wide-ranging reform initiatives after the Great Sepoy mutiny. The origin story, at least for British convenience, is better linked with the dispatch than the mutiny, and so this is how it's told. The Hindu Nationalists in India see the founding of universities as the realisation of Macaulay's dream, of creating natives who are Englishmen at heart; they took to calling university educated Indians 'Macaulay...

I am finally onto a project I always wanted to do: Write a history of the Colonial Universities. Indeed, I start with a very modest work - an essay on the establishment of metropolitan universities (Calcutta, Madras and Bombay first, and then Allahabad and Punjab Universities) in India - which I intend to finish over the next few months. But I hope to make this a prelude to the bigger project, because I see the Colonial University as a distinct form of institution, whose purpose was to educate for the economic purposes of imperialism, and even if the empire is long gone and dead, this institutional form and modes of thinking lives on.   That way, I shall claim, this is not just a freak exercise in academic pretencion for me, but an essential part of my overall work.  While I work on it, I already find it fascinating to study the rhetoric and ideas around the establishment of the Indian universities. The conventional narrative runs along the lines of Orient...

University making in India is entering a new phase. The rushed expansion of the Higher Education system is perhaps over, with many of those new colleges and universities in crisis. There is a definitive shift in the regulatory environment: The unrestrained and often useless Distance Learning Study Centre business has been effectively shut down, the unregulated institutions have been challenged and there is greater clarity and order. However, university making in India has not stopped - there are new institutions being built and planned every day - and more and more serious philanthropists and entrepreneurs are entering the fray. I see these developments with some optimism, and believe that we are at an inflexion point, from which a new Higher Education system would emerge. This may be overtly optimistic and there are a number of things that can go wrong in India. For a start, we now have a nationalist turn, and the 'not-invented-here' syndrome has become all pervasive. Th...

India is looking to fast track the legislation to allow Foreign Universities to set up campuses and even operate as For-Profits, Hindu Business Line claims . Indian media could be excitable, and we have seen such stories before, so this should perhaps be taken with a pinch of salt. However, given that this is a story on the Front Page of a respected newspaper, it deserves some commentary. I noted in this blog earlier that I would be surprised if the Government does anything on the foreign education front. This scepticism was based on observations about the general approach of this government to Higher Education, with its urgency to indianise education and introduce, as much as possible, traditional Indian values into it. While this story only confirms some of the feelers I received earlier from people in the know, the consensus was that the Government would bring some new legislation just after the Budget session, it directly runs counter to the approach of controlling Higher Ed...

If India is to build up its Higher Education sector, it needs imagination rather than imitation. Its new universities are unlikely to be built in Ivy League model. The success of these new institutions will not depend upon the partnerships they build with the great and the good abroad, but its own vision, strategy, and most importantly, will to do it well. These universities will need less of the shiny buildings and acres of land, and more of an idea what an Indian university should be like. We should be talking less about the valuation and more about values. In one way, these universities must go back in time and embrace the basics: In another way, they must leapfrog into the future. Even the best university projects in India, those sponsored by large business groups, partnered with the best universities in the world, suffer from the glamour trap. The idea is to attract the students somehow through the lure of the facilities or the plaques on the wall: These come at a cost, that...

India is building new universities, at least at a rate of one a week. Same is true for many emerging countries. Building universities is seen as the panacea for lack of modernity. The route looks ever so simple: More universities will mean more people in Higher Education, which will mean better skilled workforce and higher productivity, and hence Higher GDP - and everything else will follow. India is also a great example of what could go wrong with this formula. The universities are being legislated into, but most become weaklings at birth, most with only a few students, limited number of disciplines, almost no research activities and no industry linkages: The prospect for future GDPs don't look that bright. If anything, they hardly herald a promising future and rather stand as monuments of wasted opportunity.  However, anyone will be impressed if they visit these new institutions. Some aberrations aside, they are mostly shiny new institutions with adequate infrastructure...