Sunday Posts

Politics is back on the agenda. For some, history ended in 1990. We arrived at a final, stable, interminable age of Capitalism, a vantage point of predicting the future where every next year was supposed to be better than the last, and constant progress could happen without changing the society. In fact, at that very moment, society stopped to matter, as the profound enabling of the individual meant that we can just pursue our own well-being, leaving the idea of progress to the workings of the market, which took care of itself. It was not very unlike what people thought before the death of God, but a radical departure from the ideas of enlightenment, when, humans became political animals with the slogan of daring to know. It is paradoxical, as at the moment of complete empowerment of the individual, a logical progression of the enlightened ideas, we chose - choice being the main theme here - to give up our powers to transform societies any further and accept the autonomous wo...

There is consensus that Higher Education must change, but many views on what it would change to.  This conversation about Higher Education change are usually carried along two parallel lines. The first, Financial, is closely linked to the decline in popularity of the Welfare State, and of the doctrine of publicly provided education in general. The second, Technological, stems from the dematerialisation of communication and contact technologies, and the emergent possibility of human relationships (and, therefore, instructional contact) without the constraint of physical facilities or the availability of learner and the tutor at a specific point of time and place. However, there is a third way to approach the shape of coming change in Higher Ed, and this is to approach the conversation from the changes in the nature of knowledge and work. At this point, the conversation about educational change becomes a conversation about education, not just limited to policy wonks or ventu...

Universities are dying, we hear. This is a strange announcement, because more people than ever are going to the universities. The achievement gap between those who go to the university and those who do not are growing. And, going to university has become an universal aspiration, swelling in Sub-Saharan Africa and remote islands in the Pacific alike. This is an institutional form at the peak of its power, prestige and popularity.  The point of pessimism is indeed that the promise this popularity is based on is floundering. The allure of middle class life, that of stable life, job and income, drives the millions to the University. Yet, the middle class escalator is jammed, as Linkedin founder Reid Hoffman says, and not many of the teeming millions going to the university can really realise that dream. The alternate promise, that there will be entrepreneurs, is perhaps all too optimistic - and, in any case, unrelated to the proposition of the university. So, while the universiti...

Frank Levy and Richard Murnane wrote a book called The New Division of Labor in 2004: I only caught up with it last week. But it is one of those which gets better with time: It did not appear outdated, but rather more relevant, because the changes Levy and Murnane were predicting are already here and are driving the public debate. One could treat this book as a treatise in Labour Economics and perhaps it does get treated like that. This is a tragedy, because this seems very much a book about education too. Surely, educators are somewhat weary of being lectured by the economists about education, and usually treat all the economic treatise about education with suspicion. And, as I figured out over the last year or so, this is not merely about the disciplinary difference: The disdain is political - economists are expected to focus on the 'wrong outcome', indeed economic value - and most educators tend to see this not just as an unwelcome encroachment of their territory, but ...

Technology changes education. If it sounds some kind of obvious, it is not: There are people who will argue that there is unchanging, unchangeable, soul of education. But this besides, there is a huge gap between the claims about how technology could change education and how it actually changes. The point of this post is have a closer look at this argument. To think about how technology can change education, one must think of not just technology in education, but technology in context. So, this discussion should not be just limited to how Fiber Optic connections make education through video ubiquitous, but about such technology creating new expectations, jobs and careers as well. So, it is not just that one should use video because it has become possible to do so, but because it will be a normal feature of the workplace or professions that the learner may go into.  This is something like saying that one needed to read books in college when jobs and careers were dominated ...

Higher Education in Asia and Africa has a good problem: It has excess demand. There are just too many people wanting to go to college, oversubscribing any place that there may be. But the number of institutions offering high quality Higher Education are hardly growing: in China, even with 9 new universities joining global top charts between the years 2006 and 2012, this meant high quality provision for only 16% of the additional 385,000 students coming to Higher Ed every year. For Nigeria's 108,000 additional students getting into Higher Ed every year, there will be no expansion of high quality provision. But this does not matter for poor quality institutions because no one is really saying 'high quality or bust'. The whole rhetoric around Higher Education is really 'graduate or bust', though poorly educated usually joins the ranks of unemployed straight afterwards. And, poor education is also good business: Because education is afflicted with assymetric infor...

Raphael's painting of Plato teaching is a popular PowerPoint item for Higher Education conferences these days. This is to be seen in the context of today's classroom, somewhat like the MIT's in the other picture here. The point is not the architectural contrast and the drab predictability of today's windowless classrooms, but rather the similarities between the two - indeed, the speakers use these pictures to emphasise that education has changed very little - and the fact that it is still the students in conversation with each other and with the teacher that make education. That, announces the PowerPoint crusaders armed with incontrovertible visual evidence, needs to change. However, one may indeed be able to point out several differences in the two spaces, which directly points to the changes happening in education. To start with, the humble table must not be overlooked, as well as the pen and paper, all pointing to a writing culture to replace the Oral traditi...

I am in India after a gap of 15 months, and now writing this post sitting in a hotel in Delhi. My visit is going well: I kept my expectations low, and therefore slightly overwhelmed by both the affection of long-lost friends and the enthusiasm of the education entrepreneurs about our proposition. Everywhere I go, I am filled with stories of change, a new thing in India. The stories filtering out of India may be gloomy, but it seems that India is moving on, unleashing an avalanche of change below the analysts' radar: Despite the pessimism of the media, the never-say-die reflections in popular culture (The White Tiger to English Vinglish) may be more true than their fictional nature suggests. Indeed, my enthusiasm about change is tempered by the fact that I stopped by in Dubai before I came to Kolkata. In 2008, I called Dubai the Disneyland of Capitalism and thought the party is over: Returning after a gap of 3 years, I could see the Disneyland spirit is alive and kicking. The c...

The Promise of College Education Being middle class means, among other things, aspiring to go to college and having a white collar job of some description in the end. While millions in Asia, Africa and Latin America follow this dream, in the West, there is a different reality: Middle class jobs are disappearing. They are mostly moving down the ladder, reduced to irrelevance by the rise of clever machines. The solid certainty, the ethic of working for a retirement, alongside a clear vision of what life would be like thirty years on, are all fragments of nostalgia. Regardless of aspirations, middle class lives and jobs are disappearing all over the world. If middle class life is to change, the educational ideals must do so too. This is a debate whether the College-for-Jobs myth should be propagated any further and whether time has come to reshape the modern higher education all over again. The Hangover of The Fifties We have come a long way from the Fifties, the age of opt...

I have been intimately involved in a 'project' to change an organisation - a complex one in a highly regulated space - and I speak of the mechanics of change usually referring back to this experience. While it lasts, this has been the most demanding, frustrating yet exhilarating work I have done so far: Progress as in one step forward, two steps back was all very common, and often, we seemed to have taken forever to resolve even the most straightforward issues. Indeed, by writing about it, I am not trying to claim any breakthrough success or mastery of the art of change management. On the contrary, this is more like the dispatches from the fault lines of an organisation in transition. I learnt to hate organisational politics for no particular reason other than because people said so. In today's cynical democracies, people in politics are typically sleazy ones, those who try to be everything to everyone, with the sole objective of making themselves rich. Statesmen are a...

The business I am in is facing the full force of change. The immigration laws are changing, forcing us to rethink our business model; the university funding is changing, opening new opportunities for us. I have been here before, indeed. I started my career as a Systems Administrator managing Unix systems, in 1993, just before the advent of Windows. Then, I moved onto another company in a job setting up their private network, in 1995, just before Internet became commercially available in India. And then, we rode on the Dotcom sentiments and ran a Certification Training company in 1999, just before plane-loads of software programmers started returning to India. From these experiences, and others that I studied, I know that the best option available for a small business is to change with the environment. The greatest advantage of smallness is nimbleness, and one must take full advantage of this. The worst thing one can do is to sink in denial; but that's exactly what most small busin...

Two weeks into my 100 day plan, I am starting to see the problem. The credit goes to the chaos in my life at the moment - the deaths, the house move, the difficulties at work - and I am starting to see where I am going wrong at this time. It is simply this: While I pledged to change my life, I tried to change everything around me, except myself. I must say I am starting to see the problem. My ego was mightily satisfied acting as a change agent, but the same thing - ego - is actually the biggest hurdle to change. I may have facilitated some changes around me, but of critical importance was my ability to change. This diminished over time as I became satisfied with my work. Now that I know the problem, I have admitted this publicly. I did go up to colleagues and admitted that I took my eye off the ball. I made a career transition to higher education intending to teach and write: Indeed, that's what I still intend to do. However, I got sort of waylaid by the battles I had to fight, and...

I am back into 100 day plans. I love them. Indeed, I grew up in India during its various five year plans, and time-restricted plans are therefore in my blood. But there is nothing socialist about the propensity to plan; on the contrary, these are my exercises in fantasy. But whether fantasy or not, these 100 day plans give me focus that I so badly need, and allows me to achieve something in the end. It worked for me before, and I am hopeful that this will work for me now. Truth be told, I need a bit of a restart. While I have achieved some of the things I intended in the last nine months, but I have lost a bit of momentum in the last couple of months. My brother's untimely death is one of the reasons: It completely unsettled me and left me feeling desperately lonely. Various 'work in progress' items at work add to this feeling: There are things which I wished to complete sooner, but some must invariably wait for some time more. Some of this also pertains to my aspirations, ...

Changing organizations can be a thrilling, all consuming, life enhancing experience. It is not easy, and often it may look quite scary. But, if one's convinced about the pay-off, not just in money terms but the value one would create, every bit of the trouble seems worth it. But, then, there is nothing straightforward about it. As I told a colleague recently, everything is culturally grounded. This is something management gurus often don't get it, because they are not inside an organization. It is often easy for consultants to see and do things to change an organization, because they see and work from outside. If they have the mandate, they can follow the cold logic of management rationality. However, this de -personalizes the organization, as the logic employed can be only of money and shareholder returns: Such re-engineering can only end up with a narrow focus on stock value at the expense of everything else. Changing from inside, though difficult, can be more rewarding, in t...