Autonomy comes closer, but debates persist

When the first three universities of pre-Independence India started functioning in 1857, all the 27 colleges running at that time were brought under their ambit. From that modest beginning a century-and-a-half ago — when the Madras, Calcutta and Bombay universities were set up — the number of colleges has seen an exponential increase. Today, there are 343 university-level institutions, managing no less than 16,885 affiliated colleges.

An educationist is not needed to figure out that the proportion of universities to colleges appears to be more than a little skewed. Indeed, it is this discrepancy that has been at the heart of a call for granting autonomy to colleges, an idea that was mooted nearly 40 years ago. Many discussions and debates later, the University Grants Commission — the apex body regulating higher education in the country — recently accepted in principle a report submitted by the Central Advisory Board on Education (CABE) in June 2005, recommending granting of autonomy to institutions, on the ground that it is a “pre-requisite for enabling them to achieve their goals and objectives.”

Though autonomy seems to be closer at hand now than before, the debate on the level of freedom that institutions can enjoy is nowhere near its conclusion. Worries that institutions may follow arbitrary employment policies and charge high fees from students, thereby putting higher education out of reach of the poor, persist. As Furqan Qamar, professor and director at the Centre for Management Studies at Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi, who organised a seminar on the subject last month, points out: “Everyone agrees that autonomy is a must. But this freedom cannot be without responsibility, there has to be accountability too.”

Then and now

The report of the CABE committee (www.education.nic.in/cabe/AutonomyHEI.pdf), headed by West Bengal Education Minister Kanti Biswas, recommends that institutes should be given autonomy for designing curriculum. Some of the other suggestions include:

• Granting autonomy to universities and colleges to start self-financing courses.

• An Internal Quality Assurance Cell to be set up in institutes to assess their performance.

• All institutions to adopt “certain disclosure standards with a view to containing malpractice in relation to fees.” Also, the government could set the ceiling on fees.

• Higher education institutes should be given autonomy to establish links for “academic and research collaboration with their counterpart academic and research institutions, industry and professional organisations both in India and abroad.”

• Code of professional ethics to be developed for teachers and “mechanism evolved for ensuring its observance.”

The need for autonomy came to the fore because of concerns that affiliating universities were being bogged down by the number of institutes they had to manage. This, in turn, meant that even small administrative matters, for which the university’s approval was needed, took a considerable amount of time. Apart from cutting red tape, autonomy is seen as essential to meeting the requirements necessitated by the General Agreement on Trade and Services (GATS), under which foreign universities will be able to set up shop in India.

Of course, GATS was nowhere in the picture when the Kothari Commission report first recommended autonomy in 1966, stating, ”…when there is an outstanding college or a small cluster of very good colleges within a large university, consideration should be given to granting them an autonomous status.” The National Policy on Education (NPE), 1986, suggested that autonomous colleges and university departments should be developed within universities. Tamilnadu was one of the first states to have autonomous colleges. While the NPE-1986 suggested that 500 colleges should be developed as autonomous by the end of the Seventh Plan period in 1990, that figure hasn’t become a reality even now. According to the CABE report, there are now “204 autonomous colleges, spanning 11 states and 43 universities.”

It’s worthwhile examining India’s experience with autonomy before looking at the current debates on the subject. In a paper titled “Autonomy in higher education closer in India: Old wine fails to attract…”, presented at a seminar in 2004, Jandhyala B G Tilak of the National Institute of Education Planning and Administration (NIEPA), New Delhi, notes that the growth in the number of autonomous colleges has been slow. He points to the geographical concentration of autonomous colleges, mainly in Tamilnadu, Andhra Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh and Orissa; to the worrying fact that more private colleges have opted for autonomy than government colleges; and that “most of the colleges that have become autonomous are located in urban areas.”

Tilak attributes the lukewarm response to the fact that “there were several apprehensions about the scheme, lack of clarity on the objectives and intentions of the government, and its likely impact on the development of higher education. The most important apprehension was that this was a step in the direction towards privatisation of higher education, and towards the reduction of the role of the state in higher education development.” None of these fears have been mitigated over the years, though it’s widely accepted that autonomy — if used judiciously — can improve quality.

“In real terms, autonomy has been used to introduce programmes but not mechanisms by which the standard and quality of the programmes can be improved.” Sudhanshu Bhushan, senior fellow and in-charge of the higher education unit at NIEPA, says that autonomy hasn’t been used to design inter-disciplinary programmes or credit-based semester systems. “In real terms, autonomy has been used to introduce programmes but not mechanisms by which the standard and quality of the programmes can be improved,” he adds.

Benefits of autonomy

Former director of the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Chennai, P V Indiresan, also member of the CABE committee on autonomy, emphasises that academic freedom is essential to educational institutions. “Institutes should be able to decide what to teach, and who will teach the subjects,” he says. Besides, there should be no interference in the day-to-day affairs of an institute and no “political interference”, especially in matters of appointments, adds Indiresan.

Qamar says that bureaucratic delays unnecessarily stop institutes from doing away with old courses or starting new programmes, a problem that autonomy takes care of. Sharit Bhowmik, faculty member at University of Mumbai’s sociology department, points out that as “higher education is going down the drain, there has to be some way to improve quality.” Autonomy is seen as one of the ways to achieve this. Bhowmik says that the Mumbai University has asked some of its departments to become autonomous so as to promote a better and faster decision-making process.

Sujata Patel, faculty member at University of Pune’s sociology department, feels, “Autonomy is essential to provoke people outside the community to participate in university matters.” Her department, for instance, runs a course on sociology in Indian society, which has found takers among foreigners and software professionals interested in learning more about the country’s culture. “Without autonomy, it would not have been possible to start such certificate or diploma courses,” she points out.

A barrier too high

Notwithstanding its advantages, the concept of autonomy can be much abused as well, especially in terms of charging fees from students, fear teachers. Apart from setting a ceiling on fees, the CABE report recommends that all institutes should provide free-ships and scholarships to “meritorious and deserving students from the lower socio-economic strata of the society.” However, this is still a gray area, claim many academics.

V K Tewari, general secretary of the All India Federation of University and College Teachers’ Organisations (AIFUCTO) and faculty member at DAV College, Jalandhar, says that the self-financing courses that UGC allowed colleges to set up — wherein the fees are fixed by each institute — can be afforded by only those in the higher-income groups. “As it is, in the 17-23 age group, only about 7-8% take up higher education,” he adds. He says this figure is based on the annual reports released by UGC.

Tewari also points to recommendations made by another CABE committee on Financing of Higher and Technical Education (report submitted in June 2005), headed by Planning Commission member Bhalchandra Mungekar. This report categorically states, “The state should make a firm commitment to finance higher education.” It also says that while earlier committees have recommended raising 20 percent of resources through fees and other sources, this should be considered as the “desirable upper level”. “Revenue generation through student fees beyond 20 percent may seriously affect access to higher education,” says the Mungekar report.

“Autonomy and a possible increase in fees as a result would especially harm students in rural areas, and in particular the girl child.”

Tapati Mukhopadhyay, vice-president of AIFUCTO and general secretary of Mumbai University College Teachers’ Union, points out that the move towards autonomy and a possible increase in fees as a result would especially harm students in rural areas, and in particular the girl child. Bhowmik adds that while it is wrong to assume that all education should be subsidised, ways have to be found so as to not exclude the poor.

The machinery in existence today, such as the fee determination committees headed by retired judges, haven’t been very effective, says Qamar. “We need to evolve a mechanism that works,” he adds.

Qamar also explains why it’s not possible to leave higher education to market forces. “Education is a different kind of investment,” he says. “There is a certain irreversibility in terms of time — if students are lured by false promises, then if after four-five years, even if they get the money back for a worthless degree, the time cannot be replaced.”

Indiresan feels that there has to be different criteria for working out the fees charged from students. “For instance, abroad, in institutions such as Harvard, the fee charged is one-third the cost of the student’s education. Two-thirds of the amount comes from endowments or various other kinds of work. They also vary fees internally so that no competent student is kept out — this is what we need,” he says.

It certainly is a far cry from the situation in many of the colleges in India today, where, as Mukhopadhyay points out, the fees charged remain high even if there is no infrastructure. She says, “The IITs have done well because they were given funding, good faculty and infrastructure.” Those three factors are not to be seen in many of the self-financing courses started in engineering courses in Maharashtra, where the fees are nevertheless high, she adds.

Pure economics

“The sociology department, therefore, has to teach Human Resources Development, though that’s a management course.” The emphasis on starting job-oriented courses, on “making higher education relevant for the world of work,” as the CABE report puts it, has made some academics uneasy. “The tendency is that autonomy is mostly sought by engineering or management colleges,” says Patel. In a paper titled ‘Higher Education at the Crossroads’, published in the Economic and Political Weekly in May 2004, she writes that most self-financing universities and colleges encourage engineering, medicine and management education. “Why? Is liberal education based on humanities and social sciences not to be taught or is it because it has no commercial value? Should commercial viability be the criteria for the promotion of higher education? …Will this not create a new stratification within universities where already social sciences and humanities are relegated to the background?” she asks in her paper.

If foundational courses in sciences were not to be taught, students wouldn’t be able to learn applied sciences, says Patel. “We are being asked to teach industry-oriented courses. The sociology department, therefore, has to teach Human Resources Development, though that’s a management course,” she rues.

Teaching trouble

In autonomous institutes, there’s a lot of uncertainty in the academic environment, says Tewari, as teachers are often appointed on a per hour basis and hired and fired at will. Mukhopadhyay adds that the union has received a number of complaints from teachers about the autocratic manner in which autonomous institutes function. The CABE report seems to acknowledge the teachers’ fears when it says, “Appointment of teachers on a contract basis with a paltry amount may be disbanded.”

Qamar points out that teachers are the largest stakeholders in higher education, as they are the ones who continue in the system for the longest period. However, the quality of teaching has declined by and large, and the situation would vastly improve if institutions could appoint teachers on their own, he says. “So many posts remain vacant in universities only because the university selection committees don’t meet often,” he adds.

The teachers’ union movement has become weak, and the teaching community as a whole was being perceived as fighting only for their demands, says Qamar. “Teachers should follow a code of conduct and be more aware of social development issues. They should look beyond salaries and fight for a larger cause,” he adds.

Bhushan says that autonomous institutes should have annual reports wherein teachers include an evaluation of their own work. “Against each faculty member, their activities should be noted down, such as research papers done and innovations in teaching-learning process,” he adds. This would also help the society at large in assessing a teacher’s capabilities.

Testing times

One possible fallout of autonomy could be that each institution would have its own examination schedule and admission calendar, leading to the clashing of exam or interview dates. To avoid this, the CABE report recommends that at least in the universities within a state, the academic calendar should be synchronised to avoid inconveniencing students. Besides, to evolve a more competent evaluation system, higher education institutes could use a system giving weightage to a combination of factors such as academic performance in class X and XII, extra-curricular activities, interviews, scores in entrance test and qualifying examinations, the report says.

On the process of admission itself, the report says that “bigger systems” such as centralised admissions in general colleges could pose problems due to the differences in regional requirements. “Hence, admissions in general courses may be directly done by the institutes themselves. However, professional institutions may admit students either by conducting their own examinations or through the state/regional/national level entrance examination,” recommends the report. Even so, the already centralised admission process for many professional courses such as engineering and medicine now leave much to be desired, says Qamar.

The CABE report also recommends setting up a National Testing Service (NTS) on the lines of the Educational Testing Service in the US. The report recommends that the Ministry of Human Resource Development should initiate steps towards setting up this testing service for framing “national norms” to determine the performance of students, which could be used for comparing standards across universities in the country.” It further states that the NTS can also rank students for purposes of admissions to various courses in higher education institutes, on the lines of Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT), Graduate Records Examination (GRE) and Graduate Management Aptitude Test (GMAT).

Checks and balances

“Universities shouldn’t be free to do what they feel like doing but what they are expected to do.” Qamar says that the consensus is that “universities shouldn’t be free to do what they feel like doing but what they are expected to do.” That is, the concerns of the ultimate beneficiaries — in this case, the society at large — need to be kept in mind while autonomous institutes function. While it would be inadvisable to regulate each and every aspect of an institute’s functioning, certain broad parameters need to be set, he adds.

The need for some kind of regulatory mechanism cannot be overstated, especially in view of the Chhatisgarh experience. The private universities set up there by the state government, through its own legislation, established many off-campus centres, some of which were running out of shopping complexes, according to a Public Interest Litigation filed in the Supreme Court. In February 2005, the Supreme Court ordered the shutting down of 112 of those private universities, which were setup in a span of just one year.

While there are a number of statutory bodies for regulation now, such as the UGC, the Medical Council of India and the All India Council for Technical Education, there is a need to have a single Higher Education Regulatory Body, which could work out norms in consultation with teachers and students, says Qamar.

Patel feels that checks and balances should be in-built into the system, and that institutes should be evaluated by a mechanism that would combine peer review with internal audit. While the National Assessment and Accreditation Council (NAAC) does assess institutions, the evaluation is based more on physical components such as infrastructure, says Patel. Indiresan suggests that as a single body would find it difficult to assess institutions across the country, it would be better to involve local bodies in evaluation.

On the final count, experts say that if institutes were to function in a transparent manner, it would go a long way in building people’s confidence. Citizens could make use of the Right to Information Act to secure more information on the functioning of educational institutes, thus making them more accountable. As Tewari says, “Universities and colleges collect crores of rupees from students with no mention of how it is being used. Students and teachers should use the act to find out more about this and other activities.”