Wednesday, October 17, 2007

What's with the vice chancellors of Indian universities?


... Our education system is devoid of being practical within industries. ...

[O]ur curriculum is inadequate as well. ...

The course curriculum no longer reflects the needs of the industry. So, we must update it and make it relevant. ...

The university suffers from lack of quality staff. Most of them are not qualified enough to teach at the university level. ...

Most of the vice-chancellors admitted that nearly 60% of their faculty did not have a clue on what was new in their field.

These complaints from vice chancellors of our universities are taken from this ToI report by Pragya Kaushika about a recent conference of VCs.

To be fair to the VCs, I have to say that the ToI report is short on details on many other aspects of their conference. It is possible that they shared their experiences and insights about our higher ed system. It is also possible that they diagnosed the major problems in the system and made sensible recommendations for solving them. We have no way to know what exactly they deliberated on, since their report is not in the public domain.

Still, to the extent that the VCs deemed it fit to make these complaints to the ToI reporter, they are worth commenting upon. And I want to restrict my comment to just this:

Isn't it pathetic and depressing when powerful people whine about things that are actually under their control?

* * *

The ToI report also ends on a comical note:

... [E]ach university should also run a school, so that the root-cause of problems existing in the education system could be easily identified.

Which, for no obvious reason, reminds me of this story from an elite research institution ;-)

1 Comments:

  1. Rahul Siddharthan said...

    Isn't it pathetic and depressing when powerful people whine about things that are actually under their control?

    But are things under their control? Even in a relatively well-regarded central university like Delhi University, try to discipline a teacher who does not teach, and the teachers' association goes on strike.

    Being a VC of one of our typical universities is not a particularly enviable job.