Rainbow Scientist: Snobbery of Elite Educational Institutes in India.
Joy Monteiro at Reflections on Everything: IISc - First Impressions.
A wiki on the 50 year history of IIT-Madras.
Bala Murali Krishna in The New Indian Express: Do IITs need friends?
T.T. Ram Mohan in The Economic Times: IITs and IIMs: Yash Pal is Wrong: "The Yash Pal committee on higher education now wants the IITs and IIMs to develop into full-fledged universities. The committee is dead wrong. The IITs and IIMs have other priorities. Besides, replicating the IIT/IIM experience at universities may be infeasible."
Ram Mohan has a bit more to say on this on his blog.
Monday, September 14, 2009
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2 Comments:
Reg. TTRM's article -
Well if we grants the argument that IIT/IIMs have other priorities then
what is specifically being done to raise the level of Central/State Univs to compete with the IIXs ?
When I was at IIT X, life at least initially revolved around AIRs not only amongst us (we were young !) but also around how professors behaved with students. Depts were ranked based on AIRs of students, IITs were ranked and God forbid if you were at a lesser known engineering college. That is a fact of life. Similar stories are to be found in the US.
Where it becomes dangerous is when people start to take these too seriously. Where does this stop ? Many faculties at IIX's were themselves students of universities or lesser known engineering colleges. Are they inferior to IIT grad turned professors and therefore should get less pay? Many science graduates in India studied science because they could not get into an IIT or maybe another engineering college. Many go onto do well in their profession. Does that mean that when they become faculties they ought to be treated in light of where they went during their undergrad ? And why end there, why not rank people by which high school they went to!!
More than the labels what becomes important is what is being done with it. Being a faculty at an IIX is not the end of the world, it is the productivity that matters. And they cannot be judged by the standards of the univ. where resources are limited. I am not suggesting that the problem with universities is only about lack of resources but resources are a big part of the problem.
I think the argument about humility is a separate issue by itself. I was fortunate to study with incredibly intelligent people who at the same time were very down to earth. I associate this with being cultured. But at the same time there are very clever people who were the opposite and that did not make them any less clever, only they would not be my friends and I am sure they did not care :)
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