Autonomous Colleges

I want to return to the column by Tapan Raychaudhury who doesn't like the idea of converting some of the academically better equipped (and more accomplished) colleges into universities:

My particular concern here is with the new initiative to confer the status of universities on selected colleges. One assumption behind it seems to be that colleges that, perhaps after a glorious past, are now suffering in quality will regain their old excellence if turned into universities. The logic underlying this assumption is incredibly bizarre. Spelt out, it would imply that institutions which are mediocre or worse today will become centres of excellence tomorrow by virtue of having university status conferred on them. It is well to remember that in the golden tomorrow, the people running these institutions will continue to do so still. If they are sought to be replaced by allegedly abler people, the seat of learning will be converted into a battleground for power. If, on the other hand, the old guard are allowed to remain in power they will ensure that the newcomers do not excel in any way. Such, indeed, is the way of all flesh as is well-known to all but the most doggedly optimistic among us.

On the other hand, the logic behind conferring university status on a particular college may well be a recognition of its excellence, and making that excellence available for the service to a higher level of learning. If this is so, I suggest some very simple tests to ensure the validity of the judgment. First, since we are, these days, so enamoured of American academic practices, let us take anonymously the opinion of students about the quality of teaching and make a high mark a sine qua non of the relevant decision. Secondly, since these institutions will be expected to contribute to knowledge, let us have surveys of the amount of quality research they have produced in the last ten years — in terms of scholarly books (reviewed in authoritative journals), refereed articles and theses done under their supervision. Thirdly, a quiet survey of library books issued to students and teachers in an average year. Of course both may have borrowed or bought books to supplement what is available in their college libraries and an enquiry into this aspect of the pursuit of knowledge would be indeed worthwhile.

Clearly, Raychaudhury is pretty negative about converting colleges into universities. But I want to shift the focus to a related system: autonomous colleges.

In our hub-and-spoke system of higher education, academically better-positioned colleges could be given an "autonomous status" by their university (the hub). This system has been in place for at least three decades -- I still remember colleges like Loyola College and Madras Christian College flaunting their autonomous status in the 1980s. And this system appears -- going by this list -- implemented vigorously by the universities in Tamil Nadu.

As I recall, this autonomous college issue was not particularly controversial -- people just assumed that the better colleges would eventually get the autonomous status, and many did.

For all practical purposes, the autonomous college is a university -- it designs and implements its own curriculum and grading schemes, with the parent university's role being limited (largely) to issuing degree certificates. At least, that's the theory.

There's much going for this theory. As Pratap Bhanu Mehta says in a recent op-ed on the reforms at the Delhi University,

Ideally, a semester system allows you to achieve the following objectives. It can facilitate the creation of a credit system, and hence allow more choice and flexibility. In institutions where the semester system has real pedagogical bite, it is premised upon one important fact: that the teachers teaching particular classes evaluate their own students. [...]

A semester system works well when each individual faculty member has substantial freedom to innovate in course offering at his or her level. This is possible only where there is no disjunction between those who set the syllabus, those who teach and those who evaluate. The crisis of undergraduate education has its source, in part, in this disjunction.

The academic autonomy enjoyed by these elite colleges has all the ingredients identified and recommended by Mehta. And this system has been around for over 30 years now. Has there been a review of this system? Is it seen as a success?

A pessimistic take on higher education in India

Read this column by Tapan Raychaudhuri, former professor of modern Indian history at the University of Oxford, in The Telegraph:

... [T]he education of our MAs and honours graduates, except in the case of a small percentage of them belonging to some elite institutions, consists in memorizing lecture notes. The quality of the said notes determines the quality of our higher education. The truth or otherwise of this statement can be very easily tested by using the method of sample survey.

Assuming my hypothesis to be true, and I should be very happy if it turns out to be false, what exactly do we gain by multiplying further the number of universities at a very heavy cost to the nation? If, as I suggest, our institutions are spreading mainly non-knowledge (for how else would we describe education based almost exclusively on lecture notes?), is it really worthwhile to increase their number? If we want more people with degrees that are worth very little in terms of the knowledge acquired, this target could be more inexpensively attained through open universities and correspondence courses ...

What should undergrad curriculum be like?

Over at Understanding Society, Daniel Little has a post Defining the University Curriculum, in which he lays out the issues and arguments for (at least) two kinds of UG curriculum -- each starting from the same goal:

.. [In practical terms] a university education should allow the student to develop the capabilities he or she will need to succeed in a career and to make productive contributions to the society of the future.

And what do these goals require in terms of a curriculum? What are those skills, capabilities, and bodies of knowledge that young people need to cultivate in order to achieve the kinds of success mentioned here?

This is the point at which there is often disagreement among various academic voices and non-academic stakeholders. [...]

The situation in IIM-Shillong

This story has little that we didn't know (from Rashmi Bansal's report), but I just wanted to highlight two things which, taken together, paint a rather grim picture:

1. IIM Shillong started its first session in July, 2008, with 13 faculty members. At least six of them resigned recently, though some officials at IIM Shillong said some of them were asked to leave.

2. IIM Shillong chairman RN Datta, however, has defended the director. Datta told Financial Chronicle, “There is nothing extraordinary or abnormal in people leaving or joining any organisation. ..."

Meanwhile, on the cram school front ...

Sunday Tribune has a longish story on Kota's cram schools. Here's an excerpt from the section that talks about the nexus between the cram schools and 'regular' schools:

Another interesting aspect of the IIT aspirants joining coaching classes in Kota is that a majority of them prefer to get enrolled in the local schools, as it saves them the hassle to return to their native place to appear in Plus II exams. Surprisingly, none of them appear in these exams as a private candidate. Then how do they fulfill attendance criterion of the schools amid immense pressure of IIT-JEE coaching? "There are schools which give some relaxation in attendance to these students," says Sharma from Resonance. Though he ruled out any nexus between coaching classes and schools, he said some schools, which don’t have adequate infrastructure and fail to meet the parametres set by the CBSE or the state education board, are happy to get more students even if they are not attending the school. However, a student of Resonance told on the condition of anonymity that almost all the coaching classes have a tie-up with some private schools and they persuade the parents to admit their wards to these schools in lieu of which they get commission from the schools. These schools, he said, are affiliated to either the CBSE or the Rajasthan Board of Secondary Education (RBSE). About attendance, he said though these schools tell such students to attend classes thrice in a week, but the latter do the same in a month. "All the students who get relaxation in attendance pay more to the schools while those who don’t want to attend school at all have to shell out more money," he added. According to him, the coaching classes also get a cut from hostels and other such facilities. In view of such activities, the CBSE has tightened the noose around its affiliated schools in Kota and has asked them to admit students in Class X and XII only if one has a "strong reason"for seeking admission in the town.

* * *

And this ToI story from Neha Pushkarna is positively scary:

FIITJEE for instance will be starting a course for class VI students from 2010 session to train them for competitive exams, admissions for which, will begin in January.

* * *

Over at Midway, blogger L (who teaches at a college) calls these schools 'concentration camps'; here's her comment about how they manage to beat the life out of their students:

Students after their spell in these Intermediate college/concentration camps, don't even joke amongst themselves. Many have forgotten how to laugh, I think.

Only normal youngsters are those who went to CBSE/ISC schools without the engg/medical coaching.

* * *

We have noted that China has a nationwide entrance exam for university admissions. Now, a prestigious university in that country is experimenting with a new system of admitting some of its students through a different route -- recommendation from school principals:

One of China's top higher education institutions, Peking University, last week released a list of 39 high school principals nationwide recognised to recommend students to be enrolled without taking college entrance examinations...

The scamference goes completely "In Absentia"

On the ICFCA-2010 website, this is what we find:

Due to unexpectedly higher number of "Application of Absentia", ICFCA Board has found it unfeasible to conduct an oral presentation of the research papers for a minor number of attendees as previously mentioned in the website on 20-21 March, 2010. Publishing Board of ICFCA apologizes to the few students who opted for oral presentation. However, all the selected research papers will be published in IJFCA Digital Library as regular research papers ...

Some update:

1. In this comments thread, someone mentioned that the conference has a bank account in a Bangalore branch of ICICI Bank.

2. The identity of the organizer(s) is yet to be established.

3. The logos of several tech companies are still flashing in the left panel, misleading people into believing that they are associated with the conference.

I'm sure I'm not the only one to see the rich irony in an online scamster taking a whole bunch of tech-savvy people -- tech companies, ACM, IISc, researchers, faculty, students -- for a ride.

The scamference is supposed to be devoted to "futuristic computer applications." The organizer perhaps wanted to lead by example, with an application called "Conference In Absentia". Looks like it has been one hell of a success so far...

Links ...

1. :-(

   That emoticon serves as the logo for Despair, Inc, which sells, among other things, posters with such elevating messages as "AMBITION: The journey of a thousand miles sometimes ends very, very badly" [Link via Orgtheory.net].

2. Steven Poole in The Guardian: A review of Amartya Sen's The Idea of Justice.

3. Amartya Sen is cited as the source of this juicy quote:

   The purely economic man is indeed close to being a social moron.

   I got that quote from Daniel Little's extended musings on "conditional altruism" as a possible explanation for "the spontaneous occurrence of collective action."

4. An old op-ed in NYTimes: College Advice, From People Who Have Been There Awhile. The line-up has quite a few big hitters.

Fun links ...

1. Here's a link you should send to all your friends/family members/associates who believe in astrology. From that post, I also learned the name of the effect that many of us are familiar with:

   The tendency to see ourselves in vague or general statements has since been called the Forer effect or, alternatively, the Barnum effect, after the famous catchphrase attributed to the travelling circus impresario P.T. Barnum: "There's a sucker born every minute!"

2. xkcd on the difference between academia and business.

3. Onion on the Montessori School of Dentistry, where "dentistry is whatever our students want it to be."

4. In Manhattan, Preparing for Kindergarten Admission Test. The story has everything that a parent dreads, including coaching classes for toddlers. But let's look at the bright side: this is a great business opportunity for the Bansal Classes, Brilliant Tutorials, and Ramaiah Study Circle!

Links ...

1. Charu Sudan Kasturi in The Telegraph: Read storybooks & get more marks, suggests CBSE:

   India’s largest school board has asked affiliated institutions to include reading habits among parameters to be used in the comprehensive and continuous evaluation (CCE) of students in English, and has even proposed a reading list.

   The CCE, already in place till Class VIII and extended now till Class X, is aimed at reducing a student’s dependence on his performance in term-ending examinations to secure good marks.

2. Tamar Lewin: A Crown Jewel of Education Struggles With Cuts .

3. Chronicle of Higher Education: Average Faculty Salaries By Field and Rank at 4-Year Colleges and Universities, 2007-8: In engineering, new assistant professors made $71.8 k, and the salaries of assistant professors, associate professors and full professors were $ 72.7 k, 82.8 k and 107.1 k, respectively.

4. Chronicle of Higher Education: AAUP Faculty Salary Survey: Ten years of average faculty salaries at more than 1,200 institutions.

5. Cory Doctorow at Boing Boing: Love of Shopping is Not a Gene: exposing junk science and ideology in Darwinian Psychology.

Blogs, Attention Markets and Public Intellectuals

Public intellectuals are successful suppliers of commentary in the attention market for serious thought. Blogs are a relatively new technology that substantially alters this market. More people can now nurse aspirations to be public intellectuals, but blogs also make plain the difficulties of actually reaching a public in ways that books do not. Blogs also vitiate other romantic ideas about the public intellectual as transcendent figure. Even so, blogs may well provide the services for which transcendent public intellectuals are often lauded better than these figures ever did.

That's the abstract of Blogs and the Attention Market for Public Intellectuals by Northwestern University sociologist Jeremy Freese (if that link doesn't work, go here).

If you have been into blogging or blog-reading as long as some of us have, you won't find much in there that's new; it's nice to have a summary, though.

Here, for example, is Freese's take on the evolution of a blogger's (political) views / stance towards extremes:

No one has studied the effect of audiences on the stances bloggers take. Blog archives allow one to read the opinions of some bloggers back before they had the audiences they presently do, and a story of audience-author co-evolution is easily sketched. An intellectually engaged person of moderate views begins blogging about political issues. Mostly, they get no response, but the response they do get accrues disproportionately to posts that either provide especially clear representations of a perspective or offer unusually provocative arguments. Links from major blogs to small blogs can bring in a hundred times more readers than an author usually gets. Links from major blogs to small blogs overwhelmingly support the political orientation of the major blog (that is, major bloggers argue with one another and draw on obscure blogs for support). If attention is rewarding, incentives for blog authors to provide more commentary in line with what generates reaction is plain. Blog authors may thus increase attention by focusing only on a subset of their opinion or expressing especially extreme versions of their opinion. In other words, engaged intellectuals often enter the blogosphere with an eye toward shaping the opinion of an audience, but that audience may more strongly influence the intellectual by what they reward with attention.

Here's something that I wish Freese hadn't said (;-):

Blogs are highly unusual among leisure-time activities in that readership is highest during conventional working hours. Blogs owe much of their popularity to the rise of a workforce engaged in jobs that involve many hours of unsupervised, anomic isolation in front of a computer. In part, blogs feed an enormous craving for distraction that many members of the American reading public have. ...