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. ...

What can one do about the fake conference?

Let me start with an apology. In my previous post on a scamference, I was being needlessly offensive towards the victims of that hoax. What I said about the participants was in poor taste. I was wrong, and I apologize.

* * *

A quick update about the conference venue: "Prof. J. Thorpe" (who, as we now know, does not exist at Duke University) has responded to a query from IISc officials (about booking the J.N. Tata Auditorium) stating that the conference may move to Madrid, Spain!

* * *

Let me go out on a limb here. Given:

• the extremely low conference registration fee -- just $45 which is far too low to run a professional conference),

• the shadiness involved in the unauthorized use of ACM, IISc, (and possibly every "real" person on the technical committee, as well as the sponsors), and

• that no "real person" has emerged to take the responsibility for the conference,

we really ought to consider the possibility that the "organizers" never intended to, you know, run this conference.

In other words, we are not talking here about a low-quality conference with a near 0% rejection rate. We are talking about the possibility that there's NO conference at all!

* * *

In the comments thread, the discussion has taken a constructive turn; now that so many people have been cheated, what can they do now to punish the guilty?

Someone suggested that the cybercrime branch of Bangalore police must get involved. I'm not sure. The entire operation seems to be run out of the US.

Given that a paper trail exists -- bank accounts, money transfers, etc -- it should be possible to establish the identity of folks behind this scam, and go after them.

A loss of $45 is too small for an individual to take the trouble to file a case. Thus, any action has to be by the collective of victims.

Let me throw out two possibilities:

1. First, the participants need to organize -- which requires them to know who the other participants are -- the conference website does not have a list of participants (unsurprising). The way to solve this problem would be to form an (open) online group -- Google, Yahoo, Ning, or Facebook. I'm sure the group will have quite a few public-spirited folks who can help guide group's actions.

   [I'll be happy to link to the group in an update to this post, as well as the previous post.]

2. We can be reasonably certain that at least some of the so-called "sponsors" of the conference have been scammed. Perhaps the participants can write to these companies -- Google, Yahoo, Intel, HP, Philips, Alcatel, etc; I'm sure they all have friends, former students, and family members who work in one or more of these companies. They should alert them about the possible illegal use of their companies' logos on the conference website.

I would think the second option is probably more effective. If the companies didn't agree to be the sponsors (likely), why are their logos being flashed (and why were they mentioned as "supporters" in the conference brochure)? On the other hand, if the companies did pay to become sponsors, I think they have an even stronger case to go after the scamsters because of all the misrepresentations they have made. Either way, alerting the companies and goading them into action would be quite effective.

Any other suggestion?

Mobsters and Academics: Signaling Incompetence

In his review essay on Diego Gambetta's Codes of the Underworld: How Criminals Communicate, Scott McLemee touches on a mode of communication that's common between mobsters and academics:

Rather than getting involved in running a restaurant or dealing drugs, they [the mafiosi] joke about their cluelessness in such matters and simply collect payment for "protection." But this professed incompetence (evidently quite well-demonstrated on the rare occasions that a mafioso tries to go legit) makes them strangely "trustworthy" to those using their services: "If [mobsters] showed any competence at it, their clients would fear that they might just take over."

Gambetta argues that something similar takes place among the baroni (barons) who oversee the selection committees involved in Italian academic promotions. While some fields are more meritocratic than others, the struggle for advancement often involves a great deal of horse trading. "The barons operate on the basis of a pact of reciprocity, which requires a lot of trust, for debts are repaid years later. Debts and credits are even passed on from generation to generation within a professor's 'lineage,' and professors close to retirement are excluded from the current deals, for they will not be around long enough to return favors."

The most powerful figures in this system, says Gambetta, tend to be the least intellectually distinguished. They do little research, publish rarely, and at best are derivative of "some foreign author on whose fame they hope to ride.... Also, and this is what is the most intriguing, they do not try to hide their weakness. One has the impression that they almost flaunt it in personal contacts."

Well, one also has the impression that the author is here on the verge of writing a satirical novel. But a friend who is interested in both the politics and academic life of Italy tells me that this account is all too recognizably accurate, in some fields anyway. Gambetta calls the system "an academic kakistocracy, or government by the worst," which is definitely an expression I can see catching on.

This may seem like a tangent from comparative criminology. But Gambetta argues that the cheerful incompetence of the baroni is akin to the mafioso's way of signaling that he can be "trusted" within his narrowly predatory limits

"Being incompetent and displaying it," he writes, "conveys the message I will not run away, for I have no strong legs to run anywhere else. In a corrupt academic market, being good at and interested in one's own research, by contrast, signal a potential for a career independent of corrupt reciprocity.... In the Italian academic world, the kakistrocrats are those who best assure others by displaying, through lack of competence and lack of interest in research, that they will comply with the pacts."

Links ...

1. Affirmative Action for the Future -- an e-mail interview of James P. Sterba, a professor of philosophy at the University of Notre Dame, and author of a recent book with that title.

2. Raymond Tallis: Neurotrash. "From ethics and art history to social policy experts are embracing neuroscience as the answer to understanding human behaviour. Raymond Tallis rallies the neurosceptics."

3. Colin Pantall's cartoons: Great Author Considers His Response, and Blogger Considers His Response.

This conference is so prestigious, you can even participate in it in absentia!

Take a look at the website of this conference, and then at the brochure (which, presumably, was circulated quite a while ago) for the same conference.

See any difference?

For one thing, the brochure says that the conference is organized by ACM (Association of Computing Machinery). The website, however, is silent about the involvement of ACM. Similarly, the brochure mentions -- and the website is silent on -- the ACM Digital Library as a destination for the papers presented at the conference.

We now know why the conference website has been cleaned up. This is what ACM says on its main page:

Conference Misrepresenting ACM as Sponsor
ACM has been made aware that the International Conference on Futuristic Computer Applications (ICFC) to be held in Bangalore, India, March 20–21, 2010, is using ACM's name to promote their event. This is not an ACM conference, and the organizers have been asked to remove all references to ACM on their site.

The brochure lists Google, Intel, Texas Instruments, HP, Philips, Yahoo Inc, Alcatel-Lucent Technologies, NASSCOM, and Vnysea as "supporting" the conference. While the website has their logos flashing in the left panel, its page for participating companies just thanks "all our current sponsors," without naming a single one of them.

This page lists a "Patron" and a "Co-Chair" from Duke University which seems to be unaware of their association with it: its directory has neither Steve Paterson nor J. Thorpe [except possibly this guy in the Department of Pharmacy!].

Finally, any conference that says this should make your scam sensors antennae tingle and throb violently:

Participate in ICFCA in your Absentia.
Those who cannot come to Bangalore on the conference days due to prior engagements but wish to present a paper in absentia are encouraged to send in their "Application in Absentia" by January 15, 2010. Papers presented in absentia are eligible to be included in the conference and shall avail of all the privileges bestowed on any regular paper.

* * *

Well, this has got to be one of the most fabulous conferences! I mean, wouldn't it be great to participate in it "in absentia" and still get a paper in a journal which will be distributed by the "Harvard Press", and available on Google Scholar?

I was sort of looking forward to running into some of the conference participants because the venue, J.N. Tata Auditorium, is right here in IISc.

I'm deeply disappointed that the "organizers" have not booked this auditorium (yet).

* * *

Thanks to a couple of colleagues who alerted me about this scamference conference.

Louis Menand: The PhD Problem

Must-read link of the day: The PhD Problem (excerpts from The Marketplace of Ideas) by Louis Menand, a professor of English at Harvard.

Here's Menand on the academy's attempt to monopolize not just the production of knowledge, but also the production of knowledge producers:

It is easy to see how the modern academic discipline reproduces all the salient features of the professionalized occupation. It is a self-governing and largely closed community of practitioners who have an almost absolute power to determine the standards for entry, promotion, and dismissal in their fields. The discipline relies on the principle of disinterestedness, according to which the production of new knowledge is regulated by measuring it against existing scholarship through a process of peer review, rather than by the extent to which it meets the needs of interests external to the field. The history department does not ask the mayor or the alumni or the physics department who is qualified to be a history professor. The academic credential is non-transferable (as every Ph.D. looking for work outside the academy quickly learns). And disciplines encourage—in fact, they more or less require—a high degree of specialization. The return to the disciplines for this method of organizing themselves is social authority: the product is guaranteed by the expertise the system is designed to create. Incompetent practitioners are not admitted to practice, and incompetent scholarship is not disseminated.

Since it is the system that ratifies the product—ipso facto, no one outside the community of experts is qualified to rate the value of the work produced within it—the most important function of the system is not the production of knowledge. It is the reproduction of the system. To put it another way, the most important function of the system, both for purposes of its continued survival and for purposes of controlling the market for its products, is the production of the producers. The academic disciplines effectively monopolize (or attempt to monopolize) the production of knowledge in their fields, and they monopolize the production of knowledge producers as well.

Here's another quote; this one comes from the section on perverse incentives that encourage institutions to be unconcerned by the long duration of the doctoral programs, as well as by they overproduction of doctorates (this, despite the huge drop-out rates among doctoral candidates):

One pressure on universities to reduce radically the time-to-degree is simple humanitarianism. Lives are warped because of the length and uncertainty of the doctoral education process. Many people drop in and drop out and then drop in again; a large proportion of students never finish; and some people have to retool at relatively advanced ages. Put in less personal terms, there is a huge social inefficiency in taking people of high intelligence and devoting resources to training them in programs that half will never complete and for jobs that most will not get. Unfortunately, there is an institutional efficiency, which is that graduate students constitute a cheap labor force. There are not even search costs involved in appointing a graduate student to teach. The system works well from the institutional point of view not when it is producing Ph.D.s, but when it is producing ABDs. It is mainly ABDs who run sections for lecture courses and often offer courses of their own. The longer students remain in graduate school, the more people are available to staff undergraduate classes. Of course, overproduction of Ph.D.s also creates a buyer’s advantage in the market for academic labor. These circumstances explain the graduate-student union movement that has been going on in higher education since the mid 1990s.

Aren't these problems -- loooong doctoral programs, huge drop-out rates, and overproduction -- common to some sub-fields of the sciences (theoretical physics, for example)?

More links ...

1. David Searls in PLoS - Computational Biology: Ten Simple Rules for Choosing between Industry and Academia.

2. Michigan State University News: College job market hits bottom, though some bright spots remain.

3. Dan Ariely at Predictably Irrational: Sex, Shaving, and Bad Underwear. Or how to trick yourself into exerting self-control.

4. Geoff Maslen in University World News: AUSTRALIA: Has the great Indian bubble burst?

5. John Gray in LRB: We Simply Do Not Know! A review of Animal Spirits: How Human Psychology Drives the Economy, and Why It Matters for Global Capitalism by George Akerlof and Robert Shiller