Devesh Kapur on a goals-driven strategy for India's higher ed

On this Deepavali day, here's something to light up the debate on India's higher education priorities.

In his ToI column, Starting Point of Higher Education, Devesh Kapur focuses on "the lack of clarity in thinking about the fundamental underlying question: What are the goals of Indian higher education?". He then goes on to pose a bunch of questions in order to clarify where India's higher ed priorities should be.

The most discernible instrumental outcome of higher education is its links with and impact on labour markets. Let us say one of its key goals is to provide skills to a very large number of new entrants to the labour force. But then, should one invest in IITs or ITIs? Suppose we want to leverage the human capital resulting from investments in higher education to improve Indian health care. A supply chain of health care would require doctors, nurses and paramedics, pharmacists and lab technicians, hospital administrators and even accountants. If the goal then is better societal health outcomes, where should resources be directed? In India, investment in the human capital of nurses and paramedics might matter much more than specialist physicians, and in civil and environmental engineers who can ensure clean water and sanitation much more than the high-tech engineering behind MRIs. But what do we do? When we think of skills we are obsessed with IITs; when we think of health care we can scarcely think beyond doctors.

The first Polymath project-- A thriller!

The working record of the Polymath Project is a remarkable resource for students of mathematics and for historians and philosophers of science. For the first time one can see on full display a complete account of how a serious mathematical result was discovered. It shows vividly how ideas grow, change, improve and are discarded, and how advances in understanding may come not in a single giant leap, but through the aggregation and refinement of many smaller insights. It shows the persistence required to solve a difficult problem, often in the face of considerable uncertainty, and how even the best mathematicians can make basic mistakes and pursue many failed ideas. There are ups, downs and real tension as the participants close in on a solution. Who would have guessed that the working record of a mathematical project would read like a thriller? [Bold emphasis added]

That's from Tim Gowers and Michael Nielsen, writing in Nature about the first Polymath project that Gowers started on his blog.

Blogging: "Any idiot can do it, and many do."

John Baez on what mathematicians need to know about blogging:

[...] I could describe how to set up a blog, but that would make it seem harder than it is. Any idiot can do it, and many do. Websites like Wordpress and Blogger will lead you through the process step by step— and they’re free.

And he comes back to this remark a little later:

Should you blog about mathematics? ... Some mathematicians are too worried about making a fool of themselves in public to enjoy blogging. Others are too afraid of offending people. And if my joke about ‘idiots’ upset you, blogging may be too hard-knuckled for you.

One more reason to welcome foreign universities

Our universities may get "good vice chancellors":

Saharia addressed the press on the new selection procedure for the post of V-C, the result of an amendment in the Maharashtra Universities Act earlier this year. "Earlier, anybody could apply for the V-C's post. They would simply have to send in their applications to the government or the university. Now, for the first time, we have brought in a set of guidelines for selecting a vice-chancellor, in a bid to make the process more transparent and improve the quality of vice-chancellors,'' said Saharia, adding that previous V-Cs were of a "sub-optimal level''.

Many feel the amendment to the Act is a bid to de-politicise the post of vice-chancellor.

"We want eminent academicians to join our universities as vice-chancellors. With the possibility of foreign universities entering the country, we need good vice-chancellors for our universities in order to be able to compete with them,'' said Saharia. [Bold emphasis added].

Krugman on the kind of econ grads who went to Wall Street

... The year I got my PhD (1977), there was a very clear ranking of desirable career paths. The best economics grad students went into academic jobs; the middle went to the Fed or the IMF; the bottom went, poor souls, to Wall Street.

Even then this meant an inverse relationship between academic ranking and income, since new assistant professors were paid only around $15,000, equivalent to a bit more than 50K today. But the prestige differences more than offset the pay differentials, at least as we saw it then. And one thing that’s hard to convey is how boring business seemed in the 1960s and 1970s. (”I’ve got just one word for you: plastics.”)

But that was in the 1970. He continues:

... [B]usiness stopped being so boring, and was even getting to be fun for some people. The old conviction that the academic life was the ideal definitely began to fray at the edges.

Did the influx of smart people bring on disaster? That’s a longer story. But the change in who went where is utterly real.

His post was commenting on this piece by Calvin Trillin on Wall Street Smarts:

“So what happened?”

“I told you what happened. Smart guys started going to Wall Street.”

“Why?”

“I thought you’d never ask,” he said, making a practiced gesture with his eyebrows that caused the bartender to get started mixing another martini.

“Two things happened. One is that the amount of money that could be made on Wall Street with hedge fund and private equity operations became just mind-blowing. At the same time, college was getting so expensive that people from reasonably prosperous families were graduating with huge debts. So even the smart guys went to Wall Street, maybe telling themselves that in a few years they’d have so much money they could then become professors or legal-services lawyers or whatever they’d wanted to be in the first place. That’s when you started reading stories about the percentage of the graduating class of Harvard College who planned to go into the financial industry or go to business school so they could then go into the financial industry. That’s when you started reading about these geniuses from M.I.T. and Caltech who instead of going to graduate school in physics went to Wall Street to calculate arbitrage odds.”

Some fun links

1. Hans-Ulrich Stoldt and Klaus Wiegrefe in Spiegel Online: East German Jokes Collected by West German Spies. Hilarious stuff! Here's one:

   What would happen if the desert became communist? Nothing for a while, and then there would be a sand shortage.

   But telling these jokes carried some risk; there's a joke about this risk, too!

   "There were cases of people who were jailed, it was particularly bad in the 1950s and 1960s," says Kleemann.

   Here's one example about how that risk was lampooned: "There are people who tell jokes. There are people who collect jokes and tell jokes. And there are people who collect people who tell jokes."

2. Acronyms Sometimes Suck. A website that collects unfortunate acronyms. Like Tokyo Institute of Technology.

Income through Consulting at IIM-A

Kumar Anand of ET shines the spotlight on the income earned by the faculty at the IIMs (and specifically, IIM-A) through management consulting:

IIM-A has a 90-strong faculty, of which 70% actively participate in activities that fetch them an average Rs 20 lakh annually (net consultation income plus net salary). The amount for many active faculty goes up to Rs 30-35 lakh depending on the number of consulting projects and in-house training programmes undertaken.

The institute earned about Rs 20.60 crore as consulting income in 2008-09, with the percentage growth over the last three years being about 16% per year, institute officials said. [...]

The institutes allow the faculty to take up advisory services for the industry as per their expertise in the field to help them gain insight into the functioning of the company and also generate revenue for the institute. As per provisions made by the institute, a faculty can do a maximum 53 days of consulting, charging Rs 1 lakh for a day’s consulting. On an average, a faculty member contributes 20-25 days in a year to consulting, which fetch him Rs 16 lakh after sharing the 45% of his revenue with the institute. At a few other Indian B-Schools, the faculty-institute ratio is 70:30.

I recall reading somewhere that IIM-A allows the faculty members to claim all the consulting fees up to the first Rs. 600,000, and starts taking a share -- is it as high as 45 percent? I don't know -- only on the revenue exceeding Rs. 600,000.

* * *

There's this bit at the end about faculty salaries in some private B-schools:

... The IIM salaries are taken as a benchmark by top B-Schools like Symbiosis, Pune and IMT, Ghaziabad while fixing their own pay structure.

“We pay our faculty members a little above the UGC pay structure, but we also encourage our faculty members to involve themselves with MDPs, consulting and other activities to earn extra money,’’ said Nirma Institute of Management director C Gopalkrishnan.

It's interesting that private institutions -- some of the more wholesome ones -- use the government salaries as their benchmark, even though they have absolute freedom to pay their faculty whatever they want / whatever the market would bear.

Could this assertion from an IIM-A faculty member be true?

The need for a research regulator

Over the years, the Society for Scientific Values (whose membership includes quite a few heavy-weights in Indian science establishment) and its supporters (such as Dr. S.R. Valluri, former director, National Aerospace Laboratories, Bangalore) have been asking for a quasi-judicial regulator to deal with allegations of scientific misconduct.

Their demand has also received some support from quite a few people holding important positions in the government / scientific establishment. Here's a partial list, starting with the most recent utterance and working backwards:

1. Goverdhan Mehta, Member, Scientific Advisory Committee to the Prime Minister:

   The SSV has long been urging the government to create a mechanism to investigate science misconduct. “I think this is a legitimate demand,” said Goverdhan Mehta ...

2. T. Ramasamy, Secretary DST, and Goverdhan Mehta, Member, Scientific Advisory Committee to the Prime Minister (April 2009):

   Goverdhan Mehta, member of the Prime Minister's science advisory council, agrees that a body similar to the Office of Research Integrity in the US is needed. 'This issue has been discussed by members of the science advisory council and we have entrusted the responsibility of setting up a watchdog agency to the Department of Science and Technology (DST) and it should be created soon.'

   'The agency will be called the Office of professional ethics and will be run by distinguished Indians, not just scientists,' DST secretary Thirumalachari Ramasamy told Chemistry World.

3. C.N.R. Rao, Chairman, Prime Minister's Scientific Advisory Council (March 2008):

   India is to consider creating a national body to investigate plagiarism and misconduct in science after a string of high-profile frauds.

   C. N. R. Rao, who heads the national science advisory committee, told Nature that he will discuss the proposal at his next meeting with Prime Minister Manmohan Singh.

4. The Indian Academy of Sciences, in a report entitled Scientific Values: Ethical Guidelines and Procedures (December 2005).

   It is recognized that some incidents involving unethical behaviour are best handled locally. However, many types of misconduct like plagiarism are of special importance as they have an adverse effect on the credibility of the entire scientific community. Ideally, there should be a centralized scientific body to handle all issues pertaining to scientific ethics. In the absence of such a national body, the Academy has generated a regulatory mechanism, applicable to the conduct of its Fellows, and hopes that other institutions will follow similar procedures until a centralized body becomes functional.

I'm sure there have been many, many others. Isn't it time for them to Just Do It?

Hoping for OPE, the research watchdog with statutory teeth

Here's the full text of my piece, which appeared in TNIE after some serious pruning that brought it down to about 800 words. One of the things that got pruned was an analogy with the corporate fraud which I thought would make things somewhat clearer to folks who don't see scholarly misconduct with the same seriousness as academics do.

Bottomline: Writing an 800 word piece is hard, especially if you want to pack it with nuances, examples, details and qualifications.

My respect for people who do this consistently well on a weekly basis has gone up tremendously after this experience.

* * *

Hoping for OPE, the research watchdog with statutory teeth

T.A. Abinandanan
http://nanopolitan.blogspot.com

On 21 September 2009, TNIE ran a front page report on the plagiarism in an academic paper which led to its being retracted by its publisher. The reason for the high-decibel coverage is not difficult to discern: one of the authors of the plagiarized paper, Prof. Sandeep Sancheti, is also the Director of the National Institute of Technology (NIT-K), Surathkal.

This latest example of ignominy forces us to confront yet again the murky world of scientists gone wild, and the even murkier reality of lack of a fair, impartial and consistent mechanisms for dealing with allegations of scientific misconduct and fraud.

First, a quick chronology of events: A research paper by S. Joshi, S. Sancheti and A. Goyal was published in 2007 in the journal IET Microwaves, Antennas and Propagation. The paper has two sections with significant chunks of text plagiarized from a 1996 paper by a different group of researchers. This finding led to its retraction by the journal's publisher, Stuart Govan, who pointed to "the impression created in the readers’ minds ... that the equations derived in [Joshi et al's paper] are based on their own work."

There is no doubt about the plagiarism in the Joshi-Sancheti-Goyal paper. By its very nature, plagiarism is not only easy to commit, but also easy to detect -- one just has to compare the original and plagiarized versions!

And there is no doubt that the journal did the right thing by pulling the plug on the Joshi-Sancheti-Goyal paper.

Now, in a sane world, the retraction of a plagiarized article would not be front page news in a leading newspaper.

In a sane world, it would not be the subject of an opinion piece such as the one you are reading right now.

In a sane world, in other words, there would have been far saner ways in which l'affaire Sancheti would have been handled, resulting in, at best, a Page 12 coverage.

Clearly, India's S&T researchers do not live in a sane world.

L'affaire Sancheti underlines, once again, the need for this sane environment for India's researchers. The need, in other words, for clear and uniform rules for dealing with cases of scientific misconduct.

An analogy may be useful here.

Imagine a firm that has just issued its annual report with details of its audited accounts for the previous financial year. If a fatal flaw is found in the firm accounts, the company would retract the report, and reissue a corrected one.

Should the story end there? If it did, the entire nation would be up in arms!

If anything, the retraction of the annual report represents not the end, but the beginning of follow-up actions to be triggered automatically, once its disclosure reaches the regulatory and other statutory bodies -- SEBI and the stock exchanges, to name just two. In fact, the firm will invite criminal prosecution if it fails to disclose the problems in the retracted annual report.

Researchers who submit an article for publication are essentially like the firm publishing its annual report. When their article comes under an ethical cloud, its retraction is not the end of story; it should be the start of a follow up story with investigating agencies playing a central role.

At a minimum, researchers must be required to disclose problems in their published papers to their institution(s) and the funding agencies. It must then be the responsibility of these institutions to trigger an investigative mechanism that will determine whether the researchers violated the code of scholarly conduct and ethics.

India lacks a mechanism that comes to life when an ethical problem arises, and enforces regulations which are binding on all institutions. In this regulatory vacuum, each institution invents its own way of dealing with problem cases, all the while hoping that its method will stand up to public scrutiny.

The results of such decentralized policy-making are, to put it mildly, ugly. For the same offence of plagiarism, a Reader at one university is sacked, while a professor at another gets away with little more than a slap on his wrist. Equality before the law loses all meaning because there is no law to handle scientific misconduct.

Worse, the lack of a statutory mechanism allows inquiry committee reports to be ignored by institutions. A researcher in a pharmaceutical research lab found out that his contract was not renewed, sometime after he blew the whistle on a permanent member of the lab. He is fighting to regain that job even after an inquiry committee found his allegations to be correct.

In an extreme case, the lack of a statutory investigative authority led to a recent case being subjected to inquiry by no less than eight committees. Along the way, panel members who came to opposite conclusions about the case even fought it out in the pages of Current Science, India's premier science journal! The accused were reported to have been exonerated by a high-level committee; unfortunately for them, the non-availability of that final report in the public domain continues to feed the rumour mill.

At the time of Independence, the Indian scientific community in each field was so small that everyone knew everyone else, and peer pressure could be counted on to keep everyone from straying from the ethical path. We do not live in that era any more.

What we have now is a large, professionalized enterprise that employs lakhs of scientists. A tremendous growth in annual outlay for science and technology (over Rs. 30,000 crores in 2008) and publications (nearly 30,000 papers in 2008) has also been accompanied, unsurprisingly, by a steady growth in the number of allegations of scientific misconduct.

What this vast enterprise needs is a professional, independent regulator with statutory powers to carry out investigations that are credible, swift and fair to the accused (as well as the whistle blower, if any).

The need for such a regulator has been articulated by many concerned scientists over the last couple of decades, during which its urgency has only grown more intense. Leaders of our scientific establishment are also aware of it; as recently as six months ago, Dr. T. Ramasamy, Secretary, Department of Science and Technology, promised to create an Office of Professional Ethics (OPE) whose scope and functions will (presumably) mirror those of the ORI in the US.

As a problem in scholarly ethics, the Sancheti case should have been handled with ease. The fact that we are still discussing it in this opinion piece -- some sixteen months after the plagiarism forced his paper's retraction and robbed him of the moral authority he needs for policing ethical transgressions in his organization -- is a serious indictment of our ad hoc, inconsistent and porous way of dealing with questions of scientific misconduct.

This must change. It's high time the Indian scientific community demanded, in one loud voice, the establishment of a research regulator with statutory teeth.

"Confronting murky world of scientists gone wild"

That's the title given by The New Indian Express to my opinion piece (but only in the Bangalore print edition; the online edition has a more sober title).

I have used the Sancheti plagiarism case as the latest example of the kinds of things that are allowed to happen only because India lacks a research regulator on the lines of the Office of Research Integrity in the US.

I'll post the longer original this evening. In the meantime, here are a couple of key paragraphs:

In a sane world, the retraction of a plagiarised article would not be front page news in a leading newspaper. There would have been far saner ways in which l’affaire Sancheti would have been handled. Clearly, India’s researchers do not live in a sane world. The affair underlines, again, the need for this sane environment, for clear and uniform rules for dealing with cases of scientific misconduct. [... A looong snip ...]

As a problem in scholarly ethics, the Sancheti case should have been handled with ease. The fact that we are still discussing it some 16 months later is a serious indictment of our ways of dealing with questions of scientific misconduct. It is high time Indian scientists demanded the establishment of a research regulator with statutory teeth.

M. Anandakrishnan on the state of higher education in India

M. Anandakrishnan is the chairman of IIT-K Board of Governors and was a member of the Yash Pal Committee. He seems to have gone completely ballistic in a meeting organized by CII to discuss the state of higher education in India.

Some excerpts from The New Indian Express report:

The exam systems are so archaic. You cannot prepare students for an obsolete market. Public universities are extraordinarily handicapped by political interference. At least in central universities like IIT, no minister says promote my son-in-law,” he pointed out.

The private institutions were not spared either. “In India, private institutions are family-controlled organisations that need to be restructured. In Tamil Nadu, there are two political parties that are running only with capitation money collected from colleges. Eighty per cent of the colleges collect money and don’t issue receipts. PhDs are sold to professors for Rs 30 lakh. Deemed universities are a rotten concept altogether,” he said. [Bold emphasis added]

OCAP salary at IIT-Guwahati: Gautam Barua responds

Prof. Gautam Barua, Director, IIT-G, has left a comment on my previous post on OCAP salary at his institution. I am reproducing below his comment in full:

I am surprised at all these comments. First of all, please dont blame me for what a reporter has written. Of course I meant the basic pay when I said Rs 22,000-23,000. To this you have to add grade pay of 7000/- and to the total you have to add a)DA of 27%, b) SDA of 12.5% (this is only for IITG, being in the NE region), and c) 400/- of SCA. This adds up to Rs. 40,275.00 (gross, without house rent allowance). I never told the reporter that this is a bad pay. I had told her that the fact that we cannot offer a rgular job up front is a bummer. But we (IITG) are getting around this by making a regular offer which will be three years later (if you have just submitted your PhD), with the intervening three years on contract. This is like three years of probation. Compared to a tenure track appointment for 5-7 years, in the USA, this is much better.

As far as comments about IITG being regional, etc., what can I say, except to strongly refute such comments from one ex-faculty (presumably)who is trying to rationalise to himself why he left IITG. Our selection process is one of the most liberal (being a relatively new IIT, this should be obvious) in terms of number of years, but there is no compromise on standards, and we have fiar and transparent selections, I am proud to say. Talking about regionalism when only about 20% of the faculty are from the NE region is in poor taste (check what the figures are in IITKGP, IITM etc.)

In his e-mail, he says we should add a transport allowance of Rs. 2,032/-, which would bring the total starting salary for an OCAP at IIT-G to 42,307/- -- without house rent allowance.

* * *

Some observations and clarifications, in light of what Barua has written:

First of all, I thank Prof. Barua for his response.

1. The second paragraph of his response is related to what some others (mostly anonymous commenters) had written. I won't address that part here.

2. I'll address only the first paragraph, which is a direct response to my post.

   He says:

   Of course I meant the basic pay when I said Rs 22,000-23,000.

   I did consider this possibility -- that he was referring to the band pay in his statement -- so it's good to have it confirmed. Potential IIT-G faculty applicants now have a clearer picture of what they are likely to get as OCAPs.

3. He also says:

   I never told the reporter that this is a bad pay. I had told her that the fact that we cannot offer a [regular] job up front is a bummer.

   It certainly is; we can all see it, without it being explicitly stated. It follows directly from the salary figures.

4. He then adds:

   But we (IITG) are getting around this by making a regular offer which will be three years later (if you have just submitted your PhD), with the intervening three years on contract. This is like three years of probation. Compared to a tenure track appointment for 5-7 years, in the USA, this is much better.

   I read this stuff several times, and I'm still wondering what "getting around this" means here. [Update: Prof. Barua clarifies this point in his comment below.]

5. One final point: He asks me not to blame him "for what a reporter has written."

   While I do appreciate this suggestion / advice / admonition, I just want to mention here that I did confirm with Pallavi that the statement attributed to him in her report was a direct quote -- just as I did confirm with him about whether that comment was indeed written by him.

Scientific fields in which India's contributions are strong

A recent report entitled India: Research and Collaboration in the New Geography of Science has some info on India's relative strength in different fields of science.

Overall, India has a 3 % share in scientific publications -- its researchers published 30,000 papers in 2008.

The top five areas in which India's share is high (during the period 2004-08) are:

Chemistry: 5.71%
Agricultural Sciences: 5.65%
Materials Science: 4.81%
Pharmacology and Toxicology: 4.25%
Plant & Animal Science 3.77%

Interestingly, India's share is over 8 % in four subfields: Agricultural Engineering, Tropical Medicine, Organic Chemistry, Dairy and Animal Science.

Life imitates Onion: Area people unable to recall their interactions with Venki

With his extended family migrating from Chidambaram, Venki has no relatives left in thetown. Radhika Ravikumar, associate professor in the bio-chemistry department of Raja Muthiah Medical College, Annamalai University, who apparently was Ramakrishnan's classmate in PUC Class I said, "This is such great news. However, I can't place his face. ... In fact, I have contacted some of my batch mates and they too don't have any memory of Ramakrishnan. His achievement, however, is inspirational for students in India. We distinctly remember the classroom where our PUC classes in B group (physics, chemistry and biology) used to be held."

There's more such hilarity in this story; it's an Onion-worthy story, but it appeared in DNA.

Update (14 October): Here's what Venki said to PTI:

He expressed anguish over "all sorts of lies" published about him in a section of the media that he went to school and pre-Science in Chidambaram, the Tamil Nadu temple town where he was born in 1952.

"People I don't know, for example a Mr Govindrajan, claim that they were my teachers at Annamalai University which I never attended, since I left Chidambaram at the age of three," Ramakrishnan clarified.

Why is IIT-Guwahati offering a low salary to its OCAPs?

Update (10 October 2009): Prof. Gautam Barua responds in a comment; please see this post for further discussion.

* * *

In Pallavi Singh's Mint story on IIT faculty members' pay hike related protests, she gets IIT-Guwahati Director Gautam Barua to talk about the plight of on-contract assistant professors:

“This means six years to reach PB (pay band) IV. Now, we won’t be able to offer anyone joining us on contract the job of an assistant professor on PB III and more than Rs22,000-23,000 as starting salary,” Barua explained.

The salary figures quoted by Barua are all wrong -- he's way out of truthful territory here.

An OCAP will start at a little over 37,000 in metros, and certainly over 35,000 in Guwahati, a non-metro [see this comment by iitmsriram over at Giridhar's blog].

[Aside: The OCAP salary is bad, alright; but it's bad only in comparison with that of real assistant professors in IITs. In comparison with the salaries of other academic jobs open to a fresh PhD (in our universities, for example), the OCAP salary is actually better. In other words, OCAP is bad, but it's still the best (academic) option for a fresh PhD!]

A couple of questions:

1. What kind of leadership is this? I mean, isn't it Barua's duty to project his institution in the best possible light? Why, then, is he going out of the way to make OCAP sound worse than it actually is?

2. Barua may claim that he was only talking about the band pay (I'm being charitable here; the band pay for a fresh PhD is 20,140. Barua's figure is again straying from the truth, but on the 'right' side ;-), and not about the AGP, DA, transport allowance. But why? What purpose does this sort of low-balling serve, other than spook potential applicants?

IIT-Guwahati already has a couple of handicaps -- its location, and its status as a relative newcomer among the IITs.

Now it has a third: Gautam Barua.