Friday, October 16, 2009

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].

2 Comments:

  1. Anonymous said...

    Putting new VCs in place is not going to help. They need to do something about the problem from ground up. In many state universities, university faculty is selected based on political leanings and the system has become nasty over the years.

    There should be an organization acting as a clearinghouse for academic appointments applying uniform standards nationwide to weed out bad candidates who would have exercised political power to get in.

    Of course, better VCs may help with the whole issue, but it is very hard for a single sweeper to clean up the cricket stadium after a five day test match.

  2. Nihar said...

    Our universities already have such illustrious VCs - for instance, http://www.bhu.ac.in/aboutbhu/administration.html

    Aren't his credentials impeccable?