Mukul Kesavan on l'affaire Mehta

Mukul Kesavan's column in The Telegraph concludes with this: "... From Devanampiya to this, every epoch gets the Ashoka it deserves."

Before reaching this sentence, he has much to say about pretty much every key person in this episode -- Pratap Bhanu Mehta, Arvind Subramanian, the Chancellor, the Vice Chancellor -- and the subtext in their public pronouncements. He also has comments on a couple of commentators: Raghuram Rajan (who is deeply involved in another university not very different from Ashoka) and Gurcharan Das (the less said about him, the better).

Worth reading in full, but I have to include at least an excerpt here; so, here goes:

Universities like Ashoka are best understood as liberal arts universities with Indian characteristics. The philanthropists who fund and found these universities loom over them like colossi. The virtue of giving generously seems to purge them of self-awareness. In every official communication I’ve read, Ashoka’s founders capitalize their consequence: they are Founders. Ashoka’s board of trustees sent a statement to the faculty declaring that they had never interfered with the academic functioning of the university nor the freedom of faculty members to write about anything they wanted, in any forum that they wanted. That they could write this soon after seeing Mehta off the premises gives chutzpah a new meaning. They signalled their commitment to the autonomy of the university by endorsing the appointment of an Ombudsperson. A Lokpal. Fancy that. [Bold emphasis added]

* * *

There are just way too many news stories and opinion pieces following Pratap Bhanu Mehta's resignation from a professorship at Ashoka. Here's a (non-exhaustive) list of stuff allueded to in Kesavan's piece:

• Pratap Bhanu Mehta, Critic of Government Policies, Resigns as Professor at Ashoka University (The Wire, 17 March)

• Apoorvanand's opinion piece -- We Can't Treat Pratap Bhanu Mehta's Resignation from Ashoka as a 'Personal Decision' -- from the same day.

• My Association With Ashoka Considered a Political Liability: Pratap Bhanu Mehta in Resignation Letter (The Wire, 18 March)

• Raghuram Rajan's comments excerpted here: 'Founders Succumbed to Pressure': Raghuram Rajan on Pratap Bhanu Mehta's Exit From Ashoka (20 March)

• World Scholars on Ashoka Controversy: A Dangerous Attack on Academic Freedom (The Wire, 20 March)

• Ashoka University Acknowledges ‘Some Lapses’ but Pratap Bhanu Mehta Insists on Moving On (The Wire, 21 March)

• Okay, with gritted teeth, here's Gurcharan Das: A tale of two heroes: An Ashoka University donor on the challenges of doing good in today’s world.

  Das's has this in the first paragraph, and it's all just downhill from here:

  ... Pratap Bhanu Mehta, professor of political science and a passionate critic of the government, resigned from Ashoka University last week because he felt he’d become a ‘political liability’" [Bold emphasis added]

  Here's the actual quote from Mehta's resignation letter:

  ... After a meeting with Founders it has become abundantly clear to me that my association with the University may be considered a political liability. [Bold emphasis added]

Update (3 June 2021): I should have linked to this excellent piece by Yogendra Yadav in The Print: No one is asking the right questions about Pratap Bhanu Mehta’s ouster from Ashoka University. "We pick soft targets, we discuss inanities, but do not talk about the elephant in the room when it comes to Pratap Bhanu Mehta’s resignation."

UGC strikes back: INSA's Indian Journal of History of Science is not an "approved" journal!

After many people pointed out that the University Grants Commission's "White List" of "approved" journals had many, many predatory journals (see, for example, this recent report in The Hindu), UGC tried to make amends by issuing another list [pdf], which now consists of all the journals which are "removed" from the list of "approved" journals.

What is really galling is that in this pruning process, which killed some 4000+ journals, UGC has gone way too far on the other side, and removed a whole bunch of legitimate journals. [see this report from today's The Hindu].

I just learnt that The Indian Journal of History of Science, published by the Indian National Science Academy, has also been kicked out of the "approved" list!

Avijit Pathak: "Debating Plagiarism: Indian Academia Is Producing Imitative Conformists"

Riffing off on recent cases of plagiarism by Indian academics, he poses a deeper question: "Is ... our thinking itself ... plagiarised?"

To illustrate his point, he presents an episode from his own days "as a student of sociology at a leading university in Delhi":

... Let me recall what I experienced as a student of sociology at a leading university in Delhi. My professor asked me to write a paper on caste. I met my professor and conveyed my wish. ‘Sir, I have read what you have asked us to read. However, in my paper I wish to write something more: the way I saw, experienced and analysed the institutionalisation and practice of caste, and through this account, I would learn and unlearn the texts you have suggested.’

The professor said, ‘No, you can’t write what you think, experience and feel. You are required to write the way the likes of M.N. Srinivas and Louis Dumont have thought about it’.

I followed his instruction and wrote a highly-mechanised but ‘academically impressive’ paper with predictable quotes and references from the big names. Needless to add, I got a good grade. In other words, I got the message: My style, my perception, my words do not count; what matters is a defined academic format, a style created by others. I have to be clever in the art of copying.

A student's FB post on scientific misconduct in her lab

There are several updates, which appear at the end of the post.

* * *

Read this post (on FB) by Jayita Barua from a week ago. After reading her post, keep a copy for your own record -- just in case her FB post is taken down.

The magnitude of the misconduct in Barua's post is mind-boggling, and the frank way in which she talks about the mental trauma caused by the toxic environment in her lab is truly moving.

It is very brave of Barua to have come out and said all this in an open forum. I hope she will get all the support she needs. From my distance, the least I can do is to spread the word.

I know nothing about Barua's background -- not even the college and the research group she was in, and I stay away from FB. Which means that I am not aware of any follow-up action at her college / university. If you know of any, please leave a comment.

[Thanks to a friend who forwarded it.]

* * *

Update 1 (1 May 2018): G. Mudur of The Telegraph has a story on this case, triggered by Barua's post: CU teacher under data fraud scanner. This story appears in the Metro section, implying that the editors decided that this is of interest primarily to the residents of their home ground, Kolkata.

We learn two things: (a) Calcutta University has formed a two-member inquiry committee to probe this case, and (b) Dr. Anindita Ukil, Barua's PhD adviser, denies having committed any fraud or misconduct. A key quote:

Ukil said Barua was not a regular National Eligibility Test-qualified scholar who earned her own fellowship as most others in her laboratory, but was dependent on a project-based salary.

"She was in our lab for four years and participated enthusiastically in all our activities. She has raised this issue now - after being told earlier this month that she could not be provided any new project fellowship," Ukil said. "Why she has done this is beyond my understanding."

* * *

Update 1a (A little later on 1 May 2018): Barua has an FB post in which she rubbishes Ukil's (implied) suggestion that the impending loss the scholarship might have been the reason behind Barua's allegations.

* * *

Update 2 (2 May 2018): I am a little late to post this, but Nature India too has covered this case (in fact, this story was done even earlier than the one in The Telegraph). In their story, Biplab Das and Subhra Priyadarshini report that:

Barua's PhD guide Anindita Ukil, an assistant professor in the department, denied having forged data or being involved in any kind of scientific misconduct. “All these allegations are entirely false,” Ukil told Nature India over phone. “I have already informed the authorities of the Calcutta University and the matter is under scrutiny,” she said.Barua said she had also informed Prasanta Kumar Bag, head of biochemistry department of the University, and funding authorities – the Department of Science and Technology and Department of Biotechnology – about years of wrongdoing at the lab. Contacted, Bag also refrained from commenting saying that the issue was "under scrutiny by higher authorities".

How good are graduate admission interviews, if job interviews are "utterly useless"?

Faculty members in almost all the Indian institutions are getting ready to interview tens (if not hundreds) of students for a handful (or a few handfuls) of PhD slots in their departments. A recent NYTimes article urges us to be mindful of limitations of this format: The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews by Jason Dana.

I realize there are quite a few differences between the kind of interviews Dana describes in his article and the kind we use. For example, his "experimental" interviews were (probably) unstructured, while we may be using something more structured [such as probing candidates specifically in the areas / subfields they say they are strong in]. Also, given the overwhelmingly large number of candidates compared to the number of available slots, there's usually a pre-screening exercise which relies on previous academic record, research experience, scores / ranks in entrance exams, etc.

And yet, this article reminds us some of the pitfalls of the interview process.

Editorials by Colleagues

These days, Current Science features only guest editorials by invited contributors, and it's great to see my IISc colleagues being featured in this very exalted space. Here's a quick sample:

• Prof. Rohini Godbole: Women in STEMM: involve the institutions.

• E. Arunan: Borders in science and nations are artificial. Should we have borders within India?.

• B. Ananthanarayan: Joy of discovery as a reason for pursuing a career in science.

An Illustrated History of Free Speech in India

From Gandhi to Arindam Chaudhuri is the title of this illustrated history. Absolutely great stuff from the Free Speech Journal, appearing at Scroll.in.

"How the Left Won JNU"

It's a year late, but the excerpts at Scroll.in from Rakesh Batabyal's book JNU: The Making of a University are interesting. Here's a familiar figure:

SIS had a students’ union that was active with Prakash Karat and a couple of active students leading it. Prakash Karat had returned from the United Kingdom where, during his studies, he had come into contact with Victor Kiernan, a Marxist and a great scholar who had taught in Lahore in the pre-Partition days. With a sharp political eye, Karat got into close contact with CPI(M) leaders like P. Sundarayya and E.M.S. Namboodiripad. This was the time for the CPI(M) to start its students’ wing and Karat was an ideal choice. He was articulate and was someone acquainted with the British Marxists who were held in high esteem by even these anti-colonial communists whose minds were not totally decolonized. His being from God’s own country, Kerala, also helped in befriending many gods in the party.

As soon as the Students Federation of India was set up, north India seemed to be within communist grasp. From the standpoint of CPI(M), JNU was like a clean slate where it did not have to fight it out with the likes of the Chhatra Parishad in Bengal or the National Students Union of India in Kerala or the socialists and the RSS in UP and Rajasthan. Karat’s popularity among the mostly apolitical students of the ISIS was an excellent opportunity to establish the credentials of the fledgling party and its new students’ wing.

With Karat’s initiative, the SIS union was amalgamated with the SFI-led union, which had come into being following much discussion and efforts. ...

PhD Dissertation Quality: A Workshop at IISc

Some of you may know about the DST Centre for Policy Research (DST-CPR) at IISc, which is a part of a network of five Centres set up with funding from the Department of Science and Technology. The research at these Centres could help inform S&T policies [Disclosure: I am coordinating the activities at the DST-CPR at IISc].

The reason I'm mentioning all this is to alert you about an upcoming one-day Workshop entitled "Dissertation Expectations and Quality Criteria: Is it Enough to have a Good Dissertation?" This Workshop will be conducted by Prof. Maresi Nerad (College of Education, University of Washington, Seattle, USA), a Visiting Professor at our DST-CPR this month; it is meant for "PhD scholars [from Indian universities / institutions] who have completed at least 2 years of doctoral studies, who know what they will do in their dissertation."

Here's my request (bleg? do people still use this term?): If you know 3rd or 4th year PhD students in an Indian university / institution, please encourage them to apply. We are looking for a diversity of students (in terms of backgrounds, fields of study, types of institutions). Do please spread the word; the deadline for filing applications is the 5th of January, and the event itself will be held on the 12th of January (Tuesday).

Thank you for your help!

Prof. Venki Ramakrishnan on Nobels and Nationalism

In The Telegraph today, Prof. Venki Ramakrishnan (who will visit India soon for a vacation and a lecture tour) says a lot of sensible things:

As for India sharing in the glory of his Nobel Prize (and that of Amartya Sen), he wonders why Indians are relatively unexcited about Ashoke Sen, the theoretical physicist known for his work on string theory and who shared in the $22m Breakthrough Prize in fundamental physics set up by the Russian Yuri Milner.

In Indians not giving as much importance to Sen as they do to Nobel Prize winners, "there is something a little wrong," he remarks. [...]

A question not to ask Venki is: "How should India win more Nobel Prizes?"

"That's actually completely the wrong question because there are so many discoveries that never get a Nobel Prize. It's not a good reason to go into anything," he responds.

"First of all countries don't win them, it's people who win them," he points out. "If a person from a country wins a Nobel Prize it doesn't necessarily mean that that county is doing well overall. It could be just a fluke. It is more important for a country to just nurture scientists and provide them good environments, a decent living and help them to lead a productive life."

Imprint India

The IMPRINT India initiative website has quite a bit of information about its focus domains each of which is subdivided into several sub-themes [Disclosure: I am a part of the team for the Advanced Materials domain, led by Prof. Monica Katiyar and Prof. A.K. Singh of IIT-K]. See also the this brochure.

The Overview is probably where you want to start. The text box on the image says the objective is accelerated research and innovation. Somewhere in the middle of the page, you will find this one-sentence summary of what (this phase of) the initiative is about:

IMPRINT is a first-of-its-kind Pan-IIT and IISc joint initiative to develop a (a) New Education Policy, and (b) Roadmap for Research to solve major engineering and technology challenges in selected domains needed by the country. [source]

The epilogue at the end of the page summarizes the initiative's current phase:

IMPRINT in its first phase is a policy developing initiative covering pedagogy, teaching, curriculum, technology-benchmarking and infrastructure readiness. IMPRINT is not meant only for IITs and IISc; it is a national movement providing an opportunity for the higher echelon institutes in India to integrate with all grass root level institutes, industry and organizations, mutually complement and deliver what the country demands and aspires. Policy is our immediate mandate; technology (products and processes) development and delivery will eventually follow.

IMPRINT India

That's the name of a new initiative "to develop a roadmap for research to solve major engineering and technology challenges in ten technology domains relevant to India today." It was launched today by President Pranab Mukherjee. Here's the official press release. Here's another.

Coordinated nationally by IIT-K, IMPRINT India has identified ten themes including Healthcare and Advanced Materials, and the job of developing and coordinating a coherent research program in a given theme has been given to IISc or one of the IITs [More details at the IMPRINT India website at IIT-K].

While I have not been able to find any numbers in terms of funding for this initiative, a DNA story mentions a sum of Rs. 1000 Crores (over how many years? I don't know).

Akshat Rathi on History of Indian Science

Over at Mint On Sunday, Rathi has a great article with a brilliant title -- Separating Fact from Ancient Indian Science Fiction -- exploring the question: "Why is the public’s knowledge of the history of Indian science so poor?"

The sad part is that, despite an ongoing history of science programme, which has been running for more than 50 years, very little of that has filtered in to public knowledge. I asked Subbarayappa why.

“That is a question I have often asked myself,” he said laughing. The commission nudges on with what it has been doing for the past 50 years. Regular articles appear in the Indian Journal of History of Science, but there is little conversation between the few academics working on the history of Indian science and those working on setting the science curriculum.

Anant Bhan on Gender Gap in Medical Education Leadership in India

Anant Bhan has a link-filled post over at British Medical Journal Blogs:

Given the high number of women entering medicine—a status report in 2012 pegged the number of female medical students in India at around 200 000, compared with 175 000 male students—and subsequently also joining as faculty in medical colleges, one would expect a significant number of them to occupy top leadership positions in medical education. This is where there seems to be a gap—much fewer women occupy positions of director or principal in medical colleges in India than men.

Let’s take the example of those institutes of national importance in India which offer medical education courses. There are 11 of them: the seven All India Institutes of Medical Science (AIIMS; in Delhi, Rishikesh, Jodhpur, Bhopal, Raipur, Patna, Bhubaneshwar), the Postgraduate Institute of Medical Education and Research (PGIMER, Chandigarh), the Jawaharlal Institute of Post Graduate Medical Education and Research (JIPMER, Puducherry), the National Institute of Mental Health and Neuroscience (NIMHANS, Bengaluru), and the Sree Chitra Tirunal Institute for Medical Sciences and Technology (SCTIMST, Thiruvananthapuram). Of these 11 institutions, currently only one has a female director—Asha Kishore became the first female director of SCTIMST in mid-July 2015 after the institute had been without a director for two years.

Links

1. Ben Goldacre in Buzzfeed News: Scientists Are Hoarding Data And It’s Ruining Medical Research. "Major flaws in two massive trials of deworming pills show the importance of sharing data — which most scientists don’t do."

2. Hari Pulakkat in Economic Times Blogs: Why India is lagging in disruptive innovation.

3. John P.A. Ioannidis in Al Jazeera: Could Greece become prosperous again?

   Populism and a critical lack of know-how is the common denominator among the neo-Stalinist syndicalists, outspoken nationalists and eccentric university professors (most of whom are entirely disconnected from serious global scholarship) who now happen to run the country. Mass media, justifiably anxious to create anti-austerity heroes, manufactured an artificial reality about these people. For example, the original finance minister, Yanis Varoufakis, was heralded as a famous professor of economics, while he has never authored a single scientific article in any of the 30 top economics journals (as ranked based on citation impact factor by Thomson Reuters). In education and science, the two fields where Greeks particularly excel, emerging state policies are strikingly counterproductive. In his inaugural parliament speech, the minister of education (a professor emeritus) proudly declared himself a Marxist who considers excellence a stigma; fittingly, his deputy minister, a university professor of genetics, has not published any PubMed-indexed peer-reviewed scientific paper since 1996. This is Greek mediocrity at its finest.

Janaki Ammal

Scroll.in has a great article entitled Remembering Dr Janaki Ammal, pioneering botanist, cytogeneticist and passionate Gandhian by Geetha Doctor on the life and works of Janaki Ammal, a Fellow of the Indian Academy of Sciences right from its first year.

Vedic Planes

Siddhartha Deb has a great piece on Those mythological men and their sacred, supersonic flying temples in The New Republic. Subtitle: "What tales of ancient Vedic aircraft tell us about India’s place in the modern world."

Excerpts won't do any justice to the piece. So, go read the whole thing!

ISI, Nalanda, FTII, etc., etc.

1. R. Ramachandran has an update on the Bimal Roy affair at the Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata -- A twist in the ISI tale.

2. Arunabha Bagchi has an op-ed in The Stateman -- Autonomy of Learning -- in which he lists all the known cases of government interference in academic institutions and bodies such as ICHR. It's a very long list indeed.

3. Bagchi, of course, starts with the now famous critique of the present government by Amartya Sen (published in no less an outlet than NYRB): The stormy revival of an international university.

Here's an excerpt from the first article.

After humiliating the former Director of an institution of national importance and vitiating the atmosphere, the government does an about-turn and tries to save face by appointing him head of a cryptology centre. [...]

The current events at the ISI have resulted in a legal notice being served on the Chairman and the institute by two ISI faculty members (who were at the council meeting on April 23), two petitions being filed in the Calcutta High Court against the government (one by three academics, including two ISI faculty members, one of whom is also a council member, and a member of the ISI society who is a professor at Calcutta University, and the second by Bimal Roy himself), an online petition (www.change.org) being signed by over 2,000 people, and an open letter to the President of India from the International Association for Cryptologic Research (IACR).

But the Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation (MoSPI) does not seem inclined to resolve the issue in a fair, just and democratic way. Significantly, the Ministry, having made all the allegations against Roy, has not served any show-cause notice or a charge sheet, let alone institute, as demanded by the online petition, a “proper public investigation into the allegations… and a proper hearing by the council”.

Sexism in Indian Science

Gayatri Jayaraman has a must-read article on The Secret Sexism of Indian Science. Lots of Bhatnagar Award winning scientists speak out.

Sexism in Indian science did not get enough space in Leelavati's Daughters, probably because it was (meant to be?) a celebratory volume on Indian women scientists. It is good to see it being discussed in Jayaraman's article.

L'Affaire Bimal Roy: An Update

Wire.in has published An Open Letter to Arun Shourie on the Sacking of the ISI Director by the alumni of the Indian Statistical Institute. Needless to add, it has some rather uncomfortable questions. For example:

Did the ISI Council, at the meeting on April 23, 2015, move and pass a resolution accepting the recommendation of the Selection Committee to appoint Prof Sanghamitra Bandyopadhyay as the Director of ISI with effect from August 1, 2015, as required under the bye-laws of ISI, which clearly states that “The appointment of the Director shall be made by the Council (emphasis added) on the recommendation made by a Selection Committee?”

We ask this because, to the best of our knowledge, earlier, at the same Council meeting on April 23, when an objection was raised relating to the appointment of an ISI Centre Head, you, as the Chairman, adopted the admirably correct democratic practice of seeking a majority vote in the Council to resolve the dilemma and validate the appointment.

If the answer to the above question is YES, would you please tell us how many Council members were in attendance during the meeting, how many voted in favor of or against the motion and how many abstained from voting?

If, however, the answer to the above question is NO, and yet the minutes of the meeting asserted otherwise, would you not agree that the purported “minutes” were factually incorrect and Prof Roy did no wrong in refusing to authenticate these minutes, as has been widely reported in the media?

Irrespective of the answer to the above question, would you please review the provisions of the ISI Act quoted in the order for us and assure us that by invoking its emergency provisions to divest Prof Roy of his powers and duties without enlightening him of the charges against him and giving him the opportunity to respond to these charges, the MOSPI violated neither the letter nor the spirit of the law?