UGC's War on FYUP - VII: Some Observations

1. The very first thing to note is the shameful silence of the science academies which championed the cause of a four year bachelors program in the sciences; their position paper was a precursor to the IISc's FYUP (and also Bangalore University where it has been in suspension since 2013) which started in August 2011, the same year IIT-K converted its five-year Integrated MSc program into a 4-year BS program.

   The Academies didn't defend, even partially, the FYUP at Delhi University. I can understand, sort of, their silence because DU's FYUP was not just for the sciences, but for all areas of study including commerce and the "arts subjects". But I just cannot understand their quiet aloofness after UGC came after IISc and now, the IITs.

2. The statements of support from Prof. C.N.R. Rao and Dr. Anil Kakodkar have been timely. But their framing leaves much to be desired: "why are you doing this," they seem to say to UGC, "to our premier institutions?" It's as if it's okay for the UGC to do this to other institutions. As influential leaders, they could have stood solidly behind all our institutions of higher ed, and demanded autonomy for all of them.

3. It has become fashionable among the influencers to support the creation of new types of institutions such as IIESTs and IISERs as well as starting new IITs, NITs and IIMs. An assumption which drives this trend is that our universities are so badly doomed that reforming "the system" is not even worth the effort.

   But, this mindset ignores the fact that an overwhelming majority (more than 95%, going by a recent talk by President Pranab Mukherjee) of our students study in our universities and their affiliated colleges. It is important for our scientific elite to support them in their struggle against irrational regulations.

4. One of the strongest critiques of Indian higher ed policies of the 1950s was that the then government chose national labs (basically, the CSIR labs) over universities for science funding. This choice had the effect of pretty much decimating university research, and helped make many of them just examination-conducting bodies.

   Our current enthusiasm for creating IIXs can only have a similar debilitating effect on our universities, and may end up solidifying a two-tier system in which some get elite and expensive education while a vast majority go to increasingly impoverished universities.

   We should be aiming for a system where our good universities have the same exalted status as the IITs, and others know what they need to do to achieve that status. It is in our own long-term interest that our policies keep us moving toward this goal.

   I'm afraid our policies are dragging us in the opposite direction.

UGC's War on FYUP - VI: Newpspaers Ask UGC To Back Off

Several newspaper editorials have come down hard on UGC, and asked it to back off from its highhanded actions against FYUP at many institutions, including the IITs and IISc.

The Economic Times:

There is every reason for these institutions to experiment with varied programmes. The UGC and the government must encourage, rather than thwart, innovation in pedagogy. Centres of excellence such as the IITs and the IISc and small, private universities are ideal for carrying out such experiments. If found successful, these can then be deployed in larger universities across the country.

The Indian Express:

... [T]he UGC [has been accused of] regulatory overreach. Actually, this is more than linear overreach. It is a category mistake, a blunder that logicians abhor. ... The Kakodkar Committee, set up in 2010, had recommended that centres of excellence be liberated from the educational bureaucracy. The board of governors of each IIT should have complete control over the teaching process, ranging from course design to expenditure management, human resource development and rules governing staff and payroll.

UGC's War on FYUP - V: How the Others Reacted

Symbiosis University in Pune is one of the institutions to receive the love letter from UGC, and it hated it so much that it took UGC to court:

Symbiosis International University, a non-profit private institution in Pune near Mumbai, took the matter to the Mumbai high court on 20 August, for a stay on a July UGC directive received by Symbiosis on 9 August to discontinue its four-year liberal arts programme.

The court ruled that the UGC “never communicated and-or even asked any explanation and-or even issued a show-cause notice before taking such a drastic action”, court documents said.

The same report contains some information about how some other recipients of UGC's missive have responded. Here's how Ashoka University reacted:

But pre-empting UGC intervention, the university has re-jigged the course to a three-year degree with an optional fourth year project or research paper.

And this is the response of the O.P. Jindal Global University:

Although it was also contacted by the UGC, another non-profit, OP Jindal Global University, said it did not offer four-year programmes, only an optional study abroad year where students can go to the United States.

UGC's War on FYUP - IV: A Great Tactical Move by the IITS

Ask the UGC to send its diktat to the IIT Council, which is chaired by the HRD Minister, and has as its members some of the most respected and admired people -- IIT Directors as well as Chairpersons of their Boards.

Meanwhile, stating that the President of India, who is also the Visitor of IITs, “will have to take a call” on the issue, the directors of some institutes have said that until now, there has been “no requirement of clearance from the UGC on any matter concerning the IITs”.

Reacting to the UGC’s clarification, IIT Kanpur director Prof Indranil Manna told The Indian Express, “We are empowered to run our courses through our senate and our statutes. This is clearly stated in the IIT Act. If there is to be a change in this, the IIT council will have to take it up… In my opinion, UGC guidelines only apply to institutes under the commission and the IITs are clearly outside their ambit.”

* * *

Update: The Economic Times reports that the UGC Chairperson is also a member of the IIT Council, and the HRD Ministry has endorsed this move.

UGC's War on FYUP - III: What if UGC's Real Problem is with the HRD MInistry?

Here's an interesting speculation based on what some UGC insiders have said: UGC's problem is not with IISc/IITs/Universities, but with the HRD Ministry!

Even as UGC chairperson Ved Prakash did not respond to email questionnaire or text messages, sources said the Commission's missive to institutions is part of its growing battle with the HRD ministry. UGC, a source said, was not comfortable with the idea of scrapping Delhi University's Four-Year Undergraduate Programme but had to acquiesce as the government had made up its mind.

"The commission and chairperson had to literally go against their own words about FYUP. Before the new government decided to scrap FYUP, UGC had endorsed the new programme. While UGC is within its right to send communication to educational institutions, it has been done now to drag in the HRD ministry. The ploy seems to have worked as the Commission has gone silent and the ministry is left defending the communication," a UGC source said.

UGC's War on FYUP - II: Response from the Guwahati University

To be filed under "I learn something new everyday": Guwahati University appears to be the first one to have started a four-year UG program -- way back in 2009, two full years before the FYUPs at IISc and IIT-K. Unfortunately, GU has also been bullied into scrapping its FYUP:

The university's Institute of Science and Technology (GUIST), which conducts the course, will not enroll a fresh batch of students this year, considering the University Grants Commission (UGC)'s opposition to four-year undergraduate programme ( FYUP).

"The UGC has asked several leading institutions of the country to do away with their four-year undergraduate courses. GU does not want to violate UGC's diktats. So, its academic council has recently asked GUIST to discontinue the four-year BS programme," said a senior GU official.

UGC's War on FYUP - I: A Fighting Response from the IITs

I have no new insights into UGC's actions (which include writing to the IITs and asking them to get their degrees aligned with the UGC notification), other than what is reported in the newspapers, and what others have said. As for the latter, Dheeraj Sanghi's musings are about the best; start with his posts: UGC decides maximum standards, and MHRD agrees with UGC.

The IITs claim that since they were created through an act of Parliament, they are outside the purview of UGC; this view has been contested by the UGC which says that while the IITs have all the autonomy in how they structure their courses, they simply do not have the right to call their degrees whatever they want.

Reacting to the controversy, UGC chairman Professor Ved Prakash said there is "no question of any encroachment".

"Every university is also a statutory body, but there is a procedure to be followed… no other body except the UGC can specify degrees. We are a conduit between the government and the institution, and no one can award a degree that is not approved," he said. [Source: India Today]

If UGC has its way, the 4-year BS degree, which was introduced by IIT-Kanpur in 2011 (the same year IISc started its own BS program) would be in trouble, since the abbreviation "BS", as a degree, does not appear in the Gazette notification of July 5, 2014. [The funny part, of course, is that this list has "only" 129 degrees!].

It now appears that the IITs are itching for a public fight which the UGC is very likely to lose. This realization is probably behind the HRD Ministry's suggestion that the IITs and UGC sit together across a table, and work things out; UGC's utterances have also mellowed lately.

Given the high-handed way the UGC has conducted itself in the last several months (starting with the gutting of the FYUP at the Delhi University), it is understandable that people root for the IITs in their fight.

[Disclosure: There is a personal interest for me: if the IITs win, we at IISc will also be able to restore the name "BS" to our own 4-year degree program].

Vishwesha Guttal on Higher Ed Regulation in India

Over at The Conversation, Vishwesha Guttal, a colleage in the Centre for Ecological Sciences, has a piece on Indian higher ed with a specific reference to the recent UGC directive to IISc on its FYUP. An excerpt:

India has adopted the UK’s model of three-year BSc program for more than 50 years, but the quality of most of the programs is abysmal. A paper prepared jointly by three Indian science academies in 2008 identified various limitations of the present system that focuses on quantity of information rather than the quality of education. The report argued for a four-year program with an emphasis on flexibility in curriculum, choice of subjects and research experience. They also recommended allowing students to switch between science and engineering.

India’s requirement as a large and diverse country cannot and should not rely on a failed mode of higher education uniformly imposed across the entire country. Experiments to improve education must be encouraged, especially if the premier institutes of the country are taking the lead. We can only know what works best if we attempt a variety of approaches.

FYUP at IISc: A Resolution?

This post has some updates at the end.

* * *

Basant Kumar Mohanty reports in The Telegraph (also check out Prof. Dheeraj Sanghi's take on it in a comment in an earlier post):

The Indian Institute of Science and the University Grants Commission have agreed on a compromise formula to wriggle out of the latest controversy surrounding the four-year Bachelor of Science (BS) course.

The IISc’s proposal to tweak the four-year BS course to BSc (Research), making the fourth-year research voluntary, has been accepted by the UGC, even as students and parents continue to be unhappy.

The BS course will now be known as BSc (Research), with an exit option after three years as a general BSc programme while the fourth year will be devoted to research.

I'm sure we will learn more in the days ahead, and I'll update this post with links.

* * *

Updates

1. (9:00 AM, 14 Aug 2014) The proposed change in the degree awarded at the end of four years -- from the original, nationally advertised B.S. to the new, decidedly underwhelming B.Sc. (Research) -- is bound to rankle the students. I dont' expect the second change (that of an exit option after 3 years leading to the usual B.Sc. degree) to cause a major stir.

   It is not clear how exactly this name change came about. In one version (in Mohanty's Telegraph report, above), it was IISc's idea: "The Bangalore institute yesterday [11 August 2014] sent a letter suggesting it was ready to tweak the BS programme to BSc (Research)." CNN-IBN and Deccan Herald also support this view: "According to a ministry official, the IISc also proposed to change the nomenclature and scheme of the programme making it a three-year course for BSc degree and four-year BSc research degree."

   In a second version (also reported by Mohanty in The Telegraph, one day earlier!):

   Official sources said the UGC has suggested that the IISc should tweak the format of its course and rename it BSc (Research). The first three years could be devoted to a general BSc course as offered by other universities, and the fourth to research, which could be optional.

   Students could then exit the course after three years if they wished. If they chose to continue for the fourth year, they would be awarded a BSc (Research) degree. They would also get credit points that would help them get direct admission into a PhD programme.

FYUP at IISc: Links

Two former directors of IISc have been quoted in the press about this issue. The first, of course, is Bharat Ratna C.N.R. Rao, in a CNN-IBN news report: After DU, IISc Bangalore at loggerheads with UGC over scrapping of four-year undergraduate programme

Rao said that premier institutes should not be dealt with military commands. "IISc is the oldest also the best institute of this kind in India. It is the only institute which can be compared properly to many better institutes of the world and they should not be dealt by issuing circulars," Rao said.

The other is Prof. P. Balaram, under whose watch the FYUP at IISc came into being, quoted in The Hindu: IISc. is not Delhi varsity, say students, faculty.

The former director of the IISc. P. Balaram, during whose tenure the programme was introduced, described the Ministry’s current approach as “retrograde”, and added that the move “will dampen any kind of innovation in education.”

The government must consider that the IISc. is the only Indian institute with a global ranking, he said. “It has a 100-year history and an even longer future, and must keep evolving with the times.” [...]

As the title of the second story makes it clear, an IISc student has articulated the one key difference between the FYUP in DU and that at IISc:

A third-year student in the UG programme, Suhas Mahesh, described the move as “a terrible decision” by the Centre. “Unlike Delhi University’s case, here both IISc. faculty and students actually want the FYUP,” he said. Students take three competitive exams to make it to the course, and are each supported by scholarship.

The last point -- "each [student is] supported by scholarshi" -- is important; these are students who receive a scholarship -- primarily through KVPY and INSPIRE programs -- for studying science in any institution, and the fact that they have chosen to come to IISc should count for something.

A Nasty Surprise

G. Mudur and Basant Mohanty in The Telegraph yesterday: Meddle Virus Spreads to IISc:

The Centre today told Parliament that the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, has been asked to discontinue its four-year undergraduate BS programme but the institute said it had not received any such orders.

HRD minister Smriti Irani, in a written response to a question in the Lok Sabha, said the University Grants Commission has reported that several universities, including the IISc, that are conducting four-year programmes have been asked to discontinue them and follow UGC notification on degrees.

Although IISc faculty said they had not received such a directive from the UGC, the reply in the House has triggered expressions of outrage in the science community.

And a follow-up story today: Parents to IISc: defy order on 4yr course with quotes from lots of parents, as well as non-IISc affiliated scientists -- Prof. Pushpa Bhargava and Prof. Lakhotia, in particular -- expressing their concern and/or outrage.

* * *

This is cutting too close for my comfort, so I'll refrain from offering any comment other than to express my hope that this will get resolved soon.

Mathai Joseph and Andrew Robinson on What Ails Indian Science

Their opinion piece in this week's Nature -- Free Indian Science -- lays out (some of) the problems that hold Indian science back. The entire article is worth reading, so go read it now. I'll use this post to highlight some of the interesting points made by the authors.

Let me come right off and say that this is a great line:

Indian science needs public funding, but not government control.

Many people -- including some clueless journalists -- fail to realize that in terms of funding, academic institutions in India are the bit players; the biggies are the government labs, and it is good to see that Joseph and Robinson hammer this point home:

Nearly 60% of India's science budget2 is now spent on the CSIR, scientific departments and the Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) — an enormous and impenetrable empire set up in 1958. None of these national institutions has stimulated scientific excellence [...]

Joseph and Robinson also nail a key problem in the grants made by funding agencies to faculty members in academic institutions:

... [Although] research in the leading institutions is well funded, [...] the funding is subject to unsuitable restrictions applicable to the entire government bureaucracy. These include limited foreign travel and no travel support for research students, ruling out regular participation in leading conferences and research gatherings.

Their analysis of the problems that plague Indian science leads to a four-part solution. The first part is about insulating the funding agencies from government control:

The first step towards reinvigorating Indian science must be to create an empowered funding agency, staffed by working scientists, some of whom could be non-resident Indians. A possible model is the European Research Council, which deals with a complex of national governments no less formidable than India's 29 state governments, yet manages to focus on supporting research excellence. The crucial requirement is obviously that an Indian scientific research council be permitted to set its own criteria for the evaluation of research proposals, independent of direct government control, and disburse government funds accordingly.

There's a lot more in there -- go read the whole thing.

* * *

Thanks to Prof. S. Ranganathan for the e-mail pointer.

Links

1. Gordon Marino in The Stone: Try a Little Tenderness.

   The philosophers, the lovers of wisdom, have pondered and written a lot about love, even erotic and romantic love, but they have given a cold shoulder to that offshoot of love — tenderness. Indeed, I don’t believe I have ever heard a member of the Socrates guild even mention the lovely word in a remotely philosophical context.

2. Kate Clancy at Context and Variation: 5 Ways to Make Progress in Evolutionary Psychology: Smash, Not Match, Stereotypes.

   The biggest problem, to my mind, is that so often the conclusions of the bad sort of evolutionary psychology match the stereotypes and cultural expectations we already hold about the world: more feminine women are more beautiful, more masculine men more handsome; appearance is important to men while wealth is important to women; women are prone to flighty changes in political and partner preference depending on the phase of their menstrual cycles.

3. Noor Brara at India Ink: In India, a Rise of Private Universities and Liberal Arts Programs.

   A number of new private universities with liberal arts programs have sprung up in India. There were fewer than 20 such schools in 2005, and there are more than 100 now, according to a report by Shiv Nadar University. [...]

   One of the newest of these private schools is Shiv Nadar University in Noida, a suburb of Delhi. The university, when it opened its doors last year, offered programs in engineering, math and natural sciences to its first batch of 274 students. This year, it began its School of Humanities and Social Sciences, and the student population has risen to 574. As at liberal arts schools in the United States, students at Shiv Nadar University are required to take a core curriculum of varied subjects, regardless of their major.

4. The Telegraph: Govt open to higher pay for IIM heads.

   "[HRD Minister] M.M. Pallam Raju today said the government should have no problems if the IIMs offered a higher package to new directors from their own funds"

The Hindustan Times on IISc's UG program

Happy new year, folks!

* * *

As some of you might know, our Institute launched a 4-year BS program in 2011. The students of the first batch have just entered the fourth semester, in which they begin classes in their major subjects (after taking a common set core courses in the sciences, humanities and engineering). As expected, physics.is the most popular major, with over a third of the batch opting for it.

* * *

Today's HT carries a news report about the program. Let me just say that it's largely -- and gratifyingly! -- positive.

* * *

This semester, I teach a course on thermodynamics (with a focus on applications in materials science) for the UG students in the materials major (+ a few others). Exciting times!

Fab Four from Our University Laundry List

...according to Krishna Kumar, Professor of Education at Delhi University and a former Director of NCERT.

He discusses the four major differences between Universities, ours and theirs (i.e. the West), in a lead opinion piece in The Hindu.

Providing samples is difficult when the rant is as wholesomely scathing as this one. First in his list is 'faculty selection'; here is how, according to him, we do it:

We start discouraging talent early, but a few bright youngsters manage to come up despite our best efforts. They are the ones who face the greatest resistance from our institutions at the time of selection for vacancies.[...] If there is someone with an unusual background or achievement, you can depend on the selection committee to find a technical ground to reject him or her. [...] Democratic procedures and correctness have become incompatible with respect for quality. [...] Selection committees debate over the finest of technicalities to justify the selection of the average, allowing anyone with sheen to get stuck and lost in the maze of criteria.

Read the entire article on how we compare in other issues like teaching, research, libraries.

A pitch for liberal arts education

This one is by an Indian student, Vedika Khemani, who, studied "studied history, economics, linguistics, philosophy and creative writing ... while taking intensive physics and mathematics classes" at Harvey Mudd College. Khemani is doing a PhD in theoretical physics at Princeton.

An excerpt:

The ability to synthesize different perspectives into the big picture is far more powerful than narrow expertise in any single field. The social sciences offer perspectives from vantage points separated by time, place and society. Drawing and painting offer perspectives on what perspective even means. Critical thinking is the logical result of being able to simultaneously synthesize multiple ideas in one’s mind.

Real-world problems rarely ever have textbook solutions. More than anything, the purpose of a college education is to learn how to think critically and what questions to ask. Liberal arts colleges aim to mold their students into well-rounded, well-informed global citizens with a wide skill set [...]

Amartya Sen on Nalanda's Progress

In an interview published in The Telegraph, Prof. Sen talks quite extensively about the progress towards the creation of Nalanda University, and addresses some of the concerns raised in media reports (like this one in Tehelka).

Along the way, Prof. Sen narrates this great story:

It is perhaps a matter of interest that when my friend Bimal Matilal was interviewed for becoming the Spalding Professor of Eastern Religion and Ethics (a post that he held for many years with great distinction), he was asked by the vice-chancellor of Oxford whether he thought it was a limitation that he was not religious himself.

Bimal told me that the vice-chancellor very much agreed with him when he answered that this was neither here nor there, since he was supposed to educate people on the nature of — including beliefs and practices in — Eastern religions, rather than perform religious practices in his class.

Thanks to Ankur Kulkarni for the comment-alert.

Ready to Return?

In his editorial [pdf] in the latest Current Science, Prof. P. Balaram bestows on this Rutgers study an academic respectability it just doesn't deserve (for my comment on that study, see this post).

In addition to demolishing that study's methodology and findings, Balaram makes several other points [with bold emphasis added by me]:

1. Where did faculty come from when India embarked on the first phase of expansion of scientific and technical institutions in the 1950s and 1960s? A very large number of new recruits in those days were educated in the West, although ironically some of the very best were homegrown. ... Unfortunately, not every institution that sparkled with promise in the first two decades after independence has been able to sustain the enthusiasm and optimism of that era. How will we address the problem of faculty shortages today? The consensus, one that leaves me mildly uneasy, is that we must make vigorous attempts to entice Indian students and academics who are currently overseas, primarily in the United States, to return and build teaching and research careers in India.

2. There has been an organized hunt [by China] for high profile researchers ... [by offering them] benefits and inducements that might even attract the attention of the best of Western scientists. ... The price tag for winners of ‘prestigious international prizes – including the Nobel prize’ is stated to be ‘150 million yuan ($23 million). ... An earlier program (Qianren Jihua) for ‘recruitment ... of global experts’ launched in 2008 had a goal of hiring ‘up to 2000 experts from abroad over 5 to 10 years’. The program has already notched up 1143 recruitments but the scheme seems to be foundering’. ... In describing Chinese initiatives as ‘a massive waste of resources’ one observer notes ‘that it is better to invest in a whole new generation of talent than to buy reputation’. Mu-Ming Poo, a prominent neuroscientist in Shanghai, is reported to have characterized the Qianren Jihua program as ‘a huge disaster’, arguing that China’s current policy tells ‘the best and brightest to spend most of their productive years abroad’. ... The Chinese experience may be worth studying and there may be much to learn, even as Indian agencies formulate new schemes ...

3. A growing number of women with Ph D degrees are sometimes unable to spend extended postdoctoral periods overseas. Should there not be a mechanism which allows us to tap this resource and support their research efforts? Strangely, while schemes for attracting overseas talent are enthusiastically administered in the funding agencies, initiatives that promote local talent are invariably run with limited interest and efficiency. Looking outward may be attractive and fashionable. Looking inward may be desirable and essential.

Prof. Balaram's editorial is all suitably academic and understated (e.g., "may be desirable and essential"), but the strength of the underlying sentiments comes through loud and clear.

It's good to see him take a stand.

Tenure at MIT: Part 2. How to set junior faculty up for success

One more excerpt from the same article we saw in the previous post -- Unraveling Tenure at MIT -- about that great institution's approach towards its junior faculty, and how that translates into setting them up for success. This is something that our own institutions appear to do grudgingly and sub-optimally; some of you may already know that this is a pet theme of mine -- see here, here, here.

Part of the reason for MIT’s warmth toward tenure candidates is that it is in departments’ interests for them to succeed. For one, the recruitment process requires time and resources, and it’s often costly to support new junior faculty. They require lab space, some need a couple million dollars for lab equipment and help with funding before securing outside grants, and there may also be relocation costs for the faculty and their families. [Bold emphasis added]

“It’s expensive to hire a junior faculty member, amongst anything else, so we want to make sure that the investment in the junior faculty member is repaid, and the repayment is that they stay on as a senior faculty member,” says Sive.

But the departments’ friendliness toward new untenured faculty extend beyond financial reasons. “I tell the junior faculty that they are really the most important faculty at MIT because in twenty years’ time they’re going to be running the Institute... So there is tremendous, tremendous goodwill on the part of the senior faculty to help the junior faculty succeed,” says Sive.

Hudson felt the wholehearted support of the Physics Department. “The department is really amazingly friendly,” he says. “For some reason I think there’s this perception from the outside that because it’s hard to get tenure here that it’s somehow mean, and it is not at all like that.”

The generosity of his senior colleagues went beyond any of his expectations. When Hudson first arrived at MIT, he was assigned lab space in Building 24, but because of construction, there was no room for him to work for the time being. So, a couple of professors offered up their own facilities to him.

“That would never happen anywhere else,” said Hudson brightly. “They gave up their lab to me for like six months! That was like, ‘Welcome to MIT’!”

Tenure at MIT

If you ever wondered about what it takes to get tenure at MIT, this should interest you: Unraveling Tenure, a report at The Tech that "[reveals] one of the most subtle and misunderstood processes at MIT, and [explains how one professor, despite his popular teaching, lost because of it" [Thanks to Incoherent Ponderer for the pointer].

A couple of highlights from the article:

1. So how are the recommenders chosen? According to [Prof. Patrick H.] Winston, the candidate and his or her mentor make a list of people whom the candidate would like as recommenders, as well as a list of people the candidate would not like. But it is up to the committee appointed to research the candidate to choose who to request a recommendation from, and the committee may choose people from both lists. The candidate never finds out who the committee chooses. [Bold emphasis added]

2. How to build an international reputation is the tricky part. Winston acknowledges that tenure decisions are based on “short-term reputations,” and he recommends junior professors to tackle “the sorts of things that can end up producing results in a small number of years,” rather than large problems that require “ten years” before a paper can be produced.

   “Tenure is never about promise,” he stated. “It’s about accomplishment.” [Bold emphasis added]