What is wrong with public-funded Indian Universities?

The higher education sector in India has been largely a failure story- is what most of the analysts believe. Except for the few institutions such as IITs, AIIMSs, and Indian Institute of Science, most of the public funded Universities have shown their inabilities to keep themselves geared up to embrace the contemporary challenges with respect to quality of research, relevance of curricular contents and to the relevance of instructional methods. This write-up tries to enlist a few vital challenges that most of the Central and State-owned Indian universities have failed to recognize and address. These are based entirely on the perception and experience of the author’s working with a central university as a faculty member for about fifteen years. Some of the experiences mentioned in the article need not be from author’s direct experiences but may be anecdotal.

1. Illogical and bizarre Teachers’ Recruitment Process

Over the years, this author has realized that often the best candidates are not shortlisted and the worst among the shortlisted candidates are selected during the interviews as teachers. One of the reasons for this aberration is a ‘purely mathematical shortlisting strategy’ where only numbers matter and not quality. For instance, the shortlisting committee members themselves often are not sure of the quality of the journals where the candidate has published his/her research. They do not know if the impact factor claimed by the journal is true or fake one. Similarly, there is no criterion to ascertain if a certificate showing the participation of a candidate in an international conference is genuine one or is it of one of those with a single speaker from Nepal or Sri Lanka. What matters most is the certificate and the papers: the more the papers, the more are the points.

The second reason behind the selection of undeserving candidates is a poorly structured interviewing procedure. Most of the times the experts do not know the difference between a viva-voce examination and an interview. They mostly do not ask the candidate about his/her plans to improve the work output of the university or his/her ideas about the administration of academically active departments. They mostly end up asking questions that assess recall or, at the most, comprehension of their own subjects of expertise. They fail most of the times to evaluate one’s research skills and higher order thinking skills.

Another major problem that deals with the recruitment process is ‘canvassing’. Though most of the universities in their advertisements state that canvassing in any form would be a disqualification, practically there exists no such mechanism to disqualify the candidature. Most of the influential candidates use this method to gain access to recruiting authorities and ensure their selection. This author is yet to see a University that has taken up some tangible measures to curb such practices.

Suggested Measures:

A. Measures to improve the shortlisting mechanism:

It may be a good idea to include at least three domains of evaluation while shortlisting the candidates, especially where the number of applicants for a teaching post is more than that can be invited for an interview. Though this may not be applicable for all diverse disciplines, this idea is definitely implementable in science and other applied disciplines.

a) Writing Skills:

A written test be held where all the applicants are invited to write an examination. This test can be held online to save time and resources. This will test their expertise in the knowledge domain along with their writing skills. Written communication happens to be one of the weakest dimensions of skillsets among many university teachers- is what this writer has observed. This examination must include questions on higher order thinking skills such as analytical skills along with language skills. 1/3rd of the weightage may be given to this test based on the marks obtained.

b) Teaching Skills:

All candidates who score well (maybe those who score above the 75th percentile rank) in the test can be invited to give lectures to the UG and PG students. The evaluation may be done by students on a structured questionnaire that should include the assessment of communication skills, language skills, subject knowledge, presentation skills etc., and the average marks obtained may be given a weightage of another 1/3rd. This will test their teaching skills.

c) Research Skills and Aptitude:

University teachers must clearly know that research is expected out of them apart from their routine teaching. Hence, the remaining 1/3rd of the weightage may be given to the research aptitude. This could be calculated based on the quality of publications in terms of originality and general understanding of research and publication process. An objective rating scale may be evolved to evaluate each publication based on the number of citations received, quality of the published journal, indexing database, originality, extent of the contribution of the individual author etc.

After this exercise, the shortlisted candidates may be asked to appear for an interview. This list is likely to represent the candidates with a good combination of knowledge, skills, and attitude required for a teacher and a researcher. This method would avoid giving unnecessary and undue weightage to the number of conferences attended, the number of papers presented, the number of courses attended etc.

B. Measures to improve the interviewing process

The basic need is to train the experts to test one’s higher order thinking skills. Along with the invitation, a booklet on interviewing skills must also be sent to the experts and it must be ensured that they ask the questions to evaluate research aptitude, application skills and analytical skills of the candidates.

C. Measures to curb canvassing

Every university needs to come up with guidelines and measures to curb the practice of canvassing by announcing specific indicators of canvassing and the kind of evidence permitted as a proof of canvassing including the specific actions that are likely to be initiated against such candidates. During the interview, all the selection committee members may be asked to fill out a form to declare that they have not received any phone calls from influential people/ Politicians/ others in favor of any candidate, or, that any candidate has not visited their home pleading for his/her selection or has not offered any bribe etc. There must be some provision to report the cases of canvassing with evidence such as recorded phone calls, CCTV footages etc. There must be a form along with a list of admissible evidence which must be made available on the university websites so that the prospective candidates will not gather the courage to involve themselves in canvassing.

2. The absence of any publication guidelines

In the recent years, the quality of research publications from developing countries has been attracting criticism world over. For a country such as India, this situation is being proven to be damaging because it creates a bad reputation worldwide. University Grants Commission (UGC)’s guidelines mandating certain number of publications for promotions has fueled the mushrooming of substandard and questionable research journals that thrive on author-pays model and misuse the situation. Though some universities have started prescribing guidelines for their staff and students about the research publications, (for instance, Savitribai Phule University of Pune is one such university that has issued its own guidelines for publications), however, this has not yet become a norm.

Suggested Measures:

Instead of coming up with a whitelist of journals, UGC must state that journals indexed with more than one credible database such as Scopus, PubMed and Science Citation Index will be considered for promotion/ recruitment. UGC must come up with a warning to the university teachers about the consequences of publishing with predatory journals. Teachers publishing with such journals aiming at a promotion must be made answerable and a provision for imposing some disincentives must be introduced. Universities must release strict guidelines regarding the publications and the kinds of journals that are required to be avoided.

3. Poor intramural research funding arrangements

Though many new entry-level teachers get some seed money in many universities, there is no consistent funding arrangement for intramural research projects. Applying for extramural funding is always cumbersome and usually encounters a lot of hindrances at multiple levels. This often makes the senior teachers lose interest in research once they attain the highest level of promotion.

Suggested Measures:

Some competitive mechanism may be put in place so that a specific number of teachers may be declared eligible for receiving intramural funding based on their past performance/ project proposals.

4. Dogma of Seniority

Universities still consider that being senior in age and hierarchy equals to being wiser than all juniors: that is why many key positions such as Head, Dean, Principal etc are by default occupied by the “senior most” people irrespective of their academic, administrative and other capabilities. Sometimes these people are appointed on a rotational basis, but also based on seniority. On one hand, this makes uninterested people occupy key positions and on the other, it may make undeserving people misuse their positions.

Suggested Measures:

The appointments to the key positions such as Head, Dean, Director etc must all be made through inviting applications and only interested and capable people should get opportunities to occupy these positions. While to some extent the experience accompanied by seniority is required, it does not mean that all mid-career teachers are useless. Rather, mostly they are the ones who have the zeal to change the system in all possible positive ways and they should get opportunities to execute their dreams.

5. Compromised research and publication Ethics

While plagiarism and publication with poor quality journals are two well-known challenges, non-adherence with the ethical aspects of research and publication is another major problem the Universities have not yet been able to handle. There is no stringent mechanism to periodically screen for possible fabricated data, falsified data etc. While students want their degrees on a timely basis, often supervisors too want their list of “PhDs supervised” to grow quickly to be able to get more points for promotion. This often leads to compromised research ethics and publication ethics. Practices such as distortion of data, simultaneous submissions to more than one journal etc are very common in universities.

Suggested Measures:

There needs to be a mechanism to fix responsibility in cases of any fabrication or falsification of data. Dis-incentivization in the form of cutting down the increments will be helpful in proven cases of fraud. There must be a provision for sudden and surprise visits from external expert members to screen the progress of research work and to verify the raw data. Further, the cases of retractions and editorial queries/complaints must be taken up seriously by the authorities of the universities.

While these are a few steps that are possible to take, it depends entirely on the Syndicates and Executive Councils of the Universities whether they have the willingness to tackle these issues or not.

Note:

An edited version of this article has been published in University World News and is available at:
How can we fix what is wrong with Indian universities?