Tackling trust deficit in higher education

M Rajivlochan

Historian

Grandma, stop! That is what the anonymous girl who wore a red riding hood should have told her grandmother. She did not. We know that she ended up in a piquant situation where she could not notice the difference between her grandmother and the wolf. If you are unfamiliar with the story of the Red Riding Hood, then you need to understand that we, Indians, the people of India, all of us who have a stake in the future of India need to tell the government to stop meddling in higher education. That is the only thing which will ensure that the universities of India will rise to the occasion and lead the country into a golden future once the Covid pandemic is over.

Essentially, this revolves around the matter of trust. Trust the university administrator to do good for the university. Trust the teacher to do good for the student. Trust the student to actually focus on the task of studying and learning the meta-skills that are required for doing well in the rapidly transforming world of the 21st century. There are only two things that the government needs to do. The first is to provide funds for higher education. The second is to ensure that those involved in higher education produce tangible results, outcomes, of the sort that the government, as the caretaker for society, expects them to produce. By all means, tie down the funds to outcomes but do ensure that the outcomes are not secret and available to the public for scrutiny. Today, the government is involved in all the ructions of a university and committed to hauling up everyone who has desisted from total inaction.

We need to keep in mind that for the past three decades, the higher education sector has been working on worse than a shoe-string budget. Yet, the professors and researchers continue to produce good results even while baby-sitting more than 20 million young adults who emerge out of a completely dysfunctional system of school education.

The even more heartening thing to notice is that most of these 20 million end up being productive members of society. The only problem is that they aren’t productive enough. They haven’t learnt enough meta-skills to make them creators of knowledge or wealth. And that — few people in society realise this connection — has substantially to do with the fact that our entire system of higher education is built on layers of distrust. The government distrusts the university. The university distrusts the students and teachers. The students and teachers distrust each other. Little wonder that everyone finds various excuses for not doing what essentially is the core task of higher education: the task of creating new knowledge, knowledge that is useful to society, and, knowledge which will make India great again.

Today, India has a better gross enrolment ratio in higher education than it did ten years ago. A lot of private investment has been made in developing the educational infrastructure. Now is the time to ensure that this infrastructure actually provides value for money invested. In this, the most important would be a renewed focus on quality and ensuring that higher education actually provides students with meta-skills that they could then use to do well in any field of life after obtaining a degree.

There is also a very important gap in our system of higher education that needs to be addressed with alacrity. This is about taking feedback from students on their expectations from higher education and their experience in college. What is expected from them? What do they expect from education? To what extent is higher education actually living up to their expectations? What are the gaps from their point of view?

A few years ago, some non-Indian students attending some of the most prestigious courses in some prestigious institutes of India, had taken time off to share their actual experience of higher education in India. It would do us well to take note of what they had to say.

‘All my fellow exchange students… concurred that the academics were a joke compared to what we were used to back home. In one economic history class, the professor would enter the room, take attendance, open his notebook, and begin reading. He would read his notes word for word while we, his students, copied these notes until the bell sounded. Next class, he would find the spot where the bell had interrupted him, like a storyteller reading to children and trying to recall where he had last put down the story. He would even pause slightly at the end of a long sentence to give us enough time to finish writing before he moved on. And this was only when he decided to show up — many a time, I arrived on campus to find the class abruptly cancelled. Classmates exchanged cell phone numbers and created phone trees just to circulate word of a cancelled class. I got a text almost daily about one of my classes. My foreigner peers had many similar experiences.

‘I would sit in class and think to myself, ‘Can you just photocopy your notebook and give me the notes so I can spend my time doing something less completely useless?’ I refused to participate. Instead, I sat at my desk writing letters to friends.’ Another exchange student had to say this about one of the top-ranking institutions of India: ‘Classes always start 10 minutes late, half of the students seem to sleep or talk, and students don’t seem very passionate about the subject. I was shocked to learn that while submitting assignments, usually, a few students do the work and the rest of the class copies and for exams, cheating is almost a norm. Of course, not all the students I have seen are like this but this behaviour at Rice (University) would have met with serious punishment, so I have just been amazed. I have been told that these actions are because most students plan to go into business or finance so engineering does not interest them very much. At Rice, since we have the ability to choose our major, students are often eager to come to class or at least enjoy the subject they are studying.’

This, we would say, is the consequence of distrusting the university, its teachers and administrators from doing good. The top down approach in the management of higher education that the government has taken for almost three decades now has not yielded any positive result. Can we do away with it? Let the teacher do good to the students? And let students learn subjects that really interest them? In a form that enables good placement for them?

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