The UGC’s mandate is to elevate, not strangulate

The University Grants Commission (UGC) has been in the news again, with the States pushing back on its directive on the procedure for appointment of vice chancellors. It is unusual for chief ministers to concern themselves so closely with minutiae of this kind, but those of Kerala and Tamil Nadu have campaigned against it, terming the directive unconstitutional as it impinges upon matters that are the prerogative of the States. They are particularly unhappy that the UGC may be cementing the practice of Governors choosing vice chancellors. As the States shoulder much of the burden of financing universities, and have a deciding role in instituting them, their insistence that the elected State government rather than the Governor appointed by the Centre have the final say has validity.

A meaningful innovation

However, the substantive part of the UGC’s recent directive was an amended guideline for the qualifications for a vice chancellor. The requirement that the vice chancellor must be an academic has been rescinded, and eligibility has been extended to persons who have distinguished themselves in other fields, including industry. This is actually a rare instance in recent times of a meaningful and potentially gainful innovation by the UGC. Globally, heads of academic institutions have not always been professional academics. In the U.S., former secretaries of state are invited to serve as faculty in the best universities of that country. The colleges of Oxford and Cambridge have distinguished themselves by choosing as their heads ex-parliamentarians, writers, and journalists, and no one has thought the practice odd. The public very likely see such appointments as adding value, as most of these individuals would have had exceptional careers.

India is not a stranger to this practice. Over 50 years ago, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi appointed G. Parthasarathy as the first vice chancellor of JNU. He had played many roles in a distinguished career of public service and went on to launch JNU as a premier university of India. So the suggestion that inducting persons from outside to assume leadership of the university is likely to be damaging is unwarranted.

How the UGC should be judged

Not only is it far fetched to decry the UGC recommendation on the qualifications for a vice chancellor as “unconstitutional” and against the spirit of federalism, but such complaints detract from a scrutiny of the UGC’s record on the parameter by which it ought to be judged. The UGC was established, by an Act of Parliament, in 1956, with the express intention that it maintains acceptable standards of higher education across the country. What it has instead succeeded in achieving is to have imposed a uniformity of rules and regulations across universities while achieving next to nothing in elevating them to global standards in the dissemination and production of knowledge. The poor preparedness of India’s graduates has been flagged in public. Recently, a judge of the Supreme Court lamented the quality of young lawyers practising in India’s courts. Some years ago, the head of a leading company of the Tata Group spoke of the quality of engineers India is producing. Note that this only points to the standard of instruction in the higher education system. We have not even begun to talk of the quality of research, including that of the PhDs being awarded.

Curiously, the UGC seems to have nothing to say on the quality of education in universities. Instead, it deploys all its resources and energies to procedural matters that are best left to the educational institutions themselves. Its interventions encompass rules on an attendance requirement for students, the regulation of faculty time, the maintenance of records on examinations conducted, and procedure by which the curriculum is chosen. Some of these requirements were part of the apparatus of generalised surveillance of the natives in colonial times. It is unfortunate that they have not been junked. Much of it has no bearing on learning, apart from undermining faculty performance, the lifeblood of the university. Having managed to tie down a university’s functioning to the last detail, the UGC has succeeded in expunging all agency from faculty, who once took responsibility for learning outcomes but consider themselves no longer accountable for them, as their wings have been clipped. Fifty years ago, the university was a freer space and with greater faculty presence. It is difficult to make sense of the development that the 1991 reforms have been accompanied by more intrusive regulation of India’s universities. It is also difficult to makes sense of the fact that as the country’s per capita income has risen, the stature of its public university has measurably declined. Work at the cutting edge of science by Satyen Bose in Dacca and S. Chandrashekar in Madras in the early part of the last century took place in public universities at a time when India was far poorer.

The production of knowledge is an enterprise without borders. Nothing demonstrates this better than the spectacular emergence of DeepSeek, the AI App from China. We must reflect deeply on why India is not a player in this game. Globally, universities are one of the sites of production of knowledge but those in India are not governed with a view to attaining this goal. A high compliance burden due to micro management by the regulator and excessive social engineering imposed by political parties have resulted in their persistent underperformance. The UGC’s original mandate behoves it to address the situation.

Pulapre Balakrishnan, honorary visiting professor, Centre for Development Studies, Thiruvananthapuram