Hyderabad: The NEP 2020 is an impressive and ambitious document that also comes across as brightly and optimistically futuristic. Having met and discussed the plans with some of the committee’s members, I’m not surprised by the future-leaning nature of the document – it feels natural and expected.
Among the people with whom I’ve had the opportunity of exchange are Dr K Kasturirangan, the reputed scientist and Dr M.K. Sridhar Makam, an academic with a background in business administration who now heads a research and policy centre of higher education in Bengaluru. But probably the most striking representative of innovative thought in the committee was Manjul Bhargav, Princeton mathematics professor and winner of the Fields Medal, who credits much of his mathematical prowess to his love for Indian Classical Music.
But pulling a behemoth such as India into the future is also a remarkably ambitious venture, so its success will depend on substantial allocation of resources, and the cooperation of many. As is repeated often: a policy is only as good as its implementation.
When it comes to higher education, several striking features stand out.
First, the sharp critique articulated in the document of the rigid separation of the disciplines. For many of us who have studied in the public universities of the nation – and doubtless for those who do so today – the rigid boxes in which disciplines feel cast in the mould of eternity. Arts, science and commerce – the die is cast early on, way back in high school, and it threatens to shape the character of your career, indeed, life, all of it.
Clearly this is a legacy of the examination-driven curriculum from the British colonial university – of the University of London, not the Oxbridge model – which sought to transform brown men to competent clerks, a system that sits unchanged till today. Meanwhile, the world has moved on – to the 21st century generation of knowledge where Stanford’s promiscuous interplay of mathematics, music and literature in its labs and departments energize the innovative culture of Silicon Valley. In this document’s focus on interdisciplinarity – which I’ve elsewhere called contradisciplinarity, given the unlikely nature of the collaborations involved – we finally have the promise of the Indian higher education system waking up to the innovative knowledge economy of the 21st century.
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The committee’s celebration of multidisciplinary universities that unite research and teaching comes as a natural consequence to this mode of thought. Not only the rigid separation of disciplines, the stark polarization of teaching and research was also a structural inheritance of the colonial model from the 19th century. Research was carried in research institutes, be it the Asiatic Society or specialized centers of scientific pursuit, and teaching was left to the colleges.
The German model, designed by Alexander von Humboldt, fused research and teaching in the same venue, which inspired the high-powered US universities in the 20th century. This has been sorely missing from our universities, barring a handful of exceptions. NEP 2020 shows itself to be sensitive to this need, and it insists on the long-overdue unification of research and teaching across disciplinary divides, such as the collaboration between the humanities and the STEM disciplines that the document specifies.
It will take considerable rewiring of the professorial mind in India to institute this thinking that unites interdisciplinary research and teaching in the same venue. This needs research overhaul at the highest level, which will in turn train the future faculty. The proposed National Research Foundation, if carried out to the best of its promise, must address this crucial need.
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With this ambition in mind, it is only naturally expected that substantial investment in research and faculty development will be called for, and the NEP does not disappoint on this count. This is very clearly specified in the document, and given the rather poor culture of research training in this country – Andre Beteille once called our doctoral culture the production of trained incapacity – this is a sore need. This is something, however, which cannot be transformed overnight – it is a matter not of administrative change but reshaping a culture, so it is very hard to predict success on this count.
Probably the most striking feature of the proposed new higher education landscape is the flexibility offered to the undergraduate degree programs with the multiple exit options. I’ve always felt that a well-rounded undergraduate education that combines depth with range should be of four years’ duration, and now with the new document that has become a reality.
The staggered exit options in each of the 4 years – with the diploma, advanced diploma, and the 3 & 4 year B.A. degrees – are however, really striking, to the point of being, I’d say, somewhat risky. One cannot help worrying: what kind of tertiary education would one take away after one year of college? Even back in our days of B.A./B.Sc/B.Com Pass and Honors, Pass students, without an Honors subject, spent two years in college, and that was considered a pretty skeletal education. Hopefully this one-year exit option will not be abused, which will essentially lead to a trivialization of college education.
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Finally, the new policy allows leading international universities (within the top 100 of standardized ranking systems) to set up campuses in India. This is a huge step – essentially the liberalization of Indian higher education, and its consequences, either positive or negative, can be too far reaching to attempt a prediction now. And whatever it means to the domestic landscape of higher education, it is clear that this will have huge significance to institutions of higher education in the West, especially the US and the UK, where universities are now battling a phalanx of adversities, ranging from financial shortfall, shrinking budgets, to dropping enrollment and hostile government policies.
Long dependent on international enrollment for crucial parts of their revenue, the possibility of international campuses in a vast educational market as India will call for significant investments and collaborations, but more crucially, it can open up new streams of revenue for them. Yale-NUS in Singapore, and the various campuses of New York University in the Middle East have already set striking precedents. Not surprisingly, the Times Higher Education has already run a lead story on this liberalization of Indian higher education.
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What will it mean for the domestic landscape? Will it raise the bar for indigenous universities? Will it place them in a climate of unhealthy competition? Will it drain its student body? Will it reorient the public mindset about higher education? Who will the change affect? Just a tiny privileged minority? Will it mean anything to the country’s vast youth population on the whole?
Only time can answer these questions. A futuristic position is an ambitious one, but it can also be a costly one.
(Saikat Majumdar is Professor of English and Head of the Department of Creative Writing at Ashoka University. Saikat is a novelist and critic, educated in India and in the United States, where he taught for several years, most recently at Stanford University, before joining Ashoka.)
