This article argues that none of the reasons and objectives stated by way of justification for the replacement of the University Grants Commission by the National Higher Education Authority are genuine. There is no compatibility between the nature of problems identified and the functional capability of the institutional solution proposed. This proposal exhibits a lack of comprehension and analysis of the fundamental problems of higher education. It is a poorly disguised cover to turn this sector into a handmaiden of the corporate sector.
Rajan Gurukkal (
rgurukkal@gmail.com) is a former Vice Chancellor of the Mahatma Gandhi University, Kottayam and is presently visiting professor at the Centre for Contemporary Studies, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore.
Reports about a Ministry of Human Resource Development (MHRD) committee’s recommendation for scraping the University Grants Commission (UGC) have excited varied responses. Though officials dismiss the reports as incorrect, saying that the ministry has only constituted a committee of “experienced and credible academicians” to recommend restructuring and strengthening of the UGC for attaining its avowed goals, we cannot accept all this without being apprehensive. Presumably, the committee has submitted its report, so tailored as to be in perfect alignment with the bureaucratic agenda that hardly makes any difference between the previous and the current governments.
This is only the latest in the series of incarnations along the ongoing process of structural adjustments since the 1990s, with an added aggressiveness after the nation’s surrender to General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) in 2005 requiring legislative reforms (apparently) to gain from trade in services (in effect to benefit developed countries). In fact, its groundwork was over way back in 1985 itself by changing the name of the ministry of education into that of human resource development. Accordingly several reform bills, generally known as neo-liberal initiatives for “improving” the country’s higher education sector, have been proposed and the Private University’s Act of 1995 was the first to get legislated among the lot. Foreign Education Institutions (Regulation of Entry and Operations) Bill 2010, Prevention of Malpractices Bill and the Education Tribunal Bill 2010, National Accreditation Regulatory Authority Bill 2010 and Higher Education and Research Bill 2011 (HE&R) are examples.
Shrouded in controversies even over their constitutional validity, all of them have been pending legislation. Being sure about the withdrawal of HE&R Bill 2011, the government had constituted a UGC review committee on 30 July 2014 itself to re-examine the commission’s regulatory function.
Why Target the UGC?
Evaluating the reach of the distributive and regulatory performances of the UGC, the review committee discovers the commission to have “failed to fulfil its mandate,” and that it “side-stepped its function of being a sentinel of excellence in higher education and embraced the relatively easier function of funding education.” Constituted by all kinds of members other than academics, operated in an ad hoc working structure with no coordination due to lack of knowledge about regional offices, bureaus, disciplines and activities, the commission is in total shambles, according to the committee. It is unable to adopt “new measures for enhancing student mobility and internationalisation in higher education,” “measures for reinvigorating the teaching environment in universities and colleges,” measures for enhancing quality research and ushering in a climate of innovation in higher education. Utterly dysfunctional and completely incapable of “dealing with emerging diverse complexities,” the UGC is a sheer waste of money and manpower, according to the committee. Being too redundant to be repaired or restructured, the committee seems to have recommended a de facto replacement of the UGC by the National Higher Education Authority (NHEA).
The neo-liberal reformers are not happy about any of the 14 statutory bodies of quality assurance in professional knowledge fields, such as the All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) and the Medical Council of India, besides advisory boards like the Central Advisory Board of Education (CABE), in the higher education sector, because their regulatory functions disturb the “autonomy” and insist upon the “quality” of the institutions concerned, for determining the grants. NHEA is to subsume all these bodies including the UGC and overcome their regulatory stipulations impeding the flow of funds. UGC’s disbursing function, based on expert appraisal of academic performance, the foremost among its primary responsibilities, has been bypassed in a significant way through the introduction of the Rashtriya Uchchatar Shiksha Abhiyan (RUSA 2013). This shift from the system of expertise based academic assessment to an alternative system of liberal guideline based administrative decision, as the necessary prerequisite for the allocation of grants, is justified (often sensibly) under the alleged distributive imbalance and delay in the disbursal of UGC grants.
It is true that the UGC has many limitations such as red tape, bureaucratic delay and distributive injustice, most of which are inherent in its secretarial structure. But it is a relatively democratic consortium of experts in diverse disciplines, which discharges its regulatory and distributive responsibilities over universities and colleges of general subjects in a remarkable way, of course notwithstanding the possibility of not being foolproof at times. How to make the UGC more democratic, open and predictably error free is not the concern for the “experts” who want to scrap the institution, for their criticisms hardly mean anything beyond a justificatory rhetoric. Most of their allegations are ironical and self-contradictory as exemplified by the one accusing the UGC for not regulating “private, not-for-profit entities in higher education and for not suggesting any measures to curb commercialisation!” Truly what irritates the neo-liberal reformers in the committee is the UGC’s regulatory intervention in the privatisation and commercialisation of higher education. The UGC is an institution of nuisance for them and hence its de facto removal their main target.
Replacement of the UGC along with other regulatory national councils in the higher education sector by a single regulator has been a long-standing plan under neo-liberal reforms in the country. It was the National Knowledge Commission that recommended it for the first time by proposing the establishment of an Independent Regulatory Authority for Higher Education (IRAHE) through an act of Parliament to set standards and determine eligibility criteria for new institutions. Soon it acquired concrete form in the National Commission for Higher Education and Research 2011 (NCHER) that was to subsume all regulatory bodies in higher education like the UGC, AICTE, National Council for Teacher Education and Distance Education Council. In spite of the fact that this bill was summarily withdrawn on 24 September 2014 after nationwide debate and sustained opposition for over three years, it is back again as the NHEA Bill 2015!
What could be the source of such an irresistible pressure for establishing, by hook or by crook, this single regulator? Who are these rare ones, wiser and more learned than any of the specialist academics in the country, to constitute the infallible “Authority” of higher education?
Corporate Style
It is part of the worldwide rush of higher education industry towards embracing the corporate style of business management for making gains in the knowledge economy that represents the system of production and circulation of intellectual capital enabling heavy returns, estimated as four-fifth of the global total. American universities are being quelled by the process (Chomsky 2014). “New Knowledge” is both commodity and capital today. The role of only that research in the economy that counts gross domestic product (GDP) in terms of gross technology product (GTP) and gross science product (GSP) is decisive. It has opened up an era of intellectual assets, often called intangible assets, relating primarily to technology. This has put discovery science under intense pressure to inevitably open up or at least point to its transformation into innovation science.
Heavily dependent on innovativeness in technology and science as both commodity and capital, this phase of global economy has been called techno-capitalism—spawning new forms of corporate power and organisation with major implications for 21st century higher education (Suarez-Villa 2000). Corporate houses have erected the universal system of intellectual property rights for confiscating creativity with profound implications for the economy, science, technology and culture (Perelman 2004; Suarez-Villa 2009). The range of exploitation of intellectual assets undertechno-capitalism is far more extensive than what it had been about the exploitation of raw materials under industrial capitalism.
India, a crony capitalist state recklessly diverting national revenue for the aggressive expansion of this “techno-capitalism” under the veil of “development”—a mischievous term that still generates public hope—is being bamboozled into a techno-military disciplining system, the ultimate political consequence of which shall be the manifestation of an imperial state masked by democracy. One has to see the move to place the entire higher education sector under a single regulator as a part of this disciplining system, the urgency of which is explicit in the context of a knowledge economy. It is exerting tremendous pressure on universities and research institutions to become “of world class quality” in teaching and research. Tertiary education is obsessed with the term “innovativeness,” the latest version of commodity fetishism, that obscures the true economic character of the relation between the innovator and the corporate exploiter. It is an urgent need of the large corporate houses to bring universities and research institutes under a militaristic discipline for exploitation of intangible assets and they put up a national agenda of making gains through the production and exchange of new knowledge.
India’s emergence as a major player in the global knowledge economy is one of the reasons stated for replacing the UGC, too outmoded an institution to cater to such complex needs that include world class quality assurance, international credit transfer system, mobility across streams of general higher education, professional skills programmes and teacher training. Other major issues in the higher education sector, which the UGC and other regulatory bodies could not resolve are the unwieldy affiliating system, inflexible academic structure, uneven capacity across various subjects, and eroding autonomy of academic institutions. The implicit presumption is that the “Authority” can do all that the UGC and other regulatory bodies have failed to fulfil. But how? The illogical presumption that a handful of “experts” can do what multiple bodies of specialists could not, clearly indicates the mode of execution to be inevitably arbitrary and authoritarian. This is corporate style, pure and simple.
Bogus Objectives
None of the reasons and objectives stated by way of justification for the replacement of the UGC by NHEA is genuine. There is no compatibility between the nature of problems identified and the functional capability of the institutional solution proposed. A sheer lack of comprehension and analysis of the fundamental causation of the problems in the light of specialised scholarship is explicit here. Most of the causal connections observed by the committee are common-sensical and stale. One may not expect its members to be inclined to draw insights from critical political economy of techno-capitalism and be wary of the negative impact of the corporate trade in knowledge. But it is expected that they will use the extant science of effective teaching and learning as well as social scientific explanations for the poor quality and standards in India’s higher education. I do not think that any social scientist in the country believes that the nation’s poor gross enrolment ratio (GER) is due to shortage of institutions and therefore, a proliferation of unaided colleges and private universities is the solution (Gurukkal 2011; Gurukkal and Varghese 2012). Nevertheless, our education reformers do believe it and their recommendations have led to the rise of a large number of private colleges and universities claiming “world-class quality and excellence” as their distinct institutional attribute. It is part of the rhetoric of trade-tricks for these institutions that are engaged in competitive commercialisation of knowledge with little or no resources for quality assurance. They have good infrastructure in most cases, but lack academic resources for quality assurance.
Quality assurance is largely projected as a question of managerial efficiency by most committees and hence their recommendations invariably emphasise privatisation and commercialisation, which guarantee “standards” through competition. This approach has always precluded the possibility of analysing what quality means and how it develops. There is no dependence on specialised knowledge in the related fields like the science of pedagogy, cognitive science and neurology of learning for diagnosing the problems and resolving them. Hence the reports of such committees are nothing more than managerial implementation packages with little academic insights into the problem. Their real objectives are purposely hushed up and the stated ones are altogether bogus; the remedial prescriptions remain unfounded and self-contradictory. NHEA’s priority being the ministry’s terms of reference, what wonder can it make with regard to quality assurance.
What Is Quality?
There is no universally valid definition of “quality” in teaching and learning, which transcends time and space. Who decides what quality means is a question conveniently overlooked by all. Actually the question gives us access to the exasperating truth about who decides what quality means and who decides what needs to be done. It is the dominant economy that decides what quality means and it is those in its command who decide what needs to be done. According to the reigning global economy, quality in higher education means capability in the nurturing of professional competencies necessary for techno-capitalist development. On the contrary, those people who are conscious of social and environmental justice would argue that quality in higher learning implies the building of capacities to develop a critical consciousness. Middle-class parents lured by today’s dominant propaganda would send their children to private colleges and universities (if possible foreign owned), with the hope of acquiring professional competencies that the global industrial system demands.
High ethical postulates matter in determining what quality means in higher education, which accordingly insists upon attainment of critical reflexivity about the social utility and environmental sustainability of the science and technology one learns. Quality in teaching means rendering deeper knowledge plausible in the classroom or at the practical site or through any other learning experience chosen. It is a systematic cognitive advancement from the factual, through conceptual and procedural to meta-learning (Bloom et al 1956 and Anderson et al 2001). Quality learning is systematic, systemic and self-conscious unlearning. Quality learning enables the learner to know the coming into being of the knowledge in the discipline concerned, in technical terms—the ontology of knowledge. It is awareness about the deep, theoretical, and scientific dimension of knowledge in the discipline concerned, in technical terms—the epistemology of the knowledge concerned.
Such learning nurtures four general competencies: a higher cognitive ability, sharper analytical faculty, better language power with thoroughness about the fundamentals of the discipline concerned, and creativity or innovativeness. In short, quality in teaching and learning is what ensures the development of the above four competencies. Serious learning in any discipline is invariably subversive because it exposes the surface information shallow and shoddy as entirely different from the profoundly buried deeper truth. This is the beginning point of critical consciousness, the hallmark of an accomplished learner, who cannot but be a responsible citizen with concern for social and environmental justice.
Quality assurance has to take into account the capacity to be interdisciplinary in teaching and research. Over the past few decades several non-conventional areas of knowledge cutting across physical, natural and social sciences have come out as a result of researches beyond disciplinary boundaries, letting disciplines draw closer to one another. This convergence is neither to confront disciplines nor to bring them together. As rightly observed by Roland Barthes (1977: 155–64):
Interdisciplinary work, so much discussed these days, is not about confronting already constituted disciplines none of which, in fact, is willing itself to let itself go. To do something interdisciplinary it is not enough to choose a subject (a theme) and gather around it two or three sciences. Interdisciplinary consists in creating a new object that belongs to no one.
Interdisciplinary research and teaching is inherently inclined to extension of knowledge for social development. It is a fact that interdisciplinary knowledge production is path-breaking, far reaching and non-linear in its effects compared to what its counterpart does within the confines of the discipline. Knowledge generated beyond disciplines and across their interfaces is strikingly fresh, regenerative and converging. Convergence cuts across not only disciplinary barriers but also faculty differentiation between the natural and social sciences. Convergence research addresses the need for using deeper knowledge for resolving social developmental problems through democratisation of sciences enabling adherence to such values as people centredness, empowerment orientation, inclusiveness, and sustainability. It is seeking to facilitate: (a) production of scientific knowledge of convergence, (b) techno-social innovation for better productivity and resource sustainability, and (c) social extension for the benefit of ultimate users.
All committees recommend curricular revamping, but with little preoccupation with the science of designing programmes and their courses, because they go by catchwords like industry–higher education linkage, vocational relevance, etc. All over the world the two fundamental factors of quality assurance in any university are declaration of the programme outcome or graduate attributes and preparation of the course attributes or learning outcome of courses under each department. None of the universities in India (except for nursing science and for technology in a few engineering colleges) has bothered to satisfy these two vital requirements. They are vital because instruction strategies, learning experience and evaluation methods of courses under every academic programme in a university depend on them.
Yet another aspect quite relevant to quality is the capacity to render the politics of knowledge as part of learning. Politics of knowledge relates to the mutuality between the form of state power and character of teaching, learning and epistemology (Gordon et al 2002; Rata 2012). As a result of this tie between the state and education, as well as its instruments like the committees and their recommendations, the overall pedagogic strategy, learning mode and evaluation method followed in institutions of higher education have proved to be an effective means for the depoliticisation of knowledge. However, teaching and learning has to struggle out of it, rearticulating the higher education curricula on the basis of principles and strategies eminently conceived and profoundly enunciated long ago (Tyler 1949) and insightfully updated in recent years (Kelly 1986; 2008; Doll 1993; Beatty 2009).
I have not come across any of the committee reports reflecting on these aspects relating to the determination of what quality means. I have not found any of the committees noting the fact that none of our universities has graduate attributes or the academic programme outcome defined and their academic departments have the learning outcome of their courses spelt out. Similarly I have not seen any higher education report in government associating quality with critical consciousness. It is not accidental that the government committees seldom discuss the politics of knowledge or the relation of knowledge to social power relations, which enables the learner to be insightful about contradictory social reality. Let us not forget the fact that there is always a strong tie between the dominant interest and state power, which accounts for the absence of academic questions of quality in the reform committee reports in the higher education sector. It is extremely important to expose the fact that the higher education reform committees in India seldom take into account the consequences of the “supply driven reforms” that they recommend. None of them listen to the alarming truth about the nation, the implications of the dominant global economy and the need for the development of critical consciousness.
The Truth Is Alarming
The higher education committee reports in India engendered by the state under neo-liberal reforms are by and large repeating the exhortations of World Bank documents. They invariably hush up the alarming truth about the life of the majority of the people in the country and illuminate middle-class dreams about development, for it helps subsidising the global economy. A document of the World Bank says that India has many of the key ingredients such as: a mass of skilled, English-speaking knowledge-workers, especially in the sciences; a well-functioning democracy; and one of the largest domestic markets in the world (World Bank Report 2001). It has a large and impressive diaspora, creating valuable knowledge linkages and networks. The list goes on by adding other features like macroeconomic stability, a dynamic private sector, institutions of a free market economy, a well-developed financial sector, a broad and diversified science and technology infrastructure, a developed information and communication technology sector, and has the status of a global provider of software services, etc. The World Bank informs us that building on these strengths, India can harness the benefits of the knowledge revolution to improve its economic performance and boost the welfare of its people.
All this is about certain misleading surface features with which the neo-liberal economic paradigm fabricates its rhetoric. But the truth below the surface is extremely alarming. India, a multilingual country with English as the official medium of instruction at the tertiary level, has a poor GER of 16.3% (HRD says 20%), about 70% of the rural undergraduate students are unable to understand English, about 40% of the postgraduate students are unable to use English for higher cognition, about 60% of the youth between 22 and 35 years of age with innovative faculty and creativity belong to the villages where education is imparted in Indian languages. The knowledge base of Indian languages with respect to advanced sciences and areas of emerging importance is abysmally poor. About 80% of the total population does not have any participation in the production of knowledge because of historically and culturally contingent limitations, such as class, gender and caste discrimination.
In addition to these, there are certain demographic features that are disturbing but often presented enchanting. An optimistic version seen in the RUSA Committee Report says (RUSA 2013):
India is set to reap the benefits of demographic dividend with its huge working age population. The International Labour Organization (ILO) has predicted that by 2020, India will have 116 million workers in the age bracket of 20 to 24 years, as compared to China’s 94 million. India has a very favourable dependency ratio and it is estimated that the average age in India by the year 2020 will be 29 years as against 40 years in USA, 46 years in Japan and 47 years in Europe. In fact, we have more than 60% of our population in the age group of 15 to 59 years. This trend is very significant on the grounds that what matters is not the size of the population, but its age structure.
Before being optimistic about India’s demographic dividend, let us ask basic questions and extrapolate the reality about what percentage of people would get the opportunity to take advantage of that dividend. What would be the economic plight of this huge population as viewed against the current trend of growth under crony capitalism with no concern for equity? Is the nation really serious about equipping its youth with a socially useful and sustainable knowledge base and competencies? Outside of empty rhetoric, which committee of higher education reforms has examined the problems of access disparity, absence of social preparation strategies for improving the number of the eligible youth among poor families for enhancing the national GER, socially contingent learning difficulties, poverty, child labour and gender discrimination?
Critical consciousness, the most vital attribute of quality learning, may vary between the liberal pragmatic and the radical critical theoretical type (Horton 2003; Brookfield 2005). Value postulates are integral to social researches heading for the production of deeper knowledge that is inherently subversive and critical, for it unveils the hidden contradictions and unethical practices in human affairs and social processes (Latour and Poter 2004). The highest and the most powerful level of critical consciousness is the one based on critical theory, which emboldens to speak truth to power.
Quality higher education today is the one that generates critical consciousness essential to understand the implications of the knowledge economy that is triggered by capitalist globalisation. Critical faculty helps students understand that the growing global importance of intangibles like new knowledge and technological innovativeness is widening the inequalities between and within nations and aggravating brain drain. It makes clear to them that the techno-military-corporate complex is growing dominant and becoming ever more intrusive and rapacious through its control over technology and innovation (Suarez-Villa 2012). In the corporate sectors of computing, communications, synthetic bioengineering, bioinformatics, bio-pharmocology, medicine, genetic engineering, artificial intelligence, bio-mimetics, etc, a major chunk of our brilliant youth is being squeezed under the techno-bureaucratic regimentation and ruthless exploitation in total violation of all hard earned labour rights. They may be paid well, but are shackled to restless, commodified brain labour round-the-clock. No committee bothers to understand the primacy of critical consciousness in higher education and the significance of promoting people-centred and empowerment-oriented higher education, which is going to decide the strength of the nation in the era of its demographic advantage. Will experts rushing to replace the partly democratic bodies with oversight of higher education at present, with the authoritarian single regulator listen empathetically?
Trap of Autopoiesis
Social theory informs us that education is an instrument of the socio-economic system. It is an instrument controlled by the techno-capitalist global knowledge economy and naturally its primary function would be democratisation of conformity, rather than cultivation of critical thought. The advancement of deeper knowledge, of course, would enhance critical consciousness and enable collective action for social emancipation, but the critical edge would be lost in the process of higher education under the inescapable influence of our socio-economic system. The educational process would involve a series of depoliticisation practices that would disallow dissemination of the critical dimension of knowledge. The pervasiveness of poor quality higher education with alienated teaching, learning and research rampant in the country is not altogether accidental, they are indispensable for the reproduction of the contradictory socio-economic system. That education is a catalyst of social change is, therefore, a myth.
Mechanical ways, means, relations and strategies of teaching and evaluation in colleges and universities continue to deprive knowledge of its politics, that is, its socio-critical dimension. Higher educational institutions imbued with built-in mechanisms for depoliticising the transmission of deeper knowledge have the consequence of turning the youth into apathetic, mechanical beings. In fact, there is nothing weird about this depoliticising aspect since education—one of the most powerful social institutions—normally ensures conformity rather than critical thought, for reasons of political economy. It is technically known as autopoiesis or the process of the socio-economic reproduction by turning even antithetical elements into self-referential components (Luhmann 1990; Livingston 2006). Every educational institution is a formally constituted space for the reproduction of the relations of techno-capitalism. In short, educational institutions shall primarily service what the socio-economic system requires (Bourdieu and Passeron 2000). Nevertheless, there is no need for being pessimistic about all this, because what we find theoretically unlikely is to be made politically feasible. Let the enlightened in the higher education sector, including students, join hands to resist the growing corporate dominance by empowering ordinary people with the knowledge they need, for they alone can ensure quality in teaching, learning and research through collective cooperation.
