THE CHANGING ENVIRONMENT OF HIGHER EDUCATION

AND SOME INDIA-CENTRIC CONCERNS

M. S. Ananth

The sixteenth Kumari L.A. Meera Memorial Lecture was delivered by Prof. M.S. Ananth on 25.11.2007 at the Indian Institute of World Culture, Bangalore. The text of his lecture is reproduced here with his permission.

I. INTRODUCTION

The university is the most traditional of all our institutions, and yet it is the major instrument of the unprecedented changes in our social, economic and political milieus in the last few decades. Educators in the globalised world of today are concerned about the universities adapting themselves rapidly enough to respond to the changes in the environment of higher education while retaining their raison d’etre. The fear is that unless they do so, they will not be able to raise the resources needed to sustain their excellence. In resolving this problem they “should not seek to redesign a successful university, but rather to initiate changes that enhance what is good and vital, and create what is necessary to flourish in a future less friendly to higher education” [1].

II. ENGINEERING EDUCATION

In order to discuss the challenges in the context of engineering education, I describe in brief the three well-defined aspects of engineering education: knowledge, know-how and character [2].

III. THE CHANGING ENVIRONMENT

The major changes in the university’s environment in the last decade in India are easily identified.

  1. Government Funding: The new economic policy expects institutions of higher learning to modify their role and culture so as to assist Indian industry in its progress towards globalisation. Accordingly, the revised pattern of funding lays the utmost emphasis on revenue generation and is expected to

  1. provide flexibility in managing the yearly cash flow within the overall block grant;

  2. provide an impetus to resource mobilisation;

  3. encourage long-term financial and development planning in the institutes;

  4. limit the financial liability of the Government of India;

  5. serve as a prelude towards the grant of effective administrative and functional autonomy without being inhibited in their day-to-day functioning by governmental orders and control;

  6. infuse greater economy and effectiveness in their respective operations making it eventually possible for each Institute to build up, in due course of time, a sizable Endowment Fund so that their development expenditures could be met through interest accruals from this fund and from other income that may be generated.

This change in funding policy comes at a time when higher education and research, in particular, have become expensive undertakings. While the cost of faculty and research students of comparable competence in research and teaching is about a tenth of the cost in the US, cost of scientific instruments is actually more than that in the US. The funds available per faculty member even in the IITs are less than that in good state universities in the US by at least a factor of two. Since equipment cost is about half of the total cost in research, for us to compete internationally with the good educational institutions in the West, universities in India need resources that are at least one order of magnitude higher than the current level.

  1. Accountability: The all-pervasive nature of technology has resulted not only in a large variety of jobs that require new skills, but also in a rapid obsolescence of traditional skills. Society demands institutions of higher education to cater to a much wider spectrum of technical skills, to teach these skills to young graduates, and to provide continuing education to periodically upgrade the skills of the older graduates. It is increasingly reluctant to support higher education purely as an investment for the future. The competitive nature of technologically advanced societies, the increase in consumerism and the information explosion have increased the accountability of educational institutions.

  2. Increased Opportunity: The highly competitive and increasingly global economy has forced Industry to look for emerging technologies and for research and development to provide a global competitive edge. Professional institutions have a socially important role to play and an economically important opportunity in this context.

IV. CORE VALUES

In the context of coping with these rapid changes in the environment, it is worth reiterating the core values that an educational institution is committed to maintain and nurture.

V. THE CHALLENGES

The changed environment calls for greater flexibility and responsiveness in the university’s operations in its march towards functional and financial autonomy [4]. Coping with these changes while preserving its core values poses a variety of challenges that may be articulated conveniently under various heads as follows:

Governance: Institutions of higher learning will have to move from being traditional government-supported, ministry-directed centres of higher education, to well-managed “knowledge enterprises”, articulating their vision and goals, generating revenue by charging the users rationally for their services, seeking donations, creating endowments and entering into collaborative alliances with institutions in India and abroad in the pursuit of their goals. They will have to cope with contemporary social realities and influence Government policy especially with regard to funding of education while remaining apolitical, autonomous, socially relevant and yet sufficiently detached to serve the purposes of objective evaluation and constructive criticism. They should also actively protect themselves from all outside efforts to erode their autonomy and academic freedom.

Resource generation: Apart from Government support, the primary resource for undergraduate education all over the world is the fee collected from the students. There are, however, good non-commercial reasons that limit the fees that can be so collected. Resource generation other than through fee-increase is a slow process, especially in the case of educational institutions that are governed by procedures which require approval of the Government.

Meeting Increasing demand: Universities must devise ways of providing education for at least four to five times the present student population within the next decade, while maintaining their dedication to excellence and high standards of performance.

Coping with the knowledge explosion: Universities have to work out a healthy balance between specialization that caters to a current technological demand, on the one hand, and wholeness of knowledge, on the other. They should educate students to cope with the confusion of values that follow from technology’s threats to sweep humanity off its cultural feet.

Retaining a perspective: Rapidity of change creates ahistorical attitudes. Universities have the problem of identifying and preserving that which is good in its past while dealing with contemporaneity and relevance. They should create a vibrant community of learning that is willing to articulate, profess and defend its core values while being open to healthy winds of change.

VI. SURVIVAL SKILLS

Education has become an essential skill for human survival. Rapid advances in technology have had dramatic consequences. The environment that moulded life on earth over many millennia was, until the last century, hardly influenced by the life that it so generously supports. Technology has changed this situation drastically. The environment is being altered and even replaced dynamically. The survival of life in the old environment was governed by a process of natural selection - species that adapted better to the environment survived better than those that did not. The new environment - especially the modern urban environment in which most of mankind lives - is almost entirely artificial, and survival in such an environment is governed by what one might describe as “artificial selection”.

The human species in the new environment has two levels of survival. There is, on the one hand, the level of economic survival of the individual, and on the other, that of society as a whole. There is often a conflict of interest between the two levels of survival. During the last decade, as capitalism has emerged as the only sustainable form of government and as advances in technology have magnified manifold the profit-making capacity of commercial organizations, these conflicts have become diverse and at the same time more subtle.

Thus the skills for the survival of the individual or institution are information, resourcefulness, an elastic conscience and some professional skills. Information is picked up from many places - television, radio, newspapers, magazines and even conversations with others. This component has increased explosively in this age of information technology. Shrewdness is picked up “on the street”. The urban environment today throws together people with widely different world-views and occupational compulsions: the social worker and the marketing manager, the environmentalist and the industrialist, the conservative and the liberal, and so on. It is increasingly necessary for each to be able to appreciate the other’s point of view and to develop an elasticity of conscience for peaceful coexistence and meaningful debate. Except for professional skills, formal engineering education has little to do with the imparting of these skills.

On the other hand the skills for the survival of a society as a whole are knowledge, an abiding faith in the power of professional knowledge to improve the quality of life of all people and a sense of ethics, objectivity, aesthetics and history. Educational institutions have an important role to play in this regard.

Commercial job-oriented courses including those with “foreign collaboration” provide knowledge and know-how in the form of currently-required skills for the survival of the individual. The fees they levy are determined by the perceived market value of the skills they trade in. Their own survival is determined by the commercial demand for their graduates. Many self-financing engineering colleges also operate in this mode. They satisfy a current social need, and are therefore a necessary supplement to the main-stream institutions. In the larger interests of nation the education imparted in the latter should include a significant fraction of skills for the survival of society.

Post-graduate programmes and a significant part of the research activities are almost exclusively concerned with skills for the survival of society. Some research activities and most consultancy activities should however be appropriately classified under skills for the survival of the individual, even if they involve sophisticated technologies. An enlightened Government should, in the long-range interests of the nation, whole-heartedly support activities that impart skills for the survival of the society without enforcing bureaucratic controls, while individual institutions should be asked to find the resources to support all other activities. Individual institutions should attempt to classify their activities under these heads when applying for Governmental support.

Technology is advancing so rapidly that it is essential to provide an education at the undergraduate and post-graduate levels that includes a sufficiently good grasp of the fundamentals in engineering science, familiarity with computational aids, ability to conceptualise, formulate and find reasonable solutions for energy problems subject to constraints involving aesthetics, reliability, economics, politics, ecology, law, sociology and safety considerations. Graduates with such an education will indeed be an asset to the nation. The Government should look upon this as an investment for the future rather than as avoidable expenditure.

VI. SOME CONCERNS

Institutions of higher learning should guard against the dangers of an undue emphasis on resource generation in an academic environment [5, 6]:

VI. OUR STRATEGIC PLAN

The Strategic Management Project at IIT Madras was designed to help IIT Madras respond meaningfully to the challenges described in the foregoing. It was designed as a series of coordinated interventions to bring about changes in the directions, structure, processes, interfaces and performance of the Institute. Use of external consultants, reliance on multiple sources of knowledge, design of coordinated interventions and development of a set of shared goals are significant features of this Project. Approximately three-fourths of the inputs for the Project came from within the institute, and one-fourth from outside. The Strategic Management Plan - Vision 2010 – of IIT Madras is a documentation of the project outcome and includes, apart from an Introduction, eight chapters: (i) Environmental Context; (ii) Vision, Mission and Goals; (iii) Educational Processes; (iv) Human Resources; (v) Physical Resources; (vi) Governance; (vii) Building Relationships; (viii) Financial Resources. The document is posted on the Institute’s website and I shall not dwell on the details here. It represents an attempt at identifying and articulating institutional responses that a good US university would approve of! It did bring some semblance of integration into our thinking, but we were left with a feeling of being outsiders in a plan of our own articulation because of what I can best describe as India-centric concerns.

VII. SOME INDIA-CENTRIC CONCERNS

Education is generally concerned with objects of perception and intellectual understanding. We have a tradition of learning in India that we tend to forget. Our ancient Upanishads are a study of the self. Atmanam vidhi is the great oracle of the Upanishad: Know thyself and be free. Our scriptures describe three ‘defects’ (in the observed, in the skill and in the observer) that impede learning: mala, vikshepa and avarna. Mala or ‘dirt’ covers the essential nature of the object of study, vikshepa or fickleness reflects our inability to concentrate on anything for a long time, and avarna is like a thick veil over the mind, prohibiting the entry of the rays of light into it totally. According to our scriptures, mala is removed by karma yoga or performance of unselfish action, vikshepa is overcome by upasana or devout worship, and avarna is removed by jnana acquired by studying under a competent master. Knowledge will then arise from within. Thus: know thyself and be free, Atmanam vidhi [7].

India went through a long period of colonial governance that left us with little pride, less self-esteem and an identity crisis. We have a distinct identity as a nation of a billion people with a unique history, a unique ethos and ancient traditions that yearn to find expression at the very least through our education. Traditionally, Indian culture has been associated with non-violence, an appreciation of the arts, pursuit of knowledge and pursuit of wealth, in that order. Gandhiji advocated three important traits during the freedom struggle: adherence to truth, fearlessness and non-violence. Non-violence is more than absence of physical violence: it is absence of malice and hatred. Our philosophy advocates adherence to dharma as the only way of life and self-knowledge as the ultimate knowledge. While science and technology are universal, it behooves us to remember that scientists and scientific institutions have a national identity [8].

Swami Vivekananda [9] insisted that education must focus on strength (which alone builds self confidence) and on building character in our students. Each nation, he explained, “has a central theme, the principal theme around which every other note comes to form the harmony. For India, he said, religion is the keynote of the whole music of national life. Social life and politics have to be preached through the vitality of its religion, its age-old faith in an immortal soul”.

Rabindranath Tagore [10] explains that “man in his fullness is not powerful, but perfect”. There is, however, a genuine risk of breaking up, through technology, the wholeness of his humanity by deadening man’s will, numbing his thoughts and making his movements automatic. “Turning a man into a graduate without human values is like turning a tree into a log – it will burn for you but it will never bear living flowers and fruit!”

Goshtipoorna taught his disciple and the founder of the visishta-advaita philosophy, Ramanuja, the significance of the 'ashtakshari' hymn after warning him, "Those who recite it will find god-realisation, so you should be discriminating while teaching it". The very next day Ramanuja climbed the temple tower, summoned all the residents of the town and made them repeat the hymn after him, and then explained its meaning. People were elated with joy. Goshtipoorna was wrathful but Ramanuja was unrepentant - “My action has brought happiness and deliverance to so many, and hence it does not matter even if I am condemned to everlasting perdition for defying my Guru".

Generations of Indians have lived by the oft-quoted verse in the Bhaghavad Gita (Chapter 2, Verse 47) in which Lord Krishna clarifies that man’s right is to his prescribed duty but never to the fruits thereof; he should understand that he is not the cause of the results of his action, and that work done with any desire for its results leads to bondage. What a source of liberation in the performance of one’s duties amidst the confusing realities of life!

One can go on and on with such narrations. While they touch a resonant chord in us, we have not figured out a way of integrating their essence into our modern educational process. How does one make spirituality the central note in an S & T education? How does one teach values before imparting education in technology? How does one teach the value of selflessness in a self-centred world? Are we still so colonised in our minds that we should dismiss these profound ideas as “vague metaphysics”, or should we attempt to discuss them in our higher institutions of learning? How do we factor this Indian-ness into our plans? If we do, we will perhaps be able to work with our heads and hearts in phase. As it stands, our heads plan the western way, our hearts go along without the necessary conviction, and our pursuits appear to lack the passion that is so evident in the really good schools in the West.

I would like to take the reader through a brief tour of issues that are I think are important in addressing this concern: the history of education in India, ideas about teaching and learning, education in values and the need for national pride. There may be no simple answers, but I would like our scientific community to give some thought to these matters of concern to all of us.

VIII. HISTORY OF EDUCATION IN INDIA

Ancient India evolved a unique system of education called, gurukulam, meaning education at the home of the teacher. Instruction was predominantly oral and the paradigm was very simple: knowledge is power and should be the exclusive property of the privileged classes. By the 4th century BC Buddhism had shifted education from the home of the teacher to the monastery. Some of the monasteries developed into true universities, the most famous being the University at Nalanda [11]. A paradigm shift had occurred: knowledge is power and should be the exclusive property of the meritorious. Students were admitted to Nalanda on the basis of merit. An important paradigm shift followed the discovery of printing about 500 years ago: education was democratized and the monopoly of the monasteries over books was broken. Libraries became the centres of pilgrimage for scholars. The emphasis in education until this stage was on building character.

The industrial revolution shifted the emphasis in education from building character to training of hands for the rapidly growing industrial sector. The existing models were not scalable to meet the demand, and an assembly-line process for the production of graduates was introduced. Education in India, which until the early nineteenth century was a community responsibility, became, thanks to the British administrators, the responsibility of the State, making it impersonal albeit a more effective process by which manpower could be mass-produced for industry.

The advent of Information Science about 50 years ago has led to the biggest paradigm shift in all of history: the university is no longer the sole physical repository of civilisation’s intellectual content, the sole creator of new knowledge, nor will it have exclusive rights to provide education and training [12]. The World Wide Web has already completely democratized learning. In India we have come all the way from education in the house of the guru (gurukulam) to education in the house of the student (sishyakulam?)! Have we handled the accompanying social and psychological upheaval with grace, or have we merely swept the discomfort under the carpet?

IX. TEACHING AND LEARNING

Our traditional notions about teaching have been articulated in the form of a few principles by Shri Aurobindo [13]. The first principle is that nothing can be taught; the teacher is a helper and a guide; his business is to suggest, not impose; he does not impart knowledge, but shows the student how to acquire it for himself. The second principle is that is against dharma to force education on an unwilling mind. Indeed the mind has to be consulted in its own growth. The third principle is to work from the near to the far. Illustrative examples in teaching should be drawn from the student’s own environment. We have not been successful in implementing the second and the third principles, although they are clearly important. A fourth principle is that suppleness and comprehensiveness of the mind is increased not by the number and variety of subjects for study, but by diverse approaches to the same subject. Shri Aurobindo also identified the important attributes that a student should acquire as the capacity of attention, concentration and faithfulness of memory.

Our understanding of the learning process has been elucidated by the work of Roger Sperry and his co-workers [14]. They showed that the two sides of the brain think in fundamentally different ways: the left is logical, thinks in words and uses step-by-step sequences, while the right brain uses visual images and intuition to draw conclusions. The creative process itself has four discernible stages:

This synergistic relationship between the left and right halves of the brain is the real basis of creativity and learning. The freedom from logic and structure is what makes the visual thought process of the right brain so effective in generating ideas. Since most of the ideas so generated fail, when tested logically, the left-brain is equally important in the creative process. Historically the Indian (and the Greek) educational processes have been predominantly intuitive with an emphasis on authority. Logic was secondary and the last step in the creative process was often neglected.

Disciplined rote learning that comes easily to a young mind was therefore recommended as a desirable attribute. Traditionally it was decreed that the wisdom to realise the importance of knowledge came to man long after the sharpness of the young mind in learning was blunted. The responsibility of the teachers was to focus the young mind on knowledge that their mature minds perceived as useful. This “data-gathering” step taken together with the last three steps described above is clearly an important part of the creative process! Have we as teachers abandoned our responsibilities of selecting the data to be gathered by our young minds under the guise of possessing an open scientific mind?

In Indian tradition intuitive knowledge has been accepted as God-given, and our tradition identifies humility and faith in God as prerequisites to receiving such knowledge. Srinivasa Ramanujan was profoundly religious and learnt from his mother to listen to the “voice within himself”. He was convinced that he owed his mathematical gifts to Goddess Namagiri. Hardy described him as an intuitive genius. Clearly the differences in verbal description – intuitive insight or God’s gift - are cultural in origin, but the effect of the latter description on desirable character traits is indeed very significant.

X. EDUCATION IN VALUES

One way to build character, then, is through an education in values. Traditionally, cultural attitudes about right and wrong were nurtured in our youth by means of informal structures of learning, largely inspired by the religious texts and the epics and mediated through the extended family, public discourses, the rendering of justice in case of disputes by the village panchayats and, since the establishment of the colonial rule, by the law. The first three appear to be breaking down while the legal process is too technical to be a substitute for building character. Our sacred texts list some character traits as undesirable, viz., Kama (desire), Krodha (anger), Moha (lust), Lobha (greed), Mada (intoxication) and Matsarya (jealousy). One is exhorted to compete with oneself and do one’s best, rather than to compete with others since the latter often leads to jealousy. Some of these traits appear to have been transformed into virtues in the globalised economy of today!

Social history tells us that it is the middle classes who determine the quality of life in civilizations. Education is perhaps the most important instrument available to reach and influence this middle class. Perhaps the classical method of constant repetition used by religious leaders is still the only effective tool for building character. Yet we do not attempt to articulate these ideas in modern idiom nor do we repeat them for fear of being described as “bores” [15].

XI. BUREAUCRACY IN EDUCATION

The academic environment differs from the professional environment in a fundamental way: it is the most forgiving of environments – one in which mistakes are the true stepping-stones to learning. Experimenting with new paradigms and retaining a willingness to do so are therefore important characteristics of a university. Research is the relentless pursuit of truth and demands faith in the scientific process, an uncompromising integrity and an ambience that nurtures creativity and academic freedom. President Charles Vest warned MIT not to allow its “pre-occupation with all-consuming routine to lead to a suspension of faith” [16]. He added that “the greatest problem for a university is not its somewhat disordered structure but the administration’s tendency towards bureaucracy..…that can upset the balance between trust and accountability, import certain values into the community under the guise of incentives. Such incentives are, indeed, the last gasp of an academic institution in trouble”. Based on a principle explicitly articulated by Lord Macaulay in 1830’s, the government of Her Majesty’s subjects in England was based on trust, while that of the natives in her colonies was based on mistrust. Since Independence we haven’t changed this basis but merely replaced the white sahibs by brown ones. Don’t we therefore run a much greater danger than the West of bureaucratising our educational institutions?

XII. NEED FOR NATIONAL PRIDE

I wish to conclude with an emphasis on the need for revival of national pride in our youth as part of our efforts to build character in them. India’s progress should be viewed in the light of the burden of colonialism, the complexity of her problems, the diversity of her peoples, their identity crisis and her persistence with that wonderful yet most inefficient of decision-making processes - her vibrant democracy. We have reason to be proud of our recent achievements though we have “miles to go before we sleep”. For example, since Independence we have consciously faced five important debates: Democracy vs Totalitarianism, Secularism vs Fundamentalism, Globalisation vs Self-reliance, Defence vs Development, and Centralisation vs Federalisation. We in India should be proud that, in each case, we chose the path of dharma and resisted the temptation to take the easy way out. Even when it comes to detailed achievements we often fail to recognise our great achievements in the face of non-ideal competition: the white, green and brown revolutions leading to self-sufficiency in milk, food and oil-seeds, remarkable achievements in atomic energy and space, in manufacturing and in software. Isn’t all this reason enough for us to be proud of being Indian?

REFERENCES (from the Web, unless otherwise stated)

  1. Strategic Directions Report, Indiana University, 1996.

  2. M. S. Ananth, “The invariant core of engineering education”, Proceedings of the INAE Conference on Engineering Education, 75-78, Addison-Wesley, New Delhi, 1997.

  3. J. G. Bollinger, “Strategic planning in an academic environment”, Engineering Education, 19-22, Jan.-Feb. 1990.

  4. M. Tribus, “Quality in engineering and business education”, in Essays on Education.

  5. S. D. Kertesz, Editor, The Task of Universities in a Changing World, University of Notre Dame Press, Notre Dame, 1971.

  6. R. B. Bird, “Restore the right priorities”, Chem. Engg. Progress, 80-83, 1996.

  7. Swami Krishnananda, The Divine Life Society, Sivananda Ashram, Rishikesh.

  8. E. C. G. Sudarshan and S. M. Mahajan, “The Indian scientist: some reflections”, 1985.

  9. Swami Atmapriyananda, “Swami Vivekananda’s thoughts on education”, Seminar held in RMIC, Kolkata, 2003.

  10. Rabindranath Tagore, The Religion of Man, Rupa & Co., 2002.

  11. A. N. Maheswari, “A paradigm for making education indigenous and contextual”.

  12. V. Medlin, “The impact of the Information Age on education”.

  13. Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, “On education”, Sri Aurobindo Ashram, 1997.

  14. T. R. Blakeslee, The Right Brain, Berkeley Books, 1986.

  15. M. L. Stackhouse, “Teaching values in South India: An experiment in education”, 1988.

  16. C. Vest, MIT Annual Report, 1998.


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Dr. M.S. Ananth has a Ph. D degree in Chemical Engineering from the University of Florida, USA (1972). He has been on the faculty of IIT Madras since 1972, and has been consistently rated as an excellent teacher. His research interests are in Molecular Thermodynamics and Mathematical Modelling. He is a Fellow of the IIChE and the INAE. His honours include the Herdillia prize for excellence in basic research and the R.W. Fahien Alumni Award for 2003 by the University of Florida. He has been a Visiting Professor at Princeton University (1982-83), the University of Colorado (1990-91), NIST, Aspen Tech, and RWTH, Aachen, Germany. He has been Director, IIT Madras since 2001. He is one of the architects of ‘The Strategic Plan of IITM’ and the Principal Coordinator of the National Programme on Technology Enhanced Learning (NPTEL).