US campus protests: a post-script

In my last post, I wrote about the muted faculty response to the pro-Gaza student protests in the US. Based on my experience at IIMA, I find this not at all surprising. Over the long years I spent there, I found that, on a number of matters of internal governance, faculty response was inadequate. I could cite numerous instances. Let me mention one.

In 2008, IIMA announced a hike in the two year PGP fee from Rs 4.4 lakh to 11.5 lakh, an increase of 155% at one go. The faculty came to know of the biggest fee hike in IIMA’s history via email on convocation day after the board had approved it. Many faculty were busy with the convocation formalities and had not checked their email, so they got to know about it from the newspapers the next day!

There was a bit of a storm in the papers. The former minister for HRD, Dr Murli Manohar Joshi, denounced the fee hike saying, ''It is a decision of the elite, by the elite and for the elite.”

A few days later, a faculty meeting was held. A senior faculty member rose to say that the convention had been for fee matters to be brought to the faculty for discussion. He wondered why this had not happened. He was right. The procedure was for the director to set up a committee to look into the costing of the PGP programme and recommend a fee. The proposed fee would be brought to the faculty council and, after approval, would be duly endorsed by the board of governors.  

The then director bristled at the suggestion that the faculty body needed to be consulted in the matter. “Faculty autonomy has always been a myth”, he said blandly, adding, “Financial decisions are always taken by the board.” Going by precedents, this was factually incorrect. But even if it was true, were the board and the director not obliged to provide a rationale for a near tripling of the fee at one go? There has to be a better argument for raising fees than “we can get away with it, so we shall”. So far as we could make out, the increase in fee bore no relationship whatsoever to any escalation in costs.

Institutional autonomy does not mean that the director and the board can do whatever they like. The IIMs are public institutions and are expected to conduct themselves with a measure of transparency and a sense of accountability to the people at large. It was incumbent on the board and the direct to explain why exactly they had gone in for a stupendous increase in fee. They failed to do so. 

In the case of the fee hike, both the faculty body and the board failed to ensure conformity with these basic principles. The board of governors was a mute witness to the director's frontal assault on faculty governance. From that point on, governance at IIMA went inexorably downhill, with the consequences that have inevitably followed, including the passage of IIM Act (Amendment) Bill in parliament last year.  IIMA enjoys considerably autonomy now but it is subject to monitoring- by the government, not the board of governors. Given the conspicuous failures of the board over the years, that is most appropriate.