IIT Bombay suicide: crime and punishment

The debates on TV and in other places are along predictable lines and pretty sterile.

If a professor finds a student is cheating, is that a crime?

Is it right to invoke the SC/ST act just because an SC student is involved?

How can IITs maintain their standards if they cannot enforce academic integrity?

We need to be clear that the issue is not cheating but how an institution responds to it.

Cheating in exams clearly is not on- it is unfair to those who  are not cheating. So the issue is not whether the professor was right in intervening when he found somebody was using his mobile (assuming for the moment that is what happened, since the matter is under investigation). The issue is: How do you respond to acts of cheating? 

At IITs and IIMs in general, faculty tend to be behave as though copying or plagiarism are the ultimate crime worthy of capital punishment.

Sorry, no. There are much bigger sins in this world than cheating in exams. And the answer to cheating is not to act in ways that would ruin a student's career or life. Some deterrence is required. If it is a major exam (such as the end term), perhaps an F grade may be  appropriate. For a 10-mark in-term quiz, you may mark down the student's grade by one or two notches.

But that's not how the system responds. Students are often told to repeat a semester. They may face suspension for a year (which, it is alleged, was the threat made to the IIT Bombay student). Or you may face expulsion from the Institute), which could means years of wasted time and money and utter devastation.

At IIMA, where I taught for more than two decades, I was taken aback at the sheer fury that faculty displayed when instances of cheating came to light. Many would howl for the severest punishment to be meted out. In one pathetic case, the mother of the student facing expulsion fell at the feet of the Programme Chair and begged forgiveness- she was asked to leave the room and the Institute went ahead with the punishment.

I found it difficult to digest faculty claims of uncompromising adherence to principle. The same concern for principle was notably absent where those above were involved, say, the director or even senior colleagues. Student  cheating was a petty transgression compared to the colossal violations perpetrated by those in positions of authority. Faculty's attitude towards these violations was one of benign indifference. 

So don't tell me about academic integrity. Academic integrity applies not just to students but to everybody in the system. It is just one aspect of institutional integrity. Show your adherence to scruple with respect to all violations of norms, not just violations on the part of students. Otherwise, what you are doing is nothing more than cheap bullying and abuse of power.

This morning, I saw a note by S H Patil, a distinguished professor of Physics at IIT Bombay, who taught me when I was a student there. He says he carried out an experiment with examinations. He would give open book exams with no time limit- you could take ten minutes or ten hours to finish them. At the end of the day, the answer sheets were to be dropped off at his office. He would tell students he expected them to observe norms of fair play. His experiment worked wonderfully except in a couple of cases. In those cases, he simply spoke to the students and reminded them of basic principles.

That is the way to go. Repose trust in students, try to develop a peer culture  of enforcement and overlook or respond mildly to the occasional transgression. Cheating in exams is not such a big crime that one has to pay for it with one's life. 

Post-script: IIT B has set up a ten member committee, including student representatives, to look into the incident. The press report says the Institute has shared the composition of the committee with the Ministry and awaits its approval. Clearly, the government has waved the danda at the Institute. The government understands that an internal committee appointed by the director would have little credibility. 

Silicon Valley CEO's high praise for IIT Madras

 Vivek Wadhwa, a successful Silicon Valley entrepreneur, has high praise for IIT Madras in this article:

When I visited IIT Madras earlier this year, I was blown away by the talent, world-class facilities, and their ability to connect with top scientists across India. I was so impressed that I decided to outsource the development of breakthrough technologies for my company, Vionix Biosciences, to them. Frankly, I told my friends and VCs in Silicon Valley where I live, that IIT Madras puts MIT, Duke, Stanford - and the Valley itself - to shame in terms of intellectual capacity, scale, ambition and  readiness to collaborate.

I've been more than amazed by the progress IIT Madras has already made in building technologies that could never be built in the West. The last company that tried to develop what we're doing was Theranos, which burned through $1.4 bn on medical diagnostics that are nowhere near the advanced solutions IIT has already created - at a tiny fraction of the cost.

Wadhwa goes on to make suggestions about the sort of research that Indian educational institutions must focus on:

India must avoid the pitfalls of the US research system, which, despite vast investments in basic research, is often disconnected from real-world applications. The US spends over $130 bn annually on academic research. Yet, much of it remains locked in the 'Valley of Death', where promising research never transitions into marketable solutions. As former dean of engineering at Duke University, Tom Katsouleas had told me, based on his work with the US National Academy of Engineering, 'Only about 1% of university patents are ever commercialised.'

I do not know how IIT Madras evaluates faculty. Do commercial applications carry as much weight in tenure and promotion decisions as publications in journals? If they do, then IIT Madras will find it difficult to improve its ranking in international ratings of institutions of higher education.

But then if research publications alone matter, institutions such as IIT Madras may lose out on applications. Wherein lies the balance between pure research and impact on practice? The answer has implications not just for IITs but also the IIMs and other places. 

Should the IIMs be trying to influence  practice through executive training, consulting and participation in policy-making by using the available research? Or should they try to catch up on research with the top institutions of the world, an objective that will remain elusive in the foreseeable future?

 

India's MOOC experiment: is it ill-conceived?

India has kicked off a big experiment in MOOC with a hundred engineering colleges getting recorded lectures of IIT professors in nine subjects, according to an article in BS:

Under the QEEE programme, courses will be taught by a combination of senior Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) faculty and others. During regular class hours, the students will hear and see faculty deliver recorded lectures. Regular faculty will be present during class hours, in a supportive role. In the evening, e-tutorials will be held to enable live virtual discussions between students and tutors. Real time online experiments will be made available via e-labs.
According to a news report, as many as nine subjects will be delivered in MOOC format, including in the fields of mechanical engineering, civil engineering, computer engineering and mathematics. The courses will all be in advanced subjects such as wireless connections, linear algebra, and heat transfer for mechanical engineering.

What took my breath away was the quote from the founder of one of the leading MOOC providers, Udacity, Sebastian Thrun:

Thrun said in an interview he "was realising, we don't educate people as others wished, or as I wished. We have a lousy product. It was a painful moment (when I realised this)."

Thrun's statement came in response to the weak performance of students who took MOOCs over the Udacity platform at San Jose State University in remedial mathematics, college algebra and elementary statistics. Only 25 per cent of the online students passed, less than half the pass rate for students who took the course face-to-face in real time. Thrun is so distressed with the performance of MOOCs that he is changing the focus of Udacity from academic education to corporate education.

The author, Rafiq Dossani, raises pertinent questions about the viability of the programme. He distinguishes between MOOC for basic courses and MOOC for advanced courses. The latter require far more interaction in order to contribute to learning, he contends. Hence the former are more likely to succeed; deploying resources for the latter is not efficient.

I would go along with this proposition and I would add that MOOC can be used for scaling up student numbers at elite institutions by using it to provide very basic concepts, background and additional information and analysis. Scarce faculty time can then be deployed for exposition of more advanced topics.

Where MOOC is intended as a substitute for class-room education (other than executive training), the employability of students who have taken a MOOC diploma must be tested before we commit more resources.




 

Hogwash on dilution of the IIT brand

A section of the media has gone to town on the subject of some 700 odd students turning down IIT offers. This is construed as a dilution in the IIT brand for whatever reason: poor quality of infrastructure and faculty at the newer IITs, the impact of quotas for SC/STs and OBCs, or the availability of other institutions that are better (although I would myself be hard put to identify these).

This is plain hogwash, as Dinesh Mohan makes clear in an article in BS. He points out a number of reasons why some offers may not be getting accepted:

Students have become acutely aware that all disciplines do not offer challenging or rewarding jobs after graduation (such as civil, production, textile, and many others). Therefore, some of them may prefer to go to an NIT closer to home that gives them an opportunity in a discipline of their choice. Studying at an IIT for undergraduate students can cost about Rs 20,000 a month, not a small amount for a middle-class family. Some of those declining may have opted to spend less by studying at a local NIT instead of a new IIT and save on hostel expenses.
A significant proportion of the students entering IITs know from day one that they are not interested in an engineering career, but do so under parental and societal pressure or a lack of choices for obtaining decent education. If there was a good supply of excellent liberal arts and science colleges with hostel facilities, applications to IITs may drop by a third. It is possible that some of those declining an admission to IIT have gained admission to good law schools, design schools or science colleges that have made a name for themselves in recent years.
Lastly, there would be a group of young men and women who would prefer to spend much more money and go to an institution in the US, Australia, Singapore or the UK, even a second-rate one, than take admission in a discipline and IIT location they don't like. Therefore, the fact that many applicants have opted out of the IIT system may be a good sign, showing that we have more choices and the system is maturing. It certainly does not reflect on the standing of IITs as academic institutions in India. 

The proposition that the entry of newer IITs is diluting the IIT brand would be strictly true only if the older and more reputed IITs fail to fill their seats because of a perception that IITs are not what they were. Nobody has argued that this is the case. We need data on how many seats at which IITs were rejected.

A similar apprehension was raised in respect of the newer IIMs. It's a fact that many of the new IIMs could not place all their students in the last round of Placement. Has this impacted IIMA, the market leader? Not one bit. IIMA achieved 100% placement. The newer IITs and IIMs will take a while to establish themselves. That is very different from saying that the IIT or IIM brand will go into decline because of them.

Incidentally, Dinesh Mohan's article last year on why the JEE should be abolished is also worth reading.

Peer evaluation for IITs, IIMs

The IIT Council has said that all IITs will be subjected to evaluation by peers every five years, TOI reports. Apparently, the government intends a similar review for IIMs. I welcome the move- I had myself advocated external audit of the IIMs in my book on Ravi Matthai- IIMA, Brick by Red Brick, published in 2011.

An external audit is required for two reasons. One, we do not have sufficient competition for the IITs and IIMs and, therefore, it cannot be left to market forces to arrive at a judgement, reflected in applications for admissions. Given the acute scarcity of quality colleges in engineering and management in relation to demand, the market cannot be expected to deliver judgement. An alternative mechanism would be the Board of Governors of IITs/IIMs but this mechanism has simply not functioned. One reason is that those appointed to these boards have very little stakes in the institutions and cannot be expected to devote the attention necessary to keep management on its toes. Besides, for the Board itself to monitor effectively, an effective market for higher education needs to exist; as mentioned, it does not.

As a result of poor monitoring, the IITs and IIMs today are places where there are few checks and balances on the office of director. The scope for discretion is enormous and there is virtually no accountability. Whether a director performs or not performs, whether he abuses office or not has no bearing on his completing his term and even getting another term.

This is an unhealthy state of affairs. All public institutions should be accountable- in the case of the IITs/ IIMs, directors as well as faculty. And such accountability can be established only through an independent management audit. Indeed, the principle of independent audit needs to be applied to regulators and other public authorities, such as RBI, SEBI, the CAG, CEC, etc. No public institution should be beyond the pale of public scrutiny of their activities, decisions and performance.
 
The modalities of the independent audit are important. It appears the expert committee will be chosen by the minister of HRD from a panel of 10 names submitted by the Board of Governors of an IIT. This is not the most desirable state of affairs. The Boards cannot provide names for the audit panel because the boards themselves need to be audited. It would be better to create a collegium of distinguished academics (including NRIs) who would propose names to the ministry.

Secondly, the audit must not be based on meetings with top management of IITs/IIMs or on published documents alone. The audit panel must meet all stakeholders: faculty, students, staff, alumni, the corporate world. Not only the actual outcomes (placement, publications, number of doctorates, etc) need to be reviewed but the internal processes and important decisions. It should be open to any faculty member to submit written documents for consideration by the audit panel. It is only by shining the light on the internal processes and governance of these institutions that improvements can be brought about.

Lastly, the audit reports must be placed in the public domain. In today's world, we can expect the reports to be commented on not only in the mainstream media but also in the social media. Audit and disclosure are the keys to accountability at public institutions.

It is striking that the gurus of governance at the IIMs did not think of subjecting themselves to a peer review all these decades; it was left to their bete noire, the ministry, to initiate this proposal. 

NRN on IITs

N R Narayana Murthy has been quoted as saying that 80% of students at IITs are of poor quality. My first reaction is to ask: what would be the comparable figure for NITs and private engineering colleges? 95%? And what would that say about the quality of hires at Infosys, most of whom are drawn from second- and third-rung colleges?

Although an ex-IITian myself, I am not in a position to judge whether there has been any decline in standards in students at IITs as I have little contact these days with IITs or engineering. How do we test such a statement? We could use a number of indicators:

• Acceptance of IIT students at foreign colleges and their performance there
• Success rate of IIT students appearing for the IIM entrance test
• Acceptability of IIT students to employers in India

Are fewer IIT students going to the US? Are companies now reluctant to visit IIT campuses for recruitment? I would like to know from readers.

NRN also comments on the poor English speaking skills of IITians:

The Infosys mentor also lamented the poor English speaking and social skills of a majority of IIT students, saying with Indian politicians "rooting against English", the task of getting good English speaking students at IITs gets more difficult.

I can readily respond to this comment. Some of the best performers in my time at the IITs were from vernacular schools. Their English was poor but this took nothing away from their brilliance- they were among the toppers at IITs and went on to make a mark in the US. I met some of them a few years ago at an IIT Bombay reunion and their English was now as good as anybody else's. The great change at IIT was not counting English marks in the entrance exam. This opened up IITs to some great brains in the interior of the country. To judge the calibre of IIT students by their English speaking skills makes no sense at all.

NRN, in his New York speech, has also advocated doing away with the tenure system at IITs; he wants faculty on five year contracts instead. If this is what is required for producing quality, how is it that US universities have a tenure system and produce great quality? The tenure system was created precisely to give academics the sense of security that is needed in order to produce high quality output over a long period.

I have a suggestion. Let NRN and a few other businessmen pool their resources and set up their own engineering college. They can set their own norms for admission, faculty, fees etc. They can then realise their dream of creating in India the equivalent of MIT and Stanford.

Book on Ravi Matthai - IIM Ahmedabad

My book on Ravi Matthai- IIM Ahmedabad, published by Rupa Publications, is out (Brick by Red Brick: Ravi Matthai and the Making of IIM Ahmedabad). ET carried a story on it a couple of weeks ago.

The book is timed to coincide with IIMA's golden jubilee and is meant to celebrate the remarkable effort at institution-building in the Institute's formative years. IIMA stands out in the Indian education landscape for one reason: it is that rare institution that has been at the top for most of the five decades for which it has been around. There is an Iron Law that operates in Indian education and that dictates that institutions of higher education, started with great fanfare, must go to seed in about thirty or forty years' time. IIMA is a noteworthy exception.

My book attempts to explain IIMA's success and to answer the questions: what sets IIMA apart in the IIM fraternity? why does it enjoy a premium rating? I also devote a chapter to the governance issues in the IIM system today and make suggestions on how to inject greater accountability into the system.

The answer to the above questions, which I came to grasp only after I had spent some five years at IIMA, lies in the culture and processes that Vikram Sarabhai, its founder, and Ravi Matthai, its first full-time director, put in place. That something, which is intangible but which makes all the difference to an academic institution, has been solid enough to sustain IIMA for five decades now.

When IIMA was founded, Ahmedabad was a small town. The infrastructure at the Institute was very basic, they did not have today's IT and the connectivity it provides, communications were poor. And yet IIMA quickly made an impact on the nation as a centre of excellence. Can you imagine an IIT or IIM being set up in Tirunelveli or Patiala making a similar impact today? That is a measure of the achievement of IIMA's founding fathers.

Matthai was all of 38 years old when Sarabhai and others chose him as the first full-time director. He was not an academic by training, he had been a corporate executive. He achieved what he did in just seven years' time. His appointment as director was not a contractual appointment, and yet at the age of 45, he chose to step down. He spurned numerous lucrative offers and turned his energies towards a novel experiment in rural education in Jawaja, a small block in Rajasthan. It was a story waiting to be told. I am privileged to have had the opportunity to tell it.

PS: The book is expected to reach the market in about a week's time but it can be ordered from flipkart. com or from Rupa's website.

IITs say no to greater autonomy!

Going by a report carried by BS, the IITs don't really want greater autonomy, at least as envisaged by the Anil Kakodkar committee report on IITs.

The Kakodkar committee has favoured devolving greater powers to the IIT boards, with decisions on salaries, recruitment etc being largely left to them. Towards giving IITs greater operational freedom, it has suggested a substantial increase in fee from Rs 50,000 to Rs 2-2.5 lakh per annum. The IIT directors that BS spoke to had a different point of view from that expressed by the Kakodkar committee.

IIT Madras director MS Ananth is quoted as saying, "“In my personal opinion IITs have adequate autonomy. As an institution funded by tax-payers, I do not expect to be handed more on a platter." The IIT directors and also some faculty see any government withdrawal as coming in the way of the IITs' future growth:

“While the whole idea of the Kakodkar Panel is rooted in providing us more autonomy, I am not so sure that this will provide us with the prospects of growth that we need in the immediate future and in the long run,” said an IIT-Kharagpur professor on the condition of anonymity.

Gautam Barua, director, IIT Guwahati, expresses the view that key decisions should be taken by the IIT Council, which includes all IIT directors, rather than being left to the individual boards; leaving it to the boards would mean the absence of uniformity across IITs and the dilution of the IIM brand.

The attitude of the IIT directors is in refreshing contrast to that of some IIMs. The IITs have less autonomy on paper than the IIMs as the former are governed by an Act of Parliament whereas the latter are not. And yet the IITs believe they have all the autonomy they need while some of the IIMs keep bleating about lack of autonomy.

The older IIMs have been saying just the opposite of what the IITs are saying. They say they need to be financially independent of the government; they want more power be given to the boards; they have resisted moves to evolve a common policy across the IIMs through a pan-IIM board and other means; and they would rather have individual IIMs promoting their own brand.

So who has got it right on autonomy? The IITs, whose brand is better known worldwide than the IIMs, or the IIMs? I leave it to you to judge.

World class or not?

One of the pleasures of writing this blog is the high quality of responses it evokes. One anonymous reader talks of lack of ethical standards and even corruption at the IIMs. I cannot, for obvious reasons, comment on that. Most comments fault me for not addressing the core issue of whether the IITs and IIMs produce world-class research or not. They are right- I did not address this issue because it's difficult to deal with in a short post. Let me take a stab at it.

Perhaps, I should begin by posing some counter-questions. Is Infosys in the same league as Microsoft? Is ISRO equivalent to NASA? Are the IB and RAW comparable to MI5 and Mossad? Are our business dailies as good as Financial Times and Wall Street Journal?

There's no end to these comparisons and they will take us nowhere. No non-commercial institution in India needs to justify itself by comparing itself with somebody else who is regarded as best in class and then coming to conclusions as to its worth or utility. If that is the yard-stick, we will see mass hara-kiri.

The key issue is the impact the institution makes on its environment. Is it adding substantial value in the environment in which it operates? When the question is posed in these terms, the dimensions on which performance is measured change. You would not judge an IIT or IIM only on one dimension, namely, publication in international journals but on several dimensions: quality of students, interface with industry, impact on important sectors of the economy, inputs for policy-making, etc. The founding fathers of IIMA never talked about becoming 'world-class'. They spoke about two things: striving for excellence and striving for relevance. I guess I am talking about the same things.

The top American university is a marvel that has evolved over some three hundred years. It is supported by enormous private funding and it has put in place culture and processes that are not easy to replicate. Not just India but the rest of the world lags behind considerably: even the top European universities cannot hope to rival Stanford, Harvard, MIT and Princeton. In higher education, as in defence, the US stands alone.

The quest for improvement and reform must be eternal and the IITs and IIMs must be held to account for higher and higher levels of performance. But to condemn them by comparison with the icons of American education, which is what "world class" is all about, can only demoralise faculty and undermine whatever good can come out of our system.

Do IITs, IIMs add value ?

When it is said that the IITs, IIMs owe their eminence entirely to students, not to faculty, it is implied that they do not add value. True or false?

Well, an IIMB director answered this effectively a few years ago when some in the corporate world had made similar statements. He made an offer: he would make public the admissions list the moment it was finalised. Corporates could come and recruit anybody on the list right away. If the IIMs did not add value, neither the students nor the corporates should have a problem doing this. There were no takers. The companies' bluff had been called.

There is another way of responding to the contention that faculty do not contribute. The IITs and the IIMs admit a small fraction of applicants. An IIM would call for interview around 1000 students. Anybody familiar with the admissions process would know that there is very little difference in terms of the CAT score between a student ranked 800 and a student ranked 2500 in CAT. The former may make it to an IIM; the latter is left out and goes to some other B-School. If the difference in student quality, that is, the input is negligible, how come there is such a huge difference in output or outcome? How is it that the IIM student is hugely sought after while the non-IIM student is not? Ditto for the IITs. QED.

Jairam Ramesh on IITs and IIMs

The astonishing part of Jairam Ramesh's criticism of IITs and IIMs is his contention that a governmental research set-up can never attract young people. Ramesh presumably said this in order to justify his decision to set up a Maritime Research Centre in collaboration with the Mukesh Ambani group. The statement flies in the face of facts.

If a private institution in higher education were inherently more attractive, how is it that there are no private engineering colleges comparable to the IITs, no private B-schools comparable to the IIMs (with the exception of ISB), no medical college of the stature of AIIMS? A private institution in education can achieve quality only if it is private and non-profit. We know that is emphatically not the case in India, that the whole point about private institutions coming up in education is to make money, whether over the table or under it.

Indeed, when you look other places- France, Germany, Russia, China- the premier educational institutions are all in the public sector. The lone exception to state domination of quality institutions of education is the US. That is because of the tradition of private philanthropy supporting higher education, a tradition that is almost unique to the US. No other culture has it or has it in the same measure. That is why it is futile to expect private institutions elsewhere to produce anything comparable.

Even in the US, it is not as if quality education is the monopoly of the private sector. There are several distinguished universities that are part of government - the magnificent institutions of California university, University of Texas (Austin), Ohio State University, to name a few. Government presence in higher education need not be inimical to the pursuit of excellence and can indeed conduce to it- provided the governance structures are right. Several countries in the world have shown that it is possible to achieve this, and here in India, the success of the IITs and IIMs illustrates the same principle.

No fee hike for IITs

The decision of the IIT Council to reject the Anil Kakodkar committee's recommendation for a fee hike has not received the attention it deserves. The Kakodkar committee wanted the IITs to raise the annual fee from Rs 50,000 to Rs 2.5 lakh so that they could generate more funds on their own. The IIT Council, headed by HRD minister, Kapil Sibal, has shot down the proposal, India Today reports:

HRD minister Kapil Sibal, who chaired the IIT council meeting to discuss the report on Friday, said: "This fee hike would act as a deterrent to IIT aspirants." The IIT council also left the decision on increasing hostel fees to the respective board of governors in each institute. An HRD ministry official said: "The mathematical model proposed by the committee has to be reworked. The committee will now take a month to submit its report after considering the feedback and the response of the IIT council, which comprises the directors of all IITs."

The IIT Council's stand is commendable. It clearly does not accept the position that because IIT students can get loans and they can get jobs that can enable them to service those loans, students must pay a higher fee. A high fee and large loans are a deterrent to aspiring students. But how come this logic has not be applied to the IIMs and the IIMs have raise their fee at will in recent years? The HRD ministry needs to be consistent in its approach to commercialisation of education.

Limit IIT directors to one term

I wrote in my last post about the increase in the retirement age of IIT directors from 65 to 70. I said I did not favour the idea. Some people wrote in saying that they would like to see cogent reasoning for my position, apart from the fact that youth is to be preferred.

Well, the main reason is that in our institutions of higher education, we do not have a system of accountability for the director. So, we lack a proper basis for extending the director beyond 65 or giving him a second or third term. The decision would become subject to the whims of government or the Board.

The IIMs have long had a convention of a single term for the director and this has served them well. It was convention put in place by IIMA's legendary Ravi Matthai. I elaborate on this in my ET column, Let IIT directors retire at 65.

IITs allowed to raised retirement age to 70

The ministry of HRD has allowed the IITs to raise the retirement age for faculty to 70, according to the Hindustan Times. The retirement age of IIT directors can also be raised to 70, which would allow several directors to stay on for a second term. This is a bad idea.

Letting IIT directors stay on for until 70 is bad not just for the reason mentioned in the report, namely , that it will render IIT directors vulnerable to outside pressures. We need younger people at the top, not older ones. And, believe me, there is plenty of talent in the IIT system and outside the country that can be tapped.

Ditto with faculty. Since extensions will, in effect, be at the discretion of the director, this will render faculty totally subservient to the director. It is also not good for faculty to hang around an IIT or IIM for too long- not good for them, not good for the institution. Even as it is, faculty stay on for 30-35 years. I shudder to think of having faculty around for, say, 45 years. Faculty must be extended beyond 65, if at all, provided they have not spent more than 25 years at the institution.

I sincerely hope this does not get extended to the IIMs. The IIMs, by and large, have followed the principle of a single term for the director although, regrettably, this healthy principle was not followed in the recent past in the case of the directors of IIM Calcutta and IIM Lucknow. There is very little accountability among IIT and IIM directors and allowing them to reign for 10 years risks causing serious damage.

Another committee on IIM autonomy

Yet another committee will go into the issue of autonomy for central universities, IITs and IIMs, TOI reports:

The HRD ministry has set up a high-power committee, under noted legal expert N R Madhava Menon, to come with a comprehensive policy on the issue of autonomy for higher educational institutions like central universities, IITs and IIMs.

The six-member committee, which also has three additional special invitees, has been asked to review the state of institutional autonomy in central universities, IITs and IIMs in academic governance and financial matters.

The panel will recommend mechanism for norm-based funding of central educational institutions for development and maintenance, with an aim to enhance their financial autonomy.

It will examine the decentralisation of autonomy within central universities, IITs,IIMs and suggest measures by which institutional autonomy can percolate to governance structure within the university and to the teacher.

An IIM review committee under R C Bhargava had submitted a report on governance of IIMs in 2008. Another committee under the same Bhargava is currently looking at governance issues and its report is awaited. What would be the rationale for another committee on autonomy and accountability and covering the IIMs again?

New IITs - plenty of action

State governments have been generous in allocating land to the new IITs, reports BS. Most will have more land than the older ones. IIT Mandi in HP will have 513 acres; IIT Hyderabad 531 acres; IIT Gandhinagar 385 acres; IIT Ropar 500 acres; IIT Bhubaneswar gets 936 acres intended for 1100 faculty and 11,000 students- talk about thinking big!

Some are already operating from makeshift premises. Others plan to use research scholars for teaching until a core faculty of adequate size is in place. The build up of faculty strength so far is impressive. IIT Hyderabad already has 40 faculty.

I have never subscribed to the talk of 'faculty shortage' at the IITs and IIMs. There are ways and ways of getting faculty and I believe the newer IITs and IIMs will do a better job than the older ones because of the compulsion to deliver. Besides, there is virtue in newness- new leadership, a new campus, new ways of doing things. I believe the setting up of new IITs and IIMs is one of the best things to have happened in higher education.

IIT Gandhinagar attracts quality faculty

IIT Gandhinagar has received nearly 700 applicants for faculty positions, half of whom are NRIs from quality institutions abroad, ET reports :

Director of IIT-Gandhinagar Sudhir Kumar Jain said at least three NRIs teaching in prestigious universities in the US and Singapore will join them by the end of December. ....

"This is a great development as we would get Indians who are involved in cutting-edge research and academics and are finding opportunities in India attractive. More so for us as the faculty would get to prove academic excellence given that we are a new institute compared to other IITs and hence more open to ideas," says Jain. ...

"To attract more talent from abroad, we are also offering them option to go abroad twice a year to pursue research and academics," says Jain.

So much for the supposed faculty crunch and the problems new IITs would have. I feel vindicated because I have always held that the newer IITs and IIMs would be able to attract faculty by offering suitable terms (not higher salaries but the flexibility indicated above).

In some ways, they may have a better chance of getting good faculty because in the existing institutions, entrenched interests are often the biggest obstacle to getting faculty- they simply won't let very talented or reputed academics in. Agreed, it is not easy to entice academics based abroad, so there are supply-side problems. But the artificial problems on the demand side are also a factor - and this is generally overlooked. Besides, NRIs would prefer to get back to their home town or to some place close to it and may want to steer clear of the larger metros where the older IITs and IIMs are located.

Somehow, IITs and IIMs have not used the mechanism of well-endowed chairs in order to attract talent. This is again primarily because the academics who are already in think they have first rights to any chair that is created and, often, they can't agree amongst themselves as to who deserves it. As a result, chairs are not created and, when created, go untenanted.

The IIT Gandhinagar experience is very promising indeed and augurs well for the government's decision to set up new IITs and IIMs. We need competition for the four or five IITs and IIMs that dominate the field today. So, all power to the new institutions.

Sibal takes on the IITs

NDTV had a debate featuring the president of the IIT faculty federation, Dinesh Mohan, professor at IIT Delhi and Mohandas Pai of Infosys. I had meant to report this on my blog but Abi has pre-empted me with a detailed account.

There are just a couple of other points made by Dinesh Mohan that I would like to highlight. Mohan said he had taught in European and American universities and that the degree of autonomy he had at IIT Delhi was far more than was available in those places. So much for the talk of infringement of 'autonomy'. Yes, Sibal knocked the stuffing out of the IIT faculty's arguments with the strident declaration that the protest was not about 'autonomy' but money.

Mohan made another point that I had made myself in my post on the Yash Pal report: partly, the faculty shortage at elite institutions is the result of senior faculty not being receptive to quality talent coming in.

Let me add: both the IITs and IIMs have used the 'autonomy' argument to gain public sympathy whenever they are at the receiving end of criticism or when government has attempted to look closely into their affairs. As somebody who has been part of the IIM system, I can vouch for what Dinesh Mohan has said: you cannot have greater academic freedom than is available currently in the IIM system. At no point has government made the remotest attempt to infringe such freedom. Moreover, there is virtually no funding constraint on academic exploration, the problem that cripples research at universities.

I do believe that the IITs and IIMs offer the fullest scope possible for faculty to develop themselves as academics. Not only that, we are free to express ourselves on matters of public policy and often find ourselves taking positions contrary to those of government or public authorities and even criticising government. We must give government credit for making this possible.

My greatest fear is that it is the withdrawal of government from these institutions that will threaten academic freedom because then academics would become more subject to the control of management and the boards. Boards in which government representatives are present have never prevented us from expressing our views. But boards in which government is absent and that are run by people from the private sector well may.

Being part of government makes for true academic autonomy in other ways: you have job security; the institutions come under the writ jurisdiction of High Courts, so there is easier recourse against mala fide actions of management; and then there is the whole range of supervision and protection afforded by coverage under CAG, CVC and the RTI Act.

I come back to my old argument: putting in place a governance structure with checks and balances that will adequately substitute the benefits conferred by government presence cannot be done overnight; it has to be a slow and gradual evolution and it has be fully tested before we can contemplate government withdrawal. A governance vacuum in the IITs and IIMs caused by precipitate government withdrawal is for me the ultimate nightmare.