It is a desirable expectation that the majority of our universities should continue to strive to achieve excellence in teaching and learning, in discovery and invention, and in extension and engagement with social concerns. There is an urgent need to promote the culture of healthy academic competition amongst our universities. Their competitive spirit should stem from a positive mindset. They should make concerted efforts to win in different kinds of academic competitions, but if someone else raises the bar of academic excellence higher than them they should feel equally good, if not more. The academic competition should not be about the end result of winning, but to have a deeper understanding about the subject and showing the way forward in that particular domain to others as well.
Academic excellence is of paramount significance because it is linked with those outcomes of teaching and learning and research and innovations that are valued the most. These goals require, among others, due emphasis on interdisciplinary research, university-industry interface and continuing professional development of faculty, as the overall success of a university depends upon the amount and quality of its research and the quality of its faculty and students. These are some of the pressing issues that the university system was expected to resolve but it seems to have no end in sight. Although efforts have been made to put in place a system of professional development of faculty, far too little has been done insofar as institutionalisation of interdisciplinary research and university-industry interface are concerned.
Interdisciplinary research perspectives are the cornerstone of present-day research and it must take roots in the culture of our university system where individual departments largely operate as islands without connectivity to others. The present system requires interdisciplinary research as creation of new knowledge entails syntheses of ideas and characteristics from across different disciplines. In fact, it has become a practical necessity since new knowledge lies at the intersections of different disciplines. This is the time when advancement of knowledge has become one of the inevitabilities of a progressive and modern society. Advancement of knowledge is as important in the life of a university as the transmission and certification of knowledge. It is needless to say that it requires a larger pool of scientists and increased budgetary allocations over a protracted period.
Though the pool of Indian scientists has increased a little in the last couple of years, the number of researchers per million population, as of 2018, is far fewer (216) than China (1,307), America (4,412), Russia (2,784), England (4,603), Germany ( 5,212) and France (4,715). It is much worse than numbers in even smaller countries like Sweden (7,536), Norway (6,467), Netherland (5,605) and New Zealand (5,530). Nonetheless, India has emerged as the world’s third-largest contributor of scientific publications (135,788) in peer-reviewed journals as of 2018, with China being the first (528,263) and America the second (422,808). What is particularly noteworthy about this is that our expenditure on research and development in terms of percentage of GDP is far too less (0.9%) than both China (2.1%) and America (2.7%). There are countries which are spending even more than China and America like Israel (4.9%), Sweden (3.2%) and Germany (2.9%).
Apart from much larger research grants to universities, there is also a need to identify and address other basic issues which can promote the culture of interdisciplinary research in our university system. There is a lot to learn from how such a culture has been created in some other countries and how it could be scaled in our university system after its appropriate experimentation in some of our leading universities. Since interdisciplinary research requires funding at a large scale, and there is a scarcity of resources, it obviously requires mobilisation of resources through other means of financing. It is, therefore, necessary to understand how leading universities of the world mobilise their funding and how that model can be replicated in the country. In addition, it would also be desirable to examine how the faculty in those universities are able to deliver and meet the timelines of the funding agencies?
It is extremely important to develop and scale centres of interdisciplinary research across universities. There is an urgent need to have a concrete action plan. But we need to realize that despite interdisciplinary research being a buzzword, most seem to be utterly clueless about what they could do and how to go about it. There is a need to identify a group of eminent researchers from different domains of knowledge who can study the dynamics of interdisciplinary research and prepare a roadmap for Indian universities to make it happen.
The second important aspect of quality higher education which is as important as the earlier one is the university-industry interface. After it proved to be a hugely successful endeavour in western universities, it spread its wings across some universities in the east. But somehow it remained confined only to those premier institutions which had consciously developed the capacity to solve the problems of the industry, helped them increase their productivity, guided them to make gainful investments and supplied them with a skilled workforce. Despite the constant exhortation and encouragement by various commissions and committees, most universities could not get culturally tuned to operationalise a university-industry interface or develop confidence in meeting timelines. In fact, most of them were lacking in foresight and had been beset with diffidence and indecisiveness. Consequently, they could not arouse confidence and enthusiasm in the industry.
The university system in most leading countries mobilises its funding largely from the industry. Their research and development activities are mostly dependent upon the interface between the university and the industry. The funding from the industry sustains the research support needed by the university and in turn it helps the industry to utilise the outcome of the research for application. This aspect is not as dominant in the functioning of our universities as in some of the leading universities abroad, since they sustain largely on internal funding through research grants.
There may be different levels of strategy that can determine the direction and scope of the university-industry interface over the long term. First, universities should ascertain requirements of the industry by associating industry leaders and integrating industry-linked areas in their curriculum. Second, they should prioritize their Ph.D. as well as other research programs for finding solutions to industry-related problems. Third, the industry should absorb university graduates and after providing them a certain orientation, send them back to the university on a sponsorship basis for Ph.D. programs. Fourth, the government and industry should jointly support the university to upgrade its research facilities. Fifth, the industry should invest in establishing their labs and workshops on the campus of the university for mutual benefit. Sixth, the industry should identify areas of their interests and commission research projects to the university. Lastly, the university should study how this interface has been working well in some of our premier institutions. In addition, a group of university academics can undertake a detailed study of how this works in some leading universities of the east and the west and bring back experiences which can enhance the university-industry interface in the country and thus lay a solid foundation for R&D focus in university research.
None would perhaps dispute the contention that in the university system it is the teacher who, besides being qualified, competent and caring, has to be extremely dynamic and collaborative without which she would not be able to give an interdisciplinary orientation to research or ensure a university-industry interface. It could be possible only when the teacher continually keeps herself abreast of the latest developments in the subject and changing requirements of the industry. Thus a vibrant university system needs to ensure that every member of the faculty is able to demonstrate the best of his or her inherent potential for the good of education and the society. And it is for this reason that there has to be an inbuilt provision for continuous professional development of academic faculty, commensurate with the changing and constantly emerging concerns in all domains of human learning.
The UGC took the initiative for continuing professional development of university teachers through the establishment of as many as 66 Academic Staff Colleges (ASCs) in selected universities in the country. The ASCs were expected to be vibrant centres to provide opportunities to the faculty for their professional and career development. They were mandated to organise orientation and refresher programs in different areas of study, covering every teacher at least once in three to five years. They seem to have realised a little insofar as an orientation program is concerned but much more remains to be accomplished insofar as the content enrichment part is concerned.
Regrettably, the ASCs seemed to have drifted away from their primary goal and slipped into the role of fulfilling the requirements for career advancement. It was corroborated by the Review Committee (2010), which ound out that just a quarter of the ASCs came close to their charter. Though they have now been renamed as Human Resource Development Centres (HRDCs), this mere change in their nomenclature has not yielded any desirable results. The experience, thus far, points out that the operational design of the HRDCs calls for serious introspection, if the needed objectives of continuing professional development of teachers is to be seriously realised.
In this connection, a small group of senior faculty from across universities may be constituted to study how the faculty development initiatives are operationalised in some leading countries? What institutional structures have been created for this purpose? What is their working design? How often does a member of the faculty undergo professional development? Is it voluntary on the part of the individual faculty or is the concept institutionalized? Who pays for this activity? Is undergoing training linked with career promotion? What is the profile of institutions offering such programs? Such an exercise is extremely necessary to revitalize the faculty development program and thus should be undertaken sooner rather than later.
Academia bears a heavy responsibility for evolving context-specific and evidence-based strategies for the institutionalisation of interdisciplinary research, university-industry interface and continuous professional development of faculty along with resource requirements. This exercise will have a vast amount of beneficial interests besides fostering healthy academic competition amongst the universities and that is what is going to be a spur for modernisation. It would provide first-hand knowledge of facts and requirements which could be used to put up the case with full academic justification to the competent authority. It would be hard to become a significant global competitor in higher education if such inescapable reforms were brushed aside.
The author is former Chairman, UGC. The views expressed are personal.