One of the fundamental challenges is the lack of trust between all stakeholders, and it is this lack of trust that deters all efforts at decentralisation-led innovation. It hinders any attempt at transforming the current education system and puts the genuine student/faculty/progressive governmental/ faculty/ management at a disadvantage. This is what makes reform difficult – all parties are not unified, and the status-quo has a large number advocates across all stakeholders who benefits greatly from the current apathy.
Therefore, for classrooms to undergo successful transformation, regulators have to encourage institutions to foster their own individuality (in terms of courses offered, research trajectories, social outreach etc). Regulators will have to develop trust in institutions that they would be given resources, time and opportunity to typecast in terms of content.
At present, there is an excessive number of regulatory bodies dominated at top level management by non-academics who have insufficient experience and understanding of how exceptional international universities operate. It hinders the hope of becoming an internationally ranked institution when the leadership of these bodies has hardly anybody who has studied in top-ranking university. Consensus is also sought at the lowest level of bureaucratic convenience rather than academic excellence and student joy at learning.
Ideally, space, time and goodwill should be obliged so that these bodies can further foster the numerous non-commercial goals that are mandate: access, support for the basics sciences and humanities, insistence on more contextual and relevant India-specific research, need on improving the quality and design of all-India exams for students and faculty, building all-India peer databases of experts and research resources, insistence on more credible academics on boards, regularly communicating decisions to universities by consultations rather than by authorisation and so forth.
Source: The Wire
Join us in the upcoming QS WORLDWIDE 2018 from 22-23 May 2018 in Moscow, Russia, as we discuss the topic on “In Search of University Excellence: Perspectives from Russia and Central Asia”