Steering higher education to a new path

Updated on: Wednesday, May 18, 2011

K. N. Panikkar, Vice-Chairman of the Kerala State Higher Education Council, has been involved in revitalising the higher education scene in Kerala. A renowned academic and historian, Dr. Panikkar shares his thoughts on a wide range of issues addressed by the council in an interview to The Hindu-EducationPlus.

How do you place the performance of the council especially after the initial reservations it faced from various quarters?

When Kerala State Higher Education Council was constituted four years back, apprehensions were expressed about its possible impact on the autonomy of universities. It was feared that the council, which although had only advisory functions, would undermine through manipulation, whatever little freedom the universities had enjoyed and thus would do incalculable harm to the university system.

The four-year record of the council has now proved that the apprehension was totally misplaced, as the council, instead of dominating or subverting the system, located itself as a part of a collective, in partnership with the government and universities. As a result, the council brought about a new ambience and culture in the administration of higher education, providing a space for all the three to come together and engage in creative and collaborative endeavour. Unlike the other two agencies — the State and the universities — the council could spare time and resources for the pursuit of foundational issues. The cumulative effect of this partnership has been the infrastructural and academic preparation for the creation of a modern system of higher education.

What have been the primary concerns of the council? How successful was it in addressing them?

In the context of the neo-liberal national policy and the relative lack of dynamism in the past performance of the State, the council sought to evolve an alternative system informed by a holistic conceptualization of higher education. In this attempt the problems of access, quality, evaluation, administration and so on were not viewed as individual issues, which could be reformed in isolation, but as interconnected and interdependent aspects of a totality.

This totality is conceived within interdisciplinary ordering of academic structure, a student-oriented evaluation system and the democratisation of academic management. In the past, whenever education became a subject of ‘reform', it at best nibbled at the fringes and therefore higher education by and large remained stagnant, with a group of upper caste –class ‘educationists' clinging to the colonial system with rare tenacity, supported by ill-informed media and backed by political parties and community leaders with vested interests.

In the vocabulary of the council, the key word has not been ‘reform' but transformation. The transformation would embrace systemic change with complementarity of different substructures. Thus semester-credit system, for instance, is not purely an organisational issue, but a framework for multi-disciplinary training to eventually equip the students to develop an interdisciplinary approach to knowledge.

Such a structural change would be meaningful only when the mode of evaluation is modified to take cognizance of the pedagogical innovations necessary in interdisciplinary teaching. Unless the teachers are sensitive to this interconnection, the change may take place, but academic transformation may not occur. It was this realisation which led the council to organise a fairly large number of programmes in order to introduce the teachers to the nuances of the system. The importance of the attempted transformation would be lost, if it is understood only as the introduction of semester system, without appreciating the overall philosophy which informs its conceptualization and practice. The essentials of this philosophy are academic freedom for both students and teachers. In the circumstances prevailing in Kerala it would sound utopian, but its introduction is inevitable for stimulating students' interest and sustaining teachers' involvement.

Do you think that the cluster system could emerge as an alternative to the affiliating system and the suggested system of autonomy?

Relieving higher education from the clutches of overcentralised university administration and the control of overburdened bureaucracy are essential. At the root of the problem is the malaise of affiliating system, which almost everybody admits needs correction, but no one is prepared to press for a change. The teachers' organisations have been opposed to autonomous colleges, as it would give unbridled powers to the private managements. Given the political clout enjoyed by these organisations the government shied away from addressing this issue, even if the University Grants Commission has been advocating it for long. The council put forward the idea of clustering the neighbouring colleges as a first step towards academic decentralisation and relieving the universities of the responsibilities of the colleges. Despite the opposition of uncooperating and commercially-oriented private managements, the council made a breach in the bastion by setting up three clusters, the first to do so in the country. The importance of the clusters is not so much its immediate operational success, but the introduction of the healthy principle of institutional collaboration in place of competition.

Its aim is not merely to share the existing resources, but to create new resources and to progressively share the academic responsibilities currently discharged by the universities.

What is the alternative the council has proposed to foreign educational providers in the country?

An ‘open door' policy in higher education, which would give access to foreign educational providers to set up their branches, is the panacea for improving access and quality invented by the advocates of neo-liberalism. The danger inherent in this policy has not been adequately realised, particularly by the middle-class intelligentsia. They support this move under the delusion that it would facilitate access to quality education. There is no denying the fact that international exposure is essential for improving the quality of education and to stay on a par with the advances made in other countries.

Nevertheless, given that education is an important ingredient in the identity of a nation, surrendering the responsibility of education of the country to foreign agencies is a disastrous policy. The council has successfully implemented an alternative by creating opportunities for interaction of teachers and researchers by bringing reputed scholars to Kerala.

With liberal support from the government, the scheme has brought more then one hundred scholars from all over the world which has helped to set standards of research for students to emulate.

he academic linkages thus established could herald the beginning of internationalisation of education. By encouraging such an interaction the council does not entertain the illusion that quality of research can be superimposed from outside through short-term interaction. Instead it should emerge from within, the preparation for which should begin at the undergraduate level itself. With that in view the new undergraduate system would introduce the students to three different streams: study of the subject of specialisation, exposure to multi-disciplinary knowledge and above all training in methodology. The purpose of this sweeping change in undergraduate structure is to train the students to think conceptually and theoretically so that they develop critical ability to pursue research. By doing so the council hopes to bring about a reorientation in education — a change from market-orien

Steering higher education to a new path

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