Guest Column| Appointment of vice-chancellors: UGC guidelines or faultlines?

In its latest draft of guidelines on the appointment of assistant professors in universities/colleges, the University Grants Commission (UGC) has come up with some ‘revolutionary’ ideas with regard to the relaxation in the conditions of the appointment of vice-chancellors. These guidelines have created quite a flutter, even anxiety, in the academic circles. There are questions whether the UGC has the mandate or the legal authority to make such sweeping changes.

For all practical purposes, the vice-chancellor (V-C) is supposed to be the first academic among equals, someone who is expected to uphold the highest traditions and standards of knowledge creation and dissemination within an academic community he/she presides over.

Not only is a V-C expected to be the custodian of a university’s financial and intellectual capital, but also expected to show rare sensitivity toward the needs and problems of all stakeholders, including the teaching/non-teaching staff and the student community. Above all, he/she is expected to be an academic of exceptional merit and personal rectitude, who also has qualities of true leadership, courage and a definite vision.

Pulls and pressures

However, the ground reality is quite different. Since most of the V-Cs owe their appointment to political masters, they have to work under all kinds of pulls and pressures. Much of their time and energy goes into dealing with the legitimate or not-so-legitimate demands of their political masters or their minions within the university system. The result: They hardly have any initiative left for either introducing innovative or creative ideas in the university or implementing their vision, if at all they have one.

If our university system finds itself at a crossroads today, one of the major reasons is that our V-Cs feel hamstrung. Here we are talking of the V-Cs, who otherwise mean well, but are unable to perform to the best of their ability or capacity, owing to the external factors. Instances of academics of dubious credentials to top posts of the university are not uncommon.

All this is happening under existing rules and regulations of the UGC, which stipulate that the V-C’s appointment be made from within the academic community. It mandates that the appointee to be an academic of exceptional merit and proven integrity, with a minimum experience of 10 years in teaching/research.

The new draft guidelines of the UGC propose that the V-C’s position may be offered, inter alia, to a reputed public servant or an industry leader or a senior researcher in an institute, with the same stipulation of 10 years’ experience. The UGC couldn’t have chosen a more inappropriate moment than the present one to roll out its so-called revolutionary idea, particularly when everyone knows that the university system in India is not working to its optimal capacity.

With the expenditure on education being cut year after year, the central and state governments are slowly pulling out of their financial commitments, making it difficult for an average public university to sustain or survive.

Corporatisation of universities

If the UGC thinks that picking V-Cs from the industry or the corporate world would solve the financial woes of public universities, then it is sadly mistaken. No doubt, there is a strong need for promoting greater opportunities for the university-industry interface in our liberalised economy, but appointing someone from the industry as the V-C is certainly not the best way of doing it. If anything, it would only result in the widespread corporatisation, even commercialisation, of our universities, and consequent dilution of academic standards.

Moreover, such a move, if implemented, would be a blow to the autonomy of the university system which, over the past few decades, has already been compromised, in more ways than one. A university is of the academics, for the academic training (of teachers, researchers and scholars), and therefore, must be led or administered by an academic, too. Our inability to look for the best leaders within the academia should not be an excuse for throwing open the doors of the university system to corporate czars.

While free thinking is the essence of a university, a multinational operates on the principal of structural compliance. The very purpose of a university is to create, through innovation and research, a group of free thinkers and philosophers, whereas a multinational needs a band of people who submit to the larger, commercial goals of the company or the logic of the market. The UGC must reconsider its misguided move. rananayar@gmail.com

The writer retired as professor from department of English at Panjab University, Chandigarh. Views expressed are personal.