Shivaji Sondhi, a professor of physics at Princeton University lists out 14 good tips on what you should do to build your university into a world-class institution.
The time appears to have come for India to seriously address the challenges facing its higher education sector. The challenges are twofold, those of quantity and those of quality.
1. Aim for the best faculty, and the best students you can attract
The best universities are about the truly gifted students being taught and mentored by an exceptional faculty in a virtuous cycle. At the end of the day, a really good university is about the people on its campus.
2. Spend accordingly
Recruiting high-quality faculty requires money for internationally competitive salaries but even more so for infrastructure and for seeding research efforts before they become selffinancing. Money is a tool to recruit exceptional students certainly if absolute financial need is an issue, but also in some cases where the very best ones you might wish to attract, have attractive offers elsewhere. You can't build a really good institution on the cheap.
3. Aim small
You will have only so much money to spend. There are only so many fine academics willing to live in India today that you can recruit almost entirely Indians. Education is labour intensive. And, the best institutions have a small number of students per faculty member (my own, Princeton, has an incredible five students per faculty member). Such ratios allow efficient mentoring and student involvement in research while enhancing the transmission of knowledge that a university necessarily engages in. Small is also easier to manage in respect of quality control. [For comparison, Princeton has 7,500 students and no professional schools; Harvard has about 20,000 students and a set of professional schools].
4. Focus on faculty
The quality of faculty is key. Given the paucity of high-quality institutions in India, the pool of good students available to our new university is likely to allow recruitment of an exceptional body of students. The same is not true of faculty recruitment. With faculty, quality attracts quality—you want to be where so-and-so is present already. With faculty, critical mass is also important in most modern disciplines—you need colleagues to talk to about research on a daily basis, which makes it more important to hire wisely. This implies the need for selectivity in the areas in which you hire. Finally, faculty members last a long time—a problematic set of hires at the start can mar the tone of the institution for a long time.
5. Postpone professional education
Law, medical and business schools are wonderful additions to a university—but they are different in important ways from core academic areas (pure science, mathematics and humanities and social sciences). Initially, as you seek to define the character of the new institution, it would be best to not have to work out a 'balance' between core and professional education sectors. You can always add them on.
6. Pick an impressive academic leadership
While academic administrators necessarily sacrifice their own research productivity in the interests of an institution, it helps enormously if they come with genuine intellectual accomplishments. Such people command respect from their faculty colleagues and are far better able to judge the virtues of various competing claims on the scarce resources of the institution.
7. Empower the leadership
Much as I hate to say this as a faculty member, an institution that lacks the power centre, charged with watching out for its global interests, is likely to become a hostage to inertia. What is needed is a balance of power—where faculty has the opportunity to be heard collectively on issues that matter. But, at the same time, individuasl academic units are not the last word on their own practices—especially on hiring and promotion.
8. Build external review
For the foreseeable future, India is likely to have a small internationally-competitive higher education sector. This will make it hard to obtain purely market-driven readings of how an institution is faring. To compensate for this, build in a systematic review process involving faculty and administrators from outside India, who periodically examines all aspects of the institution
9. Incentivise the faculty
It is true that faculty do not get into academics to maximise cash returns, but they are not immune to the charms of incentives. A good university has many incentives at its disposal: reasonable differentials in pay, discretionary research funds for individual faculty, teaching relief, sabbaticals, a willingness to make additional hires in areas of interest to existing faculty, a willingness to provide funds for more public activities such as visitor programmes in support of specific research efforts. These can be used to encourage faculty to lead productive front-rank research careers. Related incentives can be used to advance the teaching mission of the institution with the caveat that experience around the world suggests that when push comes to shove the research criterion should prevail over others. At the junior stage there is the incentive of a tenure decision. As our university takes off and becomes the employer of choice, it should be able to use the tenure process to identify exceptional candidates for recruitment. In this sector set for massive expansion, selectivity in tenure at a few top institutions will be offset by a large number of jobs elsewhere.
10. Offer four-year undergraduate degrees
The American model allows for exploration. It allows some students to work out their true interests over a period of time with very productive consequences. The longer period also allows students to develop a closer relationship with the faculty. More practically, it allows the new university to interface more easily with the US, which is likely to prove attractive to students for the foreseeable future.
11. Supplement permanent faculty with less expensive manpower
Senior undergraduates could be paid to grade entering courses, graduate students can work as teaching assistants while pursuing their degrees, good teachers from the large pool of existing Indian universities could be enticed to come and teach specific courses on leave from their home institutions for short periods. Less expensive staff could be utilised to help with routine academic tasks.
12. Use IT
Information technology (IT) can boost the fundamental educational productivity. Entry-level instruction could benefit substantially from the introduction of expert systems that do everything—from examining students, which they already do, to actually instructing them on specific tasks of problem-solving, which seems well within the reach of existing technology. If our university can harness these advances it would enable its scarce resource— the high-quality faculty to focus on more advanced instruction thus effectively boosting the faculty student ratio. Given the strengths of Indian companies in IT, that seems to be an especially promising direction for our new university to build into its very DNA. Another use of IT would be to allow faculty and students to connect seamlessly to the broader world of learning. High-bandwidth access to international databases and electronic publications should be provided where possible. Videoconferencing and collaborative software can make learning even more exciting. There is no reason, that the high-quality but small physics department at the university could not host terrific talks delivered by distant colleagues via videoconferencing. However, it will find it hard to persuade the same number to hop on a plane and fly half around the world.
13. Be India specific
Our university may have some trouble competing with the established heavyweights of the international academic world in fields which are not very country specific. However there is no reason why cannot build its brand by establishing the best programmes in the world on topics that relate specifically to India. Examples that come to mind are Indian languages and literature, social science work specific to India, Indian history, India's fine arts, Indian archeology, Indian biodiversity and genetics. Given resources, selectivity and freedom from academic political fashions it seems to me a relatively straightforward task of the new University to put itself on the map in these areas.
14. Build a postdoctoral scholar programme
At least initially, our university will find it easier to attract a higher calibre of undergraduate student, then a graduate student. The best graduate students will probably still find themselves attracted to the very best universities in the world outside India. As this will pose of a challenge to faculty in the pursuit of their own research, it would be wise for our new university to explore options to recruit postdoctoral scholars where possible with attractive fellowships. As such scholars will come with a fair amount of training already under their belts, they would provide a welcome addition to the research effort.
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Rajwinder Singh
Head, Dept of Computer Science and Engineering
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