The Full text of the 94 page report of the The Committee to Advise on Renovation and Rejuvenation of Higher Education is up on the education ministry's site. The 24 member committee chaired by Prof. Yashpal included amongst others the Chairpersons of UGC, AICTE, and NAAC, Vice Chancellors (current and former) of publicly funded universities, Directors of IIT (Madras), IIM (Bangalore) and NCERT, economists and bureacrats from the Planning Commission, the Finance, Education and other ministries. Dr. Ramdas Pai, Chancellor of Manipal University, was the sole member on the committee from a private university. A few others from outside the education sector include Kiran Karnik (former President of NASSCOM) and legal expert N.R. Madhava Menon who is a member on the commission of Centre-State Relations.
Apparently, Prof Kaushik Basu, an Economics Professor at Cornell University, and a member of the Yashpal Committee, has penned a dissent note to the report. There is no mention of the dissent note by Kaushik Basu in the copy of the 94 page report put up online at the education ministry's web site.
Addendum: Prof. Basu has provided the full text of his dissent note.
Here is a summary of the main points from the full text of the Yashpal Committee Report (extracted and paraphrased by me as I have understood it, with references provided to the page numbers on the report).
- All universities must be teaching cum research universities. All research bodies must connect with universities in their vicinity and create teaching opportunities for their researchers. (p14)
- We must prevent isolation of study of engineering or management. We should look forward to the day when IITs and IIMs also produce scholars in areas like literature, linguistics and politics. Institutions must be given the freedom to expand and diversify as they see fit rather than thrusting an uniform diktat on all institutions. (p15)
- All syllabi should require teachers and students to apply what they have learnt in their courses, on studying a local situation, issue or problem. There should be sufficient room for the use of local data and resources to make the knowledge covered in the syllabus come alive as experience. (p18)
- Minimum set of occupational exposure to be made compulsory for all students, irrespective of discipline, in the form of summer jobs or internships, with evaluation of the students on this front. (p19)
- Need to expose students at the undergraduate level to various disciplines like humanities, social sciences, aesthetics, irrespective of the discipline they would like to specialise in subsequently. (p21)
- Teacher training for all levels of school education (from primary to higher secondary) must be carried out by institutions of higher educations. The absence of university-level interest in teacher training has resulted in poor academic quality. (p21-22)
- We need to build strong bridges between different fields of professional education and the disciplines of science, social sciences and humanities, All professional institutions must be part of a comprehensive university in a complete administrative and academic sense. We must abolish intermediary bodies that have been set up solely to issue licenses to professional colleges alone and inspect them. This will also help new interdisciplinary courses and research to evolve in the comprehensive universities. (p23)
- All vocational institutions must also be part of universities. (p24)
- It should be mandatory for all universities to have undergraduate programes. All teachers in universities must teach at the undergraduate level. (p26)
- Universities must take steps to reduce gender, class and caste asymmetries. (p27)
- Universities must study areas that are relevant in their immediate social and natural milieu and create knowledge bases in those areas. (p28)
- Universities must be motivated to identify and prioritise areas for reform and initiate and implement the reform themselves from within rather than having the reform thrust on them top-down by a national or state-level body. This will be true autonomy. (p28)
- There should be no discrimination between Central and State funded universities. All benefits extended to Central Universities must also be extended by State Governments to the state universities and the Centre must incentivise the States to do so. (p30)
- There is an optimum size for a University in terms of the number of affiliated colleges, which must be maintained. (p31-32)
- The inability of the state to drastically increase capacity in higher education has led to growth of the private sector in higher education. To double higher education capacity, we need all three kinds of universities: state-funded and run universities, private universities and those funded and run by public-private partnerships. All of them should work efficiently overseen by a transparent regulatory mechanism. (p32-34)
- All private universities must submit to a national accreditation system. Private degree-granting universities must not be confined to select areas like technology, medicine, management, finance etc.. They must be required to be comprehensive universities covering the arts and social and natural sciences too. (p35)
- There must be tight regulation of private universities in terms of auditing of accounts, payment of minimum salaries to teachers, certain percentage of seats reserved for meritorious students who are to be provided scholarships etc.. (p35)
- Granting of Deemed University status to be put on hold. All existing Deemed Universities to be given three years to shape up (to have strong research programmes, and become a comprehensive university as defined in this report) failing which their Deemed University status is to be withdrawn. (p37)
- Education must be made affordable for all through scholarships or loans provided by the State. Every student who gains admission must get an assured loan or a scholarship (for the needy) from the State. (p39)
- Do we need foreign universities? Can the best learning experiences not be provided to our students by opening our doors to foreign scholars? p(40)
- If the best of foreign universities (amongst the top 200 in the world) want to come to India, they should be welcomed. Such institutions should award an Indian degree and be subject to all the rules and regulations that would apply to any Indian university. (p40)
- State funding, though increasing, will not be enough to expand supply and progress towards excellence. Complementary sources of funding will have to be found even for state funded universities. Philanthropy from society and alumni as a source of funding needs to be encouraged, with appropriate changes in regulation. Universities must be able to hire professional fundraisers and professional investors to attract funding from non-government sources. (p41)
- Universities must be freed from the constraints imposed by funding agencies to obtain approvals for every single post. Funding agencies must provide block grants against a plan and universities must be allowed to spend them according to their priorities, subject to the plan. (p42)
- There are a large number of students who can afford to pay for their education. Absence of differential fees has led to subsidising students who can actually afford to pay. Those who can afford to pay must pay higher fees for which they will be offered guarateed student loans. Free education will be provided only to those who cannot afford it. (p42)
- National tests like the GRE must be organised round the year. Students from all over India must be allowed to take the tests as many times as they like and their best score can be sent to the universities for admission. Currently the CBSE and the State Board exams are a means of normalising school level competencies - this can be done by the National tests. We must seriously think of reviving our faith in each school and its teachers to credibly evaluate their own students. (p42-43)
- India can provide affordable higher education to foreign students, if we remove systemic impediments. It will also enrich the ethos of our universities. (p43)
- Urgent measures are needed to attract good people who enjoy teaching and research back to the university and offer them a positive and motivating environment. Resources in terms of libraries, laboratories and research assistance as well as competitive remuneration will need to be provided to retain good people. (p43-44)
- Student assessment of teachers needs to be instituted. Students can provide an experiential assessment of the quality of teaching. Parameters of student feedback can be drawn up to avoid distorted assessments by students. Teachers whose feedback record remains poor in successive years should be required to face formal precedures which might allow a university or college to shed them.
- We need to improve governance of universities by developing expertise in educational management, and avoid burdening good academics with administrative chores. We must have a separation between academic administration and overall management (including fund raising). State governments must abandon the trend of appointing civil servants as university administrators. (p45)
- Teachers and students must have autonomy. In academic matters, the teacher should have the autonomy to frame his/her course and the way he/she would like to assess his/her students. Students should be allowed to take courses of their choice from different universities and then be awarded a degree on the basis of credits earned. (p46)
- We should not blame private initiative, political interference, and other forces for the loss of autonomy of universities. There was no rigorous resistance, indeed there was willing abdication, from the academic community to the subversion in matters of policy implementation, appointments and day-to-day functioning of the universities. Education was made subservient to ideological compulsions, which led to its loss of respect. (p49)
- We need a De Novo regulatory body - the National Commission for Higher Education and Research (NCHER) under which the various functions of the existing regulatory agencies would be subsumed. The new body would also take over the powers vested in the existing regulatory bodies in terms of creation of new institutions as well as their content/sylallbi. (p52)
- The 13 existing professional councils created under various acts of Parliament may after divesting their existing regulatory functions to NCHER look at conducting tests for practicisng professionals affiliated to the councils, prescribing syllabi for such tests and leave it to the universities to design their curriculum based on such syllabi. (p55).
- The NCHER would not interfere with academic freedom and institutional autonomy. It would not follow the current inspection-based approval method, it but would use move to a verification and authentication system. Universities will put out mandatory self-declarations in the public domain.(corrected)
- Given the federal nature of our country and the role of states in education, there must be Higher Education Councils (HECs) in the states which will co-ordinate with the NCHER, to allow different institutions created and funded by the Centre and States to grow on equal footing. These HECs would also insulate the State universities from outside interference. (p57).
- There should be a fast-track statutory mechanism in place for the adjudication of disputes between teachers, employees and management of institutions and universities in respect of matters concerning service conditions, as well as in matters of disputes relating to fee, admissions etc. A suitable law should be enacted to establish a National Education Tribunal along with State Education Tribunals or appropriate number of Benches of the Apex Tribunal in place for such adjudication. This would be in line with the observations of the Supreme Court of India in the TMA Pai matter, where such Tribunals were recommended. (p 60)
- Any agency whose intention is to protect students from sub-par education is better off by providing information on the programmes and univerisites to the student rather than walk the slippery path of establishing minimum standards of quality (for education is about academic over-reach rather than reaching the minimum). (p63)
- Curricular reform to be the topmost priority of the newly created NCHER which would create a curricular framework based on the principles of mobility within a full range of curricular areas and
integration of skills with academic depth. (p64)
- The NCHER should galvanize research in the university system through the creation of a National Research Foundation. (p64)
- The NCHER should identify the best 1,500 colleges across India to upgrade them as universities, and create clusters of other potentially good colleges to evolve as universities. (p66)
- The NCHER too should be subject to external review once in five years. (p66)
- The NCHER should prepare and present a Report on the State of Higher Education in India annually to Parliament. (p68)
- The NCHER shall establish transparent norms and process for entry and exit of institutions. The need is to make the process easy for good and serious proposals for setting up new institutions. (p68)
- The NCHER would be an autonomous body created by making a suitable amendment to the Constitution, accountable only to the Indian parliament and drawing its budgetary resources from the Ministry of Finance. It would have a seven-member board with a full-time Chairperson. Of the seven members, one would be an eminent professional from the world of industry and one with the background of a long and consistent social engagement. All other five members would be academic people of eminence, representing broad areas of knowledge. The status of the Chairperson of the commission should be analogous to that of the Chief Election Commissioner and that of the members should be comparable to the Election Commissioners. The Commission will be independent of all ministries of the Government of India. It will have the autonomy to hire talent at various levels within and outside the government. It will also have the autonomy to define the compensation of its employees.
- The NCHER may initially consist of five divisions: (p70)
- Future Directions: Developing global benchmarks on student performance; university performance; salaries, potential programmers; new research directions; and articulation of needs of the government in terms of manpower etc.
- Accreditation Management: Creating norms for accreditation and certifyingmultiple accreditation agencies which would be independent of the government .Institutions and universities may like to get accreditation from one or more than one agencies depending on their reputation. They would be also providing annual feedback to universities, and organizing workshops etc.
- Funding & Development: Developing funding needs of universities, developing mechanisms for funding institutions, helping universities with development of corpus and good endowment management, managing the guaranteed student loan/scholarship programme, and funding the requirements of universities etc.
- New Institutions & Incubation: Including training workshops for first-time VCs as well as on themes like accounting, investing the corpus, communication within & outside the university, negotiations & managing vendors, good office practices, human resource management etc.
- Information & Governance: This division will focus on managing the data needs of the commission, display of information on universities, develop performance parameters on the governance of universities, support other divisions with information as well as provide students with information on each university. This division w ill also inform the Accreditation and Funding & Development divisions of the performance or lack thereof, for each university, each year.
There's a lot of interesting stuff in the report! Enough fodder for a separate post to follow looking at the prognosis, suggestions and recommendations.
