Confusing standards with standardisation is a recipe for stifling innovation. All that portability requires is a university recognising that another university can be trusted to uphold certain pedagogical standards; it does not require that they follow the same curriculum. Finally, the idea of standardising curriculum goes against the grain of what our education system needs: more choices for students. Centralisation militates against choice, and Indian higher education needs to err towards the latter rather than the former.

No one doubts that there is an urgent need to reform the governance of Indian universities. But the kinds of reforms that are being contemplated, suggest even more centralisation and erosion of university autonomy. It should not be the UGC’s job, for instance, to prescribe qualifications for vice-chancellors. One proposal doing the rounds is that significant administrative experience be made mandatory for holding the post of vice chancellor. This is frankly a bureaucratic solution designed to perpetuate more of the same; and exclude outsiders who have the energy and passion for institutional innovation: the likes of Madan Mohan Malviya or Ravi Mathai.

The decline of Indian higher education can be traced to that peculiar combination of the Congress and the Left that dominated higher education in the seventies. It killed higher education through a combination of state control, populism, patronage and subordinating universities to every purpose but the cultivation of the intellect. The combination continues: centralisation of syllabus is another way of enhancing state control; the seventies gave us populism in the guise of automatic promotions; Arjun Singh gave it in the guise of indiscriminate increase in retirement age; the last regime was controlled by a small cabal; the men entrusted with curricular and institutional reform now are those who represent the twilight of the old system, not those who are yearning for a new dawn.

... contd.