Why does the State want to control universities?’

There is a need to redefine the relationship between the State and universities for a truly autonomous and thriving academic environment.

In post-Nehruvian India, did the State understand the essence of a ‘university’? It should be a free space where teachers, students and researchers can freely question, argue and hold diverse opinions in pursuit of truth. A university is a centre of learning that requires an atmosphere of open inquiry and debate.

Constructive debate requires the ability to think. Scepticism, heretical views and dialogue promote the habit of thinking, facilitate innovation, even the development of new skills that India needs today. A university needs comprehensive administrative and academic autonomy. Learning involves experiments and failures, critique of contending hypotheses and, possibly, agreement to disagree.

Besides being a centre of learning, a university is a social institution with attendant responsibilities to society, such as critiquing the continued prevalence and reproduction of inequality, which causes unequal opportunities for access to education. It is thus a training ground for democracy, resented only by authoritarian governments.

So, policy makers shouldn’t be touchy about critical assessment of policies and decisions. Touchiness can lead to disdain for knowledge and over-emphasis on skill-based degrees at the cost of knowledge.

These days a majority of knowledge-proof decision makers have preferred to continue with a three-decade old Act. They are convinced that they are ‘systemic reformers’ and set up commissions and committees to cure the ills of the universities, to elevate them to international standards.

The route to achieve this worthy objective, they believe, with little understanding of the philosophy of higher education, is to reinforce a regime of bureaucratised control over the appointment and powers of pro-chancellor, vice-chancellor, registrars, finance officer, college development council, even to the syndicate, to which government nominates as many as 14 persons while the VC nominates only six persons.

For faculty recruitment, the ‘Board of Appointment’ (S.53, Karnataka Act, 2000), chaired by the VC, will have 4 experts nominated by the chancellor on the recommendation of the state government, and the chairman of the departmental council. The “government” mentioned above simply means the education minister and the principal secretary to the higher education department.

Universities are thus boxed in by the state, lock stock and barrel. As if this was not enough, the previous state government allowed a spree of private universities, most of which treat education as business. Incidentally, Karnataka Legislative Council approved the list
of universities in under 30 minutes in 2022, cleared without a murmur by the governor-chancellor.

On the appointment of the VC, academics have made various suggestions, but they refrain from contextualising the government’s tight grip over the search committee. Only internationally recognised scholars, most likely to resist governmental pressures, should be on the search committee.

The role of state-appointed governors, mostly non-academic, has been most controversial. Recent action by governors of Kerala and West Bengal in the direct appointment of VCs or acting VCs, by-passing elected governments, has invited strong disapproval from constitutional experts. The governors have tossed out of the window the constitutional mandate of federalism and the rights of the states.

Will the government respond to the question: with all the suffocating controls, what have you achieved so far?

In Mysore University, a professor who was facing trial in a court and, apparently, not even on the recommended panel of names but included subsequently by the previous government was appointed VC. But he had to quit on legal grounds.

But the HC has now (Sept 22) overruled a single judge’s order. How
will faculty and students perceive
such incidents?

In Kuvempu University, graft allegations against the VC were asked to be investigated by a committee headed by a district judge on May 29th of this year. It was given 20 days to inquire and report. By the end of August, the committee hadn’t met even once. The judge obviously felt slighted.

Governments routinely confront serious political and social issues demanding immediate attention; university problems are their last priority. However, when professors are desperate to buy-off the VC’s job at ‘the going rate’, without a sense of guilt, why blame the government even if it is a party to the deal?

Can there be any greater academic and moral depravity? That MLAs in 2020, 35% of whom faced criminal cases, 26% ‘serious criminal cases’, in their electoral affidavits “deplored corruption in recruitments of VCs in universities run by the government” is a telling irony.

The depth of the state’s misadventure into academic issues is the senseless control over the ‘Board of Studies’ (KSU Act, S33). It is a self-governing body of senior professors from the department and subject experts from other universities to frame the syllabus for different subjects, keeping in view local needs, expertise
of the faculty, feasibility of new courses -- all foreign to education ministers
and bureaucracy.

It was appropriated by the BJP government’s NEP via the ‘Higher Education Council’, still in force, for this academic year. In other words, the HEC was enabled to manipulate the syllabus, courses, and textbooks to suit the BJP’s agenda.

An unpardonable lapse is that all governments in Karnataka have failed to fill up 75% to 90% of the already ‘sanctioned posts’. In Mysore University alone, 407 out of 460 sanctioned posts continue to be vacant! In Karnatak University, 386 of its 600 positions are vacant.

These posts are filled by ‘guest/temporary faculty’. Can we expect any real commitment to the university or to students from them?

Yet, the present higher education minister recently asserted that the quality of higher education has not suffered. More shockingly, he has declared in an interview (DH Aug 8, 23) that “the government is thinking of performance-based tenure for VCs”. Does he mean an apprentice VC?

Will the present government end the dismal state of affairs by thorough-going amendments to the universities Act? If it does, it will be the first public-funded university, where administrative and academic freedoms can flourish.

It would do well to set up a ‘board of governors’, in which its nominees should be in a minority and the rest should be well-known academics, industry representatives, professionals, perhaps even from the civil society. The board should govern the university.

A question that academics have failed to raise until now, for they dare not ‘dissent’: why does the State believe that it should control universities? Does the State alone know what is best for society? 

Dr Deepak Nayyar, former economic advisor to the V P Singh government and VC of Delhi University, once said that “governments must recognise that the provision of resources to universities does not endow them with a right to exercise control”.

(The writer is an academic, former minister and former Chairman, Karnataka Legislative Council)