Why HRD ministry’s proposal of doing away with mandated research is required
Post a two-day national conference on higher education perspective in India, HRD minister Prakash Javadekar has announced that research will now not be mandatory for promotion of teachers teaching undergraduate courses. He has gone on to say that this will stop the “jhooth mooth ka research”.
The minister has got a lot of it right, while giving way to many more questions, in a country where the quality of higher education does not espouse veneration.
Firstly, Javadekar is spot on about the “jhooth mooth” part of research. A lot of research in India is bogus and is carried out because it is mandated. There are several factors that are to blame for it, beginning from a lack of culture of asking the right questions to inadequate and uneven grants to gross lack of infrastructure to politics in higher education. In such an environment, doing away with the “mandatory” part in research requirement is welcome.
Secondly, the question that gets raised is that if the teaching faculty does not undertake research, how will their merit be “measured”? Or for that matter how will new knowledge creation, the fundamental behind any research, happen? And these are pertinent questions.
While it will take another piece to discuss how research became a predominant requirement and mainstay of most university activities today, it will suffice to state here that research is very much necessary, even at UG level. In doing away with the compulsory clause, a mechanism fostering quality research should be instituted.
Thirdly, the elephant in the room, which is failing teaching standards in higher education, clearly hasn’t been addressed by making research mandatory. While many educationists cannot fathom a teacher separated from being a researcher, for others, teaching skills and research are far apart.
Many universities in the UK have gone full circle, beginning from teaching universities to research universities to coming back to teaching. The new UGC suggestion expects research at a level higher than UG and the idea is a given. Much more needs to be done to facilitate the core idea of improved teaching standards than just doing away with research.
Fourthly, the proposal stated by the minister reveals very little. Promotions, available positions, competition, reward, are all structural and there has to be something that replaces it to gauge merit. Community service and student centeredness have been proposed as alternatives, yet with these difficult-to-measure parameters, it will not be easy to distinguish faculty members.
With performance-based pay in most places, much acrimony and resulting fallouts is just due to these differentiating parameters. In that regard what the new proposal will entail is anybody’s guess.
Fifthly, the proposal opens a whole new window of opportunities to address some of the rot in higher education. The opportunity to improve teaching standards, to focus on pedagogy and research in it, to initiate and use student feedback as a performance parameter, to push for acceptance and use of technology in education, to weed out the huge predatory journal publications that India has currently, to promote scholarship and lifelong learning in faculty members and much more.
Sixthly, the challenges that implementation of such a proposal will throw will be unique. Unless differentiators are well established, it will create a tricky situation in institutions. If research output will decrease then what will happen to research targets already set?
Since research is the biggest pillar on which all ranking systems are based, will such a proposal really work on ground, or will it just become another UGC guideline which will be meaningless needs to be seen.
While prima facie the new proposal made by the MHRD appears to have identified a very valid point in Indian higher education, that of substandard research output owing to mandated research at all levels, the problem is more complex than this apparent fix.
Teaching quality, scholarship, new knowledge generation, meaningful and high quality research, are various issues which needs addressing and thus sound complementary provisions need to be ushered along with this desirable removal of mandated research at UG level.