The Presidency Dream

Among other issues brought up by the leftists during a recent debate on the politicization of education in this state was an allegation that Sugata Bose, chairman of the mentor group assigned with the task of building up Presidency University, had himself been associated with the Chhatra Parishad in his student days. Therefore, the charge often made against the Left of adulterating education in West Bengal through political machinations applied to Bose as well.

When pointed out that it was Bose’s pre-eminence as an academic alone that had led Harvard University to offer him a Chair, the leftists responded derisively that respectability these days amounted to an association with either Harvard University or the McDonald’s food chain. At the same time that they equated Harvard to McDonald’s, they pointed out that the recent controversial ordinance covering universities in the state falls short of international standards, since Cambridge University in the UK, contrary to the spirit of the West Bengal ordinance, factors in the opinion of its alumni in forming the highest academic bodies in the university.

It would appear, therefore, that if Bose were to hold a Chair at Cambridge as opposed to Harvard, his credentials would be impeccable. His academic work, in other words, counts for less than the institution he works in. Contradiction lies at the very heart of leftist dialectics, but the reported incident suggests that self-contradiction constitutes its quintessence.

What defies comprehension in many of these debates is the absence of any reference at all to the purpose underlying the creation of academic institutions. The acrimonious exchanges in the debates surround the induction of non-teaching university officials, students and so on in various university bodies, on the role of democracy in university administration or what have you, but rarely do the participants allow the discussion to veer towards the nitty-gritty of teaching itself.

It was a pleasant surprise, therefore, to listen to the views of the current vice-chancellor of Presidency University, Malabika Sarkar, at a recent panel discussion organized by Infocom. She spent more time discussing her vision surrounding curriculum and infrastructure for Presidency University than the details of the composition of administrative bodies in the making.

Her views on the curriculum in particular were what left a lasting impression on the audience and other panelists. She fondly recalled the manner in which her professors taught her class when she was herself a student of the august institution. Although the university had a well-defined syllabus for the English Honours course, some of her best teachers never stuck to the precise contours of the syllabus. She cited the example of students being introduced to large sections of Dante’s Divine Comedy merely because his name happened to have been mentioned in a recommended text. As she explained, most of the students lapped up with pleasure the fare they were offered and few considered it a barrier standing in the way of successful performance in university examinations.

The method of teaching adopted during her student days was consciously geared towards opening up the minds of the students rather than serving the narrow objective of scoring high marks. A natural corollary that followed from this approach to teaching was that a student’s quality was judged more by the teacher’s perception of his interest in the subject than by his ability to perform well in terms of the marks scored.

The best among the students absorbed perfectly the material taught, while scoring high marks in university examinations. Not all of them performed similarly, of course, but there were few who were left untouched by the beauty of the process of accumulating knowledge. Taking off from here, Sarkar went on to suggest that the best way to introduce John Keats to the students was not to list a few poems by the poet in the syllabus, but to simply state Keats’s name as a poet to be studied. Two different teachers may then select different sets of poems written by Keats to illustrate his works, or the same teacher may do so for different classes. So, the students would learn to appreciate Romantic poetry in a manner that can never be matched by their limited exposure to a few rigidly assigned compositions.

How would a question paper for the examination be set though? No undergraduate would know how to prepare for an examination based on a syllabus that didn’t state specifics. Sarkar did not address this issue during the short duration of her speech, but there is little doubt that the notion of a Presidency University should take her a long way in achieving her dream.

For example, Presidency University, as opposed to the gargantuan Calcutta University, would not be ‘crowded’ by several undergraduate colleges. There would be a single undergraduate class, as in, say, Jadavpur University, and question papers for the undergraduates could then be set by the same teacher who taught the students, as opposed to a centralized body ruling over numerous colleges.

What guarantees, however, that the teachers will maintain an acceptable standard for the final examination? Quite obviously, there should be a board of moderators that can screen the question papers. However, given the grand vision of the vice-chancellor, the board itself needs to be carefully selected. And it is precisely here that the mentor group begins to matter. It is composed of some of the best academics across the world. More important, no one in the group is actively involved in political movements. Such a body is almost certain to search for a faculty for the university that will insist on the highest possible academic standards. The faculty it is expected to recommend will consist of talented teachers as far as possible, but the appointees will be serious researchers. The quality of research will, in turn, be judged most probably by publications in anonymously refereed journals, recognized for their excellence by the international academic community. Such teachers alone can be depended on not to misuse the flexibility afforded by the syllabus and reduce the university to a travesty of a teaching institution, as was the case with some of the departments immediately preceding the elevation of the college to a university.

All researchers may not turn into good teachers, though there are well-known examples of people like Amartya Sen and Kaushik Basu (to take the case of Economics) who have excelled both in research and teaching. However, even those researchers who lack teaching skills are likely to respect an examination system based on the broad syllabus structure outlined earlier.

The observations apply with equal force to post-graduate teaching, though it is obviously less problematic to implement the idea at the Master’s level. What might prevent the realization of the dream is the near impossibility of appointing permanent teachers who qualify. One hears suggestions that tenured faculty members associated with institutions abroad should spend their vacations in Calcutta to offer short-term courses. And indeed, unless bright young people show a strong willingness to fulfil the Presidency dream, the university could well transform into a transit lounge to be occupied by NRIs between international flights. The government of West Bengal might happily pay for their business-class tickets, but the Presidency University that the vice-chancellor hopes to build will not proceed too far beyond its foundation-stone-laying ceremony.

If the mentor group fails to solve this problem to its own satisfaction, the government’s detractors will keep on merrily enchanting us with their dialectical dance dramas. One hopes, though, that the people in charge succeed, however challenging their tightrope-walking exercise might turn out to be.

The author is former professor of economics, Indian Statistical Institute, Calcutta

The Presidency Dream By Dipankar Dasgupta

The Presidency Dream
By Dipankar Dasgupta