Challenges before Higher Education in Developing Societies

Prabhat Patnaik | Vol. 1(1) 2011: 18-28 | Indian Researcher

The twentieth century witnessed some momentous developments. Countries which for decades, or even centuries, had remained colonies, semi-colonies, or dependencies, acquired political independence after prolonged freedom struggles. With decolonization, they also emerged into modern nationhood, where diverse people with dissimilar languages, ethnicities, and regional identities who had become unified in the course of the anti-colonial struggles, decided to live together as a unified nation under a single nation-State. The political form given to this nation-State was typically that of an electoral democracy based on universal adult franchise, usually a parliamentary democracy but occasionally an elected Presidency. There were no doubt severe birth pangs for this emerging new order: there were many false starts, partitions, and secessionist movements, but, through all these, the awakening of the hitherto marginalized peoples of the colonial and semi-colonial world to nationhood, political rights, and democratic arrangements remains an outstanding fact.

The momentousness of these developments must not be underestimated. In India for example, characterized for millennia by a caste-system that hierarchically ordered people into superior and inferior beings, the institutionalization of “one- person-one vote” constituted a veritable social revolution. And it was made possible because the modern elite that led the freedom struggle put this forward as a condition for mobilizing the people behind this struggle, as a promised implicit social contract that was later to be given explicit form in the new Constitution of the Republic. And this elite in turn was the legatee of an intellectual upsurge which the modern higher educational system, instituted by colonialism with the objective of recruiting functionaries for the colonial regime, facilitated despite itself.

This process of awakening sometimes referred to in somewhat inelegant language as “nation-building”, is far from over; on the contrary, it faces severe challenges on an almost daily basis. And if it is to be carried forward, then the higher education system, no longer run by colonialism for its own purposes but now an integral part of the new nation, must continue to produce people who remain sufficiently imbued with the values enshrined in the Constitution, sufficiently committed to the implicit social contract of which the Constitution is the outcome. These are the values of secularism, egalitarianism, opposition to caste and gender discrimination, support for democratic arrangements, for civil liberties and political rights. In short, the higher education system in countries like ours must be oriented towards carrying forward the task of “nation-building”. This must remain its highest priority.

Two misunderstandings may arise here. The first misunderstanding consists in the belief that higher education has to do with the striving for knowledge and knowledge has nothing to do with nationhood. By emphasizing the “nation-building” task of higher education are we not distorting its role, detaching it from the academic universe where ideas alone matter and loading on to it “political tasks” such as “nation-building”? Are we not looking upon higher education in somewhat narrow terms as a purely functional activity? The scope for this misunderstanding arises because of the crudity of the term “nation-building” which carries with it a suggestion of functionality, artificiality, narrowness, and imposition. What is meant by the “nation-building” task of higher education, however (I have elsewhere called it, following Antonio Gramsci, the task of creating “organic intellectuals” of the people) is something very different from these suggestions. It is indeed a striving for knowledge, for excellence, but unrestricted by the hegemony of the existing ideas which typically emanate from the advanced countries. These ideas must of course be engaged with, but higher education in developing societies cannot remain a mere clone of what exists in the advanced countries. Developing societies must go beyond the mere imitation of research agendas set by the established centers of learning in the advanced countries in order to take account of the people’s needs. I mentioned earlier that modern India was the outcome of an intellectual upsurge, of a period of great intensity of intellectual effort, be it in the form of Dadabhai Naoroji’s “Drain Theory” that exposed the inner working of the colonial system of exploitation, or the Gandhi-Tagore correspondence that touched upon practically every problem of modern India, or the forays into theoretical physics of a Meghnad Saha or a Satyen Bose that produced frontier research enshrined for instance in the Bose-Einstein Statistic. To create conditions for the sustenance of such an upsurge is what constitutes the “nation-building” task of higher education; it visualizes much higher levels of creativity than otherwise.

The second misunderstanding is to believe that even if the “nation-building” task of higher education is important it is a matter that is best left to certain disciplines and certain segments of higher education. How can it have any relevance for the training and research in a large number of disciplines? In other words, it can not be of concern for the entire higher education sector as a whole. The mistake here consists in not recognizing that the overall task of higher education impacts every aspect of it. (The description of the task of higher education in Gramscian terms as producing “organic intellectuals” of the people in developing societies reduces the scope for such misunderstanding). The very conception of the system of higher education in all its facets is shaped by this task, which covers not just the inculcation of certain specific values, such as secularism or respect for civil liberties, but the creation of an entire Weltanschauung.

A higher education system geared to this task will necessarily have certain characteristics. First of all, it must be largely State-funded. There has always been space for charities, philanthropic initiatives, bequests, and such like for starting institutions for higher education; they can easily get dovetailed into any State-funded system to serve the overarching task of “nation-building” in the broader sense, but the same cannot be said of private educational institutions run on commercial lines which necessarily have to treat education as a saleable commodity. Treating higher education as a commodity necessarily comes in the way of its nation-building task. For instance, it precludes affirmative action in matters of admission and recruitment which is important for an egalitarian educational system; and it also precludes emphasis on courses and disciplines that are important from the social point of view as distinct from being merely profitable.

Many private educational institutions claim that they do not run for profit, even when they are palpably profit-oriented, on the grounds that all the profits they earn are reinvested into the institutions itself. This claim however is misplaced. The logic of the operation of an educational institution depends upon the objective for which it is run. If obtaining a large surplus is the objective of the institution, then, no matter how this surplus is deployed, the logic of the operation of the institution will be vitiated in a manner inimical to the “nation-building” task of the higher education system.

Secondly, as already mentioned, a higher education system oriented towards nation-building must not only be open to all but also make itself inclusive in a deliberate sense by drawing students and teachers from hitherto excluded and marginalized communities through affirmative action, of which the simplest and the most effective form is reservations. It is usually believed that affirmative action, though necessary for ensuring equity, militates against excellence, that we have here a conflict between achieving equity and ensuring quality. This perception is fundamentally wrong. Affirmative action which achieves equity simultaneously enhances the quality of the higher education system. Not only is there no conflict between the achievement of equity and the enhancement of quality, but the former is the most effective and potent means of achieving the latter.

This follows simply from the premise, acceptable to all but the most die-hard racists, that talent and academic ability are more or less evenly distributed across the various social groups in a society. It follows then that if among the students or teachers of the higher education system there is an overwhelming representation of only a few social groups, to the exclusion of others, then that system must be suffering from a loss of quality. The best quality education system would thus be one where the group-wise composition of students and teachers, i.e., of the academic community, would closely approximate the group-wise composition of the population as a whole.

Of course, because of past discrimination, the excluded groups in any initial situation are so handicapped that their actual performance invariably falls short of what they are capable of, i.e., of their potential, so that in what appears to be a “fair” selection they continue to remain excluded; but this only shows that establishing formal equality at the level of selection only serves to reinforce and perpetuate substantive inequality. Or putting it differently, the apparent insistence on “quality” in a given situation serves to undermine quality in the long run. The only way to overcome this situation and bring about long-run quality improvement in the higher education system is through affirmative action that appears immediately to be compromising on quality. The argument here is exactly analogous to Friedrich List’s argument for the introduction of protection, as opposed to free trade, in newly developing economies for the long-run efficiency of production in the world economy.

Putting it differently, underlying apparent equality of opportunity in a system marked by a legacy of exclusion there are major and structural barriers to entry for several social groups. Real equality, and hence the achievement of real quality, can be ensured only by violating formal equality, through affirmative action, including reservation. True, this has to be followed by active steps to ensure that those who have entered the system because of being helped across the barriers to entry are given the opportunity to achieve their true potential, but that is an argument for supplementing reservations by a host of other measures, not for doing away with reservations altogether.

Thirdly, a higher education system oriented towards “nation-building” must always preserve dissent and democracy within the educational institutions so that a multiplicity of points of view, including many that are unpalatable to the ruling political echelons, can flourish. The institutions must work out norms of conduct and modes of expression of dissent that ensure that debate thrives without being snuffed out and that the right to free expression of all sections of the community in an academic institution is respected. But, snuffing out dissent in the name of creating an atmosphere of work and promoting “excellence”, by institutionalizing an authoritarian structure within the higher education system is fundamentally opposed to the “nation-building” task of higher education. Since the anti-colonial struggle itself began with the expression of dissent within the institutions of higher learning, for which the dissenters were punished during the colonial period, to snuff out dissent now on the argument that the present situation is altogether different, amounts to making the untenable claim that we have now stepped out of history, i.e., that the task of nation-building no longer exists, that it belonged only to the past but does not concern the present.

It follows then that the “nation-building” task of the higher education system precludes altogether the privatization, commoditization, commercialization, and corporatization of the education system. An education system that is largely private and runs for profit, even though the profit motive may be camouflaged by reinvestment policy, will be necessarily non-inclusive, not just in the sense of preventing or diluting affirmative action, but also in the sense of keeping out students from impecunious families; it would entail an emphasis on marketable courses rather than on courses in basic sciences, social sciences, and humanities; it would stifle dissent and the free atmosphere of debate for the sake of maintenance of “discipline” and improvement of examination performance, thereby curtailing freedom of the mind; and it would substitute “learning by rote” and conventional “good student” qualities for the intensity of intellectual engagement which is a necessary condition for excellence.

But this is precisely where the higher education system encounters its first challenge. The participation of the economy in the global market in the contemporary period creates conditions that promote precisely these very tendencies, of privatization, commoditization, commercialization, and corporatization.

II

Participation in the global market implies that only certain kinds of products, embodying only certain kinds of knowledge and skills, are demanded. There is pressure therefore on the higher education system for specializing only in such skills and knowledge. And if the publicly-funded education system resists doing so, then a parallel private system comes up, whether legally or illegally, that takes upon itself the task of catering to the market. The entire thrust of the education system therefore shifts towards producing students who can meet the demands of the global market. And since participation in the global market is far more lucrative from the point of view of the students there is additional social pressure from the middle class, from which the students overwhelmingly come, to orient the higher education system towards the pull of the global market (and of the market in general).

The attempt to resist this pull of the market in the era of “neo-liberal” policies, for the sake of preserving the “nation-building” role of higher education, is undermined by the two factors just mentioned: one is the pressure of the burgeoning middle class which is afraid that lucrative employment opportunities for its children in the global economy may go unused; the other is the fact that any reluctance on the part of the State to resist the pull of the market on the education system results in the mushrooming of private educational institutions that come up to fill the gap. As a result, willy-nilly, privatization, commoditization, commercialization and, together with it corporatization enter the higher education system in a big way. And soon the demand arises that the government should remove whatever residual hurdles it may still have in place against this process.

This also affects the publicly funded higher education system itself which now has to compete against the private system that comes up in response to the pull of the market. The public higher education system is caught in a series of dilemmas. If it does not prioritize marketable courses but remains committed to its emphasis on the basic courses which are less marketable, then it runs the risk of attracting only the less talented students who are less employable and hence more demoralized, i.e., it runs the risk of becoming an academic backwater; on the other hand, if it does orient itself to the dictates of the market, then it merely imitates the private system and loses its raison d etre. Even in courses which it has been running and which have suddenly become marketable, yielding extraordinarily high salaries to their products, if it continues to charge low fees, then it is giving an unwarranted subsidy to middle-class students with lucrative employment prospects; on the other hand, if it raises its fees then it is compromising on inclusiveness. The public system in other words is increasingly faced with an unpleasant choice: either it imitates the private system and thereby loses its sut generis character, and hence its “nation-building” role; or it resists the tendency for such imitation, remains committed to its “nation-building” role in the face of the pull of the market and becomes an academic backwater, catering to a bunch of mediocre, unemployable and demoralized students. Either way the public higher education system faces a crisis. And since the private higher education institutions have little interest in or concern for imparting any education that carries the “nation-building” project forward, it follows that the phenomenon of globalization, and the pursuit of “neo-liberal” policies as an integral part of it, tends to undermine the “nation-building” task of higher education.

Developing societies like India, therefore, appear to be caught in serious contradiction in the realm of higher education, namely, their avowed objective in this realm, of “nation-building”, appears unsustainable in the face of the current globalization. If they retain the paradigm of the higher education system inherited from the anti-colonial struggle, and adhere to emphasizing the “nation-building” task of higher education, then they get overtaken by the parallel development of a private education system that has scant regard for “nation-building”; on the other hand, if they abandon the paradigm and deliberately make the higher education system market-oriented, then the “nation-building” task is given the go-by anyway.

One way or the other their avowed objective of “nation-building” appears unsustainable in the current milieu. This would not matter much if they could afford to ignore the “nation-building” task if they could simply swim with the globalization tide and move towards the commoditization and commercialization of higher education. But precisely because the “nation-building” task retains its primary relevance, indeed becomes even more urgent because of the social strains that globalization brings in its wake, they can ignore this task only at their own peril. How to preserve the primacy of the “nation-building” role of higher education in the context of the current globalization is the biggest challenge before the higher education system in developing societies like India.

On closer examination however it is clear that this contradiction facing the higher education system is not internal to it, but a consequence of developments extraneous to it. There is no reason for abandoning the “nation-building” role of higher education in societies like ours even in this era of globalization provided a whole range of supportive policies are undertaken, and since these supportive policies are desirable in themselves there should be no qualms about undertaking them. For a start, the perception that, unless the higher education system adjusts its structure to the demand of the global market, its products will forfeit job opportunities, is more likely to be a reflection of the insecurity of middle-class parents than a reality. India’s recent success in exporting a range of “knowledge-based” services is the outcome not of any change in the higher education system that has occurred in more recent times but of the old higher education system that was erected in the Nehruvian period. True, there has been a mushrooming of private “self-financing” institutions (which are surreptitiously engaged in profit-making despite a Supreme Court directive proscribing profit-making in higher educational institutions); but the cream of “knowledge-practitioners” in India today, engaged in this entire range of activities, still consists of students drawn from institutions set up in the period when India was pursuing not a neo-liberal strategy but a dirigiste one. In fact, the mushrooming of self-financing institutions arises not because of the structure or the quality of the public institutions of higher education but because of the shortage of such institutions. What is needed therefore is not a change in the nature or orientation of public institutions of higher education but an enormous expansion in their numbers?

This expansion need not be confined only to those disciplines and areas where there is large palpable market demand, for that would discriminate against basic sciences, social sciences and humanities; it has to encompass a whole range of disciplines and areas, especially basic sciences, social sciences and humanities, for which even though no significant market demand may exist a social demand needs to be promoted. Promoting these less marketable areas is necessary both for preserving the broad-based nature of the higher education system and for developing the intensity of intellectual engagement in society.

Of course, the expansion of the public higher education system in this manner may still leave an excess demand in the market for students coming out of the more marketable disciplines, so that the mushrooming of private “self-financing” institutions catering to this excess demand may still not be eliminated. But a distinction needs to be drawn here between “education” on the one hand and the “imparting of skills” on the other. The significance of this distinction, which after all is drawn all the time in practical life, lies in the fact that while “education”, including technical education like engineering and medicine, must be the preserve of the State, supplemented by philanthropic and charitable institutions, the job of “imparting skills” may be left to private institutions, including even those guided by the profit motive, provided they are suitably socially regulated. In other words, while private profit-making institutions may be difficult to avoid altogether in a market economy, they should be kept away from the sphere of education proper and should be socially regulated, including having to pay taxes, like any business enterprise, on the profits they earn.

There remains the whole issue of whether the public higher education system should continue to subsidize at the taxpayers’ expense the education of students who are going on to get extremely lucrative jobs on the completion of their education. The typical answer suggested to this question is to raise fees. But raising fees, apart from affecting the inclusive nature of higher education, does not touch the basic issue, which is the throwing to the winds of “income relativities” in the neoliberal economic regime. The income relativities in India today are too irrational to be sustainable. The income ratio between the highest-paid and the lowest paid is among the highest in the world and has little relationship with the relative arduousness of the work or the relative length of the training period. These relativities have to be rectified anyway through appropriate fiscal measures; and once that happens the odium of subsidies to those about to become rich, through extraordinarily low fees being paid by students who are going to get extraordinarily well- paid jobs upon completing their education, will also disappear so that fees will not have to be raised. The way to overcome this odium in other words is through an appropriate income policy, not through merely changing the fee structure that leaves income relativities unchanged, and hence implicitly accepted, by the government.

A related issue concerns the so-called “brain drain”. If using taxpayers’ money to subsidize students who go on to have lucrative careers is ethically questionable, using taxpayers’ money to subsidize students with lucrative careers providing services in the advanced countries is even more so. It constitutes both private appropriation of public resources and a “drain of wealth” overseas (to use the language of the Indian anti-colonial struggle). The existing system of allowing “brains” to “drain” away with impunity needs to be changed. And a number of alternative possible measures can be adopted for this, ranging from a minimum period of service in the country, to the payment of a lump-sum amount by potential emigres, to be paid after they have settled down abroad, as a condition for leaving the country (for which domestic “sureties” would have to be found at the time of their leaving the country).

III

It was mentioned above that the real reason for the proliferation of private institutions of higher education is not the nature and structure of the public system, but its sheer inadequacy in terms of size. A predominantly public higher education system cannot be sustained, and will necessarily give rise to the mushrooming of private institutions, whether licit or illicit if the government does not spend adequately on its expansion. In fact of late in India, the most powerful argument that has appeared in justification of privatization and commoditization of higher education refers not to the nature, structure, or quality of the public system but to its insufficiency. The need of the hour, so the argument goes, is a massive expansion of the higher education system, but the government lacks the resources for this. It needs therefore to draw private funding into the higher education sphere through “public-private partnerships” to which there is no alternative. And to draw adequate private resources for such “public-private partnerships”, it is necessary that the government should provide the requisite incentives (incentives in terms of suitable profits are scarcely explicitly mentioned in view of the Supreme Court injunction against profit-making in higher education). In short, restrictions of all sorts that come in the way of private financing of higher education must be removed if we are to meet our targets in the sphere of higher education.

This argument however is logically unsustainable. Quite apart from the fact that this entire argument is based on a confusion between resources and finance, it begs the question: if there are resources with the private sector which can be attracted for higher education through the institutionalization of “public-private partnerships”, then why should the government not take these resources away from private hands through fiscal means to expand a purely public higher education system? If there was some ceiling beyond which resource mobilization through fiscal means could not be enforced then the argument could make sense, but there are no such “natural” limits. Indeed the tax-GDP ratio in India is far lower than what prevails in most advanced capitalist economies, including the United States, and is indeed among the lowest in the world. To forego taxing the private sector, and then to use this very fact of foregoing as an argument for inducing the private sector into the sphere of higher education through “public-private partnerships”, can scarcely carry conviction. In short, the resource argument for privatizing higher education cannot stand scrutiny, which is in addition to the fact that the resource requirements for higher education in all these discussions are usually grossly overestimated. Of course, there can be no two opinions about the need for a much larger higher education system, but since there is nothing absolute about this need, the actual expenditure has to be calibrated in keeping with the mobilization of resources by the government. A sum of six percent of GDP as the expenditure on education has been a widely accepted target in India (though we are far from achieving this figure). The idea should be to get to this figure as soon as possible via government expenditure, keeping in place a higher education system that is predominantly public, rather than to privatize higher education on the plea of attaining this target, and ensure that all the attendant ills of a private system, above all its deleterious effects on “nation-building”, are visited upon the country.

To reiterate, the higher education system must remain predominantly within the public domain; the inability of the government to fund its adequate expansion has to be tackled through more vigorous resource mobilization efforts rather than through relying on private resources and in the process commoditizing and privatizing higher education.

IV

Of course, if the higher education system lacks quality, if it is bereft of excellence, if it does not come up to even a minimum standard, then talking about its “nation-building” role appears pointless; and there can be little doubt that the higher education system in countries like India is in a poor state. It does not necessarily attract the best talents into the teaching profession; it is characterized by a sharp dualism, of a handful of institutions where students get trained for lucrative and usually non-academic careers, co-existing with other institutions where the students’ interest in academics is largely sapped; it is characterized by an absence of intensity in intellectual engagement, with both poles of the dualistic structure displaying this absence, the former because its students’ choice of careers has little need for intellectual engagement (as distinct from professional commitment), and the latter because the uncertain career prospects of its students leaves them with little enthusiasm for whetting intellectual appetites; learning by rote, learning from second rate text books, with the sole objective of just confronting the examinations has become the order of the day.

Improving the state of higher education, though an absolute social priority, is by no means easy. Stepping up public spending on higher education is of course a must: the proportion of school leavers who go on to higher education in India is much lower than in advanced countries and needs to be increased rapidly; and the facilities in institutions of higher education leave much to be desired. But an increase in spending alone is not enough. In India a large number of central universities are about to come up, funded by the Union government, which is a welcome move, both because of the expanded facilities it entails, and because central universities tend to embody a pan-Indian, non-parochial, and secular perspective that is also relatively modern in matters of caste and gender. But finding a large number of faculty members of high intellectual quality for these institutions is not easy. A whole range of complementary steps, in addition to large spending on setting up institutions, is thus required.

In discussions on what these steps should be, a powerful view has tended to focus on drawing talent from abroad for teaching positions through the introduction of non-uniform pay scales for teachers, on giving larger powers to Vice-Chancellors (some even going to the extent of suggesting that they should be made analogous to CEOs of companies), and of increasing the autonomy of universities, especially in financial matters (since central universities, at any rate, can scarcely be called non-autonomous in academic matters and in most administrative ones too). This however would amount to throwing the baby out with the bathwater. It would amount to introducing “corporatization” and “commoditization”, tendencies inimical to the “nation-building” task of higher education. And differential pay-scales for teachers in the same category, far from introducing excellence, will have the precise opposite effect, by destroying collegiality among the faculty, and introducing a further caste-structure within faculty members. Those on higher salaries who would be typically recruited from abroad would be ever eager to go back abroad where the prospects of academic career advancement would be much greater, while those on low salaries would be a demoralized and disgruntled lot with low self-esteem and would soon lose whatever sparks they might have had earlier. At both ends of the spectrum therefore we would have faculty members who have little interest or pride in the institution to which they belong and who would scarcely make the investment of effort needed for excellence.

Improving quality requires a gigantic effort, consisting however of a number of small steps in various specific areas. But the overall direction of the required movement is the very opposite of the above suggestion for “commoditization” and “corporatization”. The need is not for differential salaries, but an increase in academic salaries generally, with minimum interference with the principle of uniformity of pay-scales, so that outstanding talent is drawn into the academic profession. The need is not for increasing differentials within teachers but for reducing differentials within society, i.e., the need is for an appropriate income policy in society as a whole. Likewise, the need is not for making Vice-Chancellors into CEOs and hence snuffing out dissent and democratic debate, but for increasing the scope for authentic debate, which is a necessary condition for heightening the intensity of intellectual engagement. The need is not for making universities fend more for themselves, which is a recipe for “commoditization”, but for preventing “commoditization” through greater public funding, though without destroying the frugality of academic life. The need in short is to bring back to the campuses of the institutions of higher education the exquisite joy of cultivating a life of the mind, a profound sense of the grandeur of ideas.

Prabhat Patnaik was the former Vice-Chairman of Kerala State Planning Board, Trivandrum.