Sunday, March 6, 2016

HRD Ministry's Priorities

I read a recent report in the Economic Times about an initiative of the HRD ministry to identify institutions that will emerge as world class in teaching and research. I welcome this initiative but I am a bit concerned about the priorities of the HRD ministry. Yes, we need to identify potentially world class institutes and such a ranking process can be very helpful but the priority should be on research not on teaching. Don't get me wrong, teaching is important but the quality of a institute has to be judged by the quality of the research that comes out from there. Right now, there is Indian institutes that can match up to the top schools of the world, or even Asia for that matter, in terms of research productivity. We need to fix the teaching as well but it is important to identify that the priority should be research.
I recently had the opportunity to visit three of the top institutes of management in India and interact with the faculty and grad students in these institutes. I made a few observation there. First, most of the faculty that I met there were motivated to do good research. Of course, there was a bit of self selection here... the ones who are not keen on doing good research would not be interested in spending time with a visitor who was invited there for a talk... also the ones who consider themselves to be good researchers already will not be motivated to spend time with me. Second, the amount of time they spend on teaching was insane... it is simply impossible for someone to spend that much of time on teaching and still find time to do good research. Third, even the super motivated ones who squeeze time for doing research are not trained at their grad schools to publish their work in leading journals in their field... in fact they are strongly motivated against it. They even are trained to believe that international journals are biased against the scholarly work of non-western researchers from non-western schools. This is why they aspire to publish their best work in the Economic and Political Weekly rather than in the American Economic Review or the Quarterly Journal of Economics for instance. Yes, international journals have had their biases in the past but they are much more open these days to non-western scholarship. The Chinese and Koreans have been able to overcome such biases, if any. So why can't we? Mindsets need to change and incentives need  to be aligned. My suggestion is not that we start copying what the Chinese did or the Koreans did, which essentially was blindly copying what our western colleagues did. My suggestion is that we learn to embrace our history, experience and current realities in doing our research. This will allow us pursue research that matters. But the trick is making what matters to us also relevant to the world. This leads to my fourth observation: Grad programs should train grad students to engage in phenomenon motivated, theory rich research, using cutting edge research techniques... Further, Grad students should know that the PhD dissertation is not the end of one's research journey but just the beginning. The role of teaching should be to inspire students to enjoy their research and publish their best work in reputed international journals not in obscure domestic ones (or obscure international ones). Only then will research from India gain visibility and recognition.
So when the HRD ministry ranks the potential of Indian institutes, it should use a rubric that places a greater weightage on research than on teaching... this would mean that an institute that affords more research time for its faculty will be higher up in the ranking.

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