India must be innovative in its approach and work out policies to boost research if its demographic dividend is to be tapped into. Advancing research should be the way forward
Research is the cornerstone of great institutions. Without it, a professor should not be eligible to teach at the university level as he/she will not be in a position to teach anything new to the students other than what is available in textbooks. The only benchmark to judge the quality of a university is its research standard. And Indian universities and prized management institutes do not fare well going by this count. Quality in research is deteriorating and so are the great institutions that were built so painstakingly by our great researchers.
According to the World Bank, India’s higher education system is the third largest in the world, next to the US and China, but it fares miserably in terms of expenditure per student as well as per teacher. In the last decade, access to higher education has improved as more IITs, IIMs and Central and State-level universities have been established. However, this proliferation has also raised concerns about an imbalance between excellence and inclusion. Regional and State-level universities suffer from shortage of good quality teaching staff and laboratories, although they are more inclusive in terms of their geographies and social groups. More than 70 per cent of Indian students study at local and regional universities but these institutes have smaller budgets and are known for inflated grades, deflated quality and absenteeism among students, even teachers.
Statistically, out of India’s 1.3 billion population, there were only 216 researchers per million population in 2015. India’s investment in research is a measly 0.62 per cent of its GDP. These numbers are well below global practices. France, for example, spends 2.25 per cent of its GDP on research and the US spends 2.74 per cent. Both countries have some 4,300 researchers per million population. China, for its part, invests more than 2.11 per cent of its GDP on research and has 1,200 researchers per million population. Particularly in higher education, India’s research expenditure is only four per cent of its GDP. There were some 1,61,412 students enrolled in PhD programmes in 2018. This comprises less than 0.5 per cent of the total student enrollment in higher education in the country, which constitutes students enrolled in universities, colleges and standalone institutes pursuing undergraduate and postgraduate programmes.
After the first revolution of education, which was the massification of education and providing education for all, the second revolution is the arrival of the global knowledge economy, which means universities now compete globally in any given field of study. Forces in the global knowledge economy act in contradiction to massification. All countries need to have top universities that can compete and cooperate at the highest levels in the broader society and the economy. More specifically, this role can be played by research universities.
Research universities are a very small part of any country’s academic system and because they are expensive to fund, nations need to think about how many such universities they need to maintain. In the US, about 200 of the 2,300 state-funded universities are research universities. Of these, 200 are of central importance in the pyramid of the higher education system. In order to have research universities that can talk to the top universities in the world, these campuses need to be given adequate support to enable them to partake of the global knowledge economy at the same level as other universities. Interaction among world class universities entails international student mobility, faculty exchange, research and teaching programmes that require a globally mobile academic labour force.
Realities in context of the higher education mean three things for research universities and their role in the academic system. First, contemporary higher education needs differentiated academic systems. Not all higher education institutions are research universities; not all post-graduate institutions need to be universities.
Second, there only needs to be a small number of research universities but they are important in the system. Research universities play a number of complex roles and at the top of the list is research. Often, research universities are asked to do many things but they are not social service agencies. They do not earn from applied research or consulting but focus on research and teaching. Universities have been the source of research for more than 200 years and need to continue as such. They are the only societal institutions that will carry out basic research and they need to be supported by the Government. It is evident that a balance between basic and applied research is important. The former is what will win Nobel prizes, which in the long run will contribute to applied research. For example, it is only recently that Einstein’s theory of relativity was proven through basic research by the universities.
Third, universities, especially research universities, are in the education business. They educate people with the end-goal of helping them to attain the skills and knowledge required to land jobs. The evidence of universities fulfilling this role is when those that are well-educated find jobs, especially the kind of jobs created in the rapidly changing 21st century. So what kind of education should research universities provide? They need to teach people how to think and communicate in a way that brings forth the importance of being trained in more than one type of job as going forward, training for just one type of job or career in a person’s lifetime is becoming less and less applicable.
But how does academic research contribute fundamentally to the well-being of our society? People benefit from quality, ethical research and should rally to support and defend it. There is, however, a growing reliance on and acceptance of the commodification of research, ie, research projects are increasingly defined on the basis of economic criteria. This practice infringes on academic freedom and narrows the scope of research. The result is that faculty are discouraged from engaging in research that benefits society and are forced to accept research projects that are funded by the private sector or ones that are heavily influenced by the private sector. Public/private partnerships can undermine collective bargaining agreements.
There are several challenges to academic research. Some of them are:
Funding: Public funding for academic research, including basic research, is not meeting the need. Funding needs include but are not limited to creation and maintenance of quality facilities, modern equipment, staff support, informational infrastructure and funding of scholarly activities such as conference attendance. Public/private partnerships must not replace public funding of research. The challenge is to be vigilant about funding opportunities that may allow excessive outside interference and unduly influence the research.
Respect for research within institutions: Many organisations do not adequately address the need for “release time”, reduced teaching loads or other compensations for scholars carrying heavy responsibilities for research.
Academic freedom: Academic freedom of researchers is threatened by a variety of non-academic forces. Situations repeatedly arise where public/private funders assert influence over research priorities and tamper with findings. Those funding research should not be allowed to exercise control over, edit or limit dissemination of findings with which they might disagree.
Intellectual property: Academic researchers are often deprived of their intellectual property rights. For example, there are instances of copyright infringement, conflicts around the ownership of research data and findings and restrictions on publication and presentation of findings by private funders. Such disputes can negatively affect the tenure process for non-tenured faculty. For faculty conducting international research, there may be other barriers due to different or fewer legal protections of their intellectual property rights.
Another important factor to boost research and the quality of higher education is to unshackle quality higher education institutions from Government controls and give them freedom to operate, develop their own roadmaps and pursue ideas of excellence. The status quo in education has resulted in a situation where it is not only sub-standard but has also failed to open inquiring minds to the world of research. India must be innovative in its approach and open its policies to boost research if its demographic dividend is to be tapped into.
(The writer is Assistant Professor, Amity University)
