In the Indian Science Congress last week, prime minister Manmohan Singh bemoaned the fact that China had overtaken India on various indicators of performance in higher education. It is ironic that while China is ruled by a single party and India is a democratic country, the institutions of higher learning in China have more autonomy at all levels. In India, some of the institutions fear autonomy because they suspect that it will not be passed down. Greater autonomy sometimes is coupled with greater autocracy. Why does a group of academics submit to such autocracy when they have very little to lose by being upright?
 
There seems to be a crisis in many institutions because of timidity at top. Timidity affects the organisational culture in many ways. Let me illustrate. A timid leader would find it difficult to work with people who are autonomous, outstanding in their field and thus have a mind of their own. Once they choose the team of mediocre, it is inevitable that their credibility will go down. Once the credibility goes down, their feedback channels get clogged. Even if they receive the feedback about the areas where they should improve, they avoid it or ignore it. Sometimes, such a behaviour leads to learned helplessness on the part of faculty. An apathetic community surrenders the right it has to keep leaders in check. 
 
Lack of transparency in various activities is another hallmark of the institutions in decline. Be it allocation of incentives or sharing of consultancy opportunities or various other privileged resources, a spoils system comes into play. It is not very different from the malaise in the political system about which the whole Indian society is indignant and often up in the arms. But we don’t see any such protests apparently in such institutions. The reasons are not far to seek. It is not that a timid leader can lead to various kinds of arbitrariness without the complicity of various colleagues. There are many reasons why colleagues can become compliant and conformist. They may have less outstanding performance, their feedback in teaching may not be very good, they may have been obliged or they just don’t have a very strong spine.
 
When an academic community becomes docile, paradoxically it becomes very aggressive and authoritarian in the classroom. It is a like a hen-pecked husband who shows his power only on his subordinates. The students in many of the outstanding institutions of higher learning are quite good because they come through a very competitive process. They become indifferent to the authoritarian culture and lose stake in the system. The result is a very weak bonding. It shows up in the efforts to raise resources from the same students. Not all faculty members spare efforts to perform well in the class. The saving grace is that self-esteem of majority of the faculty members in such institutions helps in nurturing a reasonably high quality delivery of teaching. The good students become better. But, they don’t become as outstanding as they should because of lack of challenge, irreverence and flexibility to take challenges in professional and personal life. 
 
The staff who run these institutions suffer the consequences of mediocrity in governance no less. While they may get motivated by the efforts of the faculty and the students, recognition by society but their morale does get affected by the lack of fairness in the system. When institutions in which society has invested so much of respect and faith don’t rise to the occasion and take a self-critical look at their systems of governance, they inevitably get overtaken within the country and outside. The prime minister’s regret therefore is more an alibi of a leader who is not willing to face the challenge head on, though he can.

How can we collectively turn the situation around? Here are some ideas:
 
a. Diversity of students: Academic institutions must learn that diversity of backgrounds is a necessary condition for diversity of outlook, discussion in the class and enrichment of collective creative energy. Majority of the management institutes take as many as 90 percent or more students with only engineering background. This was not the case a decade ago. We must give due weightage to the diversity of academic background and bring students from arts, commerce, culture, science, etc in the class. Same way, other professional streams should try to diversify their intake. The gender diversity is equally important.

b. Promotion of change agentry: Despite overwhelming expression of societal dissatisfaction with the status quo, the academic institutions do not make any special effort to induct ‘odd balls’, assertive and fortitudinous minds and youth with some experience of having stood their ground in the wake of adversity. There is no evidence that high proficiency in English language or quantitative scores makes a person better manager or even leader of a society. We must bring about radical change in the way we look for achievers in different fields having potential for organizational or societal transformation.

c. Nurturing entrepreneurial talent: While every policy maker regrets that there are not enough entrepreneurs coming out of the academic institutions in our country, we never ask the question whether we have made an effort to look for such young people during admissions, and nurture their spirit.

d. Transparency and accountability: There is absolutely no escape from making systems transparent and accountable with respect to various kinds of decision making. The arbitrariness and various kinds of biases have demoralised the constituents in many institutions. This is not a sustainable situation.

e. Pursuit of excellence: We have to remember that outstanding people are generally also non-conformist. If leaders cannot learn to deal with people with whom they disagree, then we should forget about the pursuit of excellence. The policy makers must monitor the extent to which the dissent, democracy and diversity are promoted in various institutions.  A change not monitored, I have always argued, is a change not desired.

f. Capacity building:  Many times, people who are selected to lead institutions of higher learning have no experience in administration or delegation of powers. This issue had come out forcefully at the vice chancellors’ conference the ministry of human resource development (MHRD) had organised last year. Should not leadership be mentored and formally exposed to various leadership and governance models so that they can choose to evolve their own systems including good ideas from different outstanding institutions. One must concede that the IIMs in general and IIMA in particular has maintained a very high degree faculty of autonomy which despite some scope for further improvement has sustained itself reasonably well. Should not lessons be drawn from at least a dozen or two such institutions and their collegium be used to mentor new leaders and thus an upward spiral of excellence may be generated?

There is a need for social inclusion in every attempt to expand but without compromising on standards of excellence. We need to get four or five times the number of students each institution needs prepare for competition and then they can make a fair selection of the most deserving. A preparatory programme has worked for IAS so well, why will it not work for other professional streams? There is a huge opportunity for bridging excellence and inclusion in the current expansion of higher educational. Leadership is the crux. You put a timid and mediocre leader on the top, you don’t have to do anything further; decline will follow inevitably. The country does not lack, spine-full leaders in every field, education is no exception. Political class and bureaucracy have to learn to live with such leaders of educational institutions, the country will not remain subservient to borrowed ideas, and points of reference any more. Renaissance is round the corner, culture of conformity (and colonized minds) just has to give way to that of dissent, diversity and endogenous cultural and social development.