nanopolitan

Devesh Kapur on the attitude of Indian business towards education

2009-11-08T21:25:00.004+05:30

He is appalled by Indian business leaders' attitude towards higher education (in spite of its importance to their business). His list of complaints is long; here's a sample:

The commitment of Indian business to philanthropy in higher education was strong prior to independence and has dwindled ever since. Pre-independence, business interests not only made the transition from merchant charity to organised professional philanthropy, but did so in a significant way. They created some of India's most enduring trusts, foundations and public institutions, including the Aligarh Muslim University, Banaras Hindu University, Jamia Millia, Annamalai and Indian Institute of Science. Of the 16 largest "non-religious" trusts set up during this period, 14 were major patrons of higher education.

Today, the so-called not-for-profit educational institutions do not engage in philanthropy. Their income comes from fees rather than endowments and investments. [...]

But Indian business has much to explain for a more egregious failing: for the most part, it sees little value in research and even less in building quality institutions that produce good research. This is manifest most starkly in its unwillingness to fund even world-class think tanks, let alone an outstanding university. The reality is that most Indian business elites' children study abroad, not in India. The sad implication is that this reduces their stake in lending a badly needed voice to genuine higher education reform in India.

It is extraordinary how much energy and capital Indian corporate titans are willing to commit to summits, conclaves and the like, where photo opportunities and power-point presentations pass off as the epitome of deep thinking and real insight. Yet, for all the posturing by Indian business elites and their courting of universities in the West (especially in the US), the notion of Indian business coming together to fund research centres that produce knowledge and provide quality education accessible to all sections of society in India does not seem to be on the horizon.

Gladwellian "Insult"

2009-11-08T21:04:00.004+05:30

Maureen Tkacik does a great job of Malcolm Gladwell's brand of pop sociology (with an emphasis on 'pop') in Gladwell for Dummies. Here's a pretty blunt and devastating summary (buried somewhere in the middle of the piece):

In searching for an anecdote or image with which to convey the ultra-absorbency of Gladwell's book as compared with that of his soggier-sentenced peers, I found myself remembering a story Gladwell wrote in 2001 about the technology of diapers. In this story, Gladwell reported that "those in the trade" refer to the waste that diapers are engineered to retain as "the insult," and this image seems to me as useful as any for thinking about Gladwell's success. His masterful maneuver was to engineer a style that artfully conceals "the insult," honing it in his articles before finally unleashing it in book form with The Tipping Point.

If that was about the style, this, from near the end, is about the substance -- more precisely, about the absence of certain crucial kinds of it:

... I wonder if Gladwell sees himself as an office-park missionary dispatched by the church of academe to tour the lecture circuit and convert the leaders of corporate America with "good news" from the ivory tower, its gospel made easy and ecumenical by all those helpful exercises and sticky new terms.

In that case, perhaps Gladwell's intellectual compromises are neither commercial nor unintentional but rather a necessary outgrowth of his higher calling: to explore the secret workings of the world and impart the resulting data to its self-appointed stewards, the titans of industry. This conclusion, if true, may resolve many of the most puzzling incongruities riddling Gladwell's articles: his continued defense of the pharmaceutical industry even as he advocates for single-payer healthcare; his refusal to indict the financial sector's rigged "star system" as the engine of corruption that it is; the meticulous bleaching of his own prose so that he's whitewashed out any real context, any framework in which wars and economic collapses can actually be understood as wars and economic collapses rather than simulations or malfunctions; his near total avoidance of academic thought that does not base its findings on things observed in labs (with the exception of Carl Jung, whose legacy he reduces to the popularization of personality tests); his coyness about politics; and most memorably, his irritating, unrelenting readability.

Links ...

2009-11-08T14:15:00.002+05:30

From Amanda Goodall's Socrates in the Boardroom: Why Research Universities Should be Led by Top Scholars (pdf of Chapter 1):
The reasons why presidents should be able scholars are fourfold:
1. Scholars are more credible leaders. A president who is a researcher will gain greater respect from academic colleagues and appear more legitimate. Legitimacy extends a leader’s power and influence.
2. Being a top scholar provides a leader with a deep understanding or expert knowledge about the core business of universities. This informs a president’s decision-making and strategic priorities.
3. The president sets the quality threshold in a university, and the bar is raised when an accomplished scholar is hired. Thus, a standard bearer has first set the standard that is to be enforced.
4. A president who is a researcher sends a signal to the faculty that the leader shares their scholarly values, and that research success in the institution is important. It also transmits an external signal to potential academic hires, donors, alumni, and students.
Thanks to Diane Spencer's University World News article for the alert.
Jeff Bleich in LATimes: California's Higher Education Debacle:

My story is not unique. It is the story of California's rise from the 1960s to the 1990s. Millions of people stayed here and succeeded because of their California education. We benefited from the foresight of an earlier generation that recognized it had a duty to pay it forward.

That was the bargain California made with us when it established the California Master Plan for Higher Education in 1960. By making California the state where every qualified and committed person can receive a low-cost and high-quality education, all of us benefit. Attracting and retaining the leaders of the future helps the state grow bigger and stronger. Economists found that for every dollar the state invests in a CSU student, it receives $4.41 in return.

So as someone who has lived the California dream, there is nothing more painful to me than to see this dream dying. It is being starved to death by a public that thinks any government service -- even public education -- is not worth paying for. And by political leaders who do not lead but instead give in to our worst, shortsighted instincts.
Hannah Smith in NYTimes on why "the majority of the schools [universities] I would apply to would be [all-women] colleges":

My dream has always been a career in politics, and never before in history have women held as many powerful positions as they do today. But because politics is still a predominantly male field, I know that coming from an all-women’s college, or even just a school where the female population is significantly higher than the male one, can give me an edge. At all-women’s colleges there is no fear of your intellect seeming unattractive. In fact, at these institutions women aren’t afraid that voicing their opinions may poorly represent their gender.

... [W]hen it comes to the time in my life when the education I receive will dictate how the rest of things will turn out for me, I don’t want the distraction of boys, and I don’t want to compete with them. In my high school experience, the majority of my teachers have tended to pick boys’ raised hands over those of the girls in class discussions. I’ve even had to endure one teacher tell this joke: “Why couldn’t Helen Keller play basketball?” The answer? “Because she was a woman.”

The Curious Case of Dr. Shiva Ayyadurai

2009-11-06T18:15:00.002+05:30

Ankita Gupta of Mint has the scoop.

Here's a basic outline of the plot: Ayyadurai, a 45 year-old NRI scientist / technocrat, was parachuted into the CSIR system at a plum salary (by Indian public sector standards -- Band Pay of Rs. 60,000 + Grade Pay of 12,000).

It's not clear to me what exactly his mandate or job description was, but he ended up producing a report that was critical of the leadership at CSIR.

Result: he has been fired!

Here is a summary of where the two parties -- Ayyadurai and CSIR leadership -- stand:

“(CSIR) is attempting to remove me (in) reaction to my addressing well-known, intrinsic leadership issues during the course of my professional duties to serve the cause of Indian science and innovation,” said Shiva Ayyadurai in a 30 October letter, a copy of which is with the Hindustan Times. [...]

Samir Brahmachari, director general of CSIR, said Ayyadurai’s services were terminated because he was a “financial mismatch”. “He was demanding too much salary,” said Brahmachari. “Everyone told me I was pampering him because he came from abroad.”

With so much of he-said-(s)he-said in Gupta's version of the story, I still don't have enough to be able to offer a comment.

Do read that story, though. It'll give you a sense of -- and an opportunity, perhaps, to bask in some schadenfreude on -- the kinds of troubles that our institutions (and their leadership) are capable of inviting.

Ezra Klein on Superfreakonomics

2009-11-04T09:25:00.001+05:30

He has a review in the Barnes and Noble Review. He does have a large section about that infamous chapter [see this post for links] on global warming, but here's his take on another claim:

Much attention has accrued to global warming section of the book, and we'll get to that. But for my money, the book's worst tendencies are on display in its beginning pages. There, the Freakonomists begin with an analysis meant to encapsulate the general Freakonomics take on life. But the topic here isn't cutesy or trivial, it is literally life and death. According to Levitt and Dubner, all those teary warnings about driving drunk have obscured the greater danger: walking drunk. That's quite a finding, if true. But is it true?

The Freakonomists arrive at this conclusion in a fairly unorthodox manner. They begin with surveys showing that one out of every 140 miles driven is driven by someone who's blood alcohol is above the legal limit. "The average American walks about a half-mile per day outside the home or workplace. There are some 237 million Americans sixteen and older," they continue, "all told, that's 43 billion miles walked each year by people of driving age. If we assume that 1 out of every 140 of those miles are walked drunk -- the same proportion of miles that are driven drunk -- then 307 million miles are walked drunk each year." Match those numbers against each other and drunk walking proves eight times more dangerous than drunk driving. "Friends don't let friends walk drunk," the Freakonomists conclude.

But that's not a data set. That's an assumption. And a few seconds of consideration will reveal its flaws. For instance: People frequently decide to walk instead of drive because they are going to drink that evening, suggesting that no basic equivalence can be drawn. For instance: People frequently decide to walk instead of drive because they are very drunk. For instance: People frequently decide to walk instead of drive because they live in an urban area, and walking is a viable possibility. In other words, there's not only reason to believe that a higher percentage of miles walked are miles walked drunk, but that the levels of drunkenness are not the same, and the environment is not the same. In other words, this is not enough data to prove anything close to equivalence.

This doesn't stop the Freakonomists, though, who conclude that "friends don't let friends walk drunk." In an interview I conducted with them for C-SPAN's Book TV, Levitt emphasized that "if someone holds a gun to your head," you should definitely drive drunk rather than walk drunk.

Links ...

2009-11-04T09:18:00.002+05:30

Academic publications edition:

Stefano Allesina in arXiv.org - Computer Science: Accelerating the pace of discovery by changing the peer review algorithm. The paper describes a radically new model for publishing academic papers:

In the alternative setting (AS, Methods), when an author produces a new manuscript, she will submit it to a first pool of manuscripts (e.g. a preprint archive). However, to be able to submit one manuscript the author must choose three manuscripts already in the pool for review. Therefore, more productive authors are also the more active reviewers. Once a manuscript in the first pool accrues three reviews, it is revised (increase in quality and novelty), and the reviewers are asked for a second evaluation. Then, the manuscript is moved to a second pool (ripe manuscripts). Every month, the editors of the journals evaluate the ripe articles. If an editor wants a manuscript for her journal, she will bid on it. At the end of the month, authors receive all the bids for their manuscripts in the second pool. In the case of more than one journal bidding on her manuscript, the author will choose that with the highest impact. If no journals bid on a manuscript, the author abandons it.
Meredith Salisbury in Genome Technology: Is peer review broken?
Franck Laloë and Remy Mosseri in Europhysics News: Bibliometric evaluation of individual researchers: not even right... not even wrong! [Link via Anant]

Management wisdom from Harvard President

2009-11-03T20:45:00.002+05:30

In this interview, Prof. Drew Gilpin Faust addresses lots of questions on management and leadership. Here's the section where she talks about the importance of communication:

There’s one alum who was an expert in turnarounds, and so I asked him, “What should I do?” He said, “One lesson about change in any organization — communicate, communicate, communicate.” So I still think about that all the time, and the scale of communication from the president’s office is a very much more elaborate one. It’s a bigger scale. You’ve got to communicate in different ways.

I also spent a lot of time talking with people at the business school. Kim Clark, who was the business school dean at that time, was very helpful. The fundamental principle of Kim Clark’s advice, though, could be summed up in, “Invest in people, recognize that you are in the people business and you want to try to support people and make people able to do their best.”

For example, one of the things he was a very big advocate of was Harvard’s shift to promoting from within, not just hiring stars and having a junior faculty that didn’t stay, which had been the custom in an earlier time. Kim said: “You need to have everybody believe in the organization. You need to have everybody think that they’re part of it, and they’re being invested in, as well as being asked of.” So that was one major lesson from Kim that sticks with me.

Links ...

2009-11-03T20:12:00.003+05:30

Pallavi Singh in Mint: UGC under fire for too many 'deemed' tags.
Uttara Choudhury in DNA: US universities have eye on India.
IITs set up committee for incentive scheme for faculty
An update on the legal troubles of Magadh University's vice-chancellor [previously].
Video of HRD Minister Kapil Sibal's talk at MIT (Thanks to an anonymous commenter for the link).

Kumari L.A. Meera Memorial Lecture - 2009

2009-11-03T20:08:00.002+05:30

In this year's edition (on 3 December 2009), Prof. M.S. Raghunathan will be speaking about the Queen of the Sciences. Mark your calendar.

Here's the announcement from my friend and colleague, B. Anantanarayan:

Prof. M. S. Raghunathan gives the 18th Meera Memorial Lecture

The 18th Meera Memorial Lecture will be given on Thursday, December 3, 2009 at 6 pm at the Indian Institute of World Culture, Basavanagudi, Bangalore, by Prof. M. S. Raghunathan of TIFR Mumbai entitled "The queen of sciences: her realm, her influence and her health". The trust web-site is here.

On IIX faculty jobs

2009-11-01T20:06:00.004+05:30

You are probably interested in the first thing that everyone focuses on — the ‘pay package.’ Fortunately, it is also the easiest to address.

Here’s the bottomline: IIXs are among the best in the public sector. They beat private academic institutions handily. With job security, autonomy, sabbaticals and the summer months off, they are competitive with private industry as well. With the option to consult for industry, you’ll have to wonder if a non-IIX job is even worth considering!

That's me arguing why, for the academically oriented folks, IIT faculty jobs are still the best in India. This piece appeared in the latest issue (pdf) of The Scholars' Avenue, IIT-KGP's campus newspaper.

Many thanks to A.V.N. Murthy (and his colleagues on editorial team) for asking me to put together my thoughts on the issue of IIT faculty salaries.

Link between childhood deprivation and extreme libertarianism

2009-11-01T14:28:00.005+05:30

... Around the age of five, Ayn Rand's] mother instructed her to put away some of her toys for a year. She offered up her favorite possessions, thinking of the joy that she would feel when she got them back after a long wait. When the year had passed, she asked her mother for the toys, only to be told she had given them away to an orphanage. Heller remarks that "this may have been Rand's first encounter with injustice masquerading as what she would later acidly call ‘altruism.’ " (The anti-government activist Grover Norquist has told a similar story from childhood, in which his father would steal bites of his ice cream cone, labelling each bite "sales tax" or "income tax." The psychological link between a certain form of childhood deprivation and extreme libertarianism awaits serious study.)

From Wealthcare, an excellent three-part essay (the above quote is in the second part) by Jonathan Chait on Ayn Rand and the corrosive movement she created.

The immediate provocation for Chait's review-essay is the publication of two new biographies of Ayn Rand: Ayn Rand and the World She Made by Anne C. Heller and Goddess of Market - Ayn Rand and the American Right by Jennifer Burns.

Here are reviews by Adam Kirsch, Janet Maslin and A.C. Grayling.

Here's a memorable line from Maslin's review:

... And both [the books] have gray covers ... Yet Rand ... loathed the very idea of grayness. She preferred dichotomies that were strictly black and white.

Robert Zimmer: What is Academic Freedom for?

2009-10-31T13:47:00.004+05:30

Robert Zimmer is President, The University of Chicago. Here are some excerpts from his talk at a recent conference on What is Academic Freedom for?

I will summarize the principles of the Kalven report, adding a few embellishments for emphasis.

First, the focus on rigorous, intense, and open inquiry carried out by the faculty and students of the University must be accompanied by the greatest possible intellectual freedom, in an environment that supports openness and avoids steps that lead to chilling the environment.

Second, it follows that the University, as an institution, should take no political positions and should remain neutral on such matters (except of necessity those in which it is a direct party), in order to ensure that we have a maximally open environment. Violations of neutrality are a mark against the maintenance of a non-chilling environment.

Third, this University neutrality provides a safe environment for faculty and students to express their own views and take whatever stance they like as individuals. Their views, in turn, never represent the University, which remains neutral.

Fourth, the University needs to protect the academic freedom of faculty and students both by its own neutrality and the protection from internal and external forces that would seek to dampen it.

Fifth, there is recognition of a possible exception. Kalven was a constitutional lawyer, and as such deeply appreciated that a competing interest could trump under unusual circumstances. The exceptions were not spelled out, but rather the emphasis was put on the strong presumption that the above principles would govern. Much of the focus on the Kalven report in recent times is on understanding exactly where the exception clause applies. The report asserts a “heavy presumption against the university taking collective action or expressing opinions on the political or social values of the day, or modifying its corporate activities to foster social or political values however compelling and appealing they may be.”

Kapil Sibal talks to the US universities

2009-10-31T13:38:00.003+05:30

Two reports with news about what HRD Minister Kapil Sibal has been doing in the last couple of days in the US.

The first one is from BU Today, Boston University's newspaper:

“We are looking at institutions of excellence,” says Sibal. “We would like the best in the world to come to India, and it is in that sense that we would welcome Boston University.”

He says that India’s population — vast, young, and eager to learn — presents a great opportunity for U.S. institutions of higher learning.

“India has about 560 million people who are less than 25 years of age,” Sibal says. “The number of children going to school is 220 million, and a substantial percentage of those children will have to graduate. So we need educational institutions, and not all of those institutions can be provided by the government.”

The second is from The Economic Times with some stuff about what he said at a press meet:

Government has promised a level playing field to top US institutions in a bid to encourage foreign investment in the education sector as New Delhi seeks partnerships with global institutions to provide quality education at home.

"With the expansion of the higher education sector and the needs of Indian students, we need not just to allow education providers in India to grow, but we also need to provide for foreign investment in the education sector," India's Human Resource Development Minister Kapil Sibal said at a press conference here Friday.

Sibal, who was here to seek partnership with leading American universities for an Indian initiative to set up 14 innovation universities to push research and development, said he was encouraged by the response, which made the trip "exceptionally satisfying".

Big questions in the science of the brain

2009-10-31T13:05:00.003+05:30

An hour-long tour of some of the big questions in brain science discussed by five leading scientists of the day. Watch it on Charlie Rose's show

[If that link opens with some other show, go to the archives and choose 29 October 2009. ]

This is the first of a 12-part series -- the later episodes will go into the details of what we know about each of these questions.

What I found even more fascinating than the questions themselves is the scientists' ability to communicate the big ideas -- and also the excitement of working with and shaping those ideas -- in a language that's accessible to most of us outside the field. Yes, there's some occasional jargon such as "animal models" and "neural correlates of consciousness", but (a) they are not too many, and (b) there's sufficient context around these phrases that gives us some idea about what they mean.

Like I said, the excitement of doing high science shines right through this episode.

Links ...

2009-10-30T18:18:00.003+05:30

Featured link: Pankaj Jalote (Director, IIIT-Delhi) in the Economic Times: Who's afraid of foreign universities?
An old article (from 2006) in Business Week by Nandini Lakshman: Will foreign universities come to India?
Sticking to the theme of foreign universities, here's one about Australia's experience with them.
This court battle between a South Korean university and Yale is interesting -- at least for the way Yale is fighting it in public. Consider what its spokesman said: "We think the jury will certainly consider the fact that the chairman of Dongguk’s board was convicted of soliciting and receiving an illegal government subsidy from Ms. Shin’s lover, who was an adviser to the Korean president."
You probably don't need more evidence of how tough things have been for American public universities lately. If you do, here is one for you.

Gaming a Tough Entrance Exam

2009-10-29T13:29:00.005+05:30

Let me start with Priscilla Jebaraj's story in The Hindu:

At large coaching centres such as those in Kota, students effectively drop out of the school system in order to prepare for JEE. They can then scrape through their board examinations to meet the 60 per cent minimum criteria, without having actually attended school for two years.

This can result in a skewed education, which shows up once the student gets to IIT. IIT-M director M.S. Ananth tells the story of a student who arrived at IIT without having mastered the concept of integration despite it being part of the higher secondary mathematics curriculum. He had failed to study it since he felt only three marks were allotted to the topic under JEE.

I couldn't believe it when I read that stuff about a student entering an IIT without knowing anything about integral calculus. Within a day, I got this view confirmed by another friend from an IIT who went on to complain about large holes in many students' background -- which were probably due to their strategy of selective preparation.

[BTW, this is not peculiar to JEE; recently, a colleague told us about a couple of students who didn't know any mathematics and still managed good ranks in GATE. And they are in a math-heavy engineering field! ]

Frankly, I hadn't thought about this angle before; after thinking about it a bit, it actually makes sense. By any objective yardstick, JEE is a brutally tough exam -- so tough, in fact, that you could get 30 to 40 percent and still find yourself among the rank-holders (especially if you really do well in one of the subjects).

For some students, then, it is certainly rational to cut down on preparing for stuff that's difficult -- and focus more on things for which they have a flair. It's also possible that coaching schools encourage them to put this strategy into practice.

A Board exam -- conducted, for example, by CBSE -- this would be an absolutely disastrous strategy if you want to be among the among the top-rankers. This is because top-rankers in these exams typically have over 90 percent -- and you can't get 90+ percent by ignoring even 20 or 30 percent of the syllabus.

Put this down as yet another 'unintended consequence' of the design choice by the IITs to go with a 'tough' version of JEE. It's this very 'tough-ness' that allows this particular method of gaming the exam to work.

When men become a minority in a high-prestige field ...

2009-10-27T17:34:00.003+05:30

... it is viewed as A Seriously Bad Thing -- something that should be corrected. For example, by changing admissions requirement to include performance in tests in which men have an advantage. Here's something from Ireland that should sound very, very familiar:

In medical courses, women were three times more likely to earn a spot over male applicants, at least until this year when an aptitude test was introduced for the first time. The test scores were combined with results from the schools' Leaving Certificate examination to select students for entry into one of the country's five undergraduate medical schools.

The use of the aptitude test has proven to be somewhat controversial. The HPAT-Ireland test measures a candidate's logical reasoning and problem-solving skills as well as non-verbal reasoning and the ability to understand the thoughts, behaviour and-or intentions of people. It does not test academic knowledge and candidates do not require special understanding of any academic discipline.

Males did better than females in the test with the result that a higher percentage of males got into medicine this year than in previous years - still not as many as females but an improvement, nevertheless.

The change led to accusations in some quarters that the real purpose of the test was to increase the percentage of males in medicine to miligate against the high numbers of female doctors who will take time off to look after children.

This was denied by the Education Ministry which pushed for the change to end the situation whereby medicine was the sole preserve of students who obtained nearly perfect results in their Leaving Certificate.

Those results are converted into 'points' for college entry and the maximum a student can get is 600 points. Latest figures show that 61% of those who score 450 points or higher in the Leaving Certificate are female. [Bold emphasis added]

Women's dominance in higher ed?

2009-10-27T17:12:00.004+05:30

It dawned in the West two or three decades ago -- women outnumber men in universities and colleges there, by as much as (or higher than) 2 to 1.

In some countries, women are a minority only in sciences (especially physical sciences) and engineering -- but the trends appear to favor a female majority soon.

These are the inescapable conclusions from the following set of stories in the latest (online) issue of University World News:

Global: Women No Longer the Second Sex.
South Africa: Gender Divide Breached.
Canada: School the Cause of Male Minority?
Ireland: Engineering -- the Last Male Bastion.
Australia: Male Decline Continues.
USA (from an earlier issue): New Growth in Domestic Graduate Student Enrollment: "Overall, nearly 60% of all graduate students in autumn 2008 were women, and they comprised a larger share of total enrolees at the masters and graduate certification level (61%) as well as at doctoral level (51%)."

Pakistan's reform experiments in higher ed

2009-10-27T13:05:00.000+05:30

Sidebar: I'm not sure how many of these links to Nature.com will work for you without subscription; the last two will definitely work from this story at ScieDev.Net -- go to the bottom of that story for the links.

* * *

The Nature opinion piece (by Athar Osama, Adil Najam, Shamsh Kassim-Lakha, Syed Zulfiqar Gilani & Christopher King) is an eye-opener! It describes (and to some extent, evaluates) the massive efforts by Pakistan since 2002: enormous increase in funding, lots of students sent abroad for doctoral degrees, increase in the number of PhDs from Pakistan's universities, etc.

These efforts have been spearheaded by the Higher Education Commission (which replaced that country's UGC). The current head of HEC, Atta ur Rahman, has a response highlighting what he thinks are the major achievements:

... Because there were not enough suitable PhD supervisors in the universities, we sent some 3,800 students abroad, mainly to the United States and Europe, to study for a PhD, at a total cost of about US$1 billion. [...]

There followed a huge increase in international scientific research publications, from 600 or so in 2001 to more than 4,200 in 2008. About 50 new universities and degree-awarding institutes were established during this period, and enrolment in higher education almost tripled to about 400,000 by the end of 2008, having been just 135,000 in 2003.

A digital library was established to provide free access to 25,000 international journals and 45,000 textbooks for all public-sector university students. In the 2008 Times Higher Education rankings, four Pakistani universities are among the top 600 in the world — an unattainable position before 2003.

In another response to that opinion piece, Prof. Pervez Hoodbhoy, a physicist at Quaid-e-Azam University, Islamabad, is blunt in calling HEC's efforts 'a failed experiment':

the former government wasted enormous sums of money on prestige mega-projects. Nine new universities were abandoned after partial construction because of a lack of trained faculty, and expensive imported scientific equipment remains under-utilized many years later. The claimed 400% increase in publications was a result of salary bonuses awarded to professors who published in international journals, largely irrespective of substance and quality. These payments fostered a plagiarism culture that still goes unpunished.

The authors draw attention to a large increase in "relative impact" in some disciplines, based on citation of papers published in 2003–07. But were self-citations (a common ploy) eliminated from this count? I used an option available from Thomson Scientific and found the opposite result after eliminating self-citations.

The authors also praise the Higher Education Commission for increasing university professors' salaries. But this has created social disparities — a full professor now earns 20–30 times more than a school teacher. Professors, bent on removing barriers to their promotions and incomes, take on very large numbers of PhD students. To ensure that these students get their degrees, many professors seek the elimination of international testing, hitherto used as a metric for gauging student performance.

Pakistan's failed experiment provides a counter-example to the conventional wisdom that money is the most crucial element in the reform process. ...

Extreme Coaching and Entrance Exams

2009-10-25T18:51:00.007+05:30

Today's DNA has two stories where lots of different people offer their views on coaching schools. While I have heard lots of complaints from faculty (in private conversations and through anonymous comments), it is good to hear them echoed by an IITian:

Says Karthik Shashidhar who graduated from IIT, Madras in 2004 and now works as an investment banker in Bangalore, "At IIT, we refer to the coaching centres as factories. I went to the biggest factory - BASE. But it was low intensity compared to most others. We have seen that more intense the preparation, worse they do at IIT. I have seen fairly sad cases of people dropping out, taking 6 years to complete the course and so on. Those who overstretch themselves to clear the JEE, tend to take it easy once they get into IIT. They just give up in life later. It could also be that people who don't have the aptitude somehow manage to scrape through with intense coaching, and then can't cope at IIT."

* * *

Many people have pointed out that the culture of coaching schools cannot be eliminated, given the huge demand for IIT seats. Some people have even argued that coaching may actually be good, because it teaches kids vital skills that their regular schools fail to impart. All this is true; but these arguments misinterpret the concern about coaching schools.

The main complaint is primarily against Extreme Coaching exemplified by the Kota-style residential centres, which encourage students to develop and internalize a disdain for 'regular' studies -- a disdain that many students take to the IITs!

I think it's fair to say that it's worth pursuing ways of minimizing -- if not eliminating -- the pernicious influence of Extreme Coaching.

* * *

One of them is to use multiple rounds of contests, like the math and physics Olympiads do.

* * *

A simpler version -- involving a two-step process -- could also work. In fact, IITs did use (for a brief period that ended in 2005) a screening test that selected a small subset of JEE applicants for the final exam.

However, this didn't do anything to reduce the need for Extreme Coaching primarily because the screening test itself was as brutal as ever.

I think the trick is to make the screening test really simple. Something that a bright, diligent student should be able to ace without needing serious coaching. Ideally, the screening test should also be done about a year in advance, so that a huge majority of students can get on with their lives and make other plans.

With this scheme, Extreme Coaching loses its sting: where the numbers are huge (the screening test) coaching is not needed, and where coaching might be needed, the numbers are small.

* * *

An even better option is to give some weight to broader measures of students' achievement, including performance in X and XII board exams (BTW, this is not as outlandish as it sounds -- IIM-B uses them). Use of X and XII results would also reward consistent performance -- something that was found in a study to correlate well with the performance of IIT-M students.

Given their stature and prestige, IITs will not have any trouble at all in getting the boards to declare percentile scores along with marks in Class X and Class XII. The percentile scores can also be used as an input into the ranking exercise in AIEEE, Pre-Medical Test, and other such tests.

Adventures in 'open' publishing

2009-10-25T18:18:00.003+05:30

Mark Pilgrim's book, Dive Into Python, is available as a real book as well as a downloadable (free!) e-book. Interestingly, "the book is published under the GNU Free Documentation License, which explicitly gives anyone and everyone the right to publish it themselves." And sure enough, someone did, and started selling it it on Amazon.com!

If you still don't see the point behind the whole thing -- the GNU Free Documentation License -- you really have to read this post:

So I am grateful for this anonymous soul who woke up one day and said to herself, “You know what I should do today? I should try to sell copies of that Free book that Pilgrim wrote.” Grateful, because it afforded me the opportunity to remind myself why I chose a Free license in the first place. My Zen teacher once told me that, when people try to do you harm, you should thank them for giving you the opportunity to forgive them. In this case it’s even simpler, because there’s nothing to forgive, just explain. She’s redistributing the work that I explicitly made redistributable. She’s kind of the point.

Now go read Cory Doctorow's post on his latest experiment in making his books available for free download.

30 years of the London Review of Books (and 11 years of 'personals')

2009-10-25T18:03:00.004+05:30

Miller and Wilmers [the then editors of the London Review of Books] have also been prone to a touch of mischief. When in 1982 the poet and critic Al Alvarez wrote a book on divorce, they commissioned the author’s first wife to review it. A terrific fuss ensued (Frank Kermode, the paper’s longest serving contributor and a friend of the Alvarezes, took particular exception).

From John Sutherland's look back at thirty years of LRB.

Since my acquaintance with LRB has been only through its website, I wasn't aware of its section on classifieds which

became known for the expression of eccentric but articulate longings, some of them extremely odd (eg “Tell me your kidney-stone experiences: I’ll set them to music”); others worryingly direct (“Woman, 32, needful of the finer things in life seeks stinking rich bloke, 80 to 100.”).

Sutherland goes on to excerpt some of the ads in which "I had become part of an erotic lexicon." It's all pretty hilarious stuff -- check it out; it appears at the end of his article.

Links: Foreign Universities Edition

2009-10-24T12:20:00.005+05:30

Some links:

This page has what appears to be a comprehensive list of foreign campuses of US universities (until 2008).
This story is a good warning. Top universities will want 'incentives' to come to India.

When John Sexton, the president of New York University, first met Omar Saif Ghobash, an investor trying to entice him to open a branch campus in the United Arab Emirates, Mr. Sexton was not sure what to make of the proposal — so he asked for a $50 million gift.

It’s like earnest money: if you’re a $50 million donor, I’ll take you seriously,” Mr. Sexton said. “It’s a way to test their bona fides.” In the end, the money materialized from the government of Abu Dhabi, one of the seven emirates.
Inside Higher Ed: International Campuses on the Rise:

The number of international branch campuses has grown to 162, up 43 percent in just three years, according to a study released Wednesday by the Observatory on Borderless Higher Education, a British research institute that has been among the leaders in documenting the spread of this form of higher education.

Branch campuses are defined as institutions that have the name of and are run by a foreign institution, and that award full degrees from that institution -- so these figures do not include centers that are run for study abroad experiences for those from the home campus.

The international branch campus, the report says, is a relatively recent phenomenon: Only 35 of the campuses in the study existed prior to 1999. Branch campuses vary widely and involve leading universities. But they also have been controversial, with faculty groups warning that branch campuses may not always reflect the academic standards or missions of home universities. (And there are plenty of fans of branch campuses who agree that some are shoddy, and plenty of skeptics who agree that some are outstanding.)
The story of George Mason's UAE campus in Ras Al Khaimah is sobering.

After three years developing a full degree-granting campus in the United Arab Emirates, the university is pulling out without producing a single graduate. Plagued by slow enrollment growth, funding problems and disagreements with the Emirates government organization that bankrolled the project, the model is no longer viable, Stearns said Thursday.

This VoA story suggests "disagreements over operating budget and academic control" as the reasons for GMU's exit.

Also, something similar happened to the Singapore campus of the University of New South Wales.
Russel C. Jones: Exporting American Higher Education. This article provides a nice summary of the kinds of issues that one needs to think about.

Any development of American-style education in a foreign country runs the risk of educating students in a way or at a level that creates an elite class that is not well connected to the local culture and needs. And if too much adaptation to local conditions is made, does the education retain the fundamental elements which make it an American education?

As noted above, staffing foreign programs with faculty members from the home US campus is often a problem, particularly after startup. One solution to this problem is to have new faculty members who are hired to work in foreign programs spend a significant period of time on the home campus, involved in the courses that they will later teach abroad and working with home campus faculty members on research.

Home campuses in the US can be positively affected as faculty members have the opportunity to gain international experience. In the current economic climate, assignment or transfer of faculty members to foreign campuses can relieve home campus budgets, and perhaps avoid layoffs.

Developing necessary enrollments to justify the offering of foreign programs, and provide sufficient income to maintain them, is a major issue. In many developing countries, the majority of secondary school leavers are poorly prepared to handle American-style university level programs. Lack of adequate preparation in math and science is typical, and the ability to study advanced material in English is often lacking.
Here's a refreshingly blunt article ("universities are in it for the money. These campuses take in foreign students to help fund their operations back home") that also articulates philosophical / political reasons for opposing American campuses abroad (Jones, too, touches on this issue):

It is the belief of many that it should not be the role of the American military to police the world. Nor should it be the role of American universities to educate the world. Education and curricula are highly political and culturally loaded. This foreign intrusion suggests that American education is somehow superior to what is, or could be, offered in other countries. This arrangement also allows governments off the hook for maintaining or creating a domestic and public post-secondary education system. What’s more, it opens the door to cultural domination from a foreign power. Hardly a noble exercise in geopolitical welfare.

Why would a foreign university want an Indian campus?

2009-10-24T10:33:00.006+05:30

Here are some possibilities:

Foreign universities may be interested in educating Indian citizens, but they'll come here primarily because they see a market here. [Here's an Indian analogy: If IIMs want to set up shop in the Middle East, is it because they feel that it's their mission to educate the citizens of those countries?]
They can use their Indian campus for the 'study abroad' programs for their own UG students. [In the case of IIMs, they can use their foreign campuses as an 'incentive' for their faculty -- by allowing them to spend some time in Dubai and Singapore.]
They may want to be known for their 'Global Campus,' however meaningless that label may be.
Instead of short term 'study abroad' program, the Indian campus may well turn into a destination for 'education tourism.'

If #1 -- the Indian market -- is the reason, I expect the for-profit universities (the University of Phoenix) to be interested, rather than the Harvards and the Stanfords. Even if the latter do come to India, it'll be to offer easy and cheap programs (that nevertheless are in high demand): business, economics, accounting and the like. Humanities are also easy and cheap to set up and run, and they help make the programs appear well-rounded. But, don't expect a program in the sciences or engineering -- except perhaps mathematics and computer science.

Can #2 -- Study Abroad progams -- be a good reason for an Indian campus? Frankly, I don't know. My guess is that American UG students are far more interested in Europe, Japan, Australia. India may be attractive to a few because it's exotic or 'emerging', but let's be realistic. Also, universities don't need their own campus for study abroad programs -- they can do it with a local partner.

#3 -- Global Campus -- should be recognized for what it really is: an empty slogan with perhaps some marketing value. It could, for example, help in getting a better place in THE-QS rank list. But here is the thing: Harvard and Stanford don't need this label; the University of Southeastern Idaho might.

#4 -- education tourism -- could be attractive for cost-conscious students from the US as well as elsewhere, if they can get an MIT degree at a lower cost made possible by the Indian operations. But would MIT want to be in this market?