Back in 2003, Phillip Griffiths, the then Director of the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) in Princeton University, addressed a committee appointed by the InterAcademy Council to prepare its first study report.

The Report was called “Inventing a Better Future: A Strategy for Building Worldwide Capacities in Science and Technology”. Griffiths made a plea for establishing more Centres of Excellence in developing countries. In the discussion that followed, I intervened, only half-jokingly, that what developing countries really need instead are islands of excellence whereby they can isolate themselves from their societies by metaphorical moats.

As expected, the study committee ignored my word-smithy. International organisations are loathe to say in print anything that is critical of developing countries. The expression “centres of excellence” appeared 84 times in the final report published in 2004.

Fast forward to Christmas Day in Bengaluru in 2017. I was invited to a party where NR Narayana Murthy was the main draw. The host introduced me to Murthy as one who had recently retired from the National Institute of Advanced Studies (NIAS) in Bengaluru. When we were by ourselves, Murthy mentioned that he is now serving on the Board of Trustees of Princeton’s IAS and reminded me that he had also been on the Council of Management of NIAS. “Oh, except for the similarity in names, there is no comparison”, I interjected. “True,” Murthy replied, “but why couldn’t we execute a 50-year plan after which we could become at least somewhat like them? Why can’t we get the direction right?” I mumbled something unconvincingly about differences in the certainty of assured funding. “That’s not it,” Murthy assured me, “Princeton’s IAS too has uncertainties of funding”.

Growing concern

What irks our administrators is that none of our institutions of higher learning makes it into any of the annual lists of top 300. Even if the methodologies for creating these lists are all flawed, there remains a lurking feeling that not all is well with our institutional functioning.

This article has been triggered by the recent government announcement of the selection of six institutions as Institutes of Eminence and of awards to them.

In our pronouncements we are quick to adopt new jargon: self-reliance, energy access, energy security, sustainability, inclusiveness, climate change have all become parts of the standard lexicon. We are content merely on getting the rhetoric right. Reality on the ground is a lot slower to change.

Here even the rhetoric may not be right. Eminence is a term borrowed from geography now used more to describe individual rather than institutional accomplishment. Nonetheless, one can confidently assert that these institutions chosen by the government will neither be born great nor have greatness thrust upon them. This assertion flows not out of cynicism but out of decades of observations of different institutions in the world. The only way for an institution to rise to the top is by achieving greatness. It is often said that the Indian society is more powerful than the state. This has been true throughout our history. This, however, takes us far from our present question of what ails Indian institutions of higher learning.

The short and quick answer is “India”. The second answer, still unsatisfactory, is “Indian society”. The third and slightly more precise answer is “intrusion of Indian society into the governance of these institutions, mainly for the worse”. We have only ourselves to blame.

The truth is that we are unwilling to sustain conditions that promote work of superior quality. We cannot learn from the ashrams of the past because the scale is very different. We may have little to learn from Taxila or Nalanda because we cannot recreate those conditions (they had almost no competition). We can learn only from the successful models in the west where some of the best universities in the world are located.

For starters, consider the list of factors identified by the InterAcademy Council Report. “A Centre of Excellence should have: institutional autonomy, sustainable financial support, knowledgeable and capable leadership, international inputs, focused research agendas that include interdisciplinary themes, applied research as well as basic research, technology transfer, peer review as a systemic element, merit-based hiring and promotion policies, and mechanisms for nurturing new generation of S&T talent.”

Because this list is specific to Centres, for larger institutions we may have to also include knowing when to decentralise or democratise decision-making.

A gestalt

While each by itself is necessary, it is not sufficient. The list comes as a gestalt, a package deal. One cannot pick and choose amongst these factors. Getting 90 per cent right is not good enough. Throwing resources at an institution does not work. If it did, Middle Eastern universities would be flourishing. People will just build swankier buildings. Just giving autonomy to institutions is also insufficient. There are already too many one-man dictatorships in India, at all levels.

At least three characteristics of our society keep our institutions down. The first is deference for age and hierarchy. We pay more attention to who says something than to what is said. There is too much gap in authority between the Number 1 and everyone else who are all also-rans. “The number 1 provides us with shade but does not let us grow”. The second is the context-specificity of Indian life. The leaderships do not believe in creating rules-based functioning. “You show me a face, and I will show you the rule”. The third is our clannishness that prevents us from distinguishing personal predilections from professional judgments.

Finally nurturing excellence in institutions is a painstakingly slow process with the time scale of a human generation (30-35 years). On the contrary, destroying a fledgling institution can be done on the time scale of a few years. Such is the asymmetry of life.

The writer is an independent researcher based in Bengaluru.

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