Autonomy of Higher Education Institutions and NEP

The new education policy (NEP) was accepted last year. It has many desirable proposals for the higher education sector. In the next few posts I plan to explore a few different aspects of NEP for higher education (HE) and higher education institutions (HEIs). This one focuses on autonomy for self governance.

Universities are complex organisations trying to respond to the forces of globalisation, technology change, changing expectations from students and public, competition for global rankings and prestige, need for enhanced financial resources, and so forth. In such a scenario, the university must govern itself effectively to face multifaceted challenges of the twenty-first century and provide desired academic outcomes to students and society. For  strong professional governance, a higher degree of autonomy is essential, particularly to research universities.

In public universities that are supported through public funds, the state exercises a degree of control over these universities. In many developed countries, it is now broadly agreed that increasing the autonomy of public universities is essential for a modern higher education system. Experience and research indicate that autonomy helps a university in performing better and attract more funds.

The NEP recognises the importance of effective governance and leadership and that a common feature of all world-class institutions globally including India is the existence of strong self-governance and merit-based appointments of institutional leaders. It states that over a period of 15 years, all HEIs in India will become independent self-governing institutions. 

For autonomy of governance, the first issue relates to the Board of Governors (BoG), the apex body of an Institution. NEP states that the BoG will consists of a group of highly qualified, competent, and dedicated individuals having proven capabilities and a strong sense of commitment to the institution. It also proposes that the Board will be self-perpetuating, i.e. the BoG itself will find replacements for members whose terms finishes. It proposes that “new members of the Board shall be identified by an expert committee appointed by the Board; and the selection of new members shall be carried out by the BoG itself.” It is implied that the BoG will have none or very few government nominees (the NEP2019 document, which formed the basis for NEP had given a limit for government nominees.)

These recommendations regarding the BoG are indeed along the lines of the best practices being followed globally, and if implemented in letter and spirit, can truly transform the governance of Institutions. First, as the board appoints its members, it will help ensure that each member focuses on welfare of the institution and feels answerable / accountable to it. It also avoids having some government official / nominee in the Board – often such officials are on many boards and their aim is often to ensure that government’s interests are protected, not necessarily to promote the institution’s interests. Selection of members by BoG can also avoid the common situation where some Board positions remain vacant since the concerned ministry is not able to nominate people to the positions for which it has nomination authority. NEP also states that succession should be planned with care so leadership positions are not be kept vacant.

The NEP is silent on how the Chairperson of the BoG will be selected / appointed. (The NEP2019 had suggested that the Chairperson will be selected by the BoG itself from amongst its members.) If the government wants to have a say in this appointment, it is hoped that the selection of the Chairperson will be done through a committee comprising of the Government and the BoG nominees, and that the Board has some say in selection of the Chairperson. And that the Chairperson is appointed sometime before the term of the current Chairperson ends – it is not at all in the interest of the HEI that there be “acting Chairperson”. NEP clearly states that leadership changes should come with sufficient overlaps, and not remain vacant, in order to ensure smooth transitions.

It is also important to ensure that the Chairperson of the BoG has a non-executive role – clearly stated in NEP2019 and is implied in the NEP. In other words, any executive (e.g. the Director or the Vice Chancellor) cannot be the Chairperson of the Board. This is based on sound governance principle, and is globally followed in universities. It will be interesting to see how this is implemented for Universities in India, as many of them follow the old practice which the British established (but which is not followed in UK) where the Vice Chancellor is not only the chief-executive but is also the Chairperson of the Board.

The second important issue of governance autonomy is whether the selection and appointment of the Head of the Institution (Vice Chancellor or Director) rests with BoG or outside the BoG. A person appointed to a post is answerable to the appointing authority. Therefore, if the appointing authority is not the board of the university but some external authority, then, the Head is actually not answerable to the university or the board, but to the external appointing authority. To resolve this fundamental anomaly, the Head of a university, like the CEO of business organisations, should be appointed by the university through its Board and should be answerable to the university.

NEP appreciates the need to have top quality leadership (states that all leadership positions and Heads of institutions will be offered to persons with high academic qualifications and demonstrated administrative and leadership capabilities along with abilities to manage complex situations.) It states that the selection of the Head of the Institution shall be carried out by the BoG through a rigorous, impartial, merit-based, and competency-based process led by an Eminent Expert Committee constituted by the BoG. In other words, the selection and appointment of the Head of the Institution is to be done by the Institution itself through its BoG.

This recommendation, if implemented in spirit as well as the letter, can change the mindset and culture of institution leaders. It makes the Head answerable to the Board, the appointing authority. In today’s scenario, as the appointing authority is outside the institution the appointed leader is really answerable, and perhaps beholden, to the external appointing authority.

When the institution, through its Board, becomes the appointing body, many institutions will find ways to involve the faculty in the selection process. For example, a common method employed in US (and even in some places in India) is to invite the final few shortlisted candidates for leadership to the Institute and meet with faculty and often make a presentation to the Institute body regarding the vision the person has, the values he/she upholds, and what might his/her focus be as a leader. And based on these interactions/presentations, the faculty may give their input/recommendations to the Board, which takes the final decision based on all inputs. This allows all stakeholders of the institute to be involved, and more importantly, the new leader to be answerable to them.

The last issue regarding governance autonomy is of selecting and appointing faculty. Institutional autonomy clearly implies that all appointments made by the institute should be decided and offered by the Institute itself. NEP clearly states that the most important factor in the success of higher education institutions is the quality and engagement of its faculty, and that the current level of faculty motivation is lower than desired. It further states that autonomous institutions empowered to drive excellence, should have clearly defined, independent, and transparent processes and criteria for faculty recruitment, and suggests that promotion, tenure, salary increases, recognition, etc be based on performance.

Autonomy in recruitment, besides requiring that the government officials should have no role in the selection and appointment of faculty, raises a rather touchy issue, particularly for research universities / institutions that aim for excellence and want to be globally competitive and reputed. As their mission includes research and teaching excellence, these institutions should have the freedom to recruit suitable people to these positions based completely on their needs (e.g. in which areas) and excellence-merit/quotient of the candidate, and should have freedom to evolve policies and processes for tenure, promotion, etc based on performance – as supported in the NEP. If the criteria of merit and excellence is diluted for any reason, it is likely to take the institution down a slippery slope where factors other than excellence or performance become significant. This implies, that while the institution should adhere to the academic value of being open to all, it must continue to value talent, and talent alone. Any restrictions (e.g. quotas) on this actually impinge on the autonomy of the institution regarding selecting and appointing the best and most talented faculty to meet its vision and mission.

The NEP has laid out the path for modernisation of governance in HEIs, and has excellent recommendations to bring governance of our institutions in line with the global best practices. It is to be seen how the changes recommended by the NEP are implemented, as some existing rules and practices can come in the way (e.g. of having the Vice Chancellor as the chief-executive and also the Chairperson of the Board.) Implementing the NEP recommendations may also require dismantling of some existing structures (e.g. council for IITs, NITs, IIITs, …) which violate the autonomy of the Institution. The NEP says that there will be some overarching regulation/act which will fix issues. It will be interesting to see how such legacy issues are resolved.

Overall, the NEP has provided for great deal of governance autonomy to Institutions. Though the past record of governments and bureaucracies is that they are loath to give up their power and control – one hopes that the recommendations of the NEP will be sincerely implemented and our HEIs, at least the top ones, will get full governance autonomy as envisaged in the NEP.

Affiliating Model Finally set to Exit as per NEP2020

The new education policy (NEP), which has recently been accepted by the govt, has proposed phasing out of the affiliating model. This has been long overdue – many people have argued for it. I had written two articles on this aspect in Economic Times – Reform the Affiliating University Model (Sept 2009) and Times of India – Break the Shackles (April 2008). Given that this is finally going to happen (we hope), I thought it is good to discuss the impact of this on colleges. (Am giving short summary of these articles below.)

While it is a welcome change, colleges will really have to evolve rapidly and develop capabilities they currently do not have, if they are to live up to the responsibilities the autonomy brings. We have about 40,000 affiliated colleges. There are a few routes these colleges can take when the affiliating model ends.

1. Become a constituent college of the affiliating university – essentially it becomes part of the university
2. Become an autonomous college
3. Become a university
4. Form a consortium of colleges located in the same city (and perhaps not too far from each other) and form a university

In the first option, while the college and the university have to agree, but when agreed, the university will control and manage the college. A college may also merge with the university – which is effectively the same, except that the college identity also goes. This route is the simplest – college really has to do nothing else but merge with the university

The remaining routes will require a major change in how colleges function and college to add important new capabilities. Currently, colleges do not have the power to design courses in various programs. Consequently, they do not have experience or systems for this. An autonomous college will have full control on teaching and assessment, and will also have control over designing of new courses within programs (designing new degree programs is likely to remain with the university.) This change is going to be huge for a college – faculty and administration who for decades have taught based on the syllabus given to them, moving to the capability of designing the syllabus and courses is a huge shift, for which colleges will definitely need help.

To be able to discharge these responsibilities, the college will have to build capabilities in designing courses, effective delivery, assessment, regular updating of courses, building feedback loops to monitor effectiveness of design and delivery, etc. These will require establishing the goal and learning outcomes of the courses, and ensuring that the learning objective of the course align well with the graduate attributes or overall outcomes of the program. It will also require good instruction plan for the course (what is to be taught and when) and an appropriate assessment plan.

All these are complicated tasks, much more challenging requiring a broader understanding of teaching and responsibilities associated with it, and careful thought and good execution. For example, unlike the assessment in affiliation model (which is done by the university and essentially is one main exam), now assessment will include multiple elements like assignments, reports, quizzes or tests, mid-semester exams, end-semester exams, etc. And these will have to be done in a fair and transparent manner. The faculty of colleges is unlikely to have these capabilities, as they are used to getting the syllabus for courses given to them.

To perform these tasks, a college will need to establish some academic body like the Senate (or academic board), which will be responsible for overseeing the tasks mentioned above. A college will be well advised to start working on it soon, so they gain experience in managing the academics internally. It will be highly desirable to have external experts from universities with experience in the Senate. In addition, building these capabilities may require training of faculty on designing and delivering of courses.

The affiliating university, no doubt, will have to be involved in this transition of colleges, and will have to help colleges in developing the capabilities to become autonomous. An approach on how this ownership of design of courses can be transferred gradually from the university to the college is given in the Economic Times article (link above, summary below).

If the college becomes a University, which I suspect only a few colleges will be allowed, then the Senate will also have to have the capability of designing new programs. This is a much bigger and complex task than designing courses, and it is important that good and rigorous programs are designed that develop graduates needed by the society and economy. It will require a much more mature Senate, with senior and serious academicians who have participated in such designs earlier.

The last option in many ways is the most interesting and clearly viable, though logistically will be hard to implement. The rationale for this is clear – each college individually is not likely to have the capabilities to be an independent university, which will require much more resources and strong governance. However, together a few colleges will have more capabilities, as well as more connections with other academic institutions and industry. Together, they can clearly form a university, provided they can work out the management and integration issues that will necessarily come in this approach.

Merging multiple institutions is not a practice in India. In fact, we have often broken larger institutions/universities (there are many examples of this.) However, mergers have been used very effectively in many countries, particularly Australia as part of it Dawkins reforms, and more recently France, where they are creating mega universities by merging focused institutions and research labs in some cities to form a research university. According to some reports, China has had 100s of such mergers.

It will be exciting to see merging of multiple colleges, perhaps with some university and some research labs, to form large universities. Such universities will have the diversity and the size to start aspiring for place in global fraternity of universities.

I hope this policy of ending affiliation will be implemented. This will bring about exciting changes in the higher education system in years to come with transformations and mergers of colleges taking place.

Some Points from the Times of India Article “Break the Shackles”

India is perhaps one of the few countries in the world that still has the model of centralized universities which design the syllabus, conduct exams, and give degrees while the teaching is being done in affiliated colleges that have no control on the academic content or the evaluation…..

It seems that this system was borrowed from the British, as many of the universities were set in British times. In UK, in the earlier days Universities like Oxford and Cambridge indeed followed the model where they designed the curriculum, conducted exams, and granted degrees while the affiliated colleges were centers where students were only taught. However, that model has long been discontinued in the early 20^th century once science became an important part of education. Though affiliated colleges do exist in name, they are not teaching places but are social institutions serving some community purposes. For the more vocational education programs provided by Polytechnics, till 1980s there was a national body which approved the exams. However, by 1980s the divide between the Universities and Polytechnics was abolished and each polytechnic became independent University giving degrees in its own name. The model of University being an examining body is now followed by some Universities only for their overseas programs, where they cannot have direct supervision and teaching.

So, it seems that we are almost unique in the world with respect to higher education – while everyone in the world is empowering the educators and the organization where teaching is done, we, in India, are spending our effort in centralizing education and creating structures (like the Technical Universities) to control the expanding higher education setup in the name of quality.

There are some strong pedagogy reasons why across the world this model has either not been followed or has been dismantled.

First, in the fast changing world of science, and even faster changing world of technology, even the thought that a centralized committee for syllabus setting, which has no responsibility of teaching it, can do a decent job is ludicrous. And changing anything when there are many colleges also involved will be harder, leading to static and outdated syllabus.

Secondly, this model takes away the initiative of the faculty and instead of empowering them, makes them passive players. It assumes that faculty members of a college are not capable of deciding what to teach and how to teach it. Bright people with initiative and drive to learn and teach clearly cannot work in such system. Consequently, such a system will strongly discourage bright people from joining as faculty, leading to mediocre faculty with little sense of ownership, responsibility, or initiative.

Third, such a model goes against the widely accepted notion of continuous evaluation in education. In places like IITs, and most Universities in the world, a course lasts for a semester, during which there are at least two exams, a few quizzes, home assignments and projects that contribute to the final grade, etc. In other words, the modern method of education calls for more frequent evaluation. This is simply not possible in a centralized model as a university clearly cannot conduct an exam every few months. The logistic impossibility leads to once a year exam model, which is totally outdated.

Finally, such a model leads to a bureaucracy-like setup in which there is never any clear responsibility and so no one can be blamed. A college can easily blame the University for poor Syllabus and exams for lack of quality and the university can easily blame the poor teaching for the outcome. The net result is that no one has the responsibility of poor quality of higher education – just what we expect from a government-controlled system…..

In our effort to prevent anyone from offering degrees due to the possibility of foul play, we seem to have mixed accreditation of programs with control of programs. Accreditation, world over, is practiced and is indeed needed. Accreditation ensures that some basic principles are being followed by any teaching institute that is accredited. We, on the other hand, have gone to the level of micro management where right from admission to syllabus to exams is centrally controlled.

It is essential that this model be done away with, and colleges be given full control and responsibility of their programs and degrees. ….

Some Points from the Economic Times Article “Reform Affiliating-Varsity Model”

Why do we continue with this model in which the university designs the syllabus, conducts exams, and gives degrees while teaching is done in affiliated colleges that have no control on the academic content and minimal control on the evaluation, when it does not exist in any developed country and even UK, where it existed earlier, has disbanded it? ……

The main drawback, of course, of any standardized education is that this minimum is all one gets. Standardization not only has a pull-up effect for lower end players, it curtails innovation and also has a pull-down effect on those who can offer something superior to the standard. There is no incentive for operating above the prescribed minimum standard, and colleges have no room for education initiatives other than trying to improve their results in the common exam. The system is designed for achieving average performance for all and reducing variability at both sides of the average. More importantly, there are no competitive forces to push the quality bar higher……

It should be clear that ideally all colleges should not only have complete control over their syllabi, but should have complete responsibility of evaluation and quality control – the model that exists in most developed countries. With this the complete responsibility for quality of education rests with the college. However, many colleges today are not likely to have the wherewithal for this autonomy and responsibility that comes with it. And the risk of abuse by some is there. So, it is best to evolve a way to make colleges more autonomous and responsible gradually.

This can be done by allowing the colleges a limited degree of control of syllabi and examination, which can slowly be increased. Currently, in many affiliating universities, the colleges are given some control in examinations though “internal marks”. Given that many colleges benchmark themselves by the performance of their students in the university, this leads to the tendency of being extra liberal in these internal marks. So, this does not serve the purpose at all.

An alternate can, however, work. For each degree program, the affiliating university can define some “core” courses, comprising of those subjects for which the body of knowledge is relatively stable. For these courses it will define the syllabi and will conduct the exam. The University may also define some minimum number of courses (or credits) that must be done for award of the degree. Then for the remaining courses, it can allow the colleges complete control – a college defines the courses, defines the syllabus and text books for them, teaches the courses, conducts the exams, gives final grades, etc. This will provide full ownership for part of the curriculum. If a college is too liberal with grades in the courses they own, it will become evident as any reader of a transcript will be able to see the difference between performance in the core courses and other courses.

The ability to completely own a good portion of the curriculum will allow colleges to introduce new courses and new ideas in education. It can also allow colleges to specialize in some areas. It can improve education of lab-based subjects as complete local control is really the only way lab-based courses can be done properly as they require continuous evaluation and once a semester/year evaluation is quite inadequate. And it will allow the faculty freedom to design courses and methods for evaluating. This ownership can act as a huge boost to those faculty members who take their academics seriously, and it will act as a force for faculty improvement and upgradation as this responsibility will necessarily require faculty to understand on how academics is evolving across the world. …