The Lost Voice of the Indian University

Context: The university administration has been replaced by a bureaucratic apparatus from the top due to the undermined independent character of higher education institutions.

Institutional Decline of Higher Education Institutions (HEIs):

• Undermined independence:  of HEIs by constituting the National Knowledge Commission and emphasis on privatization of education.
• Restricting Academic bodies: to revising and regulating matters pertaining to curricula.
• Bureaucratic centralisation: The imposition of the semester system across India and the introduction of a four-year undergraduate programme.
• Undervalued Academic Achievements: of Indian universities, new academic traditions, and culture by romanticizing American academia.
• Cafeteria system: Choice Based Credit System and renewed attempts to privatize higher education linked to an emphasis on rankings. 
• Intervention in minute details: Pertaining to academic curricula, the teaching-learning process, and the parameters that governed academic research within the university. 
• Impact of COVID-19 pandemic: Decisions about the conclusion of the academic term and the modalities for evaluation have become government prerogatives. 

Way Forward:

• Encouraging them to develop an academic rigour: that would contribute to the nation-building process. 
• Institutional and academic autonomy: must be offered to these institutions to emerge as premier institutions of higher learning in India. 
• Collective decision-making: Giving importance to representative institutional bodies like faculty committees, committees of courses, the board of studies, university senates, academic councils, and executive councils. 

• These bodies oversaw the administrative and academic functioning of the university and ensured collective decision-making based on serious academic deliberation.

• Restoring the fertile academic space: Institutions of higher education in India have to restore the fertile academic space where ideas can be discussed and debated.