Challenges of Running a University in India

Three key challenges are: (1) trust and trustworthiness, (2) balance of vigilance and docility, and most important, (3) the regard for public goods.

When people do not trust others to do the right thing, or do not deserve to be trusted to do the right thing, we try to make up for the trust deficit by writing down rules and procedures to impose order and bring about some predictability. Unfortunately, rules are poor substitutes for judgment, and coarsen communication, relationships, and performance in workplace and in society at large. But in absence of trust, there are no clear alternatives to rules. If a powerful politician calls the director/vice-chancellor of a university demanding the opportunity to speak to the community for political purposes, he/she is violating the trust placed in him/her by the public. The system reacts by trying to draft rules on who can and cannot speak, erring on the side of isolating the university community from legitimate and rich social and political engagement. If a member of faculty uses university resources for personal benefit, the system reacts by drafting rules that err on the side of preventing efficient and legitimate uses of resources. One can come up with many examples. In universities where the output of faculty (and the university) is so difficult to measure, this problem is especially critical, and writing of rules to try to measure faculty's intellectual contributions just makes it worse. What scares most people about taking such responsibilities is walking into an environment where trust and trustworthiness are weak, and not valued sufficiently by the governance structure and the community at large.

Universities, like all societies, face the problem of dispersed information (Nobel Laureate F. A. Hayek, American Economic Review 1945). On one hand it is critical that all people in positions of power be monitored by those who have the information about the consequences of their actions (e.g., employees, faculty, and students in the university and general public in society). On the other hand, it is also important that those who are governed have a degree of docility (Nobel Laureate Herbert A. Simon, American Economic Review 1993) to accept the decisions of legitimate authority even if they impose some inconvenience, and give the authority some benefit of doubt, instead of rising immediately in protest against every and all actions which are, or appear to be, ill-advised. Protests carried out judiciously help governance of the system by feeding information to those who run the place; indiscriminate protests vitiate the environment, destroy reputations, and push authority into a defensive posture behind the rules and become non-transparent. The second fear that scares people from accepting such positions is the risk that the governance structure and the community may not act with a reasonable balance between vigilance and docility.

The third, and in my assessment the most important, issue is the lack of regard for public goods and externalities. Excessive regard for private goods (my house, my car, my children, my safety) without balancing it with public goods/bads (filth outside my house, effect of my car on city air, traffic congestion, and walkability of the street outside my house, effect of private schools on quality of public education, effect of street parking of cars in residential neighborhoods blocking access of fire engines) are just a few examples. Although these examples are chosen from everyday life, they are also applicable to academia. In fact, academic communities often have more intense externalities than elsewhere,with actions of  members of a university having important impact on others. For example, when one faculty member lingers over a cup of tea to arrive late in the class, it affects the punctuality of students in all other classes. The possibility that the community may not value the public goods sufficiently, and transfer the burden of recognizing and enforcing the consequences of extensive externalities within the university to the director scares potential candidates. Such a responsibility immediately puts the director in an untenable position.

None of these three factors belong to the category that (like material resources) either the Board of Governors or the Ministry of Human Resource Development can offer a candidate on a platter. However, the former can, in their own day-to-day functions and decisions, consider how their choices will have consequences along these three dimensions. The same applies to the faculty and staff. Building a fruitful and rewarding academic institution is like growing a tree. No matter how badly I wish to eat mango for dinner today, my ability to do so depends on whether I planted and nurtured a mango tree over the past ten years. Likewise, if I wish to have mango on the table ten years from now, time to start is now. When even the subsidized apex institutions like IITs and IIMs focus their primary attention on the revenue generating degrees (B.Tech. and MBAs respectively) instead of dealing with the problem of insufficient top talent in teaching and scholarship by using their subsidies to support the negative-revenue PhD programs, it is clear that we have some distance to go to recognize and deal with the externalities in the domain of higher education in India.

Problems of Higher Education in India

If and when the fast growing crisis of higher education in India is recognized by government, business community, faculty, students, and the public, solutions to the problem would have to be devised from within. Outside solutions are unlikely to work, and will likely be rejected by a proud society.

Broadly speaking, solutions are needed for (1) attracting a significant number of top students from each year's class to universities as teachers and researchers (i.e., get India's Einsteins into universities instead of selling soap, trading securities, or writing computer code); (2) finding a way of financing higher education through a judicious combination of government grants, private philanthropy, student fees, and royalties from research--this will have to be accomplished without profit-seeking capital in higher education because nobody in the world has yet found a way of delivering quality education without significant subsidies; (3) persuading business and political communities and it is in their own best long-run interest to strengthen delivery of quality of higher education by abandoning their pursuit of profits from education in favor of donations; (4) improving the governance of colleges, universities and their regulators through training, legislation, and restructuring; (5) enforcement of Societies Act and transparent public financial reporting by all organizations and institutions of higher education; and (6) amendment of India's Constitution to eliminate the special status granted therein to the teachers.

How these and other goals are to be achieved has to be worked out through discussion and debate in India. On problem No. 1 listed above (attracting more of the top talent from each year's class into teaching and scholarship to do innovation in India) everyone in India seems to think that somehow the US and UK universities will solve India's problem. They can't and they won't. India (like China) is too big. These two countries have to solve their talent-in-teaching-shortage by themselves. Simply trying attract more people from US universities (on sabbatical, or otherwise) will not work, because about 500 other universities in India, and a few thousand others around the world are trying to do exactly the same thing. Many efforts amount to adding more straws to the same glass without adding any water to drink.

Yet, we do not get many bright people from India applying to "free" PHD education in US universities because selling "soap" offers more attractive "packages." And for Indian universities, PHD is a low priority, if they can attract bright students at all. Private universities have no interest in money losing propositions. So, most  everyone is chasing the revenue generating degree programs with little attention to the money-eating PhD programs, hoping that someone else will spend the money, solve the problem, and they can hire the PHD graduates to teach at their own institutions. For all universities in India, the number of PhDs getting science and engg. PhDs is no more than 7 thousand per year. There are some 3400 engineering schools alone.

Not surprisingly, I would like to see more attention to PhD programs, especially at government subsidized apex institutions. Further, revenue generation from alums and other benefactors to subsidize quality education should be a high priority. Quality faculty contributions are difficult to measure, and certainly not by the number of hours spent in the office. This calls for reconsideration of not only the culture of the Institute but also of the rules by which it is run. Civil service rulebook tends to kill off most innovation in Indian universities.

John Wilson Dickhaut (1942-2010)

I first met John Dickhaut in January 1973, when I interviewed at the University of Chicago's Graduate School of Business as a rookie faculty candidate. I noticed his unusual combination of simultaneous playfulness and intensity. Later that fall when I joined him as a colleague, he was going through a difficult personal phase. That unusual combination kept showing up often in conversations "his light-hearted comments had a serious undercurrent, and his serious remarks covered the ideas he was have fun playing with and turning over and over in his head. I once asked him about his intensity, and he told me about his training in method acting when he hurt someone with a knife on the stage, and fortunately for us all, turned from stage to scholarship.

John had graduated from Ohio State three years earlier where he had been trained in behavioral research in accounting, focusing on how individuals used information to make decisions. This area of research derived from ideas on psychology and social psychology, and his dissertation was recognized with the Manuscript Award given by the AAA for outstanding work by young scholars in the first five years of their careers. The commitment to understand information stayed with him through the following four decades as it became both deeper and broader.  His intellectual curiosity, ferment, and honesty never let any doctrinal walls confine him. His free spirit constantly rebelled against any attempt to fit him into any convention or definition. Not surprisingly, chair of the department in which he worked had to be really good at improvisation.

During the seventies and the eighties, when we both served on the faculties of the University of Chicago and then at the University of Minnesota, I saw him dance through a world of ideas with his characteristic panache.  There were years when you could not separate his right hand from his chess board, while the left carried a dog-eared copy of one or the other volume of Bruno de Finetti's Probability in the other. He took his books everywhere--to meetings, classes, and bed "ever ready to talk about the particular theorem or idea that excited or upset him at the moment. A year later, he may be in a different landscape, perhaps with his backgammon set, and a copy of Maurice DeGroot's Optimal Statistical Decisions this time, but just as immersed in both. When he started running, even bitter Minnesota winters will not keep him from doing his eight miles until the doctors had to almost force him to stop. What we saw come out of him during the past 25 years was a result of that deep immersion and constant ferment inside Like in a volcano, what we saw above surface was but a small fraction of the vast pool in turmoil inside him.

John was not interested in impressing anyone with his work. He lived in a world without hierarchy. Everyone he worked with was a friend, a lifelong friend I might say, especially the PhD students who were drawn to him by his intensity, charisma, commitment to work that know no boundaries of time and calendar. What he wrote, when he did, just oozed out, almost as a by-product of his thought and life. There was no separation between the two. I never saw him write for the sake of writing, or to get a publication. In the business and economics departmental culture where intellects are often sought to be measured in pages of publications and number of citations, John did not even pretend to fit in. To him, the idea of doing research for promotion or tenure was alien; it wouldn't be research, and he would not be a part of such an enterprise.  And yet, by not trying to do so, he ended up being a model of scholarship.

John hated being predictable. How do you characterize this unique man? In words of Bhagwata Gita, he was a karma yogi who enjoyed his work, without dwelling of the fruits of his labors. Ultimately, he was a man who would not be modeled.