Half of academic papers plagiarised: Ex-VC

Savadatti assails money-mindedness, bureaucratic attitudes of varsities

July 10, 2014 12:17 pm | Updated 12:17 pm IST - Mangalore:

With corruption, malpractices and incompetence flourishing, the education system here has failed in its purpose of building values for a healthier society, said M.I. Savadatti, the former Vice-Chancellor of Mangalore University, here on Wednesday.

Talking at the third annual Prof. (Dr.) N. Sridhar Shetty annual endowment lecture, held at the A.B. Shetty Memorial Institute of Dental Sciences, Mr. Savadatti said the education system was stuck in a cycle of corruption and the country had developed an “infinite tolerance” to it.

Many private universities start with corruption to get approvals from the numerous regulatory agencies set up, and their primary objective when the college opened was to get their money back, he noted.

“Consequently, only students with money are admitted into the college…and students also enter professional life looking to recover the money,” he said during his speech on ‘Autonomous and non-governmental universities – pros and cons in the Indian context’.

Degrees over learning

The stress on qualifications and degrees over substance and learning had created another cycle that fosters incompetence, Mr. Savadatti said. A large number of people pursue doctoral courses only to allow them to become teachers and not researchers, he said, to explain the “lack of high-quality” research in the country.

“Nearly 32 per cent of papers in the West are plagiarised; while, it is 50 per cent here. However, while the guilty are punished there, there is hardly any action here and they continue to be professors and committee members,” he said.

The end result, he said, was that there was a dearth of good mentors or guides or examples for students; colleges allow students to get dissertations and projects from outside to “boost” their marks and the “reputation” of the college; and a tendency to promote a degree that grants the most money.

“Money doesn’t build society, values build society; and values are nurtured only in educational institutions,” Mr. Savadatti said. He believed private institutes can best build values through models of philanthropy, and not in government institutions where bureaucracy and politics thrives.

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