T he Kerala State Higher Education Council had, recently, recommended to the Government, the setting up of private universities in Kerala. The Education Minister P. K. Abdu Rabb has repeatedly expressed his personal opposition to the idea of private universities. Against this backdrop noted economist and educationist Prabhat Patnaik gives his take on the concept of private universities in an email interview with The Hindu EducationPlus . Excerpts…
Do you feel that educationally and socially the time is ripe to set up private universities in Kerala?
One has to distinguish between two kinds of private educational institutions: those that are set up for philanthropic reasons and those that are set up as business. The former have been with us for a long time and I see nothing wrong with them. The latter entail a commoditisation of education, which I am totally opposed to, for at least four reasons. First, since their aim is profit-making, they typically charge exorbitant fees, which exclude the poor. Commoditisation of education therefore perpetuates the existing social divide and is therefore fundamentally anti-democratic. Second, since education becomes an investment item even for the students, an investment that has to be recouped, there is a pressure to introduce courses and alter the curriculum in accordance with market demand, which means that the social role of education, its role in nation-building, in inculcating humane values, in sustaining the foundational ethics that underlie our Constitution, get progressively abandoned to the detriment of our society. Third, since a commodity is a finished product , a capsule as it were, that is imbibed, commoditisation necessarily prevents the asking of questions, encourages mediocrity, and destroys creativity. Fourth, it also converts the products of the education system into commodities, whose sole concern is the amount of exchange value (money) they can command on the market. It makes them into purely material-seeking individuals and even takes away from them the thrill of engaging with the grandeur of ideas. I am therefore opposed to private universities ( as distinct from institutions imparting particular skills or crafts), which are run as business, whether in Kerala or in India as a whole.
Private capital has always played a crucial role in the educational scenario of Kerala; both in the school education sector and in higher education. Are not private varsities just a logical extension of this decades-old phenomenon?
The operation of private capital in school education, a historical legacy in Kerala, needs to be controlled, which is what the previous government had tried to do. This historical fact cannot be used as an argument for expanding the sphere of that operation to higher education as well. Education, whether school education or higher education, must be primarily the responsibility of the government, though philanthropic institutions can supplement that effort. Sometimes, of course, profit-making institutions pass themselves off as philanthropic on the grounds that their profits are ploughed back into the institution itself, but this does not stand scrutiny.
After all, firms that plough back profits into their businesses are not counted as philanthropic!
Proponents of private varsities argue that they would provide good competition to public universities and that the result would be an overall increase in the quality of higher learning. Do you agree?
The very talk of ‘competition’ already presupposes commoditisation. We are not talking about airlines or hotels; we are talking about education. The ‘quality’ that is supposed to improve through ‘competition’ in such a world where education is converted into a commodity is precisely what constitutes the death-knell of education.
Are not private universities – with the ability of sponsoring agencies to consistently pump in abundant capital – the perfect institutional antidote to cash-strapped public universities that the State struggles to sustain?
There is absolutely no reason for the government to be cash-strapped when it comes to education. True, state governments have limited financial powers but even within the current dispensation more can be spent on education; besides, the state government should be vociferously demanding more funds from the Centre to prevent the commoditisation of education, instead of falling in line with the Centre’s neo-liberal assault on higher education through commoditisation, for which incidentally there is pressure also from the World Trade Organisation (which wants education to be a tradeable service). The state government itself can also avail of philanthropic contributions for setting up higher education institutions within the government sector.
What can be done to improve the quality of education in existing public universities? Can their standards be raised even without pitting them in competition with private varsities?
Competition, as I have already said, does not improve quality. On the contrary it belongs to a terrain of discourse whose very adoption destroys the quality of education. What is needed for improving quality is to bring back excitement into education, to increase the intensity of engagement of both students and teachers in the process of learning, for which the recruitment of the most talented and committed persons for the teaching profession is essential.
When I look back at my student days I learned so much from my teachers. Even a single teacher can make an enormous difference. Recruiting the best persons as teachers would require of course the adoption of appropriate pay-scales; but above all the cynicism that currently permeates the higher education system must be broken.
