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Let College

Teachers TeachBY PUSHKAR ON 10/06/2015

Since 2010, when the University Grants Commission (UGC)

introduced the Academic Performance Indicator (API), all faculty

members at central universities and about 100 odd colleges directly

funded by the central government are required to, other than teach

and carry out administrative duties, do research in order to benefit

from the Career Advancement Scheme (CAS). While state universities

and colleges are not obliged to adopt the API, many more than a few

have done so. Incidentally, the UGC scrapped the API in 2013 but

reintroduced ita few months later during the same year.

This April, the UGC sent out a letter to all vice-chancellors asking for

their views and suggestions on the API by the end of the month. One

hopes that most vice-chancellors have written to the UGC that the

API in its current form is neither desirable nor useful for faculty

members who teach at the undergraduate (UG) level. Indeed,

irrespective of whether the vice-chancellors have suggested it or not,the UGC should do away with the research component in API

altogether (or make it optional) for UG faculty.

There are known beneficial effects of research on teaching. However,

those good effects can come about only under conditions that are

favourable for research, which is not the case under Indian

conditions.

UG faculty at our higher education (HE) institutions must be

exempted from research because large numbers of college teachers

EDUCATION
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lack the basic training for research most are overburdened with

teaching, administrative and other responsibilities and a majority

work at institutions with woeful infrastructure and in an academic

environment inimical to substantive research. Furthermore, faculty

who were hired in the pre-API era certainly did not sign up for

research when they took up the profession. Now that they are being

forced intoresearch for career advancement, they are left with few

options other than to publish in fake journals and/or to obtain sub-

standard PhDs to accumulate the necessary points for promotion.

Low research output

There are other reasons to introduce a research exemption clause for

UG faculty. Colleges and universities which offer UG degrees are the

backbone of Indias HE system. A large majority of students in the

HE sectorapproximately 80 per cent of the totalstudy for UG

degrees and their numbers will continue to grow in the coming years.

These students need faculty members dedicated to teaching and not

to be distracted by the goal of earning API points via third-rate or

fake research.

In the old system, research was carried out by faculty at post-graduate (PG) departments across state universities, central

universities and other central-government funded institutions. A

facultys responsibilities included teaching and supervising PG

students. College teachers were occasionally known to do research in

such cases, they were usually hired or promoted to work at PG

institutions. However, as a rule, there was no expectation of research

from them and many did not obtain or even seek doctoral degrees.

The clear separation of teaching and research, with each carried out

at different sets of institutions, was maintained for decades until the

government decided that the professoriate was not doing enough

research and it was necessary to jolt it into doing so.

The real problem with the old system was that the PG faculty was not

producing sufficient amount of good quality research, leading to low

total research output of the HE sector. To address the problem, the

UGC needed to target PG faculty and insist from them to do more and

better research.


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In principle, the API is a good thing. It provides a common method to

measure a faculty members contributions to teaching, research and

institutional activities. It is a good replacement to the ad hocism of

the past when a faculty members contributions were subjectively

evaluated by heads of departments and other superiors so that those

with influence were able to gain at the expense of others.

Choose to do research

The API, however, other than measurement problems, suffers from a

fundamental flaw it demands the same combination of

requirements from faculty across different kinds of institutions

without taking into account the different objectives of UG and PG

institutions i.e. teaching and teaching-cum-research respectively.

Ideally, most UG institutions and their faculty must be teaching-

focused. A select number, especially those in cities like New Delhi,

Bengaluru and other metros which tend to attract better qualified

faculty than in smaller cities and elsewhere, should ask their faculty

to choose between teaching only and teaching and research and

assign work accordingly. It is faculty at PG institutions which must

shoulder most of the responsibility for research.

The research requirement from all faculty in the API is unrealistic

and has done nothing to improve quality research output in our HE

sector. Indeed, it may have had a negative impact on college-level

teaching by diverting the attention of teachers to doing things that

they could pretend to pass off as research.

Pushkar is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Humanities

& Social Sciences, BITS Pilani-Goa.

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