School grading systems.

I am a product of a fairly unforgiving Indian system where failure was certainly an option, but not a good one. In recent times I have heard of some Indian systems calling for the abolition of marks based ranking in primary and middle school. This would not prepare the kids for the intense competition that lies waiting just at Class X and beyond. And now read this article about how Pittsburgh schools now are mandating that the minimum a student can score is 50%. Which means that if you do one problem right in a question paper of 10, you still get 50%. Does that make any sense?

Why become a professor?

Why should one become a professor? Not like it is a paying profession. Nor does one get any respect. One does get a great deal of tension out of grading undergrad papers and dealing with angry med-school wannabes who do not correlate an A grade with effort. The grant system run by the NIH/NSF/DoE is brutally competitive. Without grants, you cannot have students, since you cannot pay for them. Without grant money flowing into the University with your name attached to those monies, many schools will restrict your lab space, or take away your lab altogether. Sound like a vicious cycle yet? Maybe one should have done the more obvious thing and gone into investment banking. Or joined TCS/Wipro/Infosys/Satyam if one is Indian and has the mentality of a lemming. But do note that lemmings get to eat, and live happy lives. This article starts out mentioning how the former President of Harvard was sacked because he posited that women cannot make it in academia where men can.. and then goes ahead and proves a very simple series of points about what a career in academia will give to you; and what it will take away. And why, perhaps those women who have left the sciences have probably made the wise decision in how their lives shape out. But don't listen to me, read and then come back to comment.

On higher education.

I came across this wonderfully written article about the other side of universal higher education.. the dilemma of preserving the quality of academia while trying to get everyone to get a college education. Makes for a fairly good read, this is, after all, an anguished appeal to a system which is broken and needs to be fixed.

Honestly though, we seem to be increasingly a society which has been built on foundations laid by some really clever people; and the rest of us are struggling to keep up. I don't have any solutions, any remedies. But wiser men have thought about these things and have spoken about them. The other face of the future: the option which does not lead The Brave New World has also been spoken of by the great Aldous Huxley. It is called Pala, and for that you have to read 'Island'; Huxley's last, and perhaps greatest work.

A word about Universities.

Universities exist to explore the boundaries of knowledge and pass on some of the same to young people. Or so they say.

There are several caveats to this:

Universities need a lot of funding to function: especially the experimental sciences. Funding is usually forthcoming from the government, and to a lesser extent, private enterprise. Private entities will always take their pound of flesh: any benefits coming out of research performed will go the the funding entity. In those happy circumstances when individuals donate monies to universities asking for nothing in return, things are different. The West has long has such philanthropists. People like the Rockefellers, Andrew Carnegie, and in more recent times (also, in relation to UM) Stephen Ross and Alfred Taubman are people who have really made a difference. Indian schools have rarely been as lucky. Certainly, in colonial times, Rajahs have donated huge sums to education and in more recent times, people like the Tatas have done their bit. But for the most part, Indian businessmen rarely seen the point in funding education.

It is perhaps this and other factors which have led to education being viewed as a service industry more than anything else. For a country which churns out tens of thousands of engineers each year most of whom are employed in turning the wheels of the global techno-economy, the highest one can aspire to, from a middle class background is the monetary security which comes with a decent B.E or a a B.Tech.

The price that we have paid is that the basic sciences, the social sciences and the humanities have been neglected to an extent which is criminally irresponsible. And now that everyone has woken up to the spending power of the slightly better off people in the Third World, we have education fairs sponsored by Australian and British diplomats set up stalls and woo Indian students who have the moolah, but not enough brains to make it into the IITs. At this point, of course any self respecting Indian student looks down his or her righteous nose at a non Oxbridge degree, from anywhere else in the Commonwealth.

For all that is purportedly ill with the US system, the quality control system in place is perhaps far more effective than elsewhere in the English speaking world. But, say what we will.. in an era of dwindling budgets (where is all the bleedin' money goin'???!?) all schools are defaulting to a business model of imparting education. And of course, academics are screaming bloody murder. The question remains: can we put a price tag on education, apart from the one the student chooses to put upon it himself? Yes, we can, and the figure runs into the tens of thousands per semester. The recent appointment of a controversial candidate as the President of the University of Colorado has made waves.

Here is what I think: academia could do with some reform, but more often than not it is the administration which holds all the cards. Amongst the schools I have seen, there is only one place where it is clear that the administration holds that its job is to smooth the life of the faculty and students. This is the Physics department of the Indian Institute of Science. At the end of the day, viewing Universities as part of the worldwide service industry devalues the one thing which makes us most human: the pursuit of knowledge... for as Tennyson put it in "Ulysses":

'And this gray spirit yearning in desire
To follow knowledge like a sinking star,
Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.'