Teachers on contract: Read the small print

The idea behind an American style tenure system is precisely to secure academic freedom from the vagaries of having to negotiate your contract every three or four years. That is why even private universities grant tenure in ways in which private enterprise doesn’t. Even with all the safeguards of the current system, universities in India have become appendages to politicians’ whims in most states. All short-term administrative appointments of posts like the vice-chancellor, the head of bodies like ICHR and ICSSR have become politicised. Making teaching appointments short term too will, as with administrative appointments, increase politicisation rather than improve performance.

In the American system, contracts are used largely to cut costs or give fresh graduates short term opportunities where otherwise none would exist. But nobody thinks that contract appointments are necessary to get the faculty to take classes or produce better research. There are other incentives: salary increases, for instance, can be linked to performance. It is possible that for fresh entrants into the system, contract appointments for a very limited period might not be a bad idea, and could be used sparingly. But as a general model of hiring teachers it would be a disaster.

In some ways the position of temporary lecturers in colleges is extremely precarious, but there is little evidence to suggest that this precariousness necessarily makes them better teachers. In many ways, the pre-automatic promotion scheme in Indian universities wasn’t such a bad thing: it gave academics enough necessary security, but made advancement incumbent on performance. It encouraged geographical mobility as well. The decline of the university system was accelerated when the idea gained ground that every entrant into the system is entitled to promotion. The UGC is trying to compensate for too much security, by introducing too much insecurity.

Finally, the UGC keeps invoking the ‘‘American’’ example. But the institutional context is vastly different. For one thing, American academia is more professionalised, things like refereed journals and letters of recommendation carry more credibility and makes wide peer review possible. There is open competition amongst universities trying to recruit the best talent and the market gives incentives for performance. The UGC, in its infinite wisdom, decided that all teachers in the 200-odd Indian universities should be treated more or less the same, subject to similar rules and regulations, and there is very little healthy competition amongst universities. Therefore we cannot avail of the other advantages of a ‘‘contract system’’.

Would the UGC even consider vastly differing pay scales depending on the quality of institutions? Would it allow individual faculty to consider bargaining for the terms of their employment, allowing more productive ones to get higher salaries and therefore introduce both flexibility and incentives into the system? We will end up with all the disadvantages of contracts without any of the benefits.

The UGC’s approach to education reform is punitive. It does not ask the right questions. Why is India the only country in the world where the content of undergraduate education does not make the students either marketable employees or scholarly? Why does the UGC allow 200-odd PhD programmes to flourish in every discipline when all that does is create excess supply, lowers standards and contributes to general anti-intellectualism? Once we decided that standards are somehow anti-democratic or anti-poor, universities are already finished.

Rather than thinking of ways in which to improve the quality of PhDs, the UGC decided to introduce an exam called the NET. If passing the NET is what it takes to accredit you to do serious teaching and research then the UGC, to borrow, the words of its chairman Arun Nigvekar, ‘‘has its head in the sand’’. Will not financial reform of higher education produce accountability? Is bureaucratic agenda setting going to generate the inner momentum for higher education? How can you motivate teachers to teach when most of them have no working space, appalling libraries and have to teach syllabi set by distant committees?

Most students know that in your standard BAs an MAs, they will do much better if they stop thinking for themselves and learn the profoundly anti-intellectual art of cracking certain kinds of exams. The production of serious intellectual life in Indian universities is going to be a very complicated task. The UGC is right. Higher education is in an appalling crisis. The teaching community’s abdication of its responsibilities is horrendous. But if the UGC thinks that building in more possibilities of punitive sanctions of the kind the contract system will allow for, is the only way to reform higher education, it will have proved the joke going around campuses: the only thing worse than the UGC not taking interest in reform is the UGC actually attempting reform.

(The writer is a Professor of Philosophy and Law and Governance at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi)