Varsities no longer home for research, feels expert

PUNE, Dec 6: The idea of a classical university in India, taken from Britain, has undergone a degrading transformation with the result that the research component is increasingly getting detached from the university system and being transferred to laboratories and to non-teaching research institutes, remarked Dr. Pramod Talgeri, Central Institute of English and Foreign Languages, Hyderabad said here on Friday.

Speaking on `globalisation and farewell to a classical university’ at a golden jubilee research students’ seminar at the University of Pune, Talgeri lamented that such a sitution left the universities with repititive courses which are mainly instructional, vocational or applied and skill oriented in nature.

“The number of universities has proliferated but the levels of standard and competence have deteriorated to such an extent that there is an exodus of Indian students to foreign universities, which are blatantly advertising in the Indian newspapers”, he said. Today, the university has become a complex structure of diverse functional, methodological and ideological perspectives. How can we then expect a commonality of thinking conciousness from its members, he argued.

The present system has grown into a highly intricate multidisciplinary structure, which cannot any longer integrate a kind of “intersubjectivity” among its members, he added.