Research must be promoted for both teachers and students from college level itself

Research must be promoted for both teachers and students from college level itself

Union HRD minister Prakash Javadekar has announced, at a higher education conference, that research would soon be optional for college teachers. This announcement threatens to blow the culture of research and teaching in India to smithereens.

It is well known that research both in colleges and universities is already in a shambles. The existing mandatory research clause for promotion of college and university teachers has contributed only to the mushrooming of dubious academic journals and overnight publishing houses. As academics were left with the option of ‘publish or perish’, many came up with the solution of ‘pay and publish’.

The goddess of fortune smiled on sycophants with little academic credentials, and those allergic to libraries and books got enough publications to become professors, principals and vice-chancellors. Consequently, research increasingly became a term of abuse and the international rankings of our universities dipped further.

The solution to this academic malady does not lie in separating research from teaching at the undergraduate level and reducing it to a matter of choice, but in putting into place certain regulatory and quality control mechanisms. UGC approved list of journals is one such recent step towards weeding out the spurious publications.

A good starting point to initiate, nurture and improve the culture of research in colleges both for faculty and students would be to ask some fundamental questions, such as, what are the objectives of research; how does good research contribute to class room teaching? Until we answer these rudimentary questions, we cannot appreciate the invaluable role that research plays in teaching and thus see it as an added frill, a tendency exemplified in the minister’s recent announcement.

To illustrate the inextricable relation between research and classroom teaching, my experience of teaching Homer’s Iliad in a Delhi University college can serve as an example. The Iliad was supposedly composed in the 8th century BC when Greeks reinvented alphabet, forgotten a couple of centuries ago. Prior to this, the songs of Homer’s tour de force were circulated orally. To grasp the overwhelming phenomenon of transition from orality to writing, and its outcome on any culture, i read a wide range of books such as Milman Parry’s The Making of Homeric Verse, Walter J Ong’s Orality and Literacy, and various others during my doctoral research on Maithili print culture at Delhi University’s English department. I was able to help students appreciate what appeared merely redundant and repetitive in Homer as essential components of an oral culture.

If thoughtful research will not be incentivised and linked to promotion and adequate salary increment, the day is not far off when a teacher will no longer be able to come up with probing answers to the simplest of questions. The aim of education in general and research in particular is to cultivate a spirit of enquiry in students, to enable them to ask pertinent and uncomfortable questions related to their discipline, society, identity and nation.

Good research offers a solution to a problem, an answer to a good question and contributes to our knowledge of the world. As liberal spaces, universities and colleges must inculcate the spirit of questioning in young minds, and the job of good teachers-cum-researchers should be to provide gratifying answers.

The culture of enquiry, the ability to frame questions, cannot develop overnight once a student leaves college and joins the university. If we will not orient our students towards research and original ideas during graduate and post-graduate levels and suddenly exhort them to come up with new ideas and perspectives for their MPhil and PhD, they are bound to fail miserably.

The need of the hour, therefore, is to promote research both for students and teachers from the college level itself so as to orient them gradually towards knowledge production. In the absence of orientation to research and enquiry, we may well just have netizens keen to imitate and reproduce without creative and critical impulses. And, who will care about quest for knowledge and speaking truth to power then?

Source | Times of India | 8 August 2017

Regards!                       

Librarian

Rizvi Institute of Management