Previously home to 700 odd colleges, Bengaluru University has been trifurcated. The same is the case with Rajasthan University with its cumbersome 792 affiliated colleges. Actually bifurcation and trifurcation of elephantine universities is the new trend in higher education. While status quoists criticise this as a breakdown, the fact is that the trend promises greater academic quality and better governance. When too many colleges are affiliated to a university, the latter tends to deteriorate into an exam factory instead of an institution imparting quality education or pursuing research.
Chhatrapati Shahuji Maharaj University in Kanpur has an astounding 1,276 colleges and about 1.5 million students. Across the country there are 17 universities that have 500 or more colleges attached to them. Together India's 268 affiliating universities have 39,071 colleges. These are extraordinarily unwieldy numbers. While the rising count of colleges makes sense because of young India's rising hunger for higher education, too many of them seeking the shelter of one university is counterproductive. The relationship becomes colonial rather than democratic, where colleges do not get any freedom to set syllabi or start new courses, but just carry out orders like lower-ranking clerks.
These days high-ranking colleges like St Stephen's in Delhi University are seeking autonomy. Presidency College of Kolkata and Ravenshaw College of Cuttack have been upgraded into universities. This trend needs to be speeded up and colleges helped into adulthood instead of being under the tutelage of somebody else. Because it's right that strong colleges devise their own courses and syllabi, assess students' performance and conduct examinations themselves, pursue research activities freely – rather than all this being dictated by a remote leviathan with little appreciation for individual colleges' strengths and specific needs. Let competition, rather than bureaucratic centralisation and hierarchy, be the preferred mode for ushering in desperately needed improvements in the quality of education.
Source: Times of India
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