Dear Sir,
While technical research has a life cycle from science to engineering to humanly-made artifacts and one can invariably trace academic work to final practical use, in social science the path from the ideational world to practice is more tenuous. So if you ask practitioners (personally I was in the corporate world and management consulting for several years too in different countries) how social science is useful to them, they invariably will not be able to say anything. In highly research oriented institutions world over (I have taught in some too) the way the faculty deal with MBA teaching is different. You touch knowledge lightly and convey to the students that there are alternative models competing with each other and the student has to cleverly mix and match theory with individual styles, own experience, and make it all practical. The final recipe is the students'. In non-research oriented teaching environments, models are treated as "once and for all" ready to plug in means to decision making (skill development rather than mental quality development). The biggest idea of research in social science is the intellectual and emotive richness that faculty (who are thinking flexibly and deeply) impart to students over several interactions. All this while being sympathetic to practitioner's world of quick decision making and contingent situations.
Palmer's "Courage to Teach" is a book that come to mind on how teaching is a self reflective process. By extension my experience tells me that research too is a self reflective process that rubs off on students (no doubt colleagues too) even at the under-graduate level.
While India is still debating the value of social science research, the Chinese are improving by leaps and bounds (despite their handicaps with English) in research; in science output as well as social science output. Quality of the mind, quality of human interactions, imagination, inquiring minds, ability to sense the connections across domains, framing the right questions, subtlety in causality seeking etc. etc. are the almost only enduring qualities that faculty can impart on students in the social sciences domain especially when substantive knowledge keeps changing on a daily basis.
Often people who teach from the textbook forget that the models and theory they find there were originally expressed in research journals and that the idea of teaching is to convey that these models would become passe in future! A research oriented mind brings that "evolving knowledge flavor" in the classroom. All research is about re-search for truth, beauty, goodness, justice etc. The academy is the institutional arrangement provided by society to emphasize and reiterate this need of the society. Young minds have to be channeled properly. Research is simply re-search and this is an ongoing process.
Perhaps because of the deep knowledge traditions in India (of subtle wisdoms as expressed Upanishads for example) and the vulgar way in which subtle knowledge is bandied about by utilitarian interests, we, the mainstream in India, have developed a distaste for knowledge-seeking or respect for those who seek such knowledge. Combine this with the post colonial burden of uncritically accepting what the West has dished out...
Been discursive enough... Let me wind down.
Sankaran
On Tue, Apr 11, 2017 at 7:52 PM, kiran paranjpe <kdparanjpe@rediffmail.com> wrote:
Dear Sir, There needs to be a topic of research to ascertain how serious are companies
about academic research. The gut feel is that they aren't so. There may be many reasons
but the most important one seems to be the low value of such research and the
corresponding high cost for spending on it.
I am sure that some in this august forum will find it a fit topic for investigation.
Best Regards,
K.Paranjpe
On Tue, 11 Apr 2017 09:22:29 +0530 "K. Sankaran" wrote
>Dear Sir,
In Higher Education, I think, the teaching fraternity collectively is the main issue. We
have become passive regulation takers rather than regulation influencers. There has to be
positive academic activism based on sound intellectual research. There is need to come
together to drive collective enlightened self interest through positive social capital.
Academicians have to address what the different stakeholders expect of then and
accountability to the society. And not wait for regulators to tell them.
In fact this is where accreditation started elsewhere (self regulation that provides
freedoms to do the right things). Most of the academic groupings we have today in India,
as far as I know, emerged to counter some legislation or the other rather than to achieve
higher level ideals. We have to restore academia to higher levels of commitment to
transformational ideas and ideals whereby other sectors (political and bureaucratic
leadership) would sit up and listen to them.
For this to happen academicians have to take PhD and other research work seriously. The
work of academicians is to do high level abstraction, re-search to see things anew, all
while being critical of existing order of things. Is this sacred covenant being even
attempted today by mainstream academic community?
There is no substitute for academicians to be anything other than higher-idea
entrepreneurs that they honestly practice, profess and through students propagate.
Thank you, Dear Professor Bholanath Dutta, for this opportunity to air one's views.
No malice meant please.
Best regards
Dr. K. Sankaran + 91 9740372559
On Sat, Apr 8, 2017 at 10:14 AM, Prof. Bholanath Dutta wrote:
What do you believe to be the biggest issue facing us today in public education that is
resulting in many of our schools / colleges to be labeled as low performing?
We will consolidate the views and come out with a white paper on the same.
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EDUCATE, EMPOWER, ELEVATE
Prof. Bholanath DuttaFounder & President MTC Global: A Global Think Tank in Higher
Educaiton Education, ISO 9001: 2008Partner: UN Global Compact I UN Academic
Impact www.mtcglobal.orgIEmail: president@mtcglobal.orgCell: +91 96323 18178 / +91 9964660759
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