Reaching For The Stars

Article by: Dr. JAYANT V NARLIKAR
(The writer is an astrophysicist formerly the director of IUCAA, Pune)


Higher education should fuse teaching, research to improve


A few months ago the finance minister announced a grant of Rs 100 crore
to the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, to help it raise its
standards to the levels of Oxford and Cambridge. Will a fistful of
crores help set up Oxbridge-level institutions of higher learning in our
country? How about offering a large sum to the Board of Control for
Cricket in India to generate a cricket team comparable to Bradman's 1948
Australian team? Or to Sahitya Akademi to produce another Indian Nobel
laureate in literature?

To get to where Cambridge and Oxford are, we could learn a thing or two
from them. Consider the following anecdote. In the middle of the 19th
century, two clever students, Parkinson and Thomson, were competing for
the Cambridge Tripos examination. When the results were out, Parkinson
stood first and Thomson second. Both stood way above the rest of the
pack. They were the only two to have solved a very difficult question.
The examiner of the paper, however, was intrigued to find that both had
solved the question in the same way. Did one copy the other?
He called Parkinson to find out how he arrived at the solution.
Parkinson explained that he made it a practice to go beyond the syllabi
and texts to read research journals and he had encountered the question
in a research paper whose author was anonymous. The examiner, who had
taken the question from the very same source, complimented Parkinson on
his preparation and interviewed Thomson. Thomson said: "I wrote that
paper". Thomson later went on to be a famous physicist and is better
known as Lord Kelvin.

In my batch there was an undergraduate who wrote a paper in the Physical
Review Letters, pointing out a serious error in an experiment performed
in the UK to verify a prediction of Einstein's gravitation theory. The
student went on to get a Nobel Prize based on his research work as a
graduate student. His name is Brian Josephson.
The likelihood of such brilliant students cropping up frequently
increases when the overall level of the students is high. Why does
Cambridge attract superior talent?

Good students are attracted by good teachers and researchers. I was
fortunate to attend Dirac's lectures on quantum mecha-nics, Hoyle's
lectures on electrodynamics and cosmology, Batchelor's course on fluid
dynamics,Davenport's course on number theory and Attiyah's lessons on
geometry in the course of my mathematical tripos at Cambridge. To learn
the subject from those who made important research contributions to it
can be very inspiring to a student.
These faculty members delivered their lectures as part of their
lecturing commitments at the university. They were not
exempted from lecturing because they were producing good research: It is
axiomatic that a faculty member in an educational institution will teach.

When Hoyle's proposal to establish a new Institute of Theoretical
Astronomy was under consideration at Cambridge, a condition was sought
to be imposed by a lobby of the faculty — that its staff members should
not teach the tripos students. Hoyle was unhappy with this. He explained
that teaching was complementary to research and that if we did not teach
undergraduates, we would not attract good students to research.

This explains why we are still a long way off from Oxbridge. We have two
streams in our educational-cum-research system — universities and
research institutes. In universities, teachers are overloaded with
teaching duties with research taking a back seat. The situation is
reflected in the membership list of our national science academies:
There are very few members from universities because the criterion for
membership is research.

In national laboratories and research institutes, the research
facilities are fine, but there are no undergraduates, not even students
for a masters' degree. A typical research scientist believes he will do
research alone and that teaching students is a distraction.
Organisers of graduate schools in these institutions will tell you how
difficult it is to persuade a faculty member to give even a short course
of 15 lectures.

On my return to India, I ran up against this attitude which I could not
grasp after my Cambridge experience. The University Grants Commission
should have made it a condition that these institutes have some minimal
undergraduate or masters' teaching programme, before giving them deemed
university status.

Our undergraduates fall between two stools, between professors who do
not teach and professors who do no research.
We lose motivated students who could be attracted to academia. My
experience as a scientist extends to other disciplines. We grope for
excellence in history, literature and other social sciences.
What is needed for our progress towards Oxbridge is a new set of rules
that enable teaching and research to go hand in hand, with no compromise
on merit, whether for faculty or for students. To achieve this, Rs 100
crore is neither necessary nor sufficient.