Comparative Higher Education: Knowledge, the University and Development by Philip Altbach; Ablex Publishers; 312 pp To say that tertiary education in India is experiencing an existential crisis is to state the painfully obvious. Hamstrung by government interference and micro management; perennial funding shortages; obsolete syllabuses; unruly students and work (especially research) shy academics, India’s 344 universities and 17,700 colleges which boast an aggregate enrollment of only 10 million (from a population of 1.2 billion), are rapidly going from bad to worse. As any HRD manager in industry will vouch, the average college and often university graduate has hardly any useful knowledge, can barely think in a straight line, and is rarely able to substantiate his/her views and opinions. That’s bad news for an economy growing at 7-8 percent per year. Little wonder contemporary India — perhaps for the first time in its 5,000 year history — is experiencing an accentuating shortage of minimally skilled workers and managers. Despite this accumulating body of evidence testifying to the gradual attrition of the country’s laboriously constructed higher education system, there seems little awareness of this within the rarified environment of Shastri Bhavan, New Delhi where septuagenarian Union human resources development minister Arjun Singh is playing chess-board politics to reserve incremental percentage of capacity in the few surviving superior higher education institutions for favourite constituencies, with nary a care for supply side economics. Or within the education departments of the country’s 31 state governments overrun with barely literate rustics whose involvement with education is restricted to auctioning student admissions and faculty positions to highest bidders. Nor is there sufficient awareness within academia itself or society in general that the highfalutin degrees awarded by Indian colleges and universities are hardly worth the paper they are printed on. Oxygenated by the perceived success of the applications-oriented IT (information technology) industry which has been driven places by essentially self-educated pioneers, government (and the great majority of the populace) entertain the delusion that contemporary India is a powerhouse of science and technology. Data testifying to the huge pool of the nation’s scientists and technicians is regularly advanced in international seminars and workshops. Never mind their abysmal quality as testified by the nation’s crumbling infrastructure and governance systems. Against this backdrop and the new mantra of political correctness which posits development of higher education as inimical to the spread of elementary education, Boston-based educationist Philip Altbach’s Comparative Higher Education: Knowledge, the University and Development written in 1997 and republished this year, is mandatory reading for all — professionals and laymen — who subscribe to the viewpoint that quality education is the cornerstone of social and national development. The virtue of this cogently argued work of impressive research and scholarship is that it enlightens confused minds of the vital purpose of the university. “With its roots in medieval Europe, the modern university is at the centre of an international knowledge system that encompasses technology, communications and culture. The university remains the primary centre of learning and the main repository of accumulated wisdom. While it may…
