Explorations in helplessness of higher education institutions in the third world

Abstract

After independence, the Education Commission called for the creation of new institutions to undertake the task of higher education in technology, agriculture and management.

Three models of higher education were imported. In the field of technology the “MIT model” was advocated by the Sarkar Committee. The five Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) were the results of this thinking. The “Land-grant University Model” provided the basis for development of agricultural universities. The “Business School Model” was instrumental in the creation of the Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs) at Ahmedabad and Calcutta. In this article, we explore the implications of importing the “MIT model” in the case of IITs and venture some possible explanations of the feelings of institutional helplessness through in-depth data collected in one IIT. We believe that the “sorting” process implicit in the MIT and the Business school models, in particular, when imposed on the Indian socio-economic milieu has aggravated the isolation of the elites from the realities of the country as well as increased dependence on the West. This, has in turn, resulted in mediocrity and irrelevances even in these islands of intended excellence. The IIT experience serves to illustrate this argument. Our argument is developed through

• 1 understanding the phenomenon of sorting and how this distances the IIT graduate, in particular, from the rest of the engineering graduates, among others;

• 2 placing the argument in the perspective of transfer of intellectual technology from the West.