Time for a rejig?

Time for a rejig?

 

Recasting the relationship between universities and colleges is long overdue and a conceptual framework for this has been provided by a study submitted to the Kerala State Higher Education Council

Over the past few years the concept of affiliation of colleges to a university has increasingly fallen out of favour with many in academia. To some it has almost become a dirty word, synonymous with the stifling inertia of a university's bureaucracy and indeed with almost everything that is wrong with the higher education system.

Many academics have stridently called for the abolishment of this “colonial hangover” in the nation's universities. Such academics have also mooted the idea of granting autonomy to colleges so that higher education becomes a federal structure of sorts with the university having only a broad, policy role to play.

All the same there are those who have sounded a note of caution; warned that doing away with affiliations at one go may actually further weaken the fabric of higher education. They have posited that what is required is a reshaping of the concept of affiliation so that universities and colleges become partners in a drive for creation of quality knowledge on a level playing field whose boundaries are quality, autonomy and accountability.

A recent study— ‘Affiliation System: A Study of Kerala Experience' — done by former Vice-Chancellor of the Calicut University A. N. P. Ummerkutty for the Kerala State Higher Education Council offers what could be a conceptual framework for recasting the relationship between universities and colleges in a Kerala context.

Prof. Ummerkutty, in delineating the evolution of the system of affiliation, points out that over the years the academic aspects of affiliation have been crowded out by the overbearing administrative and regulatory aspects of the university system. The one-time affiliation system has generated an overwhelming sense of academic inertia in the colleges. Very little of any accountability — of teachers to students, of students to themselves and to their course of study and of the universities to the society at large — is discernable in the higher education system. For this to change, Prof. Ummerkutty, argues, it is necessary to redraw the contours of the affiliation system.

For starters, affiliation need not be a permanent affair but should be something that the college earns periodically. Affiliated colleges should have the freedom to plan, design, review, monitor, and execute academic programmes. This ‘autonomy' for colleges would come with a rider; they should ensure that sustained quality education is given to the students. Lapses may invite punitive action including disaffiliation. Affiliating colleges would have to submit annual reports to the universities about their activities and plans. Each affiliated college should have a College Academic Council through which the institution operationalises its autonomy. Chaired by the respective principal, all teachers should be regular members of that body. Non-teaching staff, students, parents, subject experts, and other stakeholders too would find representation in this council. The CAC should create vision and mission statements for that college and should act as a catalyst for academic

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