The Modern Review/Volume 29/Number 1/University Problems of To-day

by Jadunath Sarkar

UNIVERSITY PROBLEMS OF TO-DAY

By Prof. Jadunath Sarkar, m.a.

I. Extra cost involved in new Universities

We have entered an age of the creation of new small universities in India. To our five older universities, viz., those of Calcutta, Bombay, Madras, Allahabad, and the Panjab, five new ones have been added between 1917 and 1920, and three more (Nagpur, Lucknow and Agra) are in contemplation in the no distant future. It is, therefore, necessary, before we proceed any further, to survey our real situation, take accurate account of our ways and means and decide on a well thought-out scheme of advance with full knowledge of our existing resources and needs.

First and foremost, we should never blink the fact that a modern university is a very costly thing. The creation of a second university in a province means the duplication of the entire administrative staff, office buildings, examination halls, senate house, library, &c., printing and (to a great extent) travelling expenses and cost of setting and printing question papers. When the same number of colleges and students are divided between two universities instead of one, we have to pay for two Vice-Chancellors, two Registrars, two sets of office staffs, double groups of examiners, instead of one. Separate notices, reports, calendars, minutes, &c., have to be printed for the two. In short, we have all the wastefulness of what economists call “production on a small scale.”

Let us take a concrete example. The Patna University (separated from Calcutta on 1st October 1917), is at present a purely examining board, it does no teaching work at all; it has only six colleges under it, and turns out less than 300 graduates in a year. Yet the extra cost due to the duplication of the administrative and other machinery exceeds a lakh of rupees a year, or nearly Rs. 400 per graduate per annum!

Figures for 1920

Rs
Vice-Chancellor 31, 400
Establishment (office) 28,500
Providend Fund Contribution 1, 300
Bonus & gratuities tund 1,900
Travelling Allowance of non-official members . 15,000
Printing charge ( excluding books ) 23,000
Travelling allowance of official members (approximately) 19,000
1,20,000

The above figure does not include the recurring expenditure on and the annual interest on the capital value of the university buildings proposed. Such a huge expenditure can be justified only if the new Universities succeed (a) in making the education of our youth more thorough and liberal and (b) in promoting research more effectively than was possible under the old universities. But so long as they merely act as examining machines and reproduce the work of the Calcutta University in its old unregenerate age of imitation of the old unregenerate London University, and before its recent assumption of direct post-graduate teaching in many and specialised branches and its organisation of research, these new Universities have no reason for existing^[1].

Now, it should never be forgotten that each of these two desirable ends involves a further expenditure of money, and when in the fulness of time these ends are achieved ( as we hope ), the heavy cost of duplication of machinery, buildings, etc., referred to above, will not be decreased in any way.

(a) Of the work of improving the efficiency of teaching, the Colleges must bear the brunt; the central or administrative body of the University can contribute but little to it, and that too only by the inspection of the Colleges, wise regulation of the courses, and judicious direction of examinations with a view to influence the teaching in the right direction. Therefore, the creation of a new University, while the colleges are as much starved as before, cannot in itself improve the teaching and raise the efficiency of the education given. On the contrary, by diverting the public funds into mere duplication of the examining machinery, it automatically deprives the colleges of the means of strengthening themselves, and postpones their much needed improvement.

II. The Evil of Small Classes

(b) When the new Universities undertake post-graduate ( or Honours ) teaching and organise research, they will no doubt become teaching bodies, and universities in the true sense of the term. But it should be always remembered that such teaching requires a vast expenditure, ( at Calcutta, on the Arts side only, about 3 lakhs of Rupees a year, of which only a small portion is recovered from tuition fees ). Another and equally important point is what few people other than actual teachers know, viz., that in order that post-graduate teaching may be fruitful there ought to be annually produced a large body of graduates to pick out of, large Honours classes to select capable research students from. A few hundred graduates of mediocre merit and no ambition to distinguish themselves by the advancement of learning cannot supply the necessary material for a research class, with them for the audience even M. A. teaching degenerates into mere mechanical preparation for passing an examination, higher than the Intermediate or the Bachelorship in theory, but not differing in quality. The Patna University supplies the intellectual needs of an entire province, but last year only one student secured Honours in History. The situation is as bad in Political Economy. The organiser of research in such, a place is, therefore, called upon to make bricks without straw.

It is futile to argue that in many of the Universities of Europe the total number graduating every year is as small as at Patna, and yet valuable research is being done there. We should remember that in these happier European countries only the pick of the youth, the men of brain who feel a call for intellectual pursuits, go to the Universities, and research scholars from other provinces or even countries and Civil service probationers (selected by the stiffest competition) attend the lecture of the highest teachers, who thus get a fit audience though few. Not so in India, where everybody must graduate at a University before he can read for the legal, medical and even commercial professions.

Fairly large classes are also necessary for the efficiency of higher teaching, as distinct on the one hand from mere lecturing and on the other the conducting of specialised research, in the first of which the number of the audience is immaterial and in the second a hindrance. But an Honours or M. A. class must have enough boys to make it possible to hold discussions, mutual criticism of papers written by the boys, and informal exchange of ideas by students of the same “school”. In such classes the teacher’s duty is to inspire and guide, the student must do his own reading and noting, and therefore the impact of keen young mind on keen young mind is absolutely necessary to stimulate, precipitate and clarify thought. Seminar work is as essential at this stage as mere lecturing, and a Seminar implies a fairly large group of students of the same “school” (subject). Our new small Universities will fail to secure this element for several years to come, and in this respect they will tend to lower the standard and work for inefficiency of result compared with the cost,—not through any fault of the teacher, but simply through his lack of the necessary material for a ‘school’.

III. Tendency to lower the standard.

The success or failure of these new Universities must depend upon the capacity and spirit of the gentlemen ( necessarily local magnates and educationists predominantly Indian ) who form their Senates and Boards. If we remain content with duplicating the administrative machinery (miscalled University) and fail, for want of funds, to improve the Colleges, and what is even more important, the secondary schools,—then the actual teaching being nowise better than before, there will be the same heavy failure at the examinations. The representatives of the public on the Senate will year after year condemn this “massacre of the innocents”, the teachers on the Senate cannot be expected to approve of a ‘result’ which is a scathing commentary on the efficiency of their teaching. Who then can be expected to stem the tide of agitation for cheapening degrees by lowering the standard of examination or profuse liberality in ‘grace marks’? The few foreigners on the Senate? A proconsular Chancellor barricaded behind despatch-boxes? Vain hope. Therefore, the mere creation of new universities unaccompanied by the much-needed and long-delayed improvement in the prospects and quality of the college teachers and school-masters at an immense recurring expenditure, will lower the standard of education here more quickly than the overgrown federal old Universities ever did.

IV. The Pre-requisites of Research

I trust it will not be considered presumption on my part to offer advice in the matter of research. Having been engaged in the original investigation of history for over 22 years now and groped my way in the dark, unassisted, for years till I unlearnt my mistakes and found out the right method for myself,— I consider it my duty to place my dearly-bought experience at the disposal of my countrymen.

Original research presupposes the collection of materials, such as manuscripts, rare old printed books, back volumes of the journals of learned societies, antiquities, coins and prehistoric remains (which last, however, are often supplied by the Museum in the provincial capital, the seat of the University). The collection of all these requires time and a long-thought-out and steadily-pursued plan of aquisition, as much as money (In science we require apparatus, which is a question of money only).

As Professor Ernst Leumann (of Strassburg) writes:

“It is generally not known or scarcely noticed, to what an extent the history of any science is dependent on the local distribution of its materials. Denmark has only produced Pali scholars, Northern Buddhism is chiefly cultivated in Paris, and other branches of Indian studies are more or less confined to particular seats of learning. The real explanation [ of this fact ] lies in the dispersion of the materials. Rask furnished Copenhagen with a splendid collection of Pali MSS, which roused the interest of Danish scholars, just as Hodgson sent to Paris an excellent collection of the writings of the Northern Buddhists as preserved in Nepal. So the famous general Sanskrit library of Chambers went to Berlin and found there an indefatigable interpreter in Weber, while the India Office and the Bodleian have become seats of Indian philology through the MS libraries of Colebrooke and Wilson. In later years also Cambridge received a series of MS treasures from the enlightened activity of Daniel Wright with the consequence that two Cambridge scholars (Cowell and Bendall) have made them their special study. The majority of the 500 MSS, which Buhler sent to Berlin belong to the literature of the Svetambara Jains. This has had the effect that Jain philology [? philosophy] is comparatively much cultivated in Germany.” (Ind. Antiquary, 1898, p 308)

Research, then, depends on the collection of materials, and the materials must be complete, i. e., light from all sides must be thrown on our subject, the original sources in all languages must be brought together. Thus, for a complete life of Shivaji one has to study books and MSS written in seven different languages: Persian, Marathi, English, Hindi, Dutch, Portuguese and French. Even the old printed records are not always available except at the European capitals. Witness the extreme rarity in India of the French printed sources on Shivaji and his son cited by Orme in the appendix to his Fragments.

V. How to collect rare books.

The collection even of printed books when rare is a slow process. It took me fifteen years of patient watching before I could procure a copy of Ravenshaw’s Gaur or Robinson’s Asam (1841). And rare books are becoming rarer and more difficult to acquire with every succeeding year. I have recently been buying the old Portuguese works dealing with the history of India, among them Castanheda’s Historio do Descobrimento e Conquista da India in 8 volumes, giving a contemporary Portuguese account of Sher Shah’s wars in Bengal. A high price had to be paid for a set of this work. As my Lisbon correspondent, Dr. D. G. Dalgado, wrote to me in April last “The reason why all the old Portuguese books are so very costly is that the Brazillians buy them at any cost. One of them, who came here for a month took away 30 cases costing about £1,000. They are starting new libraries everywhere there. There were two copies of Castanheda at £7 and £8, and both of them were bought by the Brazillian referred to above.” Indian Universities must be prepared to meet such competition, if they mean to acquire the indispensable requisites of research.

The case of Persian MSS which it is hopeless to expect to buy and can only be transcribed for the use of our research scholars,—is even worse. In my experience, ten years have to be spent in the preliminary hunt before the apparatus for the history of a single Mughal Emperor can be exhaustively collected by the purchase of the printed works and transcription of the MSS, in the various European and Indian libraries. For instance, there is a history of a portion of Aurangzib’s reign in Persian verse in the Nizam’s library, but though the authorities were most courteous, it was exactly one year from the date of my application when the MS actually reached my hands for being copied. Again, the earliest and most authentic history of the Muslim monarchies of the Deccan, viz, the Burhan-i-masir, was kindly lent me by the India Office, London. But this volume lacks the first eight leaves, which I had to get photographed from the British Museum copy of the work before my transcript of the Burhan could become complete. It is only after many years of patient and persistent effort that I have completed my collection of the Persian MSS, which form the original sources of the history of the Bahmanis and the five Muhammadan kingdoms that succeeded them in the Deccan.

Even books printed in India have in many cases entirely disappeared from the market. Marathi printed materials often become absolutely unprocurable within twenty years of their publication. Thus, I have failed to secure any copy of the Chitragupta Bakhar and the 96-qalmi Bakhar, both printed. The Calcutta University, I learn, has not been able to get any copy of the Shiva-digvijay, which I luckily bought ten years ago. Similarly, the old Reports of the E. I. Co., and the early Parliamentary Blue-books, so indispensable to students of our economic history, are extremely rare and in some cases appear in the second hand book market at intervals of 20 or 25 years only.

These examples will clearly demonstrate the necessity of a well-planned, sustained and expert-directed search for MSS and rare books on the part of our Universities if they aim at true research. First make your bibliography of desiderata with the help of experts, then spread the hunt over years, never relaxing your efforts, but keeping your eyes ever open on the book-lists of the second-hand dealers of France, Holland (Martinus Nijhoff) and Germany as well as England in some cases advertise your wants in England. Thus only can you succeed within a reasonable space of time.

VI. How to Use the Rarest MSS, Which are Now in Europe

The rarest and most valuable Sanskrit, Pali, Persian and Arabic MSS have found their way to the great European capitals and Universities and thus been saved to mankind. The India Office, London, has a very rich Sanskrit collection, the nature and value of which can be judged from Eggeling's catalogue (1884-1904). Manuscripts from this library are lent to scholars in any part of the world on proper security. But most of the other great collections, notably the British Museum, the Bodleian and the Bibliotheque Nationale,—do not send any MS outside. All that scholar in India can do is to take copies of them by the rotary bromide process which is quicker and cheaper than ordinary photographs. Indians working on our antiquities or philology do not sufficiently realise the necessity of securing such rotographs of the rarest and oldest Sanskrit or Pali MSS. in their subjects belonging to these European libraries. They prefer to work on corrupt modern printed editions of these books and where they have not been printed to ignore their existence. The value of the colophons of very old MSS to the historian has been demonstrated by the light which the Nepal MSS have thrown on the chronology of the Pala kings. There must be many more Sanskrit works of equal importance in the British Museum, the Bodleian or even the Vatican.

VII. Let the Universities Co-operate and Avoid Overlapping

The task before the Indian Universities if they want to do their duty is, therefore, a heavy one, a costly one. It is necessary for us to economise our resources. When people pursue reckless or extravagant schemes of University expansion, and talk glibly of the custodian of the public purse footing the bill and snarl at the custodian when he naturally pleads inability to be eternally assisting with State doles those who are constitutionally incapable of cutting their coat according to their cloth, these people forget that all money spent by the Universities, whether fees, sale-proceeds of monopoly books, private subscriptions or subsidies from the public revenue,— comes ultimately from the Indian tax-payer, India is a country of poor people, of a population whose elementary wants have not yet been fully supplied by State activity. Waste and improvidence would be a crime here.

Our Universities must, therefore, practise the strictest economy and vigilantly avoid every kind of superfluous luxury, “window dressing,” needless duplication and overlapping of effort. They should pool their resources, and co-operate with one another, so that by a deliberate co-ordination of effort among all the Indian universities the efficiency of each would be increased and the maximum good would accrue to the country taken as a whole for the minimum of expenditure, though some Universities may have to retrench then ambitions and ever-ramifying programmes.

How can this be done? Certain subjects will probably have to be taught in all the Indian Universities, these are the irreducible minimum of higher education. But all other subjects should be divided among our Universities, no two of them doing the same thing. Above all, specialised study at the postgraduate stage and research must be localised. If an elaborate course of Ancient Indian History and Culture is taught by a large and competent staff at Calcutta, it should be a sufficient reason for not attempting it anywhere else in India. If certain branches of Physics are cultivated at the Bose Institute, no other institution should undertake them. Biology is flourishing at Lahore; let it flourish there, Calcutta or Bombay should not attempt the highest study of this Science till our country is richer and better educated. Geology may well be specialised at Patna or Nagpur, Islamic studies at Aligarh. The highest students, viz, the researchers and candidates for doctorates, must be left flee to migrate from one University to another, as they do in Europe and America. There should be no water-tight separation of province from province above the Bachelorship stage. The corporate life and discipline which the membership of a College supplies to the freshman are no longer necessary after he has become a graduate. He should then be regarded as a free citizen of the entire academic world, a sannyasi who can make his pilgrimage to any shrine of learning that he likes. On the continent anybody can join a University and become a doctor of it.

I should like to go even further and advocate an exchange of professors between our Universities, as was the practice between England and the United States and between the U. S. A. and Germany before the war. An expert adorns (say) Madras. Let him spend a month or two at Bombay or Aligarh also, delivering there readership lectures followed by what I may call “workshop talk” on his subject with the local research students and teachers of it. In this way the normal work of neither Madras nor Bombay will be interrupted, but two or three universities instead of one will benefit by the inspiring personality and genius of the specialist originally engaged by only one of them.

So, too, in the collection of sets of journals of learned societies, our universities should co-operate with one another, to avoid unnecessary waste or repetition. Everyone of them will keep the few universally necessary journals, but as regards others, if Bombay takes A B C, Madras ought to avoid them and take D B F, Calcutta G H I, and so on. A resolution to this effect was agreed upon at the All-India Librarian’s Conference held at Lahore in January 1918. Each university should notify its valuable acquisitions to the others, so that all may know where in India a certain rare volume is to be found. We may, in time, even have a Catalogus Catalogorum of the university libraries of India.

How very necessary such economy of expenditure and co-ordination of work among universities is in India we can realise when we see that even England, the richest country in the world, needs it to-day Mr H. A. L. Fisher (the Education Minister in the Cabinet) in his address to the British Association at Cardiff “asked that each university in the country should limit itself to some special field of research. Every university should not attempt to do everything’ It is feared lest there should be overlapping and waste of energy as well as money” (Times Ed. Sup, 2 Sep 1920). But Calcutta is prancing on to bankruptcy in supreme disdain of such sound advice.

VIII. Business-like method of University Administration

After all it is not bricks nor printed papers nor scientific apparatus that really constitute a University. It is men. The university is, or ought to be, a brotherhood of Scholars assisting each other, co-operating in various ways, to promote the advancement of learning. The quality of its work will depend upon the capacity and spirit of its professoriate. If they are trained men, if they are ever alert to learn and to try the latest methods of education devised anywhere in the civilised world, if they frequently meet together (informally as well as formally) to exchange their ideas and discuss their different personal experiences, and above all if they are inspired by the spirit of self-criticism and divine discontent with things as they are, then only can our universities fall into line with the Universities of Europe and America. Otherwise, they will remain for ever pack-oxen importing to India the ready-made (intellectual) goods of the West, but producing nothing of their own. They will remain academic brokers and not manufacturers, the Marwaris and not the Parsis of the world of letters and science.

Nothing can have a more demoralising effect on the staff of a university than insecurity of tenure and advancement according to personal favour or family influence. These evils are not dreamt of in English Universities, which first of all secure the indispensable financial basis of a new chair, and then recruit its officer publicly in the open market of scholarship. Here in India in certain universities the unbusiness-like method is followed of creating chairs without any endowment or permanent source of income, but on mere speculation that it would attract some pious founder later on, that “something would turn up” to save the extinction of the chair through bankruptcy. Mr. Micawber as vice-chancellor is a sight peculiar to India and the results cannot be happier than his well-known method when applied to his domestic economy. This uncertainty about the financial basis of the post-graduate teaching organisation and the chronic rumours of deficit and impending bankruptcy every year, are the surest means of unsettling the minds of the staff and the students alike and effectually preventing any substantial work being done. I shall not insult the intelligence of the reader by labouring the point that a university cannot add to its reputation if it once abandons the principle that men are to be valued according to the work actually done by them and not according to their family influence or the country where they took their degrees.

The greatest enemies of a king are his flatterers and the most harmful poison that can enter into the chiefs of staff of a university is self-conceit and impatience of criticism. English universities welcome criticism and have periodical reviews of their work by impartial outside commissions. Self-criticism is their normal daily duty. As the Right Hon'ble Mr Fisher rightly says, “The spirit in a university—wide, tolerant, self-critical, alive to generous issues, disinterested,—should penetrate into every part of the educational system of the country, saving it from dull mechanical routine, from the unintelligent pressure of stereotyped examinations, and keeping it fresh and wholesome by contact with the living movements of thought and discovery and the true intellectual pleasures of the world” Prof Sir Oliver Lodge says the same thing, when he remarks that “everybody in a university is subject to sane and healthy criticism, and each is judged by his peers.”

The banishment of criticism would cause academic atrophy.

---

---

1. Where an old federal university has grown unwieldy in the size of its constituency it must be split up, or where a province (like Burma) is apt to be neglected by reason of its distance from the seat of its old university, it ought to have a provincial university of its own. Here the gain in efficiency outweighs the expenditure involved in duplication of machinery, but not where universities are multiplied in the same province with a small English-educated population.