At the 1981 National conference of the higher wing of Akhil Bharatiya Rashtriya Saikshik Masangh at Indore, I moved the resolution that the UGC must not deem PhD a criterion for getting an increment. I suggested that UGC do the same when it consults teachers’ unions and the public. Instead, it was suggested that all the professors be an increment irrespective of the PhD-Non-PhD difference. The wisdom behind the suggestion is that one should not go after a PhD just for financial gain because pricing a scholarly degree with some salary increases is based on academic sincerity and integrity. If the increment string is not attached to a PhD, none sans academic interest will do it so that the area of research could maintain its aristocracy. There was a time when PhD theses proved worth publishing, opening new thresholds for further studies, when scholars researched thanks to their academic passion rather than economic emotion. While most early Indian PhD theses were prescribed texts and reference books from prestigious universities, most of the present ones cease to have standards even for the moth to eat. Vikram Sarabhai’s ‘Cosmic Ray investigations in Tropical Latitudes’ or Bhabha’s ‘Absorption of Cosmic Radiation’ or R. C. Majumdar’s ‘Corporate Life in Ancient India’ were the prestigious theses acceptable to the international community of scholarship which opened new chapters in their respective areas of study. But the present plight is unimaginable even for the author of the ancient satire, ‘researching on crow’s teeth’ – Kakadantapariksha. And naturally, of late, the standard of PhD stooped beyond all levels that it began to deck every dog’s tail. Think of a dissertation on working in a milk marketing cooperative society in a Kerala hamlet during a particular year in which it did not work! The lack of a standard criterion for selecting PhD candidates made the area messy.
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Universities and even their departments were conducting entrance tests, so the chance for manipulation was much. Even the first-ranking students were netted out of the entrance rank lists prepared by different university departments. Consequently, undeserving scholars continued their research in undesirable areas where antinationalism, regionalism, communalism, and secessionism abounded. I still remember an ICHR JRF interview wherein one was researching how to help Kashmir unite with Pakistan! While the entire relevance of research centres on developing academic coherence or coherence at all levels of thinking, it promotes de-coherence, disintegration and destruction. This writer stresses that the screening tests at the university and department levels proved to be mere watchdogs sleeping with their eyes opened when these types of undesirability stole in or even helped to steal in. PhD research thus, to a good extent, plummeted beyond all levels and stooped to be good for nothing and sometimes even dangerous.
Now that PhD admissions call for the national level eligibility test is a highly welcome decision by the UGC. The question of why the NET, the requirement for teaching posts, should not be there for PhD admissions too or, as usually happens, why most of the PhDs used fail at the NET proves relevant. It concludes that none of our colleges and universities were eligible, though they qualified. We have the interesting instance of a Vice-Chancellor scribbling his letter to the well-educated Kerala Governor in a diction bristling with grammatical errors. That it was unbecoming of the chair he sat on was beyond even a VC’s realization, let alone the case of an ordinary college teacher! This VC was also a PhD; one knows not who gave it to him. This being the state of affairs, it was already high time the UGC brought some desirable system changes. The number of candidates who get through the UGC-conducted screening test would not be like the mushrooming numbers that pass through the substandard entrance tests of the universities along with the different self-advertised prestigious institutes wherein even nepotism was highly likely. Earlier, the UGC terminated the guideship of the retired supervising teachers. The UGC could also reconsider reinstating the guide-ship of the well-experienced retired teachers so that the well-filtered candidates may avail the supervision of teachers with lifelong experience.
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