Many years ago, when I was an undergraduate student at St. Stephen’s College of the University of Delhi, I had two interesting conversations with a couple of well-known academics. Both these conversations were in stark contrast with each other. The first with a historian from the Jawaharlal Nehru University who had come over to deliver a lecture at my college. I had the temerity to ask the venerable professor on the lack of an undergraduate programme at JNU. His response bordered on superciliousness and seemed to imply that undergraduate teaching was a sort of distraction from research activities. Around the same time, I also had a conversation with a distinguished mathematician from Harvard who was visiting Delhi University. When asked about teaching at the undergraduate level, the professor narrated how he and other senior Harvard mathematicians vied with each other to teach freshman students.
A couple of years later, when I entered the portals of the Imperial College of Science, Technology and Medicine as a student, I discovered that the most distinguished mathematicians there would engage with the teaching of beginning undergraduate students. In fact, one of my most memorable recollections of that time involves the teaching programme in the mathematics department for freshman students. These students were being taught a beginning calculus course by one of the world’s leading mathematicians and their tutorials for the same course were conducted by a winner of Fields Medal, a sort of mathematical equivalent of the Nobel Prize.
My point in narrating these experiences is to highlight how India, for over 50 years, has neglected undergraduate education by divorcing it from any creative and innovative endeavours. This has greatly harmed university education. Of course, there are some notable exceptions but, by and large, undergraduate education has been relegated to the backwaters of unimaginative college teaching programmes. Unfortunately, college teaching, over the years and in most parts of India, has been the domain of teachers who have been hampered by lack of exposure to research and innovation. It is no surprise that there have been almost no connections to entrepreneurship beyond the confines of the blackboard and management teaching programmes in most of India’s colleges.
However, things are beginning to change for the better. Delhi University had been in the forefront of bringing about this change when it launched the erstwhile ‘Four-Year Undergraduate Programme’ in 2013. That has led to the main features of the National Education Policy, which has laid out a roadmap on why and how our undergraduate teaching can be elevated to a much higher and more meaningful level. This shall involve the blending of skills with knowledge riding on the back of trans-disciplinarity and a hands-on approach in pedagogy. I hope and pray that this bears fruit.
Dinesh Singh
Former Vice-Chancellor, Delhi University; Adjunct Professor of Mathematics, University of Houston, US
Twitter: @DineshSinghEDU