The Academic Goal

There is a growing amount of confusion regarding what academics should be doing in their profession. What ought to be their contribution to the world? This is an important question to ask. Equally important is the question: What ought NOT to be activities that they be expected to directly engage in? I think the latter needs our attention first.

Let us start from ground up. I am going to restrict myself to the framework of engineering education. But I suppose one can extrapolate these thoughts to other disciplines as well.

The first engineering degree that is offered is a Bachelors degree. When a student graduates with a B.Tech. (or B.E., BS, etc.), it is expected that he/she is capable of solving day to day engineering problems in his/her discipline. Furthermore, there is, in general, sufficient breadth of instruction in a good B.Tech. program to enable students to think across disciplines and be part of teams that carry out real world engineering tasks that are by and large inter-disciplinary.

Important realization 1: When one asks whether an academic institute has contributed towards solving day to day real world engineering problems of society, one must realize that the contribution made by the institute at this level is in training its undergraduate students effectively. Full stop. From there on, it is for: "The society to absorb graduates in meaningful professions, provide them with a work atmosphere in which they can thrive, and compensate them sensibly for their services."

I think we have fallen short on creating enough opportunities with the passage of time. If you ask me, our public as well as private sectors overall need to do much more than they have in terms of creating a scenario wherein highly talented and bright graduates can feel the fulfillment of participating in challenging assignments, be able to make meaningful contributions in a positive work atmosphere that enables them to express their talents and thrive professionally, while being compensated fairly and sensibly for their services. [No, I'm not encouraging greed with the last part of my statement. But I'm definitely emphasizing the need for fair and sensible salary packages. Just to drive home the point: There are schools and colleges in this country that pay their teachers less than auto and taxi drivers. And politicians make more money than most engineers and scientists. This is lunacy.]

And the onus of ensuring that all this happens does not lie on the institute that trains students. It lies on the world outside the institute.

The job of an academic himself or herself is not to solve a society's day to day engineering problems directly but rather contribute by teaching those who can do so effectively. And no, this is not an easy task. It requires professors to be at the forefront of their respective disciplines and be able to transmit knowledge effectively. Well delivered lectures that cover the subjects in sufficient breadth and depth, exposure to appropriately designed problems that serve to clarify concepts and show how to apply them, meaningful laboratory experiments, testing a student's knowledge from time to time and providing feedback. All this is easier said than done and requires great thought and effort if it has to be done really well.

So the next time you ask: "What have these institutes done for the country?", realize that you are asking the wrong question. The institutes are doing their job quite well. The correct questions to ask are sitting in points (a) and (b) above.

Then comes the Masters degree. The objective behind M.Tech. level training is to prepare a student to work in advanced areas of technology. Teaching is at a more advanced level and there is usually a significant project/thesis component associated with this level of education that prepares the students to work on problems that are tougher, longer and possibly without any ready made solution at hand - thus requiring the student to think for him/herself and solve the problem at hand independently.

Again, it is not the academic's job to address every technological challenge that arises in various sectors directly. Rather they train those who can. And, again, it all sounds way easier than it really is.

We need to ask ourselves: "Have we created enough avenues to absorb people who have the talent and training to contribute at an advanced level in different areas of technology?". The answer is, sadly, nowhere near enough. We haven't been serious enough about advancing our own technology sector. Rather we have stayed satisfied with simply buying technology that is developed in other parts of the world. And unless we address this lacuna, we can kiss our dreams of being a technologically advanced nation goodbye. [As an example of what I have just said: How difficult do you think it really is to set up factories where we manufacture our own aircraft for civil transport?]

Finally, the PhD degree. This is when those few who appreciate the value of advancing frontiers of knowledge associate themselves with a professor who can guide them, take them along in their respective disciplines to the point of "We don't know more than this yet" and engage them in pushing the boundaries of knowledge further. Thus entereth he/she into the domain of knowledge discovery.

Some of these students go on to becoming scientists (or equivalent full time knowledge discovery professionals in fields other than science and technology) while others may prefer to pursue an academic career where they participate in teaching as well.

Again, are we (a) training our PhD students well enough to be globally competitive and (b) absorbing them to the extent we should be in postdoctoral, scientific and academic roles? Nope.

To understand the manner in which an academic contributes to society, let us ask ourselves the following question:

"Do we value knowledge - both for its power to improve the quality of life if applied wisely and the role it plays in satiating our curiosity and inspiring a sense of wonder and awe in us? Are we curious? Do we want to understand the world we live in and the laws that govern this universe? Or are we content with sleep walking through our lives? Some food, some booze, some sex and that is that.

Important realization 2: And this is where the essence of an academic lies.  An academic is devoted to the pursuit of knowledge. That is his/her real goal. And that is also the means through which he/she most meaningfully contributes to the world. It is for the world to grow up and be mature enough to realize how valuable this is.

To understand where things have gone wrong in our country from the viewpoint of knowledge discovery, consider this: Pretty much any book dealing with any field of science and technology (I don't know enough about other fields to comment on them) that you pick up today contains knowledge that has by and large been discovered outside our country. Our input, either in terms of modern knowledge or aspects of traditional knowledge that may still be relevant and worthwhile, is pretty much non existent. One of the reasons this has happened is we have misunderstood the academic's role at a very fundamental level. We have turned things upside down. Our (mis)understanding is that professors are meant to primarily be in classrooms i.e. they are just teachers. What this translates to is professors (at least in science and technology) in our country being required to simply assimilate knowledge discovered elsewhere and spend hours and hours in the classroom to pass it on to the next generation. Then comes all this noise about how professors should be solving problems that in fact our bachelors and masters degree holders should be. Add to this hours upon hours of mundane committee work and meaningless university politics, and at the end of it all, this is how much value addition happens in terms of knowledge discovery: Zero.

If we don't correct our understanding now, we will still be in the same boat fifty years from today. We will still be reading books that contain knowledge discovered by other people elsewhere. Neither would we have made a significant contribution to the global knowledge community in modern knowledge nor would we have been able to revive those aspects of our traditional knowledge that may still be relevant and worthwhile but can get lost in obscurity due to not being studied systematically. And if we don't consolidate our identity in the field of knowledge, we are going to stay behind overall. We will always be the world's backyard. Many may come and "Make in India" but we will never really reach the level where we "Create in India" and capture the world's imagination. You can be absolutely assured of this.

An academic is as much a philosopher, a thinker, a researcher, as a teacher. Academics have to be given the time and space to immerse themselves in knowledge and contemplate deeply on fundamental problems and challenges. Spending quality time in their offices and labs with a firm and intense research focus and delivering a few hours of lectures of the highest quality every week - this has to be our modus operandi if we are to be at the very frontiers of knowledge and take our understanding of ourselves and the universe we live in further.

Some of the knowledge an academic or a scientist uncovers may feed back into applications that (hopefully) improve our quality of life and the planet. But perhaps of equal, if not more, value is the viewpoint that knowledge is also valuable in itself. It satiates curiosity just as food satiates hunger. (If we are awake and curious to start with that is!)

The day we become clear about what academics really should be doing, how they can be most valuable to us, and start creating favorable conditions for them to thrive not just in knowledge transmission but also knowledge discovery - our universities will start making a global impact. I absolutely guarantee this.

[Please note: My use of the term "Professor" above has nothing to do with the academic hierarchy of Assistant Professor, Associate Professor and Professor. It simply reflects the essence of a role played by an academic. These designations (ideally) reflect the growth and maturity of an academic as he/she perseveres in his/her quest for knowledge. But hierarchical considerations are best set aside when it comes to the actual work being done. So when I say "Professor", I am including all three levels in the term.]