Comparative Higher Education: Knowledge, the University and Development by Philip Altbach; Ablex Publishers; 312 pp

To say that tertiary education in India is experiencing an existential crisis is to state the painfully obvious. Hamstrung by government interference and micro management; perennial funding shortages; obsolete syllabuses; unruly students and work (especially research) shy academics, India’s 344 universities and 17,700 colleges which boast an aggregate enrollment of only 10 million (from a population of 1.2 billion), are rapidly going from bad to worse. As any HRD manager in industry will vouch, the average college and often university graduate has hardly any useful knowledge, can barely think in a straight line, and is rarely able to substantiate his/her views and opinions. That’s bad news for an economy growing at 7-8 percent per year. Little wonder contemporary India — perhaps for the first time in its 5,000 year history — is experiencing an accentuating shortage of minimally skilled workers and managers.

Despite this accumulating body of evidence testifying to the gradual attrition of the country’s laboriously constructed higher education system, there seems little awareness of this within the rarified environment of Shastri Bhavan, New Delhi where septuagenarian Union human resources development minister Arjun Singh is playing chess-board politics to reserve incremental percentage of capacity in the few surviving superior higher education institutions for favourite constituencies, with nary a care for supply side economics. Or within the education departments of the country’s 31 state governments overrun with barely literate rustics whose involvement with education is restricted to auctioning student admissions and faculty positions to highest bidders. Nor is there sufficient awareness within academia itself or society in general that the highfalutin degrees awarded by Indian colleges and universities are hardly worth the paper they are printed on.

Oxygenated by the perceived success of the applications-oriented IT (information technology) industry which has been driven places by essentially self-educated pioneers, government (and the great majority of the populace) entertain the delusion that contemporary India is a powerhouse of science and technology. Data testifying to the huge pool of the nation’s scientists and technicians is regularly advanced in international seminars and workshops. Never mind their abysmal quality as testified by the nation’s crumbling infrastructure and governance systems.

Against this backdrop and the new mantra of political correctness which posits development of higher education as inimical to the spread of elementary education, Boston-based educationist Philip Altbach’s Comparative Higher Education: Knowledge, the University and Development written in 1997 and republished this year, is mandatory reading for all — professionals and laymen — who subscribe to the viewpoint that quality education is the cornerstone of social and national development.

The virtue of this cogently argued work of impressive research and scholarship is that it enlightens confused minds of the vital purpose of the university. “With its roots in medieval Europe, the modern university is at the centre of an international knowledge system that encompasses technology, communications and culture. The university remains the primary centre of learning and the main repository of accumulated wisdom. While it may be the case that the university has reached the end of a period of unprecedented growth and expansion, it remains a powerful institution. In the knowledge-based society of the twenty-first century, the university will remain at the very centre of economics, culture and development,” writes Altbach explaining the rationale of this invaluable study of university education round the world.

The unequivocal assertion that healthy, flourishing universities are of vital importance for national growth and development apart, the other refreshing perspective the book provides is that universities everywhere are internationally-oriented by definition and history — the original globalisers. Whether it was Egypt’s Al-Azhar University (the world’s oldest surviving academe) or India’s ancient varsities of Taxila and Nalanda, all of them welcomed foreign learning and hosted students from far countries. “The university is an international institution with strong national roots. Most analysts overlook the international origins and role of the university, focusing exclusively on national realities,” writes Altbach in implied criticism of supra nationalists worldwide intent upon blocking the free flow of knowledge and ideas across political borders.

Nevertheless this study is not a panegyric of the university, and in particular the dominant American model characterised by its teaching, research and community service operations. According to the author, although academics seem blissfully unaware, the university as an institution is confronted with “unprecedented challenges” by way of diminished state funding, subsidisation fatigue, technology ignorance, confusion about the linkage between research activity and graduate study, the role of foreign students and scholars on campuses, declining influence of the traditional full-time “professoriate” and the corresponding rise of administrators. Particularly recommended to Indian academics is chapter 3 which is a historical account of the impact of western higher learning and scholarship upon Asian academia, and chapter 9 which assesses the position of India and China — countries which perhaps pioneered university education — within the contemporary global knowledge system overwhelmingly dominated by western institutions of higher learning.

The reprinting of this valuable study which is a status report of higher education worldwide and its future direction, is timely. Currently there is considerable confusion regarding the role of the university in society, particularly in the developing countries of the third world. Against the backdrop of crumbling, cash-starved primary and secondary school systems, to what extent should higher education — often defined as a personal good — be publicly subsidised?

Moreover, how should the organisational structure and objectives of institutions of higher learning be modified and redefined so that society can derive optimal value from investment in tertiary education, which is the prerequisite of meaningful socio-economic development? All these questions critical to education are addressed and debated in this valuable study, which per se is testimony to the superiority of western academia.

Dilip Thakore

English communication manual

Indlish: The Book for Every English-speaking Indian by Jyoti Sanyal; Viva Books Pvt. Ltd; Price: Rs.295; 394 pp

“I just don’t agree with this hoo-ha about short sentences and simple words. If I can write long sentences well, why shouldn’t I?” demands a journalist in Jyoti Sanyal’s Indlish: The Book for Every English-speaking Indian edited by Martin Cutts, research director of the UK’s Plain Language Commission. It epitomises what Sanyal terms “Bhadralog culture which equates roundabout expressions with elegance,” summing up the confusing world of English writing in contemporary India. The journalist’s question, in the chapter titled ‘Shrink or Sink’, is a typical example of the attitude of many who communicate in the English language and invites trenchant criticism from Sanyal, a veteran journalist of the Kolkata-based daily The Statesman â€” once regarded the style-setting newspaper of India. Later Sanyal served as dean of the pioneer Asian College of Journalism, Bangalore (1997-2000).

In Martin Cutts, proclaimed as the editor of this book, Sanyal seems to have found a zealous sympathiser. He too decries “flatulent orotundity,” a legacy of Victorian English, cherished and preserved by Indian journalists. “Short sentences, vigorous expression and a point of view: these are the three essentials of a good writer, whether it’s about sport or the price of fish,” he writes in the foreword. And that’s what Sanyal, author of the legendary The Statesman Style Book, which claims to be the only style guide among 415 English-language dailies and weeklies in India, preaches in this book.

Indlish comprises columns first published in the Language column of The Statesman between August 1999 and December 2000. Their compilation into book form serves the very useful purpose of telling journalists what readers want.

This compilation of 63 essays on ways and means to improve written English — especially journalese — is divided into seven chapters: ‘Making a botch of writing’; ‘The letters we write’; ‘John Company Baboo as hack’; ‘Usage Indlish style’; ‘Those troublesome midgets’; ‘Mother tongue, other tongue’; and ‘Your reader deserves better’.

In these essays on contemporary English usage, Sanyal advises journalists and communicators to unlearn ingrained primary school English and learn to tell it like it is. Battling through decades of what he describes “clumsy Victorian English that hangs like a dead albatross around each educated Indian’s neck” and a “feudal culture that frowns on directness of expression”, he shows the reader why Indian English has lost its way to the path to clear expression and how communication nirvana can be attained.

Unsurprisingly this self-improvement manual has the approval of The Statesman’s incumbent editor Ravindra Kumar. “It takes an eccentric’s passion for a language to fight what has increasingly become an uphill battle, but Mr. Sanyal has soldiered on,” he writes in the preface of this fault-finding, but humorous compilation, peppered with an impressive range of examples of bad English usage, especially from the print medium.

Circumlocution, use of abstract nouns, automatic expressions, preachiness in writing, fuzzy thinking, errors of logic, using pronouns without antecedents and being “verbose, vague and pompous” in the cause of elegance. All these sins of ommission and commission commonly found in newspapers, magazines, company circulars and corporate press releases are highlighted, condemned — and usefully — corrected.

“The components of Indlish are commercialese, officialese, legalese, archaisms and unidio-matic expressions,” writes Sanyal. “Anyone who wishes to write good, clear English needs to avoid them. But surely, this demands that he must first be able to identify them.”

Undoubtedly Indlish — The Book for Every English-speaking Indian is a useful and practical guide for all Indians simultaneously blessed and cursed by Macaulay’s gift of the English language. As such it is a recommended handbook to all journalists in particular as also to academics, and corporate communicators.

Shireen Joanathan