April 2, 2023 | The Indian Times
– M. Balakrishnan
All university rankings give significant weightage to the research productivity of an institution. While its importance is evident for post-graduate (PG) and PhD programs, what is its relevance to undergraduate (UG) programs?
Those of us who have worked in academic institutions know that a good researcher need not always be a good teacher in the classroom (and vice versa). However, almost all faculty recruitment at the entry level – the position of the assistant professor – in top institutions is based primarily on the research profile and potential of the applicants. An excellent researcher with moderate communication skills can still make it to a top institution, but the reverse is unlikely to happen.
Further, most awards and recognitions that academicians seek, from the Nobel prize to fellowships, again depend on the quality and quantity of research output. Supporting research faculty is expensive and involves factors such as limited contact hours of teaching (up to 1.5 courses per semester), flexibility to offer research-level courses with very low enrollment, PG and highly subsidized PhD students, library subscription to research journals, laboratory space with equipment and consumables, and support for conferences. Collectively, this could easily cost 5X to 10X per faculty in comparison to a teaching-only institution.
So, the key question is this: if you are an applicant for UG admissions, why should you care whether the faculty is active in terms of research? There are distinct benefits for UG students who opt to study in an institution where the faculty is focused on research.
Firstly, almost all technical areas are seeing rapid growth in terms of knowledge. There are even fundamental paradigm shifts in many cases. This is highly visible in some areas such as computer science, but it is true for every engineering and science discipline. An active researcher has to keep track of these developments to remain current. This is inherently addressed through attending conferences and workshops as well as reviewing papers for journals and conferences, which are an integral part of her activities.
Once a person joins academia, they would be a teacher for 30 to 40 years. Consequently, if the faculty member is not active in terms of research, they would soon be outdated.
Secondly, in most research-focused institutions, except perhaps for one or two basic courses in a department, courses would be taught by specialists who would be doing research in a related area. This is with the belief that only someone with a deeper knowledge can do justice to any course, even if it is at the UG level. It is in contrast to the assumption that given some time, any good teacher can teach a much wider range of subjects using a textbook.
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Clearly the depth, conceptual understanding and the application of the course knowledge gets constrained. The classroom experience suffers as a result. Thirdly, over a career of three to four decades, it is much more likely that an active researcher remains enthusiastic about their area in comparison to those who are just reading and teaching.
Such enthusiasm is absolutely essential for inspiring students, much more so today when there are many distractions. Lastly, an active research institution attracts a large number of national and international researchers who visit and give seminars. Typically, such seminars are open to all, including UG students.
Attending these seminars can not only help students professionally but also create understanding and opportunities for pursuing higher studies. Though the benefits are many, there is a point of caution as well. The high stake for research among the faculty as well as the institution should not result in the neglect of UG teaching.
This includes not just classroom lectures but beyond — the informal interactions with students, serious assessments, among others. This is where the institution’s culture and discipline related to UG teaching matters.
So, how would an applicant know whether a particular institution is focused on research or not? I would classify institutions to be research focused or not, broadly into four levels, based on the following information on their websites.
The webpages of individual faculty members that are updated and contain information on their research focus, publications and courses they have taught or are teaching; institution or department web pages that only list faculty, with their qualification and research profile in a standard template and no individual faculty websites; institution or department webpage that just lists the faculty names with their qualification often just mentioning PhD; and institutions or department webpages that have no details about the faculty and their qualifications.
To attract research students (PhD) and faculty to apply, it is important to project the research of existing faculty. With research playing a role in rankings, one can also notice another trend. Some universities are setting up exclusive research centres with separate research staff whose primary role is only to publish and file patents. These research staff have no connection to UG programs and thus do not bring any of the benefits of their research experience to the UG classroom.
The writer is honorary professor (IIT Delhi) and a distinguished visiting professor at Plaksha university