Can a Tier 2 institution have a culture of excellence

I have been to a large number of Tier-2 and Tier-3 institutions in the country, and at every place, I make it a point to argue that they can imbibe a culture of excellence, that they can do better than what they are currently doing. This is almost universally resisted. Typical argument on the other side is that a culture of excellence can only develop in a resource rich environment, where the quality of students and faculty is high, and all that. "We don't get IIT type students," "Our faculty is not like that in Stanford," "Our budget is only 10 percent of IIT Kanpur," it goes on and on.

Is it really true that we can only have a culture of excellence in a resource rich environment.

Let me change gear briefly and talk about one more experience. IIT Gandhinagar organizes a 2-day event every winter. On one day, they invite a select group of academicians from around the world to discuss excellence in academics at IITGN. On the second day, they invite people from academia, industry, government, alumni, and discuss excellence in non-academic issues at IITGN. It has been going on for a decade and I have been luck y to have been invited to each of these events (and I have attended all of them). I love those two days at IITGN as there is so much learning for me.

In one of the early years when they hadn't even graduated the first batch, they discussed excellence in one of these meetings. After a lot of discussion, it was opined that IITGN should try to be like a top class institution. You can not be the top ranked university in 10 years, but you can be like a top ranked university very soon. I wasn't sure if I understood the import of that statement fully. But after a few years, I started realizing how important that statement was.

Let us consider teaching. A tier-2 institution would argue that they don't have faculty of the same quality as Tier-1 institution and hence cannot offer teaching programs of the same quality. Even if this is assumed, can Tier-2 institution imbibe some of the cultural aspects. The difference is not just in the competence of the teacher (which in today's world does not account for much) but how other aspects of the course are handled. If you are teaching programming, for example, your students may not be capable of building a large project within that first year course (actually, one will be surprised, if one were to try, but let us leave it for now), but do you even give them a programming assignment every week, and do you even penalize when students copy. Those things do not require competence and rich infrastructure. Every engineering college today has a course on communication. Do you only do some grammar and have an in-class presentation, or do you ask your students to read up 4-5 books in the semester, may be even watch a few English movies and write a critique. (And the teacher can spend 5 minutes with each student to figure out whether that has indeed been done honestly or not.) Today, you don't need competence to suggest a few books/movies, and you don't need rich infrastructure for students to read/watch. One of the biggest problem with teaching/learning in Tier-2 institutions is that we don't engage students beyond the contact hours. And that requires neither very high level of competence nor resources.

Consider faculty recruitment. All IITs would go out of the way to attract faculty. They would all have a mailing list of people, typically department heads in top places, or alumni who are in academia, to whom they will keep writing. They would meet PhD students in conferences and tell them about faculty openings. They would invite PhD students closer to graduation to visit the department and give talks, etc. How many Tier-2 institutions do this. To create a mailing list of heads of 50 departments from where you expect most of your faculty to come will take a student in your department not more than a few hours. Sending an email to this list every 2-3 months will take 5 minutes of your time. Similarly, putting out this information on platforms like LinkedIn would take a few minutes, and all this is free. How do you treat an applicant. Do you think you are doing a favor by offering a job, or do you think that the process of recruitment is not just about "evaluation" but also about attracting that person to join you. Do these things require competence or resources. Of course, not.

When we do performance evaluation, clearly the criteria for recruitment/promotion, etc., would be different in MIT, IIT, and NIT. But what cannot be different is the need for performance evaluation. The need for performance evaluation and accountability is independent of competence and resources. If you start doing time bound promotions in academia, that is the end of excellence.

How do you treat your students. Are they kids to be "controlled" or are they grown up who can be trusted with many a decisions. You would find that in most Tier-1 institutions, students have a far greater freedom and a role in institute administration, while in Tier-2 institutions, there are all sorts of restrictions. Do you need a lot of resources to have students as members of various committees in the Institute.

There are so many other aspects of an academic institution where becoming "like" a better institution (or inculcating a culture of excellence) can improve  quality significantly, but these examples should suffice to make a point.

There is no doubt that greater competence, and greater resources can improve things a lot, and I would certainly like to see a larger funding of all academic institutions in the country. But one can be "like" a good institution even with lesser resources and we can have a higher quality of academics than what we see currently in our Tier-2 and Tier-3 institutions. What we need is a culture of excellence.