Governance in our universities

A few years ago, IIT Kanpur conferred its Distinguished Alumnus Award to Dr. Pramath Raj Sinha, who has been an institution builder, having been associated with ISB and Ashoka University and many other initiatives and institutions. In a public lecture, next day, he was asked for the secret of his success. How come all the institutions he is associated with are doing so well. And his answer was that the most important element in success of an educational institution is its governance structure. Of course, faculty, infrastructure, curriculum, research, and so many other things make up for an excellent institution, but good governance makes all these things happen, and good governance is more likely to happen when there is a good governance structure.

And the problem in most of our institutions is that their governance structure is weak. The number of board members who owe their membership to connections in the government is large. Self perpetuating boards are almost non-existent (perhaps, IIIT Delhi is the only exception in the government sector). The chairperson is usually a political appointee (not usually a politician, but still). Thankfully, it is becoming increasingly common to have some faculty representation in the board.

Even when there are non-government nominees, they are either ex-officio, or decided by the government. So if you are enlightened enough to have an alumni representation in the board, it will be either ex-officio (let us put President of Alumni Association in the board), or let the government decide which alumni. Why can't the board decide who will be the alumni for the next term.

The governance structure within the institution is no better. One either has extremely rigid structures (like every Head has to be through seniority and one can not consider leadership, passion, vision, etc.), or there is no structure at all and a Director/VC can appoint anyone in a dictatorial style.

The selection of Director itself is seriously flawed. Often that process takes a few minutes of interaction. How can the two sides understand each other in a few minutes.

To make matters worse, there are no red lines around any entity. If an employee has a grievance, the email will be sent to board members and they will even oblige by asking the institute questions about that grievance. It is common to interfere in the internal functioning of the institute. Ideally, there should be very clear distribution of responsibilities for various committees and one should not interfere in the functioning of the other. On the other extreme, since the roles are not well defined, some people in leadership positions just refuse to take any decisions, like Heads and Deans will seek approvals from Director/VC for the smallest of things. You can't be nimble in such a setup.

Further, the concept of conflict of interest is not understood at all in our committees. This is such a serious problem that may be one day I will write a full blog article about it.

And we continue to perpetuate the poor governance models. Anyone from IIT system, for example, can tell you that the success of IITs is due to multiple factors, including resources, autonomy, etc., and an extremely important reason is its governance structure. And yet, new institutes keep coming up with other poorer governance models. UGC will even ask institutes as to why they are following IIT model of governance and not the older university model.

Thankfully, some of the newer institutions like Ashoka University are showing the way forward with a much better governance structure and as Dr. Pramath Sinha said that is one of the important factors for its success.

How do we improve governance in educational institutions. It is perhaps possible to change the legal structures, the composition of boards, the selection process of Directors and Vice Chancellors, etc., but it would be very difficult to change the culture. But we must start one day. Remember the corporate governance in Indian companies was considered quite poor just 25 years ago. If we start improving governance in education, in a couple of decades we will be at par with the rest of the world.