Freedom of Expression

For the last two days, the media and the social media is busy discussing whether IIT Madras administration is right in what it terms as temporary dercognition of an independent student body.

The derecognition has been reported by almost all newspapers, including, Deccan Herald, Financial Express, Business Standard, Firstpost, and Hindustan Times.

Here is what seems to have happened. An anonymous letter is received by MHRD complaining that certain undesirable activities are being conducted by Ambedkar Periyar Study Circle (APSC), an independent student group at IIT Madras. The Ministry forwards this letter to IIT Madras for their comments. Soon afterwards IIT Madras temporarily de-recognizes the group for violating guidelines for such groups.

A whole lot of politicians have jumped into the fray, sensing an opportunity to score political points against each other claiming that the Ministry pressurized IIT Madras into banning the group. IIT Madras continues to claim that there is no permanent ban, but only a temporary de-recognition till the beginning of the next semester when the issue can be discussed after all students and faculty are back, and they continue to insist that the ban is not under pressure of MHRD but because of the violation of certain guidelines.

I think the politicization of the event is unfortunate. In these matters, the Dharma of the ministry is to try interfering in an autonomous institution by seeking comments on something that Ministry should not be bothered about. And the Dharma of the Institute is to ignore all such letters. This way a peaceful co-existence can be maintained. The equilibrium gives way to chaos if either side goes beyond its Dharma, that is, either the Ministry sends reminders, uses threatening language, or demands certain actions, or the Institute starts taking such letters seriously and starts taking action on them. In this case, it appears that the action by IITM is not suo moto, but motivated by this letter from MHRD, which only makes them more amenable to interference in the future. So they are causing problems for not their own autonomy but the autonomy of other IITs as well, since such actions become precedents. Even if they wanted to take this action, they should have waited for another event, another time, so that the action can not be easily linked with the MHRD letter. But they seemed to be in a hurry and did not want to wait even for the summer to be over and the Institute to reopen.

I tend to believe (despite the timing and sequence of events) that IIT Madras has taken this action not because they were under pressure from MHRD, but because the administration had a level of discomfort with this group, and the letter from MHRD only acted as a trigger. IIT Madras is quite conservative and has an opinion on what should be allowed and what should not be allowed on things that other Institutes wouldn't care about. That is just the way they are, and poor them, they get into such controversies unnecessarily as a result.

So what are the guidelines for such groups, and which guideline has been violated. The guidelines are available here. The important guideline which seems to have been violated by the group is the second one which says that such entities can not use the name of IIT Madras, or any of its official entities, in any capacity, to publicize their activities or garner support without official permission. And apparently, in their pamphlets, the group had said that they are students at IIT Madras and the event is at IIT Madras.

So what should have been done. The group should have announced that the event will happen in this national institute beside Adyar Cancer Institute, Opposite to C.L.R.I, Sardar Patel Rd, between Guindy and Adyar,Chennai, Tamil Nadu 600036. You see we are not allowed to name the institute in our address. They should have then said that they are the students of the said institute, but can't name it.

How dare they name the institute in their pamphlet. How dare they say that they are students of IIT Madras. For such unpardonable sins, they have to be taught a lesson.

One may, of course, ask, if this is the only independent student group who has mentioned the words "IIT Madras" in their communication. If yes, then the ban is completely justified. If other groups can survive without mentioning IIT Madras in their communications, why does this group want such a huge privilege as to mention its college in a communication. On the other hand, if others too have mentioned IIT Madras in their communications, are they being banned (OK, temporarily de-recognize, such a long word which means the same thing) too. I know the answer, so I won't ask. All of them had sought permission and were granted permission to mention the name of the Institute in their communication. This group did not seek permission.

One may, of course, ask another question whether every student of IIT Madras, when s/he contacts anyone outside IIT Madras for anything, takes permission from Dean of Students to mention in their communication that they are from IIT Madras. If yes, then it is a draconian institute. if no, then one wonders what sin has this group done to deserve such an action.

The IITM Students have an official reaction on their publication, "The Fifth Estate." The APSC students have criticized the ban and have written this letter. They have also questioned on their facebook page whether the guidelines were formally approved by an appropriate authority of the Institute, but others on the same page have said that the guidelines were indeed approved.

On the face of it, it seems that the group has indeed violated the guidelines, and therefore, IIT Madras can justify its action in a legal sort of way. But in my view, the guidelines are typical of control mindset and I am sure have been breached by many people in the past. You want to control everything and everyone, so you create guidelines which allow you unlimited power. At the time of passing the guidelines, either people don't realize that unlimited power is being granted, or they are assured that this will be used in the rarest of rare cases. But once those guidelines are approved, you know that they will be used against anyone with whom the administration is uncomfortable with. And frankly, I can not possibly support ban for violating such guidelines. Unless some new information comes to light, I would consider this ban as an unnecessary restriction on freedom of expression that our constitution guarantees to all its citizens.

Any constituent of IIT Madras should be able to claim that they are part of IIT Madras. What they shouldn't be able to do is to claim that they represent the institute, or their opinions are official views of the Institute, and things of that nature. IITM certainly needs to come up with a better excuse for the ban (they apparently spread hate, for example).

Having such controversies in sister institutions actually do a a lot of good for other institutions. Today, sitting in IIT Kanpur, I realize what paradise I am living in.  Thanks to the culture set up by our founding Director, Prof. Kelkar and the american influence that we had due to support by Kanpur Indo-American Program (KIAP), the campus is very liberal and tolerant of all sorts of views and allows all kinds of debates.

By the way, Telegraph has as always covered the issues very nicely in their multiple reports. These reports are here, here, here, and here.

Times of India has reported that many student groups in IIT Madras have opposed this ban.

Edited:

Sriram in the comments below has said that the student groups mentioned in ToI report are not from IIT Madras.

The Fifth Estate, the students official newssite, has many more articles on this issue now.

Retirement Age for Professors and Directors

Today, there is a news item in Hindustan Times which suggests that MHRD is thinking of reducing the maximum age of Directors in CFTIs and also of Vice chancellors in Central Universities from 70 to 65. I have mixed feelings about it.

When a faculty member in these institutes can be given extension till the age of 70, why not Directors and VCs be given extensions up to that age. After all, with so much advance in medical science, people are healthier than ever and working longer. On the other hand, let us understand that such appointments are done almost as a lottery (or worse, sometimes politically influenced), and not based on a solid review of the performance. If the selection is based on a random process, then statistically speaking a younger leader is more likely to perform better, and thus a requirement of being younger may be in the interest of the institutes and universities.

But that is not why I am writing this blog. Actually, I want to talk about the retirement age in general. Why should the retirement age be 65 for faculty, when it is 60 for non-teaching staff in the same organization. If it had come by way of performance evaluation of individuals, I would have no objection to it. But to give everyone a higher retirement age seems counter-productive. We are told that the increase in retirement age is due to shortage of faculty. But is increase in retirement age a solution to that. If the faculty member had formally retired at the age of 60, and is healthy and active, s/he would surely continue to be a faculty member either at the same organization or in another institute/university. So increasing the retirement age does not increase the overall supply of faculty members, but only ensures that they get a right to stay in the same place.

Why should they have a fundamental right to stay at the same place? Shouldn't this be based on performance evaluation and the needs of the organization to have a faculty member in that discipline. Of course, I know the answer. If the extension is on a case to case basis, then politics will play a role. Some good people will not get extension and some bad people will. Is this a good enough reason to oppose discretion. And if this is a good enough reason, why allow this during the age group of 65 to 70. I am not denying that some times decisions on extension will be taken in less than fair way, or at least the perceptions will be that some decisions are based on politics. But the possibility of few bad decisions should not be the basis of a bad policy. After all the loss to the person concerned is very minimal. One can always go to another institute and work there, considering the serious shortage of faculty we face in the country.

I really find it strange that for hard working staff (even if they are fewer in number), there is no avenue for extension and the market place also discriminates against them since there are too many unemployed youth who are willing to work for much less, but for faculty, who has all the options in the world, we want to give an extension (or increase in retirement age) without any evaluation of their contribution.

The quality of faculty

 I have been to numerous selection committees, and I am quite aware of the quality of faculty selection in our tier 2 institutions. As soon as you go beyond IITs, BITS, IIITH, IIITD, and a handful of other institutions, invariably the selection committee meeting ends with the Director making a request to the committee to recommend at least one candidate, any one who was marginally better than the others, so that the next semester's courses can be taught. In any of these committees, I always look at my role as providing my honest views about the candidate, and making sure that there are no biased selections. I don't look at my role as quality control (beyond giving my honest feedback). The primary stake holder in that hiring is the institute and not me, and hence they have to do quality control and not me. So, invariably, I will agree to recommend that one candidate, who could not speak a word about his thesis that he had just submitted, and who could not answer simple questions about the course that he had recently taught, and yet in my opinion, was the best amongst all those who were interviewed. Participating in such committee meetings can be very depressing as they expose this myth about India being the largest producer of scientific manpower. These candidates can hardly be called "scientific manpower" and yet they represent the best that our scientific manpower production factories have produced. What are we doing to our next generation, forcing them to study from these types of faculty members. And this is one reason why I always ask people to seriously consider studying abroad, if they can afford it.

A few weeks ago, I was in a selection committee to recruit faculty for a new institution. The new institution (which shall remain nameless) has this agenda of excellence that they would not want to recruit just about anyone. So they had shortlisted a set of people whose CVs looked pretty good, better than the most candidates that I have met in tier two institutions. Most of them were existing faculty members in our Tier II institutes, which included IIITs, NITs, IIMs, and a few select state colleges and universities with excellent reputation. (IIMs are certainly Tier 1 institutions, but only when it comes to management related programs.) If you were to select faculty purely on the basis of their CV and pedigree, it would be extremely tough to take a call. And I was really excited about a new place being able to attract such CVs.

All the candidates were told to bring in prints of a few papers of theirs, preferably those papers which were recent and in which they had a significant contribution. One member of the committee had a very sound strategy for the interview. He would ask the candidate which paper is the strongest work. He would then ask a simple question about something in that paper, and the result was often hilarious (actually, very sad, given that these represented the second tier of institutions in the country).

The hottest area of research amongst those was "optimization." Can you explain what is a generic problem of optimization (not in your specific context). Sorry, I don't understand the question. OK, you have this equation in your paper. Can you give us an insight into this equation. Sorry, no. I just copied this equation from Matlab help files. Do you think it is ok to copy from Matlab help files without understanding. What's wrong, everyone does it. But then this appears to be a central equation in your paper. Why are you using this one and not anything else. I don't remember. But this is your recent paper, with you as the first author. I am the first author, because I am the supervisor. How do you avoid convergence to a local maxima, and guarantee that you will find the global maxima. I don't understand the question. Do you know what a local maxima is. Yes, the points that are close to global maxima. Thank you very much, you can leave now.

There were a few senior professors as well amongst the candidates. There was a faculty member who said that he is very strong in Operating Systems. When we asked to narrow down the area further, he said memory management. OK. Why do we need virtual memory. Virtual memory is needed to allow a program of larger size than the physical memory of the computer. Really. But it means that if the physical memory in a computer is larger than the addressable memory, then we don't need virtual memory. Yes, we don't need virtual memory. If we can somehow enforce that all programs will be smaller than the RAM in the computer, we don't need virtual memory. Yes, we don't need virtual memory in such a situation. How would you ensure that two programs who are using the same address space will not conflict with each other's memory. Sir, I have been teaching OS every year for the last 20 years. My students have got jobs in top CS companies, and you are telling me that I have been teaching wrongly all these years. Yes, my dear professor, you have been teaching wrongly for all these 20 years.

I suspected this, but did not want to believe this. In the last 20 years, I would have asked this question on virtual memory to at least 100 potential MTech/PhD students, and till date, NOT EVEN ONE (other than those who have studied at an IIT) has answered it correctly. The sequence of exchange that I had with this senior professor of operating systems in one of the good institutes of the country, was exactly the same I have had with students from such colleges. And yet, I always believed that they were taught correctly, but they didn't pay attention. Or they are learning from poor quality text=books. I could not believe that they learnt wrongly because their professors did not know.

I can go on and on, but the summary is that most of these faculty members with great CVs did not know even the basics of what they were teaching, or what they were doing research in. They did not know that copying content from elsewhere was plagiarism. They did not know that they should understand what they write in a paper. It was almost as if the papers were generated with some automatic paper generating software.

And what is worst is that when we investigated further with these faculty members who all had substantial number of journal papers, it turned out that many of those papers were in paid journals with no peer review. And yet, they would defend the practice by saying that everyone else did it too.

Since most of these faculty members were young and recent PhDs from similar institutes (IIITs, NITs, and good state colleges), it also puts a question mark on the kind of PhDs being produced in the country.

And yet in a country where the quality is determined primarily by the amount of money their graduates can get in the market, these institutions are rated very high by the society. So there is no hope of any improvement either. If they are all doing very well, where is the pressure to change. The only positive of these institutions is that they have successfully created a culture of self-learning (necessity is the mother of invention), which will ensure that their alumni keep learning on their own throughout their careers.

But is this enough for the "Make in India" to succeed. Are we really on our way to harness our demographic dividend.