Indian Cabinet Approves Legislation to Crack Down on Admissions Bribes

November 17, 2011, 12:05 pm

India’s cabinet on Wednesday approved legislation that would fine higher-education institutions up to $200,000 and send college officials to jail for up to three years if found guilty of taking bribes in exchange for admitting students, reports the Indian Express. The proposal, which is expected to be approved by the Parliament, is aimed at for-profit institutions that have asked for bribes, euphemistically called “capitation fees,” as a condition for admissions. “The objective is to curtail the element of profiteering in some institutions which are currently beyond the scope of any such regulation,” said a government statement. In addition to the new penalties, institutions would also be required to make public information related to their admission processes.

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rogue_academic

What I am saying is that “critical thinking” mantra has been hijacked by humanities faculty and abused. In sciences we avoid such high phrases and simply teach scientific method by doing. Of course in physics and mathematics you can’t talk your way to the truth as the verification/falsification criteria are usually hard. We do not grant degrees by a majority vote, as is common in our humanities departments where faculty can rarely agree on methodology. Including physics into liberal arts curriculum is semantics. What I really have problem with is the fact that 60 hours out of 124 required for a bachelor degree are in the general education area. Our graduates cannot compete with other countries’ people with their meagre 64 credit hours of physics in 4 years (8 classroom hours a week — 1.6 a day, all from a very low starting point of their high school knowledge) under their belts.
idomeneo

OK, I’m lost. What was the point of this essay?

“It desperately wanted to be recognized as legitimate in the eyes of
the Catholic Church but thwarted itself at every turn by posting, on its
own authority, audacious heterodoxies.
In that, it bears some similarities to contemporary American higher
education, which is likewise often eager to impose certain heterodoxies
of its own while clinging to the mantle of traditional authority.”

I fail to see the similarity you’re drawing – between a group whose heterodoxies prevented it from being recognized as legitimate, and an institution you’re apparently criticizing for being both authoritative and heterodox.

“To the extent that its traditional authority depends on reading the signs, I don’t think higher education is getting high marks.”
Could you be specific, please?

“you miss its vitality, aspiration, and vibrant multicultural reality”
As viewed from a bus?

Adding to this article’s incoherence, I think you’re conflating the many meanings for the word “sign” – portent, symbol, advertisement, etc.
_perplexed_

If “grievance-mongering” is your view of multiculturalism on-campus, you are just plain missing the “vitality, aspiration, and vibrant multicultural reality” of real campus life that you ably detect off-campus. How much time to you spend on-campus (in dorms, dining halls, and classrooms), at different universities, with your eyes open?
peterwwood

“As viewed from a bus?” No, as viewed from living here for the last five years. The bus provides a visual synopsis.

“Could you be specific, please?” I drafted this as a longer piece with the kinds of specifics you probably had in mind but then judged that open-ended “signifier” worked better. I am content to leave it as a general observation that (1) the campus version of multiculturalism is remote from the lived experience in ordinary communities, and (2) American higher education has an impoverished view of the degree of self-determination among people outside the precincts of the campus.

Peter Wood
vpostrel

FWIW, I enjoyed the break from the usual tightly structured argument, preferably with a political thesis. There should be room, especially in a blog post, for the occasional rumination and room in the intellectual world for closely observing what is actually there before rushing to cram it into jargon-ridden theory. And this was a good line if you’re looking for a broad point: “the world has a perpetual surplus of signs and no lack of eager expositors.”
http://www.facebook.com/people/Jennifer-Jones/599806618 Jennifer Jones

Thought provoking.
_perplexed_

I think you need to work harder to distinguish between faculty discourse pertaining to multiculturalism, and multicultrualism as it is lived on campus. The two are only barely related.
idomeneo

Thank you for the response.
And thank you for the observations, as I didn’t get to see the draft.

However, I still don’t see the significance of these points; just to throw some comments on them:

“the campus version of multiculturalism is remote from the lived experience in ordinary communities”
I think campus life itself is quite different from ordinary life, not just its multicultural aspects.

“American higher education has an impoverished view of the degree of self-determination among people outside the precincts of the campus.”
I think most communities don’t fully understand other communities. For instance, these working class communities are most likely not going to have any idea what life at Princeton is like, even though it’s right in their backyard. And vice versa.
11137138

Two thoughts: 1) The same trip on Route 1 confirms much of what you’ve observed, especially the booming South Asian communities, but it also would take you by all the big box complexes (Target, Best Buy, etc) that stand in tension with the locally-owned businesses. Sometimes they are in conflict, other times they creatively co-exist (the multiplex movie theater that dedicates several screens to Bollywood movies.) 2) You should make the same trip from Ewing and The College of New Jersey (TCNJ) where you’d find a state-institution trying to reinvent public education away from the mega-universities like Rutgers and toward the liberal arts college. When it comes to selectivity and an emphasis on undergraduate education, you’d find TCNJ a lot closer to Princeton than RU.
ncod6472

“racialized, sexualized, and gendered” — what about able-bodied-ized?
Deaf people and people with disabilities state that the attitudes of society towards them are more disabling than the disability itself.
Do read the signs — and sign language!
ccchron

Isn’t this article, with its sweeping claims about identity politics in “contemporary American higher education,” in search of just the manufactured grievances it complains about? I feel like the author exited the highway sometime in the 1990s.

As a graduate student, I lived in one of the more run-down housing developments on this route. Maybe things are on the upswing now(?), but I didn’t get the same sense of vitality from the small-business environment there as the author’s more Romney-esque statements would suggest.