Round 3 of the NAACcreditation

The results from the NAAC reaccreditation are now out, and our University has been awarded the overall score of 3.72 out of 4. This is lower than what we had in the first round of reaccreditation when we were given 3.89 out of 4. It is disappointing that we have slipped by 0.17, a percentage drop in quality of about 5%, however that may be estimated… From the documents that can be seen on their website, it is clear that with the passage of time the NAAC has gotten somewhat stricter, but that in of itself is little solace, given the effort that went into the preparation for the visit of the peer review team in January.

Be that as it may, all of us owe a word of appreciation to the Coordinator of the effort, Professor Sachi Mohanty of the Department of English. He was a veritable one-man army, mobilizing the efforts of so many staff in preparing reports, collecting information, supervising cleaning, painting, and doing the million things that we all saw him do.

As a colleague wrote to him after the NAAC peer team visit, “I want to take the opportunity to congratulate you and your team for an excellent academic presentation and for the efficient coordination and organization of the NAAC visit. We may know the grade/marks later, but whatever these may be, you and your team made the UoH community proud of its achievements.

I would also like to acknowledge and salute your personal commitment, dedication and devotion to the University; it is rare to find this today. You not only put together and presented an academic assessment through the voluminous report documenting the achievements of the various Departments and Centres and Schools but also highlighted the small and big endeavors made by the teaching, non teaching and student community. As a member of the campus residential community I want to particularly thank you for efforts you made to improve our environment and ambience and make the campus a clean and aesthetic place to live in. In ensuring this, you went beyond the call of duty.“

There are some advantages to not being No. 1 – one tries harder to achieve excellence… There will be time enough to discuss what all needs improving at the University- starting with the infrastructure, both physical and academic. But we should find both the time and the will to bring about some real changes, to earn the higher grades that we all know that we are capable of. Till then, we should keep trying.

See an interview on the local tv station: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=57gT5J8wrxE#aid=P-sgiBrV7IE

CKN: The Campus Knowledge Network

Yesterday’s Distinguished Lecture by Ashok Venkitaraman was exciting in more ways than one. First thing- it was a superb lecture. Great material, excellent presentation, very thought provoking and truly inspiring. And the best part was that you can see it again, here. And again. And tell your friends they can see it via the National Knowledge Network (NKN) all over the campus, and all across the nation.

The NKN is a state-of-the-art multi-gigabit pan-India network for providing a unified high speed network backbone for all knowledge related institutions in the country. The purpose of such a knowledge network goes to the very core of the country’s quest for building quality institutions with requisite research facilities and creating a pool of highly trained professionals. The NKN will enable scientists, researchers and students from different backgrounds and diverse geographies to work closely for advancing human development in critical and emerging areas.

This is just the beginning, I hope. We should have all our Distinguished Lectures made available to all Universities on the NKN, and as you can see from the map on the right, that network is pretty extensive. In some ways this would be better than just putting them on UoHTube, but since it is in addition to that, it only widens our range.

Our Campus Knowledge Network needs strengthening, though. Too often our ivory tower is actually more like a set of ivory minarets, each housing a School, Department or Centre, isolated even from each other. To that end, starting this Valentine’s Day, the University begins its Inaugural Lecture Series, an ongoing set of colloquia that will be delivered by newly appointed Professors. These lectures are to be very general and accessible to colleagues from all disciplines, and are open to students and faculty from all across the University. The first of these will be given by Professor Siba Udgata of the School of Computer and Information Sciences: February 14, 2014 at 3:00 pm in the Raman Auditorium.

Siba works on Wireless Sensor Networks, crucial to many aspects of the ubiquitous computing environment that we inhabit. A great opportunity for us all to learn about the work that he and his group are doing in the area of green computing among other things.

We do need to cross the many divides that separate the two or more cultures that inhabit our academic landscape, and it requires not just the effort of the lecturer to reach out to a diverse audience, but also the effort of the audience to listen and learn. I hope that our community on the campus can learn to engage with ourselves and the variety of scholarly work that is going on here at home, namely our very own campus knowledge network!

Ku·dos UoH

There has long been a need for a major award in the social sciences, something to parallel the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar awards in the sciences, and finally the ICSSR (the Indian Council of Social Science Research) has stepped in and instituted the Amartya Sen Award for “Any citizen of India/Overseas citizen of India (OCI)/Person of Indian Origin (PIO) below the age of 55 years, engaged in research and who has made outstanding contribution–theoretical and/or empirical–towards the advancement of knowledge in any field of social sciences, is eligible for the award.” The naming of the awards after Prof. Amartya Sen, Nobel laureate in Economics, is in itself another recognition of the exceptional contributions that Prof. Sen has made to the social sciences in India and up to ten awards will be given each year. These awards were announced by Kapil Sibal, then Minister for Human Resource Development, as part of a five-point agenda to rejuvenate social science in India crucial for sound policy decisions. “Unless we are able to lift the quality of research in India in social sciences, we will not be able to get the kind of data which are fundamental for policy makers to take decisions.”

It is therefore a distinct pleasure that one of the first set of awardees is our colleague Vakulabharanam Vamsicharan, Associate Professor in the School of Economics. Vamsi earned his Ph D in economics from UMass in 2004, and has been at UoH since 2007. His research interests center around the nature and changing dynamics of inequality in the contemporary economies of India and China,  on globalization and agrarian change in India, and consumption and wealth inequality during the period of economic reforms in India and China.

Our alumna, Kalpana Kannabiran, Director of the Council for Social Development in Hyderabad is another of the awardees.   A founder member of the Asmita Resource Centre for Women, Kalpana has worked on rights of indigenous communities and with community based disability rights groups in rural areas. Her work has focussed on understanding the social foundations of non-discrimination, violence against women, and questions of constitutionalism and social justice in India. Kalpana’s MA in Sociology was from UoH, and her Ph D from JNU.

(The University of Hyderabad connection to the awards is stronger- another of the awardees, Surinder Jodhka, Professor of Sociology at JNU, started his career here at UoH, and Amartya Sen is the one recipient of an honorary doctorate from our University who has not yet visited our campus to pick up the degree … )

But this is not all. In the Centre for Health Psychology, Thomas Kishore has been  selected for the Child and Adolescent Mental Health Award given by the Indian Association of Clinical Psychologists (IACP).

A Ph D from the Central Institute of Psychiatry, Ranchi, Kishore was at the National Institute of Mental Health, Kolkata prior to his joining the UoH a couple of years ago. The award is given to the Fellows of the Association who have contributed to the field of Child and Adolescent Mental health in India and will be presented at the next National Annual Conference of the IACP.

Great news to get as the academic year 2012-13 closes. Bravo all!

Scope this,

The National Academy of Sciences, India (NASI) in Allahabad is the oldest of the three scientific academies in India. Founded in the year 1930, with the objectives to provide a national forum for the publication of research work carried out by Indian scientists and to provide opportunities for exchange of views among them, the NASI Memorandum of Association was signed by seven distinguished scientists: Meghnad Saha, K. N. Bahl, D. R. Bhattacharya, P. C. MacMohan, A. C. Banerji, Ch. Wali Mohammad and N. R. Dhar. Several colleagues at the University are currently Fellows of NASI.

In recent collaboration with Elsevier, publishers of numerous scientific journals and books, NASI have introduced the NASI-Scopus Award for young scientists. From the Elsevier site, I gathered that the Elsevier Scopus Awards, started in 2005, recognize and reward the talent, knowledge and expertise of young scientists around the globe in a variety of disciplines. Currently, 15 countries have participated in the award, each marked with an event co-organized by Elsevier with prestigious national consortia, funding body or society. Traditionally, these academic groups nominate an award committee to recognize scholarly output, citations, and prestige of their region’s outstanding researchers across a range of subject areas. Publication and citation information provided by Scopus helps the committee to assess country-wide research strengths and rising talent.

Winners are selected after a fairly rigorous process, so it is particularly gratifying that one of our own has been named the NASI-SCOPUS awardee in Physics for 2013, one of 8 this year: Dr S Venugopal Rao of the ACRHEM.

Venu came to ACRHEM in 2007 from IIT-Guwahati, where he had joined the faculty of the Physics department after a postdoc in Scotland. His doctoral work was at the UoH, on Incoherent Laser Spectroscopy for the measurement of ultra-fast relaxation times and third order nonlinearities in a variety of organic molecules.

The philosophy of the Scopus Awards program is to celebrate science, and this has been emphasised over the years that the awards have been given.

Our heartiest congratulations, Venu!

March 5: A Date with the UGC Task Force on Gender

There will be a discussion with members of UGC Task Force on Gender on Gender Issues on our campus on Tuesday 5th March in the Auditorium of the School of Humanities at 10:30 am. The terms of reference of the Task Force is broad. Apart from issues of safety and security, the Committee is interested in knowing the space that women (students, faculty and employees) have in the academic and non-academic life of the university community. Some themes around which the discussion may be centered are

• Around CASH (its scope, its activities, accounts of its functioning by the members and the complainants)
• Women’s hostels (facilities, safety, security, lighting, timings, toilets, discrimination, restrictions etc.)
• Transport (within and from the University for students at different levels)
• Students groups and if they take up any issues concerning women students
• Issues of caste, ethnicity, region and religion – how do they effect women’s mobility, mobilization on the campuses.
• Women students and student politics – ability to participate, adequacy of representation,
• Issues of class 4 women employees and their access to grievance redressal
• Issues related to health care facilities – presence of a trained gynaecologist in the health centre, adequate care and medicines.
• Moral policing by groups/individuals on the campuses
• Academic equality: the academic space accessible to women, relationship between colleagues, students, supervisor-student and so on…
• Individual and group experiences of women on campus

The UGC would highly value written representations on all the above issues individually or
by a group. Anonymous representations are also accepted.

An Economics Sūtra

Professor Jayati Ghosh of the Centre for Economics Studies and Planning (CESP) of the Jawaharlal Nehru University has been very appreciative of the new book by our colleague G. Omkarnath of the School of Economics (as well as the Centre for the Study of Social Exclusion and Inclusive Policy), Economics: A Primer for India, recently brought out by Orient Blackswan. In a review in Frontline she says: This book should be required reading not just for the average person who wants to know more about how the economy and economic policies affects her own life, but also for media persons, government officials and legislators who determine economic policy, and even those regularly engaged in pursuing the profession in different ways. This may be a sad commentary on the state of public knowledge about economics. But the unfortunate truth of that statement shows how important it is for books like this one to have very wide readership and dissemination.

The fact of the matter is that there are few books that are written with sufficiently clarity in most fields, and especially on matters in the social sciences, where examples and instances from a local context can make the immediate connection. Prof. Omkarnath’s book is therefore quite unusual. The review has this more to say: … a new book by G. Omkarnath, Economics: A Primer for India (Orient Blackswan, Hyderabad, 2012) comes as a welcome addition. It is usually an act of great courage to write an introductory book on anything, and it is probably even more courageous to do so for a subject like economics. This book is nothing if not ambitious: it attempts “to bridge the gulf between the real world and introductory economics”, by introducing the subject through the medium of the Indian economy.

Given the grand nature of this task, the author has done a surprisingly good job, presenting the basic ideas of the economic structure of society and of change through time in a logical, clear and consistent manner. Omkarnath concisely discusses issues of production, distribution and growth; of market functioning and how it can be socially embedded; of the significance of macroeconomic variables like savings and investment and how they are measured; of various government policies and their effects on economies, including both state intervention and liberalization; of the challenges of economic diversification and industrialization in affecting both productive structures and employment; of the significance of petty production as well as the persistence of informality; and other issues directly relevant to the Indian economy.

There was a formal release at the University a few weeks ago, in collaboration with the publishers, Orient Blackswan. As the blurb on their website says, “Economics: A Primer for India is tailor-made for foundation courses in undergraduate programmes. Its pedagogic standpoint is based on two convictions. First, a foundation course need not invoke formal economic theory which is a contested terrain, especially at the present time. Second, such a course should be grounded on the empirical reality of the economy in which students live.

Context. As I remarked in an earlier post, some things are better taught with local references, and keeping the local backgrounds in mind.

Jayati Ghosh adds: Another significant feature of the book is its recognition of distributive issues – of how different economic processes and policies have different distributive outcomes, and that nothing is “neutral” in that sense. This enables a better understanding of the political dynamics that are closely associated with economics, within national economies and well as in international economic relations.

Obviously, in a book that attempts to deal with so many important concepts and to cover such a large ground in a relatively short space, there can be quibbles about the weight given to different ideas or about the degree of explanation provided for particular concepts or processes. But these are really no more than quibbles, because the overall result is an impressive one.

We need many more such books: local reference points are a great help in effectively internalizing universal subjects, and their value in pedagogy cannot be underestimated.

Anandibai’s Quilt

On the third floor of the Kelkar Museum in Pune, in the corner of the room where articles of clothing are displayed, is a quilt. Presented to the museum by ‘Wrangler’ Paranjape, this quilt is possibly the only physical article known to have been in the possession of the remarkable Anandibai Joshee (1865-87).

The image on the right is from a photograph I took a few years ago when a friend told me about its existence. The description provided at the display says that the quilt was a community effort by Anandibai’s friends to mark her return to India. As one can see, it contains scraps of cloth that must have formed part of everyday objects and clothing- it was difficult to not be moved- one irregular piece has mirrorwork , while another contains the name of her husband, embroidered in what must surely be her hand. I have not been able to find much about this in what has been written about Anandibai’s life, both in the popular press as well as in scholarly journals. As things go, maybe quilts are not that important.

But as one of the first Indian woman to be trained in western science, her story is iconic and inspirational, and in its own way as remarkable and as tragic as that of Ramanujan. She was the first Indian woman to get a medical degree, in the Women’s Medical College of Pennsylvania. Upon her return to India where she hoped to practice, she died of tuberculosis at the age of 22.

Commenting on her life, the sociologist Meera Kosambi writes: Anandibai Joshee was a true pioneer…. she was the first Indian woman to qualify as a medical doctor. She was also the first Maharashtrian woman to leave these shores for higher studies abroad, at the young age of eighteen.

In March 1886, when she received an American medical degree, she was barely twenty-one — an astonishing achievement in an era that refused even simple literacy to most Indian women! Anandibai chose a medical career because she wanted to serve other women who had inadequate health care. She defended this choice publicly and against heavy odds. Her personal life, too, was a continuous struggle on many fronts. Given the dramatic and eventful nature of her life, it is difficult to believe that she died so tragically young, just before her twenty- second birthday. [She was] an intelligent woman who was dispassionately perceptive of herself and her society — one who had independent views on contemporary gender issues. She was fearless in pointing out the obstacles to women’s education in India, and yet was firmly anchored to an Indian cultural and nationalistic identity. Anandibai was not merely India’s first woman doctor: she was also a feminist and a nationalist at a time when women were a rarity in the public sphere. And though she was not a scientist in the proper sense of the term, Anandibai wrote and researched in the field of public health/ epidemiology while still a medical student.

As has often been underscored, there are multiple identities that each of us carries, and Anandibai’s life, short though it was, was a patchwork quilt, not unlike that with which this post begins. Married young, she learned to read and write, not just Marathi, but 6 other languages including English. She she had a child at the age of 14 and upon losing that child due to inadequate healthcare, she decided to become a doctor. A letter written by her in 1883 gives a glimpse into her determination and strength of character. It is not unlike letters that reach similar offices even today…

Dear Sir, she says, I beg to ask, if upon any terms pecuniarily consistent with my means, I may be allowed to enter the Women’s Medical College of Pa. for a thorough course of study. I have with me seventy dollars, and my husband expects to send me twenty dollars per month less the cost of sending.

I was eighteen years of age last March.

I am not quoting the entire letter which can be seen in the archives of Drexel University, in their collection on Women Physicians, but the arguments she makes find an echo even today!

Though I may not meet in all points, the requirements for entering College, I trust that as my case is exceptional and peculiar your people will be merciful & obliging. My health is good, and this, with that determination which has brought me to your country against the combined opposition of my friends & caste ought to go along way towards helping me to carry out the purpose for which I came i.e. is to render to my poor suffering country women the true medical aid they so sadly stand in need of, and which they would rather die for than accept at the hands of a male physician. The voice of humanity is with me and I must not fail. My soul is moved to help the many who cannot help themselves and I feel sure that the God who has me in his care will influence the many that can and should share in this good work to lend me such aid and assistance as I may need. I ask nothing for myself, individually, but all that is necessary to fit me for my work. I humbly crave at the door of your College, or any other that shall give me admittance.

I’ve included a piece on Anandibai’s in Lilavati’s Daughters, a collection of essays on and by women scientists that I co-edited some years ago. Her story, while sad and complex, is compelling, and a perpetual testimony to the value of higher education, and to the importance of a higher cause.

Sacred Groves

The practice of demarcating portions of forests as “off limits” for all human intervention has a long history in our country, and indeed across the world. This traditional form of conservation, of declaring some space as “sacred”  has been increasingly recognized as a very effective means of preserving biodiversity, particularly as the pressure on land use increases and urbanization spreads.

Sources list about 750 known sacred groves in Andhra Pradesh, and this has been extensively documented by the  World Wide Fund and the AP state office of Sacred and Protected Groves.  Each of the  23 districts  have some, ranging from 2 in Adilabad to 133 in  Chittoor. Hyderabad had 10 of which essentially nothing remains, and this includes the “protection to vegetation given by temples, mosques and idgahs, [as well as] churches in these districts. About 134 species of medicinal rare and endemic plants are reported from these sacred sites“.

Sanctuaries and such sacred groves are really the last refuge of wildlife as well.  Coexistence is difficult: we humans tend to view any interference by other animals as a threat, unless of course we see them as food instead. And we really don’t think that other animals have rights, at least not in the way we think of “Human Rights”. Anyhow, whether animals have rights or not, a very tricky question that generations of philosophers and lawyers (among others) have grappled with,  one way in which we can at least try to see that our campus retains some of the biodiversity that it is famed for is that we set out to protect it using some ancient techniques in addition to the modern.

Some of you were at the meeting we held in DST the other day, on the campus master plan, and saw first hand what the pressures on the land were, and what little usable land is really all that is left. We have to ensure that the land that is there is for generations to come, to be able to accommodate the numbers of students we plan to have at the University in the future, and to keep the biodiversity there is now without letting it dwindle…

The three lakes on campus and the land surrounding them are prime candidates for our own modern day sacred areas. Given the importance of water and the role it is going to play in the coming times, there is no doubt we should conserve and preserve this very vital resource. And the sheet rock. There are large tracts of the campus that are covered with wonderful rock formations, many of which we need to keep in their pristine form, both for their sheer physical beauty as well as the biodiversity they sustain.

Our sacred groves, our  पवित्र वन.

Flattery

The sincerest form is imitation, it is said [1]. But even that sincerity has its limits, particularly when it comes to academic matters, when inspiration can quickly become plagiarism. Our University does not yet have an official policy on plagiarism, but we soon shall, I hope. And one that is designed for us, not just something copied from some other place…

Yesterday I took part in a meeting at the UGC on plagiarism in the university system and how to address it. In preparation for the discussion, I had been reading up on the guidelines issued by a number of institutions, mainly in the US, as well as some discussion on the matter in scholarly articles. It is clearly something that is problematic, especially since the legal issues can be unclear.

The basic point is simple enough to state. Plagiarism, as various dictionaries will tell you, is essentially the wrongful appropriation of another author’s language, thoughts, ideas, or expressions, and the representation of them as one’s own original work. What is complex arises from the difficulty of making a 0/1 test for most of the concepts contained in that definition.

Part of the difficulties we have with plagiarism is that the action is unethical, immoral, wrongful, but as of now, not illegal (in the strict sense of the word) as, for example, stealing some material goods might be. Trash or not, who steals my purse may be punished by law, but who steals my words and thoughts may suffer our collective displeasure, but most often not much more than that. The loss of reputation is one thing, but the loss of revenue is quite another- and there are instances in the recent past of plagiarists who have had to suffer one or both as a consequence of being detected.

In a University context, there are a couple of issues that need to be discussed and clarified. We are, as an institution, committed to the creation of knowledge. This knowledge often comes from standing on the shoulders of giants [2], by incremental growth. And also by recognizing what is the intellectual legacy we inherit, and the debt we owe to our intellectual forebears. This debt comes to the front in three principal arenas:

• Research papers and monographs,
• Dissertations and theses, and
• Term papers and assignments.

Plagiarism is extant in all these areas, and our University is not immune to the disease. To what extent can be debated, and what we should do about it is clear in principle, but less clear in practice. The lack of a policy on plagiarism- or indeed on other ethical issues that are relevant in the University context- is an impediment, but that alone should not be taken as licence for incorrect action…

Nevertheless, there are some general issues that we need to discuss, among which are

• The distinction between copyright infringement and plagiarism
• What is “common knowledge” and how to cite/not cite that
• What constitutes self-plagiarism
• What is the role of the institution in educating its constituents: students as well as teachers.

A zero-tolerance policy has its drawbacks: after all, not every piece of writing should be viewed as a potential case of plagiarism, and one should reserve punitive actions for demonstrable violations of an implicit honour code. So the onus, in some sense, is on us. In giving or reserving attribution, we first need to clearly enunciate what is acceptable and what is not. And then help the University community to uphold these values.

To briefly touch upon the points of discussion, copyright infringement- say the commercial showing of a movie without obtaining permission or paying a licence fee- is punishable by law. Plagiarism attempts to pass off another’s work as ones own: not quite the same thing… Common knowledge is just that- one need not throw in citations to well-known notions or ideas so long as one is not passing off something as one’s own when it is not- it can become tediously gratuitous to cite every concept contained in a text. To whit the examples at the top of the post… Plagiarising oneself is a fairly common failing, and many academics do find themselves repeating ideas, and sometimes whole sentences, especially the better crafted ones. But repeating whole paragraphs or sections is a no-no, as is dual publication, the publishing of a given paper in more than one place. And even if one does not repeat entire sentences or paragraphs, this type of duplication of work, publishing similar papers with small tweaks is common enough.

On the matter of University responsibility, the potential for moral instruction is there of course, but given the fact of our being a largely graduate University, the opportunities are not many. Making a thorough discussion of the major issues a mandatory part of the research methodology course is one option, but I believe that informal discussions starting early- when new students arrive in the University for instance- would also not be out of place. Given the emphasis on rote learning that we are led to believe is the “proper” way of learning at the school level, one has this step of the process to unlearn in a graduate environment.

Term papers that are a “cut and paste” job are unacceptable, of course. Dissertations or theses that have substantial bits of copying or plagiarism are routinely rejected, but here detection is the key. If the INFLIBNET Shodh Ganga project or VIDYANIDHI take off and it becomes mandatory for all M Phil and Ph D theses to be posted on the net, such detection will become easier- and will deter any potential plagiarist. And on the matter of research papers, while the penalties are quite severe- ranging from a blacklisting of the authors to a withdrawal of the paper, the issues of culpability are more blurred. Today’s research papers often result from collaborations that can be large- it is not uncommon to have over a hundred authors on some papers in experimental physics, while four or five is quite common in experimental biology- some problems can be attacked only with a diverse combination of talents and skills. In such circumstances, when only a few of the collaborators will actually write the paper in question, the equal culpability of all those listed in the authorship is difficult to sustain. Some journals go to the extent of specifying author contributions, but even this has its limitations.

In the end, a Mosaic law may be the simplest to enunciate, as yet another commandment… Thou shalt not copy another person’s work and pass it off as your own!

And then leave it to individual conscience to uphold … or break. With the assurance that the affected institutions will also step in to uphold what they believe to be the necessary norms.

___________________

[1] Charles Caleb Colton, in “Lacon. Or, Many things in few words” (1820).

[2] Isaac Newton, in a letter to Robert Hooke, 1676.

Aotearoa

Aotearoa is Maori for the land of the long white cloud, New Zealand. I’m on a week’s visit here courtesy the UGC, to see their eight Universities: The University of Auckland, AUT (the Auckland University of Technology), Waikato, Massey, Victoria, Canterbury, Lincoln and Otago.

The long white clouds  have been playing hide-and-seek until the last few days of the trip. Many days looked more like  the picture on the right, a set of dark grey clouds that seemed to follow the delegation wherever we went. However, this was briefly graced by an unexpected rainbow one evening…

It has largely been a week of discovery- I have known less about New Zealand than is warranted.  Especially Otago- the University we visited on the final day. The southernmost University in the world, this is also NZ’s oldest university, very research intensive. The first people I met immediately asked after our School of Chemistry and our Centre for the Study of Indian Diaspora!

The manner in which universities here are funded is largely indirect: the Government essentially fully funds the students who are then charged whatever it takes to give them an education. There are some advantages to this scheme- the entitlements become clearer- and the Universities have more flexibility in what they can do. In addition there are other direct funds, of course, but by funding students directly, this makes sure that the responsibility for education is shared.

Small is beautiful might well be this country’s byline, but even so, visiting 8 universities in 5 days makes for a rather rushed visit. Nevertheless NZ, for a population of 4 million people has 8 universities, while we with 1200 million people, should by that scaling, have 2400. In reality we have only about 600 in all- central, state, private and deemed. So there are many miles to go, and much to learn from others.

Sometimes the unexpected. In Victoria University in Wellington, the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences includes, among other disciplines, Art History, Film, Theatre and Media Studies, Nursing, Midwifery and Health, History, Philosophy and International Relations, Linguistics… Asian Studies, Literary Translation and even a University Press! The coexistence of all these areas under one umbrella is not as uneasy as one might imagine, at least that was the view presented… But even allowing for some latitude, our ideas of trying to federate the different centres that exist at the UoH should be viewed as an effort that is not without precedent or parallel.

One area that all the Universities highlighted was their efforts to include Maori into the mainstream of all efforts- academic and cultural- within the institution. Preserving the Maori language is one area where we can learn how modern tools can be used to keep traditions and cultures alive. This is a language without a script like many of ours, and seeing the loss of stories, traditions and culture if the language falls out of use has motivated all NZ universities to set up departments of Maori Studies. Our efforts at UoH have had similar foci in the Centre for Endangered Languages and Mother Tongue Studies and in the Centre for Dalit and Adivasi Studies and Translation. Perhaps there is something that we can learn from them, and they can learn from us in this area…

One phrase that kept recurring in conversations across the islands was that this was a country that “punched above its weight”. Certainly, that comes through- in fact this week’s The Economist points out that NZ has as many diplomats and diplomatic missions as India does, being about  1/300th as many in population, and some similar fraction in terms of area. Their Universities have a similarly large international presence, more than the numbers would warrant. I know these are not quite the right comparisons, and some things scale well while others do not, but it does seem that we do not always punch above or even at our weight. Mostly below, and even when we don’t need to.

The common colonial past  is reflected in the names. On the drive from the airport into Auckland city, one could see a sign for Khyber Pass Road, and Wellington has a suburb named Khandallah, with Bombay Street… There is an Indian diaspora that dates from the 1860’s and more recent migrations, of course.  There’s clearly a wealth of opportunities here for some serious academic engagement…