Improve infrastructure in universities

[sajiv]

Improve infrastructure in universities

THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: The government should take immediate steps to improve infrastructure in the State's universities if there is to be any qualitative improvement in higher education, Kerala State Higher Education Council vice-chairman K.N. Panikkar has said.

He was delivering the keynote address at a programme organised by the University of Kerala here on Friday to felicitate those awarded Ph.D. in 2008.

Dr. Panikkar said massive amounts of money would be needed. The government may not be able to foot the bill. So, a new public-private partnership had to be evolved on this front; an initiative that kept in mind public good. The quality of education needed to be improved from the degree courses. Now, the graduate and postgraduate courses were weak and did not have the required academic worth. The weakest link was the graduate course. So, a student was intellectually and academically incapable of carrying out research of a high quality. Unless the graduate courses were given a multi-disciplinary orientation, it was pointless to talk about quality in higher education, Dr. Panikkar said.

Dr. Panikkar said the keyword of higher education was specialisation, which was missing in Kerala. The only difference between what was taught in class 12, in graduate courses and in postgraduate courses was quantitative and not qualitative.

In his inaugural address, university Vice-Chancellor A. Jayakrishnan said the quality of theses had gone down. Over the years, there had been a shift away from research in fundamental disciplines to applied disciplines. Though there had been a tremendous paradigm shift in favour of engineering and medicine, there were few who did research in medicine. Dr. Jayakrishnan said it was not a good idea to take away medical education from a university and carve out a separate university for it. If this trend continued, the university would be left only with traditional arts and science courses, he said.

Dr. Jayakrishnan and Dr. Panikkar later gave away mementos to those awarded the Ph.D.