The word "Autonomy" is a much misunderstood framework in educational administration. Autonomy is today treated in a very narrow sense of only examination orientation and offering some slightly fine tuned version of the existing university recognized courses or programs.
But autonomy is a concept with far greater depth and zeal. A college should take up the responsibility for achieving excellence and own up both achievements and mistakes in process and delivery of education. That's what autonomy is. In other words, a college should set its own milestones for excellence in input, educational process, assessment and evaluation, besides output and in long term social impact which the institution creates.
Institutions such as IITs, IIMs, BITS and IISc or our own PSG or TCE-Madurai, are well-known organizations that have used their autonomy to the full extent. They maintain a transparent and high quality oriented admission process, attract the best of students and teaching talent, best of researchers, in a vibrant educational ecosystem, have tough markers for examination question paper setting, educational process and classroom delivery, and output. These institutions have also made a social impact in the long run. their alumni are leaders in industry, education, politics, business, academics, etc.
In terms of academics, even India's well known institutions are not fully utilizing their academic and administrative autonomy to create more innovative courses/programs. In American or British universities, it is not uncommon to find someone pursuing sciences and arts/fine arts in their UG program. Also, institutions abroad believe in creating revolutionary academic changes by putting disparate differently-thinking minds in one place. For ex: history, science and agriculture major students have the opportunity to work together to look at how agricultural sciences have grown and how some new innovations can be fostered in this....the possibilities of utilizing autonomy to benefit all stakeholders is immense.
Affiliating colleges: To quote Dr. V.C. Kulandhaiswamy, former VC of Anna University and Madurai Kamaraj University, affiliation is a curse and an outdated concept. In the affiliating system we see that 85 per cent of the students are outside the university system and only 15 per cent are within the university system, with access to the best of professors, teaching learning process, equipment and research exposure. His suggestion which has also been echoed by the National Knowledge Commission, is that the govt should select the top 10 per cent higher performing institutions among the 18,000 plus colleges in the country, and grant them university status. As for the rest, they should be given a five year time window to either become on par with the universtities, or be relegated to community colleges that offer diplomas and not full degrees. In the existing affiliating system, universties neither have the time to manage its own affairs or the affairs of their so-called affiliated colleges. So research, teaching innovations and process innovations suffer and cannot be sustained.
Deemed Universities: It is clear that this process has turned out to be a problem areas in terms of money, muscle and political power. While government is dithering and seems to be undecided in whether to continue with deemed universties or not, students are clearly avoiding even better performing institutions, which manage to get deemed status. So first the stigma about deemed universities should go. for this, colleges should not be encouraged to apply and seek the status. This becomes a den of corruption. Instead, the govt should put in place a robust system with clearly defiined weightage for input, process and output excellence, encourage all colleges to meet the high quality milestones or indicators and once colleges reach that type of excellence, they should be granted deemed univ status by an independent empowered committee.
you can give specific examples of negatives and positives of the deemed university and autonomous colleges. the pros and cons of this.
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