Sorting and Shaping: Explorations in Helplessness of Higher Education Institutions

After independence, the Education Commission called for creation of new institutions to undertake the task of higher education in technology, agriculture and management. Three models of higher education were imported. In the field of technology, the ‘MIT model’ was advocated by the Sarkar Committee. The five Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) were the results of this thinking. The ‘Land-grant University Model’ provided the basis for development of agricultural universities. The ‘Business School Model’ was instrumental in the creation of the Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs) at Ahmedabad and Calcutta. In this paper, we explore the implications of importing the ‘MIT model’ in the case of IITs and venture some possible explanations of the feelings of institutional helplessness through indepth data collected in one IIT. We believe that the “sorting” process implicit in the MIT and the Business School models, in particular, when imposed on the Indian socio-economic milieu has aggravated the isolation of the elites ffrom the realities of the country as well as increased dependence on the West. This, has, in turn, resulted in mediocrity and irrelevances even in those islands of intended excellence. The IIT experience serves to illustrate this argument. Our limited experience suggests that the IIMs may be no better off. Our argement is developed through – 1) understnading the phenomenon of sorting and how this distances the IIT graduate, in particular, from the rest of the engineering graduates, among others; 2) understanding the phenomenon of institutional helplessness in shaping the career choices of the IIT graduates, and finally through 3) placing the argument in the perspective of transfer of intellectual technology from the West.