304
Commissions repeatedly expressed their fear of deterioration of quality if the sys-
tem is expanded. In other words, the Committees preferred a high-quality higher
education sector with limited access to a poor-quality system with expanded access
to promote equity.
The Commissions were focussing more on research and teaching in higher edu-
cation institutions rather than teaching and research on higher education. They
made a clear division of labour between research and teaching. The Committees
considered that a major share of the postgraduate studies (Master’s onwards) and
research should be carried out in the university departments and research centres
and that the colleges need to focus more on teaching than research. In fact, the
Education Commission of 1964–1966 recommended that nearly 80% of the post-
graduate study programmes and research should be the responsibility of university
departments rather than the colleges (NCERT 1971 ).
The Committees argued that teaching and research needs autonomy and freedom
from regimentation of ideas. Higher education is not organized under one regula-
tory body or under one examination board and did not favour any text books, uni-
form syllabus and any one set of text books for all students following similar study
programmes in different universities. Further, the Committees and Commissions
found dependence on textbooks in higher education as disturbing since the text-
books prevents the students from developing their own judgements (Mathew 2016 ).
The Committees and Commissions were not in favour of an engagement on what to
teach, how to teach and evaluate what has been taught in higher education the way
they were measured and evaluated in school education. They talked about the ‘crip-
pling effect’ of external examinations in higher education and argued in favour of
replacing them with internal and continuous assessment (NCERT 1971 ).
All these recommendations taken together meant that teaching and learning in
higher education should be an autonomous process, and therefore, the pedagogy
and evaluation procedures need to depend upon the teacher. Under such circum-
stances, it was very difficult to develop a common framework for teaching, research
into teaching-learning processes and evaluation systems which are common in a
typical school system. In my view this understanding of higher education was not
very conducive to develop studies on higher education focusing on pedagogical
aspects and classroom practices.
Higher education as a field of study has yet to emerge in India, although there are
research studies on higher education. An attempt is made in the following para-
graphs to analyse development or nondevelopment of higher education as a field of
study in India based on two criteria, namely, study programmes and research on
higher education.
Study Programmes in Education
The first instance of starting a study programme in education followed the recom-
mendation of the Calcutta University Commission of 1917–1919 for establishing a
department of education in the University of Calcutta. Later, Bombay University
N.V. Varghese