HiEd Log

Any photographer worth her pic will direct a Principal while the Principal is shot in one's office! She will direct the Principal to hold a pen, keep a laptop open in front and may demand certain files on the table, preferably open. It is clear that the photographs of the principals, the scores of formal pics of bureaucrats in offices the photographer has been familiar with, has dictated this need. In our country often the Chair of the officer has to be wrapped in a white turkey towel too which has national tricolour bordering it. The pen perhaps symbolising the signature, the power the person holds, the file probably linking the man with his work and the laptop, a sign of the times. All these pieces of regalia add to the sobriety of the position of the Principal, it is believed. To the best of my knowledge , there are no Higher Education advisories which direct a uniform look for the heads of HEIs. Not so far. In my disobedient, unprincipal-like thoughts, I have been asking myse...

   The number of Ph D holders is rising fast in India. According to one estimate latest annual count stands above 24,000 in India. Globally the country is placed in the top 5 bracket in Ph D production. In a State like Kerala which takes education seriously, this is more pronounced. The drive to earn a doctoral degree among young academicians got intensified as the University Grants Commission (UGC), the apex Higher Education advisory body in the country, proposed making Ph D a mandatory requirement for entry into teaching in colleges and Universities as Assistant Professors. Those faculty members already in service too have recognized the urgency of the matter and have started acquiring the doctoral qualification. The weightage given to the degree in terms of pay, perks and accreditation too obviously is a driver of the trend.   A doctoral degree is held to be the highest academic qualification generally. It also is a claim of having deeply explored an area of...

  This post is a continuation of my previous post on B-Log on NAAC Accreditation and Quality Shift in HEIs. A series of posts is planned which will attempt to connect the NAAC accreditation needs and the HEI quality uplift possibilities with interventions at multiple levels of the teaching-learning processes and academic-administrative strategies. The first blog post (available here: http://pkbabu.blogspot.com/ 2022/07/naac-accreditation- and-quality-shift-in_21.html ) in the series was around the common question of why the supposed quality claimed by the HEIs in Self Study Reports (SSRs) fail to show up in actual practice. What I dwell on here is about how the Key Indices included in the NAAC Accreditation parameters of the HEIs can be considered as questions which a Department / Faculty member can ask to self-evaluate its/ his/ her performance and how the academic goal-setting can be tied to these accreditation norms. Questions / Key Indicators (KIs) about the curriculum plan...