I hear a lot of people talk about introducing the tenure track system in Indian universities. It will not succeed for the following two reasons:
1. We don't understand what the tenure track system is :)! Universities in USA give their incoming assistant professors very generous research start-up grants to start setting up their laboratories (and of course give them space to set up their laboratories :)!), fund at least a couple of PhD students and post-docs to work under them, keep teaching loads very reasonable (~3 courses per year), understand that the first few years are to "build", and extend every service and resource possible to enable excellent research progress. With all this in place, the assistant professor is evaluated after about seven years on all three parameters: teaching, research and service. If found suitable, he/she is promoted to associate professor with tenure (permanent appointment). If not, they have to seek a position elsewhere.
Most Indian universities (even most of the "elite" ones) will keep an incoming assistant professor thirsty on almost every resource he/she needs, yet insist on a significant output :)! The situation is of course worse in private universities. Its common to see teaching loads as high as Harvey Mudd (a purely undergraduate college with a high teaching load of five courses per year!), limited exceptions aside - quality PhD students and post-docs are in general mere pipe dreams at most universities in India, lab space and start up grants are miserly (at some places still unheard of!), sometimes even an office and a computer isn't provided, yet, I've heard of places that have incoming assistant professors give a "signed commitment" to publish a certain number of papers per year from Year 1 :)!
This is not tenure tracking :)! This is a dishonest joke :)! As I said right at the start, we don't even understand what tenure-tracking means :)!
2. Universities in USA know when to make exceptions. For example, a university as good as Princeton has been known to hire an exceptionally talented young faculty member directly as a tenured full professor. At another university (U Maryland) a faculty member was offered tenure and promotion just three years into his tenure-track period by a competing university (UM Ann Arbor) - and everyone understood and wished him well when he accepted and moved. When he became a Full Professor, he had published 11 papers - each strong enough to make a dent in his field - that's as clear an example of emphasizing quality over quantity that you'll ever see. His full story is covered here: Strike a Pause: Excellence In Education is Not As Easy As 1, 2, 3... :) (strike-a-pause.blogspot.com).
We do not understand all this. We have rules and forms and bureaucratic requirements that will put everyone thoughtlessly through the same washer and drier :). And changing universities to move up is considered as a sign of "weak commitment" - how convenient :)!
Its best if we don't try to blindly ape the west. Instead, lets grow up and start conducting ourselves a bit more maturely and with more commonsense than we do today. Then many possible ways to improve ourselves will come to our minds which will actually be effective. Otherwise just blind aping and making noise will sink us in quicksand. That damage is permanent!
[I also invite you to read: Strike a Pause: Academic Productivity: A Misnomer (strike-a-pause.blogspot.com)]
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