Academics Vs Administration: A False Dichotomy!

The "academic acumen" vs "administrative acumen" split is a false dichotomy and it has lead to many a sound academic staying away from administrative responsibilities. This has hurt us because we then often (read: usually) have administrators who have neither been brilliant teachers nor deep researchers - so they don't really understand what it takes intellectually to excel at academics.

This is the central reason why the quality of research is dipping at most universities and faculty members are increasingly working on short term simple problems, writing review articles to build citations, paying for authorship of papers, publishing in paid journals, etc. while very very few folks are engaging themselves in solving difficult and important problems that actually matter. (Teaching of course has gone out of the window completely. Every faculty member knows that the time and effort invested in teaching is wasted time because excellence in teaching is simply not on the agenda at most universities in India today and does not get any credit - period.)

We need to break this dichotomy. Academics who have demonstrated excellence in teaching and have successfully worked on tough research problems need to be directors and vice chancellors. They will know what needs to be done and will start correcting course - this is the important thing. The rest of it - leadership skills, the ability to negotiate university politics, have photographs clicked and give news conferences, etc. - comes later and can be picked up in time by any reasonably intelligent person. First things first: We need excellent academics at the top.

What I'm suggesting above will certainly need a certain amount of sacrifice from academics intensely engaged in high quality teaching and research. But we need to make this sacrifice for five years (the usual term of director or vice chancellor) if we are to protect our universities from intellectual decay. Else we are looking at a very very bleak future where there will be almost no universities left that we can trust to provide our children with excellent education - and that's a student's (and their parents') fundamental right!