The Nepali intelligentsia excels in playing the blame game. Finding fault and pointing fingers at others for everything wrong with society and polity is the favourite pastime of the comfortable class. It is rare to find a sense of self-reflection, let alone self-reclamation, even among those holding leadership positions in their respective fields for long.

Along with the government, the school management, the community of teachers, and parents of students up to the secondary level are the four most important pillars of quality education. Public schools began to deteriorate the day the social elite abandoned them altogether in the 1980s. Even teachers of public schools don’t enrol their children where they teach.

A similar practice of finding fault with everyone other than the self is prevalent in most other elite professions, such as medicine, law, accountancy, auditing, banking, engineering, insurance and even journalism to a certain extent. Since it’s time for a change of leadership at Tribhuvan University (TU), the state of higher education is the flavour of the season.

Almost every allegation being thrown around about various professions has an element of truth in it, and university education is no exception. Politicking has indeed played havoc with the governance of federal and provincial universities. It’s more common for senior university teachers to be found at programmes of various NGOs or political parties than in laboratories, libraries, seminars or classrooms. The so-called “helmet-teachers” spend more time commuting between various outlets of educational businesses than interacting with students of their primary institution. Student associations of TU boast of their affiliation with political parties rather than their ability to question their ideological position, raise issues of public interest or voice academic concerns.

While the state of the entire public education in the country is deplorable, the intelligentsia is particularly worried about the condition of universities because that’s where the more educated and often the more voluble section of the middle-class Nepalis have traditionally looked for employment for over half a century. Teaching at TU has long been considered a pensionable government job with slightly less power and fewer perks but more leisure, greater political influence and higher social recognition. Even though being a teacher at a university no longer commands as much respect as it once did, it is still relatively attractive.

Ostentatious education

Recently, it was reported that 110,217 students obtained the obligatory no-objection certificate from the government to study in over 100 countries of the world. Meanwhile, several departments at TU and other universities have seen a fall in the number of students seeking admission. Academics often bemoan that if the fall in admissions continues, their institutions may be forced to amalgamate certain courses or even close some departments altogether. However, nobody has a clue about the ways of reversing the trend, maybe because it is irreversible.

Academic planners need to accept that the exodus of Nepali students has more to do with the possibility of gainful employment abroad than the availability, suitability, cost and quality of education. Higher education is no longer a ticket to guaranteed employment, and not everyone can afford the cost and time of going to college for self-improvement or the love of learning. When the government was getting bigger and new schools were being built all over the country between the 1950s and the 1980s, it was possible to believe that a TU graduate would be absorbed—at least in the fast-expanding education sector. That is no longer the case. Opportunities for the highly educated in the private sector of Nepal remain—well, in the private domain.

Changes in the modes of production change lifestyle as well as values. In feudal societies, bearing arms for the lord was a marker of prestige. Scholars were accepted as delightful eccentrics. Trading needed accountants, interpreters, lawyers and fixers. Industrial societies added skilled operators, mechanics and engineers to the demand for manpower. Arts and literature have always remained the obsession of the leisurely class that didn’t have to work to make a living.

Higher education's opening to the masses was a product of the expansion of the print media and subsequent independence movements fired by the imagination of the French, American and Russian revolutions. Education was believed to set the weak free and open the doors for them to the upper echelons of social, cultural and political hierarchies. Perhaps such a moment in human history has passed. The economics of cost-benefit analysis is all that matters in a world divided between the hyper-rich and the ultra-poor with a fearful middle class squeezed in between. The dread of falling off the ladder prevents the aspirational class from investing too much time and money in higher education.

The so-called knowledge economy relies on ideas, information and perception management rather than optimising the output from investment in capital, technology, resources and workforce. Somewhat similar to the status of philosophers, writers and artists of the Mughal Period, Victorian Era, Belle Epoque or the Gilded Age that helped the powerful run their possessions, the hyper-rich in the age of V=virtual realities and artificial intelligence will require an elite force of highly educated doctorates in STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) and humanities that will remotely control armies of skilled workforce in various locations of their ever-expanding global empires. In much of the developing world, higher education for the middle class is fast becoming a superfluous ornamentation if it’s not a ticket for migration to Australia, Europe or North America.

Ungovernable behemoths

According to a popular data-aggregating web portal, TU has “the highest number of registered students in terms of full-time equivalents worldwide, teaching 482,000 students” in the academic year 2023-24. Once the number of teaching, administrative and support staff is added to the tally, its size will easily surpass the entire population of a country like the Maldives. The exact figures are hard to come by, but the combined acreage of TU’s central and other campuses all over the country will probably be bigger than the geographical area of some island nations. It’s difficult to govern such a complex institution with far-flung campuses, unmotivated students, disinterested teachers and an apathetic community. Redesigned in the 1970s to generate uniformity and ensure conformity in the country, TU is no longer an appropriate model for the production and dissemination of knowledge.

For a remittance-driven economy of consumption, more trade schools will be needed to produce a skilled workforce for local needs and manpower export of higher value. A few boutique universities, rather than affiliating behemoths duplicating the TU model, will be enough to train a small number of local interlocutors and informants for the scions of independently wealthy that return home after their higher education abroad. Some academies and research institutions will survive as shelters for scholars, eccentrics and mavericks passionate about playing with ideas. No matter who ends up on the hot seat of the vice-chancellorship of TU, it will be run at best like any other government department. Appropriate leadership is necessary but not sufficient to improve the functioning of outmoded universities in peripheral countries.