The winds of change are blowing at last...

So, foreign universities are about to set up camp in India. And local universities run helter-skelter to get their acts together before they make fools of themselves before their ‘phoren’ counterparts.
The newspapers are so interesting these days! A few days ago, the vice chancellor of Gujarat University, who is usually quite smug and over-confident about his governance of this infamous institute of supposed higher learning, said something along the lines of ‘we will look like municipality schools in front of those universities’. And I started laughing out loud just reading that one quote. Because, uh, hello, hasn’t Gujarat University always operated like a municipality school? With unending bureaucratic processes and SEVERELY messed up administration, it doesn’t seem like a university to me at all. Ok, I myself got my degree from there, and I should perhaps have some attachment to my alma mater but I can’t help being annoyed that I never got the marks I worked really hard for. Instead, some person who didn’t study half as much as I did got away with a first rank; hundreds of people who can’t string two sentences of English properly scored higher than me on the English compulsory paper; people who blindly wrote out whatever they crammed up got the top ranks where as I was just left laughing at myself for taking pains to understand every concept in-depth. In one word, their entire system is unfair, which is why I’m never going to be particularly proud of the green colored degree certificate I received some time back.
While at college, our professors implored us that the university’s archaic examination system had not changed in decades, so would definitely not change for us. The only option was to accept it and do the requisite mugging up and focus on quantity rather than quality if we wished to score well. Everyone had given up all hope that any improvement would ever come about, but now, it seems like that is exactly what’s happening!
From next year, universities in Gujarat plan to begin implementing the Choice Based Credit System, because they have suddenly realized that that’s how most of the rest of the world’s higher education systems functions. I wish they could have evolved like this much, much earlier, but oh well, as they say, better late than never. At least the prospect of some looming competition from prestigious institutions has finally made everyone wake up and smell the burning coffee!
I just hope, for future generations’ sake, that they do the whole transition well. I hope the choice of courses doesn’t stay limited the way it is right now; I hope they offer all kinds of degrees like foreign universities do, from Anthropology and Aerospace Engineering to Linguistics and Creative Writing, from Dance and Drama, to Religion and Music. It will take a long time for things to improve in the true sense of the word, but at least the process is finally beginning. And I’m keeping my fingers crossed as I smile sinisterly at the fate of the great Gujarat University, which has landed itself in boiling, hot soup. At long last. :)