Oxford of the WHAT? WHAT of the East?

The term ‘Oxford of the East’ for Pune never fails to amuse me. It always elicits from me either an lol, or a short barking ha!, a chuckle, or a grim smile, depending on what fresh un-Oxfordly trait this city’s education institutions are exhibiting.
The term should have been given a rest quite a while ago, even before the mushrooming of colleges and autonomous institutions in every galli, recklessly promising students and their parents the moon. By the time people of my gen were in college, already many of the well-established places of Pune were simply coasting along on their past reputation. Truth be told, I do not remember a single inspiring lecture or student-teacher dialogue or mind-challenging assignment in the four years that I spent in one such place.
By this time, the Oxfordliness of Pune’s education joints was on the wane already. It was quite routine for dons…err… I mean lecturers… to show up, open the text book and read from it for 45 wearying minutes, while our stomachs and minds colluded to conjure up hallucinations of wada pav and chai. They also expected you to ‘take notes’ from this most un-donnish lecture. I distinctly remember pretending to write but actually sketching a fluffy wada pav and a steaming cup of tea.
The education standards of many such places, not so much slipped, as ossified into a kind of shabby sameness, that made them unresponsive to young minds or the changing world outside. And going by recent reports in the Pune Mirror itself, it seems that some of the ‘great’ places, including the phamous medical college, had other irons in the fire, like efficiently siphoning off library funds over years and years…and students can go to…go fly a kite.
Then came the newbies – an explosion of degree colleges, deemed univs, diploma schools – started up by people who were convinced that ‘edjjucation’ was the new cash crop. Just plant some buildings, apply some manure in the form of tall claims and promises, water with some tepid teaching, and voila, reap the benefits!
Let us decode some of the claims of these places that offer medical, engineering, design (yes, even aeronautical and automobile design), liberal arts (that new buzzword here that nobody is quite able to define as yet), media studies, IT, and suchlike.
• If the institute is named after some well-known Indian Captain of Industry, you can be fairly sure that said Captain has got a tidy sum of money to lend his name, and will show his face once, or maybe twice in the academic year, and virtually nothing of his stature and experience will really be available to the students.
• If they boast of state-of-the-art equipment, this usually means that there will be wi-fi everywhere, including the bathrooms, so that your kids can pretend to listen to a lecture and take notes while twittering and facebooking and texting away.
• If their brochure touts ‘national and international faculty’, this means they randomly and hurriedly send off a car to Mumbai and cajole or kidnap someone from the ad/media/art/industrial world to show up and hold forth. There may be white man thrown in, usually some academic who’s hoping for some India-exposure, and who half-way through the term reads the writing on the blackboard and books his ticket home. Entire courses are announced without faculty actually in place. However, read the websites of any of these places, and you would think we’ve outstripped Oxford in our dedication to education.
• “Hundred per cent result” means that they fail no one, and even lousy students are simply kicked upstairs every year.
*  "Liberal Arts" usually means helping themselves liberally to parents' money, and a rather open-ended, liberal view of actually delivering on many airy-fairy promises.

The list is long. The saddest part is that the higher education available in smaller towns of Maharashtra and the instability and mawaligiri in other cities and states of this country is so bad, that they continue to pour in to Pune, and our unOxfordly educational institutes continue to burgeon. It’s a seller’s market, no doubt.
Parents who’re going to part with their hard-earned, don’t be taken in by brand names, billboards and blandishments. And students are best advised to use that ‘gap year’ concept, not to see the world or volunteer in rural areas and other such lofty pursuits, but to carefully research what all these oxen..I mean Oxfords…are really delivering in the name of training and education.
Gouri Dange
Pune Mirror