Our Universities must, therefore, practise the strictest economy and vigilantly avoid every kind of superfluous luxury, “window dressing,” needless duplication and overlapping of effort. They should pool their resources, and co-operate with one another, so that by a deliberate co-ordination of effort among all the Indian universities the efficiency of each would be increased and the maximum good would accrue to the country taken as a whole for the minimum of expenditure, though some Universities may have to retrench then ambitions and ever-ramifying programmes.
How can this be done? Certain subjects will probably have to be taught in all the Indian Universities, these are the irreducible minimum of higher education. But all other subjects should be divided among our Universities, no two of them doing the same thing. Above all, specialised study at the postgraduate stage and research must be localised. If an elaborate course of Ancient Indian History and Culture is taught by a large and competent staff at Calcutta, it should be a sufficient reason for not attempting it anywhere else in India. If certain branches of Physics are cultivated at the Bose Institute, no other institution should undertake them. Biology is flourishing at Lahore; let it flourish there, Calcutta or Bombay should not attempt the highest study of this Science till our country is richer and better educated. Geology may well be specialised at Patna or Nagpur, Islamic studies at Aligarh. The highest students, viz, the researchers and candidates for doctorates, must be left flee to migrate from one University to another, as they do in Europe and America. There should be no water-tight separation of province from province above the Bachelorship stage. The corporate life and discipline which the membership of a College supplies to the freshman are no longer necessary after he has become a graduate. He should then be regarded as a free citizen of the entire academic world, a sannyasi who can make his pilgrimage to any shrine of learning that he likes. On the continent anybody can join a University and become a doctor of it.
I should like to go even further and advocate an exchange of professors between our Universities, as was the practice between England and the United States and between the U. S. A. and Germany before the war. An expert adorns (say) Madras. Let him spend a month or two at Bombay or Aligarh also, delivering there readership lectures followed by what I may call “workshop talk” on his subject with the local research students and teachers of it. In this way the normal work of neither Madras nor Bombay will be interrupted, but two or three universities instead of one will benefit by the inspiring personality and genius of the specialist originally engaged by only one of them.
So, too, in the collection of sets of journals of learned societies, our universities should co-operate with one another, to avoid unnecessary waste or repetition. Everyone of them will keep the few universally necessary journals, but as regards others, if Bombay takes A B C, Madras ought to avoid them and take D B F, Calcutta G H I, and so on. A resolution to this effect was agreed upon at the All-India Librarian’s Conference held at Lahore in January 1918. Each university should notify its valuable acquisitions to the others, so that all may know where in India a certain rare volume is to be found. We may, in time, even have a Catalogus Catalogorum of the university libraries of India.
How very necessary such economy of expenditure and co-ordination of work among universities is in India we can realise when we see that even England, the richest country in the world, needs it to-day Mr H. A. L. Fisher (the Education Minister in the Cabinet) in his address to the British Association at Cardiff “asked that each university in the country should limit itself to some special field of research. Every university should not attempt to do everything’ It is feared lest there should be overlapping and waste of energy as well as money” (Times Ed. Sup, 2 Sep 1920). But Calcutta is prancing on to bankruptcy in supreme disdain of such sound advice.
