In three months from now, the network of National Law Universities (NLUs) will welcome incoming students who will secure their places in these institutions
after clearing the formidable hurdle of entrance tests. At present, there are sixteen
institutions located all over India which form part of the experiment that was
initiated with the establishment of the National Law School of India University
(NLSIU) in Bangalore in the late 1980s. A few more states have announced plans
to establish institutions of a comparable design in the near future. The
emergence of these considerably autonomous institutions dedicated to legal
studies has been described by many as evidence of improvement in the quality
and social perception of legal education. However, as pointed out elsewhere,
much of the external scrutiny of these institutions is based on narrow
parameters such as their intake of students through a competitive admissions
process and their visible output in terms of how graduating students fare in
the market for recruitment to well-paid positions in commercial law firms and
businesses. An excessive emphasis on what happens at these points of entry and
exit deflects attention away from several structural problems in the internal
working of the NLUs. It is almost as if the essential features of an
educational institution such as the performance of its teachers, the impetus
needed for carrying out meaningful research and transparency in administration are
unimportant and hence undeserving of sustained scrutiny.
In some
instances, objections to apathetic teaching and opacity in administration have
been sidestepped by pointing to the achievements of exceptional students in
inter-institutional competitions and the job-market, wrongly assuming that these
are comprehensive indicators of the institution’s quality. It is akin to saying
that the citizens of a country should not be bothered about widespread irregularities
in the distribution of public goods as long as it produces some star athletes
who succeed in competitions. While this worrying trend can lead us towards a
thicket of problems, lackadaisical and often inept teaching in the classroom is
the foremost concern. This is largely a consequence of the difficulties faced in
attracting and retaining motivated teachers. Since a majority of the students admitted
to the five-year integrated law programmes tend to be from upper-middle class
backgrounds, the perception of this problem is heightened in cases where teachers
do not have the same level of proficiency in the English language or when they
are unfamiliar with their students’ cultural preferences. Regardless of such oddities,
there is no justification for administrators to sit idly when an instructor’s
performance is found to be below par.
Many observers seem
to believe that increasing teacher-pay is a ‘one-size fits all’ solution for
improving the standards of instruction in the classroom. The assumption is that
better salaries are more likely to attract competent individuals who may
otherwise opt for other career avenues and at the same time act as an incentive
for existing teachers to up their game. However, financial incentives alone are
unlikely to yield the desired changes. For one, the disparity between the
salaries given to university teachers and the income that can be earned by
experienced litigators as well as those engaged in transactional lawyering is
likely to persist. Furthermore, across the board pay-hikes by themselves may
not stimulate a large pool of teachers to make conscious efforts towards
self-improvement. The missing links are appropriate methods for assessing the
performance of teachers as well as the periodic review of course-content and teaching
techniques. While most of these schools have adopted formal measures such as
preparatory workshops and refresher courses for faculty members, it is the
feedback collected from students that often invites heated debates. Since I have
been at the giving and receiving end of such anonymous feedback on taught
courses, I can safely say that there is some resistance to the idea that it
should be given weightage for routine staffing decisions such as subject-allocation
and relatively infrequent ones such as the regularization of contract teachers
or promotions for those with assured tenure.
The usual method
for gathering such feedback is by way of questionnaires distributed to students
at the end of the instructional period in a term. In some institutions, the
same process is being conducted online with the help of software that enables
individualized surveys. The students are asked to anonymously rate the
performance of their course instructors under different-heads such as the
quality of reading assignments, communication skills, time-management,
responsiveness to questions, guidance for writing requirements and availability
outside the classroom for answering doubts. The insistence on anonymity seeks
to serve a dual function, namely to ensure that those students who provide
adverse feedback on their teachers do not face retaliation and conversely that
those who provide positive reviews do not become the recipients of undue
favouritism in the future.
Since autonomous
institutions require the instructors who design and teach a course to evaluate their
own students’ performance in examinations and term papers, there is scope for
the feedback forms to include questions about the levels of satisfaction or
dissatisfaction with grading patterns. This often turns out to be contentious
since there is an understandable tendency on part of students to be more
concerned about their eventual grades. The inherent risk is that grievances
about stricter evaluation standards can play a predominant role in students’
evaluation of their own teachers who may otherwise be quite effective inside
the classroom. Likewise, teachers who are comparatively lenient when it comes
to grading may often get away with deficient teaching. A precautionary step
that is taken in this regard is to release the content of the feedback to
teachers only after the completion of the evaluation process. Irrespective of such
distortions, it may be useful to recount the presumptive benefits and costs of
collecting feedback in the first place.
The primary
argument is that the instruction and evaluation process should put the needs
and interests of students first. Since it is the students who interact with a
teacher over the course of a term, they are best placed to gauge whether the
latter’s performance meets their expectations. The apprehension is that in the
absence of any credible feedback mechanism, instructors may become so detached
from the needs of their students that the entire process can become redundant.
This can happen in different scenarios. You may have the case of an instructor
who is very knowledgeable and renowned for scholarship in the respective field.
However, it is quite possible that this teacher communicates in a manner that
is too complex. Even the choice of reading assignments and examination
requirements may be beyond the reach of students who are in their formative
stages. Given the extant power-relations in our classrooms, students may
hesitate to openly point out such problems. On the other hand, we can consider
the possibility of an instructor who is unable to meet the minimum standards expected
in such a role. This could be evident in numerous ways such as poor
communication skills, inadequate preparation for the classroom,
disproportionate coverage of some topics which crowds out the time needed for
others and an inability to engage with comments or queries from students. In
some cases, this instructor may either evade incisive questions posed by
students or resort to disproportionate assertions of authority when the
students express their dissatisfaction. In the first scenario that involves the
competent yet incomprehensible instructor, the anonymous feedback collected
from students serves as a useful dialogical device which can help instructors in
aligning their methods with the capacities and needs of their students. In the
second scenario involving the underprepared or apathetic teacher, the feedback
can highlight issues that need corrective interventions by administrators and
other faculty members.
In turn, we must
also examine the arguments against giving weightage to anonymous feedback gathered
from students. As described above, students tend to overemphasize evaluation
patterns instead of the quality of course materials and in-class teaching. This
can lead to serious distortions if their ratings and comments are unquestionably
used to make staffing decisions such as the removal of a contract teacher or
the denial of promotion to someone with assured tenure. Furthermore, deep-rooted
differences in the socio-economic backgrounds of students and teachers may lead
to an escalation of minor animosities that routinely arise in campus life. However,
the strongest objection to relying on student-generated responses falls back on
an idealized characterization of higher education. The assumption is that
teachers are positioned as trustees who are expected to act in their students’
best interests precisely because they possess the requisite experience and
expertise to do so.
Sometimes it is
in pursuit of the students’ long term interests that teachers prescribe
challenging readings, engage in sophisticated classroom discussions and sternly
monitor the student’s performance. Instructors may deliberately adopt
provocative and seemingly counterintuitive positions in order to compel their
students to examine issues from different perspectives. The use of such methods
could be perceived as excessively burdensome by students, thereby leading to a
pushback of sorts which is reflected in their ratings of a teacher. Students
may often be unable to appreciate the teacher’s efforts to expose them to nuanced
ways of reading and thinking. In fact, it is very likely that they may only
understand the importance of what they were taught in hindsight, in some cases several
years after they finish their first degree. In the autonomous law schools,
there is the additional expectation of clearly demonstrating how what is
discussed in the classroom bears any relevance to what students may encounter
in the workplace. Especially among undergraduate students, this often creates an
unhealthy impatience with discussions of theoretical materials. Owing to such
possibilities within higher education, one may hold the view that staffing
decisions made on the basis of student feedback can often prove to be
counterproductive.
Coming back to
the particular case of the newer law schools, it must be reiterated that most students
come in with high expectations after securing top ranks in extremely
competitive entrance tests, whereas the market for teaching positions is
under-developed. This reality makes it difficult to fall back on the
conventional wisdom about the nature of higher education. Viewed in this light,
we must be skeptical of the claim that students are not in a position to judge
their teachers. Even if that claim holds good to a certain extent, it is
difficult to disagree with the qualified use of student feedback alongside
other criterion for monitoring the performance of teachers. Some of us may have
serious apprehensions if it plays a determinative role in decisions about
continuation in service and promotions. The most serious objection would be
that such a process likens the teacher-taught relationship with the one that
exists between buyers and sellers of commercial goods and services. There may
also be a worry that such measures could possibly invert the power-relations
that exist between instructors and students. However, there is an unambiguous case
to be made for its dialogic importance, principally to enable teachers to
improve their methods of instruction and course-content over time.
Admittedly,
the problem of unsatisfactory teaching in the NLUs cannot be tackled through
reliance on student feedback alone. In many cases, the immediate cause is a mismatch
between a teacher’s prior training and the assignment of teaching
responsibilities. As described earlier, the overarching problem is that of a limited
pool of individuals with the requisite qualifications who are willing to take
up full-time teaching positions. Among those who are available, there tends to
be a concentration of qualifications in certain fields such as constitutional
law, substantive penal laws and public international law. Inevitably,
practice-oriented subjects such as the laws relating to property, taxation and
procedure are frequently taught by those who don’t have much exposure to the
uncertainties that arise while dealing with clients and public officials in a
professional setting. While there are a few who choose to teach these subjects
after gaining experience in litigious or transactional settings, a majority of full-time
teachers do not have such a background. While some career academicians may
progressively become well versed with the statutes, precedents and principles
related to these fields, students tend to feel shortchanged in the interim. The
situation becomes even more unsatisfactory when efforts to involve practicing
lawyers in the taught programmes attract those who may be unsuited for the
latter. In some notable cases, even eminent justices and lawyers have struggled
to perform in classrooms whose dynamics are fundamentally different from those
inside the courtroom.
Apart
from the presumption that the best talent in the legal profession may be consciously
staying away from the teaching branch, another set of concerns can be
identified with recruitment practices and administrative decision-making. While
these issues deserve a much longer comment, I will briefly point out one of the
visible maladies. There are numerous instances where instructors are initially
hired to teach a given set of subjects but are subsequently asked to teach subjects
in which they may have no previous experience or exposure. In conditions of
scarcity, this may be a compromise that is eventually accepted by the immediate
stakeholders. However, it is difficult to defend such a mismatch in elite
institutions such as the NLUs which receive public funds and recover a
considerable part of their operating costs from tuition fees. Unfortunately,
age-based hierarchies and substantial reliance on teachers appointed on a
contractual basis tends to aggravate this problem. Instead of trying to solve
this problem of misallocation, administrators tend to become indifferent since
younger teachers who are hopeful of regularization would be reluctant to openly
disagree with the existing arrangements. There is the very real possibility of
such checkerboard solutions becoming the norm and thereby eroding the quality
of instruction inside the classroom.
The
students who enroll in these residential institutions start their studies at an
impressionable age. While a few approach these programmes with predetermined career
preferences, a majority of the students form their subsequent choices through a
fusion of experiences and influences, most importantly those shaped by their teachers
and peers. Unfortunately, we seem to have come to a point where the
contributions of teachers are being increasingly seen as incidental to the
entirety of the student experience. If we do not take decisive steps to arrest
this slide, there is a grave danger that the national law schools will be
reduced to the pejorative description of degree-selling enterprises.
(This post was originally carried on barandbench.com on August 20, 2013. I have re-posted it here because it has since gone behind a paywall.)
