LSE's modest saviour

It follows that, even at the best of times, running things is never fun. But to run an academic institution is masochism at its best (or, depending on your point of view, worst).

And it gets a lot worse when you have to run an academic institution (or think tank) full of economists. It is hard to think of a worse fate. Few people I know have emerged unscarred.

The point, eventually, is to be graceful about whatever the experience does to you. And that is the chief merit of this little autobiographical note by one of India's most respected citizens.

I G Patel tells the tale of his six years at the London School of Economics (LSE) with the equivalent of a literary wry smile and a series of classic understatements. Thank god, he writes for example, "I left the place no worse than I found it."

He does not labour the point but as everyone knows had it not been for him, the LSE may have become, well, just another polytechnic pretending to be a university. Dilution is always easy. To fight it off is truly heroic. Such was the onslaught by Margaret Thatcher that the LSE ran into serious financial difficulties in the early 1980s.

Government funding of all universities was set to decline by about 2 per cent in real terms till the end of the decade. For LSE, which the Thatchers regarded as a bastion of left wing clap-trap, the cuts had begun earlier and were in many ways more damaging. (When she met him, Mrs T asked Dr Patel if he was the "new principal of that school" and her husband treated him to a diatribe on the social sciences which he thought served no useful purpose).

Dr Patel joined as Director in 1984 and left in 1990. He refuses to take loud credit for it, as so many others would have done, but the fact remains: he rescued it from ignominy because it was not just money that was short.

Academic talent, too, was drifting away, mostly to the US. He, therefore, had two tasks before him "" to get money and to get talent. By 1987, he had restored the LSE's reputation sufficiently for it to once become a place worth working for. More money and more centres for research and study on specialised areas made this possible.

The fee battle that Dr Patel had to fight also provides interesting insights for the Indian situation where universities charge as little as Rs 20 on average as tuition and have not revised the fees since 1955! He succeeded in having them raised "" for foreign students mainly.

And far from their numbers coming down, more of them started to come. Reason: everyone had been waiting for someone to take the first step and the moment the LSE did, all other universities followed suit. It is interesting to note that whereas in the mid-1980s, tuition came to around £ 3,500 annually, it now comes to only a little more than twice that amount.

This is doubtless because of the increase in the number of students, made possible by the sheer diversity of the courses on offer. The contributions that LSE alumni have made, both in terms of time and money, is also something worth emulating.

Our IITs, to some extent the IIMs and a some of the colleges run by church-related organisations, have a strong tradition of networks. Dr Patel has some interesting observations to make in this regard.

But it was not just these things. There was another incident that surely deserves mention as it relates to one of the greatest philosophers of the 20th century "" Sir Karl Popper. Since a great deal of the LSE's reputation was due to Popper, Dr Patel arranged with the university to have a chair in philosophy named after him. Then came the question of finding a suitable person to hold the chair. After the usual search and procedure, a name was finally approved by all "" except Sir Karl.

Dr Patel hints that Popper may have been disappointed that one of the names suggested by him had not been accepted or because he felt that the candidate may not have fulfilled the objective of carrying forward his philosophy. He made his displeasure known and in the event, it was decided to hold the chair in abeyance and it is still to be filled. It will be interesting to see when someone is appointed to it and who that someone is.

AN ENCOUNTER WITH HIGHER EDUCATION

My Years at LSE

I G Patel

OUP

Pages: 200

Price: Rs 495