Mumbai University needs to clean its rot, seek foreign shores later

Last month, Mumbai University vice-chancellor Sanjay Deshmukh and his team visited the United States to set up a local campus office and have been scouting for locations in Manhattan and Texas. The team has almost agreed to strike an understanding with the University of Akron, Ohio, as one of the partners for a few courses.

Akron’s ranking is 1,018 of 1,647 of Best Colleges in America according to the ranking done by the Department of Education, USA. Its acceptance rate of students is 87% according to the Princeton Review, which means the college is low on priority.

Mumbai University itself does not feature among the top 100 universities in the world (it ranks 701 (+) in the QS rankings) and if it wants to seek partnerships to improve its quality of education and systems, it should aim at seeking out the best on foreign shores.

This brings us to the point: is setting up international branches for the university the need of the hour?

Students have been constantly complaining about MU’s crumbling infrastructure, including run-down buildings and classrooms at the 150-acre Kalina campus. A decaying library, inadequate and poorly-maintained hostels and staff accommodation, unkempt open spaces, inhospitable canteens and lack of internal transport and even total absence of signage in the Kalina campus are common grievances on the hardware side.

Dearth of teachers, outdated coursework, a languishing distance learning institute, no audits of its affiliated colleges and administrative inefficiency, have become the hallmark of the university. Over the past year, the university’s reputation has taken a further beating with the corruption scam expose in its examination system. The urgent need for both administrative and infrastructure reforms only presses for the need for the university to reconsider its priorities and first focus on stemming the increasing rot.

(The writer is a research fellow at Observer Research Foundation, Mumbai)