From an article about bureaucratic suppression of Indian higher education:
Mr. Rao says space requirements are calculated to ensure students have the room to learn. “For quality education, you need enough space — enough space for labs, for teaching. Our experts decide based on these requirements after examining world-class universities.”
Richard Feynman criticized what he called cargo-cult science — pseudo-science (including my area, animal learning) that had the appearance of science but didn’t actually work. Mr. Rao’s beliefs about what quality education requires are based, like cargo cults, on what is easy to see.
I seem to remember Feynman writing in his book, What Do You Care What Other People Think, on the differences between the facilities at MIT and Princeton. His comment was that the facilities at MIT were more cramped, less well funded, and required more ingenuity to accomplish work than those at Princeton.
I also seem to recall that he felt that it was his opinion that devising ways around the constraints was helpful to the educational process.
This is from my memory of reading the book shortly after it was published. Its in a box in my storage unit so I can’t suppy quotes.
The focal point of the article is the number of highest caliber universities (see the table). It seems pretty bulletproof that laboratory space is necessary to be in this category, although maybe teaching space (if not truly a constraint atm) is an indication of success rather than a necessity.
The government seems to have made the decision that having highest caliber universities is more important than many podunk U’s. This might be a poor decision, but that’s the real story here.
NE1, thanks for the analysis, it helped with some perspective.