Governance in higher educational institutions (HEIs) in West Bengal-An empirical inquest

Education in its general sense is a form of learning, in which the knowledge, skills, and habits of a group of people are transferred from one generation to the next through teaching, training, or research. Higher education institutions are an important part of-and play an important role in-society. The institutions are societies unto themselves, but they are also part of the larger society. If they remained only societies unto themselves, higher education institutions would be locked up in the proverbial ivory tower and their future would most likely be considerably shorter than their past. On the other hand, higher education institutions without some distance from society at large would run a serious risk of losing their capacity to reason in terms of principle, to take a long term view somewhat detached from the immediate issues of the day and to identify sustainable solutions to the most serious and long term challenges facing our society. Student participation as defined by this conference is an aspect of the broader area of higher education governance, so it may be useful to recall that higher education governance is at the heart of the Bologna Process and will be a key feature of the European Higher Education Area to be set up by 2010. To an extent, this is taken for granted, and many institutional representatives and higher education policy makers refer to academic freedom and institutional autonomy-or sometimes a mixture of the two-as if these were obvious features of higher education in Europe, freedoms earned at the dawn of time and destined to be with us until some distant academic sunset. While discussing quality in the field of education, the focus of students is on the facilities provided, of the teachers is on the teaching-learning process, of management and parents is on the scores or grades achieved, and of prospective employers is on the nature of the output. The present study investigates the issues of governance in Higher Education Institutions in India, with a specific and pin-pointed analysis on the degree colleges in the district of Howrah, West Bengal. The study is based on Primary Data Analysis. Statistical tools like frequency distribution table and factor analysis have been used for the study.