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300 DR. BABASAHEB AMBEDKAR : WRITINGS AND SPEECHES
at Oxford, Cambridge and London are only graduates and yet they are doing their work of directing post-graduate research remarkably well so as to attract students from all parts of the world. The reason is that their undergraduate training was of a high order. I am, therefore, bound to emphasise that the University must undertake the training of the undergraduates if it intends to rear a structure of a sound system of post-graduate work.
(2) Secondly, the assumption by the University of direct responsibility for teaching in the post-graduate sphere by its own staff which is regarded as a great reform tends to produce the unhappy effect of placing the university staff in antithesis and in opposition to the college staff which feels that its status is unreasonably reduced by the formal and practically permanent limitation of the colleges to an inferior sphere of work.
(3) Thirdly, the establishment of a distinct University Professoriate for post-graduate work is a sheer waste of the resources of the University and can be easily avoided by a proper husbanding of the resources of the colleges. In our system of University education the colleges are the only places of learning. But they are at present the property of separate bodies and the management of each college is vested in a separate governing body. The income derive from a college goes to its own fund. If there is any surplus after the necessary expenses it only serves to swell this fund. Each college teaches the same subjects as the rest and is so to say a ‘pocket’ university obliged to maintain a competent staff to teach all the subjects and to provide separate libraries and laboratories for their own use. Autonomous as these colleges are none of them is financially a wealthy institution to be able to engage a first class and adequate staff and to provide a first class and adequate equipment in the form of libraries and laboratories. Owing to their slender resources the college staff is handicapped and overburdened. Being obliged to teach too many subjects specialization becomes impossible and a college professor under these circumstances has neither the inducement nor the opportunity to become the master of a small branch of a great-subject. As an inevitable result of this system of autonomous self-sufficing colleges we have scattered here and there poor professoriates, poor libraries and poor laboratories. But because the existing resources seem insufficient when looked upon as attached to or dissipated among the different colleges it does not follow that the resources of the colleges in the aggregate are not great enough to cope with the teaching of the post-graduate and undergraduate work of the Bombay University. Take for instance the resources of the colleges situated in the City of Bombay for the purpose of teaching economics.
We have in the City of Bombay the following colleges providing training in Economics for the B.A. Course of the Bombay University :—(1) Elphinstone College, (2) Wilson College, (3) St. Xavier’s College and (4) Sydenham College, There are two men teaching economics at the Elphinstone, two at the Wilson, two at the St. Xavier’s and some six or so at the Sydenham