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This chapter describes the extraordinary efforts made by Kapil Sibal to reform almost every aspect of education, and his refreshing courage in advocating polices shunned by the political class such as promotion of private participation, and encouraging reputed foreign institutions to establish campuses in India. It describes the successes he achieved like enactment of the RTE Act, and the heroic failure to enact as many as six acts which would have totally restructured the policy and regulatory framework of higher education. By focusing on the process and politics of policymaking it brings out that the failure was mainly due to strategic and tactical mistakes, and adopting a no-holds barred adversarial approach that is eminently appropriate in a courtroom is utterly inappropriate in policymaking. All in all, Sibal’s achievements and failure offer valuable lessons for policy entrepreneurship. It also describes the failed efforts of the Health Ministry to establish the National Commission for Human Resources for Health as a super-regulator in Medical Education in place of multiple regulatory authorities like the Medical Council, Dental Council and so on.

World War II generated concern for restoring values in Western civilization. The Harvard Report of 1945 urged study of the best in the West, including religious texts as one source of such values. The Truman Commission report of 1947, Higher Education for a Democratic Society, added more practical concerns for the new mass higher education. Humanists such as Robert Hutchins were appalled. The postwar era saw a broad religious revival in mainstream higher education, blending broadly Protestant, democratic, and humanistic ideals. Reinhold Niebuhr and other leading scholars provided guidance. The problem, though, was that the liberal Protestant emphasis on freedom tended to undercut any specific religious demands. Senator Joe McCarthy’s anticommunist crusade helped test the extent and limits of freedom. Leading educators often saw Catholics and their schools as too authoritarian. William F. Buckley’s critique of Yale’s claim to be a meaningfully Protestant institution should be understood in this context.

This chapter examines the impact that the arrival of television had on journalism. It argues that Section 18 of the Broadcasting Authority Act had a profound influence on the trajectory of journalism. This section required RTÉ to be ‘fair and impartial’ in its news and current affairs – a very different requirement to that which had previously informed journalism. This inevitably put pressure on other media outlets to distance themselves from their political allegiances and give journalists greater autonomy. The chapter examines how, in a decade of unprecedented social change, this new dynamic in journalism took root and looks at the clashes that erupted between journalists and institutions that had, up to then, had it all their own way.

Some of the hits taken by administrators will be delivered by those faculty members who have forgotten (or never knew) what their job is and spend time trying to form their students’ character or turn them into exemplary citizens. I can’t speak for every academic, but I am not trained to do these things, although I am aware of people who are: preachers, therapists, social workers, political activists, professional gurus, inspirational speakers. Teachers, as I have said repeatedly, teach materials and confer skills, and therefore don’t or shouldn’t do a lot of other things—like produce active citizens, inculcate the virtue of tolerance, redress injustices, and bring about political change. Of course a teacher might produce some of these effects—or their opposites—along the way, but they will be, or should be, contingent and not what is aimed at. The question that administrators often ask, “What practices provide students with the knowledge and commitments to be socially responsible citizens?” is not a bad question, but the answers to it should not be the content of a college or university course. No doubt, the practices of responsible citizenship and moral behavior should be encouraged in our young adults, but it’s not the business of the university to do so, except when the morality in question is the morality that penalizes cheating, plagiarizing, and shoddy teaching. Once we cross the line that separates academic work from these other kinds, we are guilty both of practicing without a license and of defaulting on our professional responsibilities. But isn’t it our responsibility both as teachers and as citizens to instill democratic values in our students? Derek Bok thinks so and invokes studies that claim to demonstrate a cause and effect relationship between a college education and an active participation in the country’s political life: “researchers have shown that college graduates are much more active civically and politically than those who have not attended college” (Our Underachieving Colleges). But this statistic proves nothing except what everyone knows: college graduates have more access to influential circles than do those without a college education.

Not long ago, there was a time when I was responsible for a college with close to 30 departments and units, a budget of between 50 and 55 million dollars, 400 tenure-track faculty members, 700 staff, 10,000 undergraduate students, 2,000 graduate students, and 17 buildings. On any given day, I had to deal with disciplinary proceedings, tenure and promotion cases, faculty searches, chair searches, enrollment problems, fundraising, community outreach, alumni relations, public relations, curriculum reform, counteroffers, technology failures, space allocation, information systems, chair meetings, advisory committee meetings, deans council meetings, meetings with the provost, student complaints, faculty complaints, parent complaints, and taxpayer complaints. Office hours were 8:30 a.m. to whenever and often extended into the evenings and weekends. Vacations were few and far between. The pressure never relaxed. When I left the job after slightly more than five years, I felt that I had all the time (well, not quite all ) in the world at my disposal, and for a while, spent it by trying to improve everyone I met, whether or not those I ministered to welcomed my efforts. I took my opportunities wherever I found them. While I still lived in Chicago, but after I stepped down as dean, the building next door to mine was bought by a developer. For a long time, no development occurred, and the lawn and bushes were allowed to grow wild. The developer, however, had made the mistake of putting his telephone number on an overlarge sign, and as a reward he received a series of dyspeptic phone calls from me accusing him of being a bad neighbor, an irresponsible landlord, and an all-around no-goodnik. During the same period, I would go into a store or stand in a ticket line and was often greeted by someone who asked, “And how are you today, young man?” That is my least favorite salutation, and I quickly delivered a lecture and, I trust, a bit of improvement: “When you call someone who is obviously not young ‘young man,’ what you are doing is calling attention to his age and making him feel even older than he is; don’t do it again!” I delivered an even longer lecture to the blameless fastfood workers who routinely handed me a bagel along with a small container of cream cheese and a plastic knife that couldn’t cut butter.