Most recommendations of the Calcutta University Commission were influenced by

Concept

A commission of enquiry never designs a university from nothing. It carries over whatever model of university organisation its own members already accept, so the way to identify what shaped a commission’s recommendations is to ask which body of contemporary thinking its members were working inside — not merely which earlier document on the same subject happens to come first in time.

For a colonial-era enquiry into Indian universities, that contemporary thinking was British. Two rival models were in play: the older affiliating-and-examining university, which only sets and marks examinations for colleges attached to it, and the newer unitary teaching university, which itself teaches and researches through internal faculties and a full-time professoriate.

Application

1. The Calcutta University Commission (1917–19), also called the Sadler Commission after its chairman Sir Michael Sadler, was appointed to examine the condition and prospects of the University of Calcutta and, through it, university education in India.

2. Its membership was drawn largely from British academics of the civic-university movement — Sadler himself, Ramsay Muir and Philip Hartog among them — who came to India directly out of the debate over reorganising the University of London.

3. That London debate had just been settled in print by the Royal Commission on University Education in London, appointed in 1909 under Lord Haldane and reporting in 1913, which argued for a unitary teaching university with internal faculties, honours courses and a full-time teaching staff.

4. The Calcutta report then reproduced that blueprint in an Indian setting: move intermediate work (classes XI–XII) out of the university into separate intermediate colleges so that university work begins at degree level; build unitary, teaching and residential universities; separate honours courses from pass courses; add departments of education and applied science; and vest real academic power in internal university bodies.

5. Because each of those proposals is a position argued in the London enquiry of 1909–13, that enquiry — the Haldane Commission — is the source the Calcutta recommendations draw on.

Cross-check — the other landmarks, by scope and date

• Wood’s Dispatch, 1854: created the provincial departments of public instruction and the 1857 universities at Calcutta, Bombay and Madras as affiliating and examining bodies — that is, it established the very structure the 1917–19 report set out to replace, so it is what the Commission reacted against rather than what it drew on.

• Hunter Commission, 1882: an enquiry into primary and secondary education and the place of privately managed aided schools; university education lay outside its terms of reference.

• Indian Universities Commission, 1902 (Raleigh Commission): led to the Indian Universities Act of 1904, which tightened affiliation conditions and government control over senates — an administrative-control measure still working within the affiliating model.

Result

The recommendations of the Calcutta University Commission follow the Haldane Commission.