A newspaper photograph that caught the eye in the past few days is that of former Jawaharlal Nehru University Students Union President and CPI candidate for the Lok Sabha elections from Begusarai, Kanhaiya Kumar, flanked by the mother of another JNU alumnus, Najeeb Ahmed. The visual speaks of the embattled state of their alma mater. Najeeb enrolled in JNU in 2016 and should have been on course to complete the academic requirements for a biotechnology degree last year. But he has been untraceable for over two years, and his family and fellow students have raised strong suspicions of foul play. Kanhaiya’s troubles with the current regime — inextricable with JNU’s recent travails — are, of course, well-known.
While JNU’s unfreedoms have garnered national attention, what is disquieting is that the prestigious university’s fortunes are the tip of the iceberg in India’s general state of universities. All is not well in the country’s universities. It’s, therefore, natural that a volume of essays on the “idea of a university” devotes a major part of its investigation to academic freedom.
What marks this volume, however, is that it does not look at academia from the narrow perspective of the classroom. The essays, instead, try to locate institutions from the standpoint of the several stirrings in the country. Universities have become rife with possibilities of new ideas of citizenship — ones that contest old notions of religion, caste, and even the nation. This is not a simplistic break from the past, as has been viewed in some quarters, but an engagement with and questioning of power structures that ought to be the raison d’etre of academic spaces in the first place.
But at the same time, universities are increasingly been asked to confirm. While they are becoming “catalyzers of social mobility,” the suicide of Rohith Vemula and the periodic reports of caste, gender, and religious discrimination in educational institutions also attest to the fact that the university is increasingly being viewed, as Niraja Gopal Jayal writes in her essay, ‘The Idea of Academic Freedom’, “as a space that should be sanitized of the dangers of critical thinking and free inquiry, of dissent and critique, debate and engagement”.
Such tension informs the essays in The Idea of a University. One response would be to see the Indian university’s predicament as a sub-set of “the existential crisis” of institutions of higher learning worldwide. Knowledge is increasingly been seen in terms of “market compatibility”. However, neo-liberal forces have appropriated the educational space differently in different parts of the world. The essays in the volume try to understand the workings of such troops in India and their convergence — and divergence — with political currents.
As Alok Rai writes in his essay, ‘The Barbarians Have Landed’, we stand at the cusp of a paradigm shift in how the university has been imagined in the country. “The colonial conception of the university has been rebranded for the twenty-first century as the’ skills university’, a policy goal, which would ideally render entire generations into servants of giant corporations, slaves of the engines of capitalism”. This has meshed with the thinking that everything that is useful in the realm of ideas has already been imagined — largely in ancient times — and the function of the university is to regurgitate them.
How should pedagogy respond to such challenges? How should teachers contest the antediluvian demands increasingly placed on them? In ‘Night Thoughts on Academics, Administration, and the University, ‘ Ram Ramaswamy puts the onus on the faculty. The quest for academic excellence has to be reconciled with the changing composition of the student body “in terms of class, caste, ethnicity, religion, and religious affiliations”. The nature of pedagogy ought to be thought through,h. Though teachers cannot be faulted on conscientiousness, the present effort towards student-centered education” is “on the whole, inadequate,” he contends.
But how well-positioned is the faculty to effect such a change? In ‘Questioning Academic Freedom’, Pankaj Chandra questions the power structure within the university itself. “While the university leaders seek academic freedom for the university and themselves from the regulator, they rarely pass this on to their constituents…So rigid is the hierarchy of colleges and the university that academics primarily see themselves as executors of decisions and not their originators”. However, does the answer lie in an institution impervious to political currents, as Chandra suggests?
Or is it instructive to go back to Apoorvanand’s introductory essay? Here, he talks of an “obscure article” by Premchand in which the writer contrasts two convocation addresses: One by scientist C V Raman at Allahabad University and the other by Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan at Lucknow University. Premchand roots Radhakrishnan’s views that universities “should become nurseries for youthful courage and excitement” against Raman’s advocacy of caution against the “lure of the political”. But Apoorvanand, while not dismissive of the philosopher president, urges a different reading of the scientist. “Universities should not give in to the demands of political correctness of the day,” he says.
The core of The Idea of a University places such emphasis on different readings—dialogue, debate, and dissent. The volume should be seen as a call to reclaim institutions of higher education as spaces for such activity.
