Autonomy of Universities and a Life of the Mind

One of the features of the Modi regime was the apparent crackdown on various institutions of higher education, including TISS, FTII, Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs), University of Hyderabad, and of course, JNU.⁴⁸ Autonomy of universities granted by the Parliament and the culture of speaking truth to power under Modi seemed to be systematically undermined through various methods—including posting those close to the RSS as the heads of administrative positions, removal of grievance mechanisms internal to these institutions, and removal of individual faculty opposed to the viewpoint of the ruling dispensation. BJP dispensation led by the RSS does not imagine universities as sites of autonomy where a life of the mind is fostered; instead they see them as citadels of discipline, efficiency, loyalty, and standardization.⁴⁹

Quality and work ethic have been a long-term problem in India’s higher education. The strange situation in India, in comparison with foreign universities in the US and Europe, has been that of having a few institutions of global quality and the rest remaining in the backwaters of the educational system. The best of our institutions and scholarship is comparable to global standards and our worst is as worst as that of any other lesser developed nations. The problem is posed by the middle-level institutions; while they maintain a bare threshold level in the US and Europe, our institutions fare rather poorly. The primary reason for having a poor average has been both poor infrastructure and even poorer work ethic. When analysts of social policy want a robust state intervention, they hardly reflect on how to bring about a better and more accountable work ethic.⁵⁰

Further, over the last few decades, there has been an erosion of the quality of state universities and institutions in comparison with the Central universities. In the 1970s, the best of scholars who returned with degrees from foreign universities returned to their home states and contributed to their growth. Universities such as Allahabad and BHU in the North, and Osmania and Madras universities in the South were recognized as top-rated universities. However, over the last few decades, these institutions have witnessed a terminal decline. They declined primarily because of poor funding from state governments, owing to which the best of the faculty migrated to central universities, essentially located in Delhi.⁵¹ Universities such as the IITs, JNU, and DU, while undoubtedly contributing a great deal in pursuing globally recognizable research, nevertheless have singularly undermined the state universities by poaching on the best available scholarship in these institutions. Better academic atmosphere, more autonomy, and differential payments made central universities more attractive, while the institutions of state government became dens of ‘ignorance and isolationism’. They collapsed into sites of inbreeding, networking, and kinship-based recruitment. Added to that or owing to that was poor work ethic and infrastructural facilities. In much of North India, higher education simply caved in with dysfunctional universities and an education of abysmal standards.⁵²

Global Ranking and Differential Education

After India became a signatory to the World Trade Organization (WTO) agreement on educational institutions, overnight, there was a realization of the need to stand up to global standards. And global ranking has made this even starker. The urge to figure in the top 200 universities of the world has prompted changes in the way higher education was being regulated by the University Grants Commission, and later by the National Assessment and Accreditation Council (NAAC). As part of the ongoing changes, the UGC has come up with its latest order—UGC (Categorization of Universities for Grant of Graded Autonomy) Regulations, 2017. Under this order, it is stated:

The Commission may have different provisions for different categories of Institutions as defined in Clause 3.1 with the objective of giving higher levels of autonomy to Institutions under Category I compared to institutions under Categories II or III, and to institutions under Category II compared to institutions under Category III. 4.2 While framing any Regulation, the Commission may also sub-categorize any of the Categories in that Regulation to give a differentiated autonomy under that specific Regulation to institutions within that category.

This is a far-reaching regulatory order that is probably recognizing that there is a massive gap between the quality of education provided by the various universities; essentially, the gap is between state and central universities. However, in recognizing the gap, the UGC is promulgating graded autonomy, which in effect will also mean providing graded funding to the differentially located universities that would only end up exacerbating those differences.⁵³ The primary reason is that there is neither a concerted effort to understand the reasons behind differential performance and outcome, nor is there desire to protect, nurture, and improve the poorly performing universities. Instead, in line with the rest of the policy framework, only public institutions of standing will be retained for state funding and the rest would be eased out gradually, yielding space for private universities. Private universities, going by their track records, perhaps have had a far worst-off track record compared to even the poorly performing state universities. Quality has never been the mainstay of private universities; instead, what they brought in was job-oriented courses that offered some kind of opportunities. In essence, what the current government intends to do is to phase out public-funded universities the way state-owned industries, airways, railways, telecom, and postal services have gradually been shrinking.

Research cannot be improved merely by regulating universities; instead, they need efforts to create an enabling atmosphere for which it is imperative to grant more autonomy, better funding, and new instruments to regulate work ethic. Work ethic has been a long-standing problem. In order to improve the work ethic and output, it is imperative to address the impending problems that include linguistic skills, bringing local knowledge systems into formal structures, and improving diversity through more representative schemes. If the developments in JNU are a case in point, where there has been a massive seat-cut in the name of teacher-student ratio and maintaining quality, it is only apparent that quality is only a trope to pursue marketization and commercialization of the education system in India. These policies will be disempowering a majority, pushing them into technical and vocational education and reserving higher education to a privileged few; whether the open democratic system India will succeed in resisting this is a question that one has to wait and answer.

JNU: Mandatory Attendance

Following the administrative orders that attempt to create a differential system between various state and central universities, individual university heads across the nation took various measures to undermine the basic ethics of higher education that provide an atmosphere of freedom to think, write, and reflect. One such measure that led to a series of protests was the imposition of mandatory attendance in JNU in 2018. Administration in JNU pushed for a mandatory 75% attendance as the minimum eligibility criterion for students to take exams and be eligible for the degrees they are pursuing.⁵⁴

JNU, perhaps, comes closest to Ivan Illich’s dream of ‘de-schooling’⁵⁵ and creating decentralized webs of learning, since universal education is not possible through an institutionalized education system. The university is a rare combination of institutionalized learning and de-institutionalized living of a life of the mind. You learn by living a philosophy. This ‘authenticity’ is what is troubling the current Right-wing dispensation because for them, a ‘life of the mind’, goes against an established order of things. An additional problem that afflicts the current administration in JNU is the double-edged problem of seemingly improving academic standards but essentially undermining the basic ethos of a university.

On the one hand, current vice-chancellor Prof. M. Jagadish Kumar received the award for best university for JNU from the President of India, and on the other, there are claims that the varsity is a space for ‘anti-national’ activities and that faculty appointments have been made in violation of procedures and are way below the available talent pool in the country. One ‘advantage’ that Right-wing politics seems to enjoy is that they are ‘liberated’ from both commitments and convictions.

Sushma Swaraj, minister for external affairs, praised the IITs, All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS), and other premier institutions at the United Nations (UN) to belittle Pakistan, but in reality, the Right wingers appear to be undermining the same institutions.⁵⁶ In fact, the current dispensation at JNU is using mediocrity as a weapon against the system. All those who were at the margins of the current liberal/English educational system are being talked into dislodging the best practices and introducing a ‘tradition’ of discipline and control. Making attendance compulsory for students is yet another step in furthering this not-so-hidden agenda. Refresher courses that are meant for lecturers are being organized in JNU and other universities with a circular asking not to invite or organize lectures that are ‘anti-national’. This attempt to completely control the system is born out of both a sense of academic inferiority and construing freedom to think and live a life of the mind as at best anarchic.

It is not simply sufficient to offer a critique or dismiss the current move to make attendance compulsory; even as we do that, the progressives on and outside the campus need to think about how to reach out and include those at the margins of the educational system, who have remained mediocre, inferior, and therefore anxious to control the system and make it an assemblage of disciplinarian methods.

New Challenges of Pedagogy

Further, it is an open secret that there is a lurking anxiety among the faculty of JNU that class attendance has been steadily declining. At the Centre where I teach a compulsory course, while the student strength is around 80, not more than 50 students have been attending classes. It’s been a long-standing issue that students, as they progress in the course, do not attend classes but what is new is that even fresh students in their first semester itself have been lackadaisical in attending classes. However, this is not merely an issue of discipline but new challenges that pedagogy is facing in the light of the many changes the educational system is undergoing globally.

To begin with, liberal arts courses are not the first preference of many who join these courses but they are mostly the last resort to stay afloat. New exposure to technology and internet has given easy access to information that the teacher was the sole source of earlier. Attention spans of the students have taken a beating.

Further, JNU has other sites of learning including student politics and informal interactions. Even the post-dinner talks that were at one point in time the high point of student life on campus have witnessed a steady disinterest. Easy access to faculty, growing democratization of student-faculty relations, and rising aspirations among students have set in a culture of pretentiousness and a false sense of confidence that is not backed by hard work and professional ethics.

Earlier, students inquired about the chapters they needed to read in a book; now they inquire about the paragraphs they need to focus on in a chapter. It is also a fact that in institutions such as JNU, because of the overwhelming reputation it enjoys and the little competition it has from other central or state universities, students have got an easy claim to superior academic status over their compatriots in other places (this problem continues to plague JNU students when they join mofussil universities as academics; they struggle to strike a rapport with others and often end up forming ‘JNU Clubs’ that exclude others. In most cases, students refuse to move outside Delhi and some even outside JNU.).

There has been a clear decline in the quality of dissertations, where most Master of Philosophy (MPhil) and Doctorate of Philosophy (PhD) work is written in the last leg before submission. Since evaluation methods are lenient, for various reasons, quality of research has not been something that JNU can really boast about. Not many of the theses that are submitted are eventually published. In fact, most students find it difficult to even publish the mandatory paper that is now required for PhD submission. A culture of self-arrogation not backed by matching competence has inaugurated a non-dialogic posturing and aversion to criticism. In fact, more often than not, students in JNU begin their research proposals with their conclusions.

In this intriguingly deductive logic of research, open-ended spaces and sites of interaction have been supplanted by political activism and experiential fundamentalism. Research proposals take their inspiration more from the daily dose of prime-time news than from interactions in class. JNU continues to suffer the confusion of drawing a clear line between activism and scholarly interventions. While they are undoubtedly related, it is also a fact that they cannot be collapsed into each other.

The interpersonal relations among the faculty are marred by extra-curricular concerns and a scarcity syndrome. Students that are taken under the fold for guidance are seen more as social and cultural capital rather than co-equals in the sojourn to discover newer aspects of research agenda. As a consequence, evaluation standards of MPhil and PhD work have suffered, and students are keenly aware of this fact and prefer to appear as the surrogate progeny of their respective supervisors and demand that their supervisors treat them like their adopted children.

While students do opt for courses from other disciplines, inter-disciplinary research has been a non-starter in JNU. The interactions between the various schools and centres belong to an ‘imagined community’ of the hierarchy of the Vedic period. Amid all the talk of egalitarianism, a class system prevails between the various centres, with particular centres and schools representing the ‘high culture’ and the rest relegated to ‘low culture’ and subalternized. For instance, economics assumes to be the king, and history the queen, and disciplines such as political studies and sociology occupy the position of intermediaries or provincial fiefdoms.

Schools outside of the School of Social Sciences are imagined as backwaters meant for recreational purposes. Academic life on the campus is not in the pink of health but the diagnosis and medication that the current administration has administered make wayside quacks look more authentic and reliable. Part of the problem is the current political dispensation, and in this, I must add not just the Right-wing parties but all and sundry have developed a contempt for higher education in India. There have been budget cuts and attempts to further privatize higher education in India.

In order to circumvent this grave problem, the current dispensation did what it is best at—changing the goal post. Earlier in the year, it was a seat cut in the name of teacher-student ratio; now it is mandatory attendance to usher in more accountability.

It is important to resist these rather devious methods, but equal care should be taken not to sidestep the declining academic standards. While the university administration is ostensibly resisting a ‘classless’ society, it should not be an occasion to undermine the need for revolutionary changes in pedagogy that a premier institution like JNU urgently requires. This internal debate on pedagogy has to be in tandem with the need to resist and protect the basic ethos of universities such as JNU that not only provide globally acknowledge education but also perform the social role of admitting students from weaker backgrounds and enabling them to emerge as individuals with self-confidence and a worldview.

It’s A Class Struggle

The protests at JNU, against mandatory attendance imposed by the administration, were not about the right not to attend classes. However, attendance, as I suggested above, is gradually becoming a concern due to various other pedagogic reasons. It is a much more serious issue that was struggling to find a language to articulate itself. It is, in essence, about the life of the mind in an increasingly technocratic world. Critical thinking, to think against the grain, and to live a life that is infused and inspired by ideas, rather than the lure of money, comfort, and power is a very uphill task in a world marked by the pressures of a secure life. Students of JNU continue to carry the burden of this cross that society at large has by and large given up in succumbing to the imperatives of pragmatism.

One needs to understand the life on campus and what it does to scores of students coming from extremely deprived backgrounds. JNU does not merely transform their social status; it also equips them to undergo a metamorphosis of sorts in enabling them to develop a reflexive self. This reflexive self is a guarantee of sorts for a dignified life outside the campus in a society plagued by prejudice.

JNU does not merely teach philosophy but an ability to live a philosophy. This is a process that is delicate and ephemeral. It is an everyday life that leaves nothing unquestioned and thereby creates a sense of meaning in questioning the immediate identity that one is born into and one is often reduced to living.

That’s the point Rohith Vemula made in his dying letter—the burden and suffocation of being reduced to one’s immediate identity and ‘to a thing’.⁵⁷

It is the anxiety to protect this internal critical culture on campus that has taken the route of protesting against the mandatory class attendance. The current administration is beyond even an elementary debate on this issue. It does not understand what the students wish to strive for when they protest against mandatory attendance, they would compulsively merely look at it as an act of indiscipline.

I am afraid much of the larger society would also fail to make sense of this protest as being anything other than a protest to preserve a privileged unaccountable lifestyle. Even most parents of the students might view it as a self-goal, given the pressures of career and settling down. Classrooms are unique spaces in JNU. They are not merely for a monologue by the teacher or for information to be consumed by the students.

Dignity and Self-Confidence

In fact, classrooms are part of the larger learning process that goes on in many other sites on campus, including at the dhabhas (one of which used to be open till late night hours has been ordered to be closed well before midnight by the current administration), post-dinner talks (that have been made virtually impossible, again by the current administration, by invoking many procedures and checks to get permission to organize a talk), study forums, and informal discussions with the faculty. What students gather from these sites form a loop to critically interrogate what is being taught in the classroom. It is this unique loop that compensates for the insurmountable gap in social location and linguistic skills within the student community to make the classroom a more even playing field.

It is a constant tussle between experiential knowledge and textual and professional skills that remains aesthetically unsettled in JNU. Students coming from marginalized backgrounds, who are hesitant to speak up in the classrooms in the first semester of their joining JNU, gain the self-confidence to raise issues even as they struggle with English and the categories of social sciences.

A change that would otherwise take perhaps decades is a kind of a marvel to witness in JNU in a few months’ time. Self-confidence is gained from the space that swims against the tide and refuses to be judgemental about issues of lived diversity.

It is not about the right not to attend class, but it is about how clamping down through rules will dislocate this rather ephemeral idea of self-confidence. It is the complexity of demanding the right to self-confidence that takes the language of a protest against mandatory attendance. Even if class attendance were to be a problem, it calls for a debate on pedagogy and it cannot be viewed as an issue of indiscipline. In fact, my own experience has been that classes overshoot the allotted time. Even as protests progressed, students were asking for classes to be taught outside classrooms, sitting in corridors on cold winter days. The protest is to preserve this unsaid and sometimes difficult-to-verbalize process that students are anxious to protect.

It is an ongoing conflict between an idea of education of the Right that is marked by discipline, standardization, information without questioning, and technical education versus an idea of education that allows you to bridge the gap between thinking and being. Students were, in the true spirit, taking a cue from Marx, once again reminding those currently heading the university that ‘educators need to be educated’.⁵⁸ ‘Class’ remains the missing link in all of this.