MUKUL MANGALIK: Everything is at stake at Delhi University
administrators, bureaucrats and capital are savaging the institution, destroying teaching, learning and research
“What is the Third Estate? Everything. What is it being reduced to? Nothing. What does it aspire to be? Everything” (modified version of questions asked and answered by Abbe Sieyes, France, January 1789). Currently in the midst of a Delhi University Teachers Association (DUTA)-led indefinite relay hunger strike, DU, over the last three years, has witnessed agitations by students, teachers and non-teaching employees rooted in anxieties about all that is happening to higher education and our workplace, the university:
1. The terms and conditions of work are becoming worse, more burdensome and increasingly insecure — especially for the rapidly expanding number of ad hoc teachers — beginning to negatively impact academic activity and even intimately private domains;
2. Our work itself — teaching, learning, research — is being emptied of depth, creativity, meaning and the possibilities for inspiring critical thought, in a word, quality, as rapidly as it is being taken out of our real control, arbitrarily and thoughtlessly semesterised and variously “reformed” from above, and subjected to meaningless and demeaning forms of bureaucratic monitoring, quantitative measurements and accountability; and
3. Our 90-year-old University is being consciously destroyed and dismantled to pave the way for the large-scale commodification of higher education.
It is unfortunate though hardly surprising that apprehensions expressed by large numbers of teachers regarding unmanageable chaos that would ensue and the catastrophic consequences for academic standards and students’ futures — especially of the most vulnerable — resulting from major structural changes thrust upon DU in a mad rush in the form of semesterisation for example, are coming true. Students and teachers have become collateral damage of hurriedly taught, hastily cobbled courses, rampant administrative ad-hocism, and the collapse of systems of examining and evaluating performance. The next wave of shock and awe is set to hit DU in 2013 as the Administration drags us mindlessly into four-year-study schedules and meta-Universities.
One moment supremely symbolises the destruction and impoverishment being wrought at DU: the decision taken by the VC-in-Academic Council to excise A.K. Ramanujan’s brilliant essay, “300 Ramayanas” from the UG syllabus even at the cost of legitimising prejudice and the “politics of hurt sentiments,” a politics that has been central to fascistic mobilisation on a world scale. Teachers’ and students’ anxieties are compounded by the fact that the VC and his team, entrusted with taking on board our fears, suggestions and concerns are refusing to even meet with us, declaring instead that the DUTA, the most important democratically elected teachers’ body whose struggles have contributed immensely to teachers’ lives all over the country, is an “illegal welfare association.”
This is reminiscent of November 7, 1942 when Hitler, rolling through Thuringia on his special train, suddenly saw the awed faces of his wounded soldiers staring in at him from their tiered cots in a hospital train. Angered, he ordered the curtains to be drawn, thereby denying himself the miraculous human moment of reaching over to a wounded soldier. This would have meant Hitler acknowledging the nightmarish results of his military adventure, an intrusion into his reality that he so dreaded, he preferred pretending it out of existence.
The DU VC’s refusal to meet with teachers and their representatives is corroding his own humanity apart from the fact that neither the DUTA nor resentments and concerns will cease to exist for lack of acknowledgement. If anything, this is only fanning the flames of discontent at DU.
An attack on freedoms: In fact, DU continues to be in turmoil above all because the wider restructuring of higher education being pushed through by the Indian state at the behest of Capital has meant an attack on freedoms, democracy and rights, without which no university can hope to flourish. Those meant to ensure that our institution remains a public University free of violence, harassment and discrimination so that we may read, write, think, love and evolve without fear have been doing their utmost to terrorise and humiliate teachers and non-teaching employees, blanket the university with fear, turn it into a prison and squeeze the life-breath out of it. They continue to crack down on unions and trample upon hard-won rights, including the invaluable rights to organise and protest in a bid to turn DU into a machine, and employees and students into courtiers and slaves.
Let us be clear about the enormity of what is happening. Teachers, tasked with bringing the universe into classrooms, encouraging students to explore, interrogate and debate, teaching them to think critically, act independently and together as equals and discover the meaning of being fully human, are being told NOT to think, NOT to speak, NOT to participate as equals. Teachers, students and non-teaching employees are, being silenced and robotised, losing control over work and workplace while our university is savaged at the hands of administrators, bureaucrats and Capital. Read more:
http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/op-ed/everything-is-at-stake-at-delhi-university/article4026267.ece
“What is the Third Estate? Everything. What is it being reduced to? Nothing. What does it aspire to be? Everything” (modified version of questions asked and answered by Abbe Sieyes, France, January 1789). Currently in the midst of a Delhi University Teachers Association (DUTA)-led indefinite relay hunger strike, DU, over the last three years, has witnessed agitations by students, teachers and non-teaching employees rooted in anxieties about all that is happening to higher education and our workplace, the university:
1. The terms and conditions of work are becoming worse, more burdensome and increasingly insecure — especially for the rapidly expanding number of ad hoc teachers — beginning to negatively impact academic activity and even intimately private domains;
2. Our work itself — teaching, learning, research — is being emptied of depth, creativity, meaning and the possibilities for inspiring critical thought, in a word, quality, as rapidly as it is being taken out of our real control, arbitrarily and thoughtlessly semesterised and variously “reformed” from above, and subjected to meaningless and demeaning forms of bureaucratic monitoring, quantitative measurements and accountability; and
3. Our 90-year-old University is being consciously destroyed and dismantled to pave the way for the large-scale commodification of higher education.
It is unfortunate though hardly surprising that apprehensions expressed by large numbers of teachers regarding unmanageable chaos that would ensue and the catastrophic consequences for academic standards and students’ futures — especially of the most vulnerable — resulting from major structural changes thrust upon DU in a mad rush in the form of semesterisation for example, are coming true. Students and teachers have become collateral damage of hurriedly taught, hastily cobbled courses, rampant administrative ad-hocism, and the collapse of systems of examining and evaluating performance. The next wave of shock and awe is set to hit DU in 2013 as the Administration drags us mindlessly into four-year-study schedules and meta-Universities.
One moment supremely symbolises the destruction and impoverishment being wrought at DU: the decision taken by the VC-in-Academic Council to excise A.K. Ramanujan’s brilliant essay, “300 Ramayanas” from the UG syllabus even at the cost of legitimising prejudice and the “politics of hurt sentiments,” a politics that has been central to fascistic mobilisation on a world scale. Teachers’ and students’ anxieties are compounded by the fact that the VC and his team, entrusted with taking on board our fears, suggestions and concerns are refusing to even meet with us, declaring instead that the DUTA, the most important democratically elected teachers’ body whose struggles have contributed immensely to teachers’ lives all over the country, is an “illegal welfare association.”
This is reminiscent of November 7, 1942 when Hitler, rolling through Thuringia on his special train, suddenly saw the awed faces of his wounded soldiers staring in at him from their tiered cots in a hospital train. Angered, he ordered the curtains to be drawn, thereby denying himself the miraculous human moment of reaching over to a wounded soldier. This would have meant Hitler acknowledging the nightmarish results of his military adventure, an intrusion into his reality that he so dreaded, he preferred pretending it out of existence.
The DU VC’s refusal to meet with teachers and their representatives is corroding his own humanity apart from the fact that neither the DUTA nor resentments and concerns will cease to exist for lack of acknowledgement. If anything, this is only fanning the flames of discontent at DU.
An attack on freedoms: In fact, DU continues to be in turmoil above all because the wider restructuring of higher education being pushed through by the Indian state at the behest of Capital has meant an attack on freedoms, democracy and rights, without which no university can hope to flourish. Those meant to ensure that our institution remains a public University free of violence, harassment and discrimination so that we may read, write, think, love and evolve without fear have been doing their utmost to terrorise and humiliate teachers and non-teaching employees, blanket the university with fear, turn it into a prison and squeeze the life-breath out of it. They continue to crack down on unions and trample upon hard-won rights, including the invaluable rights to organise and protest in a bid to turn DU into a machine, and employees and students into courtiers and slaves.
Let us be clear about the enormity of what is happening. Teachers, tasked with bringing the universe into classrooms, encouraging students to explore, interrogate and debate, teaching them to think critically, act independently and together as equals and discover the meaning of being fully human, are being told NOT to think, NOT to speak, NOT to participate as equals. Teachers, students and non-teaching employees are, being silenced and robotised, losing control over work and workplace while our university is savaged at the hands of administrators, bureaucrats and Capital. Read more:
http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/op-ed/everything-is-at-stake-at-delhi-university/article4026267.ece
