Niraja Gopal Jayal - The modern Indian university - a department of state
The modern Indian university has always been yoked to the state project of the moment
The fundamental disagreement in the clash of the titans,
Amartya Sen and Pratap Bhanu Mehta, appears to centre on the question of
whether political interference in universities today is more egregious than in
the past. Mehta claims that there is nothing unprecedented about this, “even in
its scope or scale,” and Sen responds with impeccable logic that that does not
make it acceptable. It could nevertheless be argued that Nalanda — with its
short history tainted by allegations not all of which have been convincingly
refuted — is scarcely the most alarming example of all the attempts, past and
present, to control academic institutions.
Both Sen and Mehta seem to share the somewhat optimistic
assumption that academic institutions in this country once were or could
potentially be autonomous entities that are constitutively free of governmental
and/ or partisan political control. Neither acknowledges the black hole at the
heart of any debate about higher education in India, a fact that has to do with
the very nature of the beast itself: that the modern Indian university has,
from colonial times to the present day, been viewed as properly yoked to the
state project of the moment.
Every major commission on education in India over the last
60 years — from the S. Radhakrishnan Commission to the National Knowledge
Commission — has sought to harness universities to state projects of,
variously, constitutional values, nation-building, development and the creation
of a 21st century knowledge society. It is only the particular state project to
which universities were hitched that has changed from time to time, not the
fact of such a harness, much less the legitimacy attached to it. Partisan
politics of one sort or another has undoubtedly made this worse, but this is at
best an exploitation of the opportunities provided by structural weaknesses in
university governance. Fundamentally, universities are not, and have never
been, autonomous.
Even as we recognise that public funding is incontrovertibly
essential for higher education, we neither have institutional mechanisms for
securing public accountability while safeguarding university autonomy, nor an
archive of past institutional practices of this kind available for retrieval.
To confine governmental power to domains of university functioning in which it
is appropriate, and to resist its relentless encroachments into domains in
which it is not, calls for serious reflection on how to strike this balance.
The Napoleonic model of the university as a department of state, with faculty
treated as (lesser) civil servants, has long thrived in India.
Centralisation and bureaucratisation have serious
implications — curricular and pedagogical — for universities. Indeed, a major
concern of the university community today is the clumsy attempt, initiated by
the last government and being energetically promoted today, to standardise the
curricula of the central universities, ostensibly to give students more choice.
Ironically, this so-called choice entails the sacrifice of diversity and
greater control through homogenisation.
This is certainly among the most serious challenges facing
universities today, along with the stifling of dissent, the packing of
leadership positions with individuals whose calling card is loyalty rather than
academic credentials, and the pathetic attempts to infiltrate the intellectual
life of the academy armed with faith and myth rather than objective standards
of scientific achievement.
It could be argued that there is, in any case, little scope
for autonomy in academic institutions whose primary function has, since
colonial times, been seen as the transmission of knowledge and the
certification that such knowledge has been duly transmitted. The Indian
university has increasingly and exclusively become a source of credentialisation
for a society in which certification matters more than what is learned. Two
current obsessions — that of fake degrees and of 100 per cent marks in
school-leaving examinations — are poignant symbols of this.
The view that the purpose of the university is to transmit
knowledge rather than to produce it led, in the early years after Independence,
to the creation of standalone institutions for research, in the social sciences
and even more in science and technology. The accomplishments of some of these institutions
were surely impressive, but an unintended consequence was the arrangement of
research and teaching in a hierarchy that privileged researchers, or the
producers of knowledge, over teachers as its transmitters.
The introduction of research and publications as a formal
requirement for recruitment and advancement in universities is a relatively
recent phenomenon that has, in both design and implementation, ill-served the
objective. In the states, where the bulk of Indian universities are located, talk
of nepotism, cronyism, and even corruption in appointments — from lectureships
to vice-chancellorships — is commonplace. In the “elite” Central universities,
many conform to the Napoleonic model fortified by the self-conscious virtue
that comes with association with the higher purposes of state, and sometimes
also the power and that results from such association.
Others live out the
fantasy of a Humboldtian community of scholars engaged in the pursuit of
knowledge for its own sake. This wishful imagination may be the source of
elitist islands of scholarly excellence, but let us not forget that it inhabits
a meta-institutional hyper-reality. In the end, what we have is a highly uneven
and differentiated university system in which there is little reflection and no
consensus on what a university is for. Even the arriviste private liberal arts
college has come to us from the United States and not from the British Isles
where Cardinal Newman articulated the vision centuries ago.
But colonialism did not give us universities modelled on
Dublin or Oxford. It gave us institutions modelled on the University of London,
essentially affiliating institutions formulating syllabi and conducting
examinations. To entertain greater expectations of the mass of Indian universities
is to be deluded, because this is and has always been their purpose: to
transmit received knowledge, conduct examinations and award degrees, all of
these functions performed by state personnel called faculty under the watchful
eye of a micro-governing state.
