Shvetal Vyas Pare - The Indian University System Is Imploding And We All Stand To Get Hurt
Earlier this March,
the authorities at Jawaharlal Nehru University announced massive
cuts (estimated to be 83%) in the intake of M.Phil and PhD students. This
includes departments of social sciences, international relations and language
studies among others. Also around the same time, the
Tata Institute of Social Sciences in Mumbai removed 25 faculty members,
which will result in fewer students finding supervisors for advanced degrees
and three Centres shutting down. A few days ago, Punjab
University hiked its fees by up to ₹82,000
a year, a decision that will definitely affect students of lower-middle
class and poorer backgrounds. Over the last year, Delhi
University has been pushing its premiere colleges towards autonomy, which
means that the
colleges will no longer remain public institutions but become private
ones.
With centres
shutting down, colleges becoming private, and seats being cut across the board,
we are effectively decimating our public universities one step at a time...
Students and teachers
at all these institutes have been protesting these decisions, but the general
public neither knows about this nor cares. A narrative has been built over the
past four years that a lot of people believe: all academics are left-wing intellectuals
who brainwash students. These students then become Naxalites or secret spies
who plot ways to destroy the country. This narrative also includes a general
mistrust of social science research: "Why do you want to study what is
wrong with society?" "Why are these people studying about tribal
people in India?" and so on. Given this narrative, it is easy to see why
people are not going to oppose any of the above decisions and berate the
students and teachers for doing so.
Let me present another
possibility to you. Instead of thinking of the above events as separate, let us
examine the underlying pattern. Public
Universities in India are both good and cheap. The semester fees are not
high; nor are the hostel fees. Most of them have entrance exams which are quite
competitive, and in some of these universities to get a seat at the hostel you
have to get a good rank in the entrance exam. This year,
the office of the President of India awarded JNU an award for being the best
research university. The link clearly outlines the parameters on which
this decision was based: "The President said the JNU has shown
"outstanding" performance in all key parameters like quality of
students and faculty, training of faculty, citations, publications, research
projects, foreign collaborations, seminars and innovation exhibitions."
Decreasing the number of students at JNU will in turn lead to decreasing the
number of teachers, and research outputs will go down. It is difficult to
continue being an excellent university without students and teachers.
Education is too
profitable to be administered through a public system... the best way to get
people into private universities is to decrease the seats in public education.
These changes are not
about ideological issues. The undermining of public universities by making them
offer the minimum possible is not going to stop only at a few specific
universities or for "problematic" disciplines like politics and
sociology. Anti-intellectualism does not distinguish between universities and
disciplines. We have already had the push to teach
Vedic Science in the IITs, government
ministers who label doctors who advise patients not to follow Ayurveda as
anti-national, and an
indictment of the Indian Science Congress. With centres shutting down,
colleges becoming private, and seats being cut across the board, we are
effectively decimating our public universities one step at a time and over a
decade or so the cumulative damage will be irrevocable.
By the time the
schoolchildren of today are ready to go to university, unless they make the
very high cut for a limited number of seats, their only other option would be
an expensive course at a private university, with big loans in the offing. Or
they can take bigger loans and go abroad. Across different disciplines Indian
students regularly go abroad and are able to match the rigour of world-class
universities. Not only that, a high number of Indians go on to hold academic
positions abroad, and one reason for this is the high standard of Indian
education. International students subsidise the education of local students by
paying higher fees, and add skills to the economy if they choose to stay back.
Given increasing hyper-nationalism around the world, however, it is likely that
this option too will become available only to those who can pay the highest
prices and jump the tallest hoops for it...
read more:
