Gagged Campuses, Hollowed Classrooms: The Universities in India Today |
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It is not uncommon to read a new media piece every few months where someone rediscovers the same supposed malady that ails the Indian universities: Indian universities are failing because they are too political. If only the campus could be disinfected of politics, the argument goes, “human knowledge” would finally flourish.
A recent column, offering this old beaten-to-death story, begins with global league tables (Times Higher Education rankings) and laments India’s absence from the top rungs, and then continues to propose a cure: revive greatness through either a strong state or a new class of philanthropists. Along the way, the piece treats reservations and democratic contestation as the primary reasons universities “lost their lead”.
This is not an entirely uncommon set of arguments. What is uncommon is how clearly it reveals the ideological core beneath the “minor hints” – the belief that knowledge is a technocratic enterprise, best produced in enclaves protected from politics.
Let us not lose sight of the fact that there indeed is a crisis. The despair on campuses is real. The stagnation in many institutions is real. What is wrong is the fantasy that universities become great by becoming less democratic.
The idea that a university exists to “advance human knowledge” is an incomplete one. Universities have always been institutions where knowledge is produced through social life, not outside it. A university is a civic form. It is a community of teachers and students, a culture of argument, a discipline of evidence, and a space of disagreement. The pursuit of truth is protected by building norms and institutions that keep power from monopolising truth. That protection has been fought for – against kings, churches, markets, states, and sometimes against the university itself. If you strip away contestation in the name of “knowledge,” you simply get obedience. And obedient institutions are rarely original.
So the first move in the “depoliticise to improve” script is already suspect because university’s politics – the struggle over who gets to speak, what counts as legitimate knowledge, what the public owes the institution, and what the institution owes the public – is part of its very........