Opinion Missing The Teacher
Rohith’s despair also speaks of the collective failure of the teaching community.
Students staging a protest against the suicide of a Dalit scholar in a Hyderabad Central University, in Mumbai. (PTI Photo by Santosh Hirlekar)
Rohith Vemula is dead. Politicians are making suitable noises. TV networks are manufacturing rage. Newspapers have carried out some sensitive analyses. I wish to focus on an aspect that seems to have escaped scrutiny. It’s Rohith’s relationship with his teachers. He had been a student of Hyderabad Central University for more than six years. As a teacher, the questions that first occurred to me were, “Who were his teachers? Where are they?” The media seems to have missed Rohith’s engagement with his teachers. Is it related to a real absence of teachers who engaged with him or the dominant narrative that prevails in the media? Either way, it’s a sad commentary on our expectations from educational institutions.
Being a researcher in our part of the world is an impossible situation. The researcher might be dreaming of stardust but he’s firmly earthbound. The family expects the researcher to start earning as soon as possible. A steady job is usually considered necessary for “settling down”. The uncertainties of finances and relationships with friends and family create a mélange of economic, emotional and sexual deprivation. This is aggravated by students’ habits of dreaming up beautiful worlds and desiring to fight for them. Rohith’s politics would have automatically ensured the pitiless contempt of our social traditions and academic culture. Such journeys are marked by loneliness that can easily turn into despair. Years of solitude turn into lost steps to nowhere. It’s in this world filled with the absence of a clear vision that the role of the teacher becomes very important. It is not as much about the scholarship of a teacher as it is about the desire to open a dialogue with students. It’s an ability to listen to disagreeable barbs. This can happen only if the teacher is willing to devote time and energy. Institutional requirements increasingly pressure teachers to show quantifiable achievements so that even those among us who enjoy engaging with students beyond the classroom are driven to consider such activities unprofitable, a “waste” of time.
In such selfish times, teachers are less inclined to spend time with students. A collective failure of the teaching community becomes apparent when a Rohith kills himself, perhaps in his loneliness, perhaps in his despair. We also need to ask how the teaching community has been shaped by the decisions taken by the HRD ministry and UGC.
I shall point to two issues. Every profession has its rules for promotion. If we look at the current format for promotions of teachers, teaching is a small, insignificant segment of the order of things. It is a teacher’s presence at seminars and publications that ensure prestige and promotion. This promotes an attitude of indifference to the fate of students. No one cares whether you teach well or badly. A teacher might spend the mandated “periods” dishing out a monologue in the name of a lecture before rushing off to hubs where they can network for promotions. Such a system cannot promote dialogue.
Decisions about increasing the number of students are taken without any meditation about its impact on classroom transactions. A primary casualty of mindless escalation of student strength is one-to-one contact and interaction between students and teachers. If the student-teacher ratio is not worked out properly, we create a system where students go through the motions of attending university without learning anything. We produce students sullen and angry, many of whom do not know why they are there. Rohith is no more, will someone listen to him?
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