Opinion What Ashoka University founder needs to realise: Andolans are at the heart of knowledge, creativity and politics
The extent of negative liberty – the minimum area in which no external authority should be allowed to interfere because it would violate that which is essential human – is a measure of freedom in that society. Ashoka allowed interference by external authority in that minimum area
Since the renowned academics at Ashoka have remained sphinx-like in their silence on these public controversies, I returned to the website for a clue on how to read the challenges to the university. (Express Archive) It is, I suppose, unfair to ask the question, “Is Ashoka University backsliding?”. But I ask it nevertheless because I have been trying for the last few days to ignore Sanjeev Bhikchandani’s September 4 post on X (Twitter) but, for some reason, am unable to do so. There are four troublesome aspects to his post. The first is his celebration of Ashoka University being “boring”. Can a liberal arts and sciences university ever be “boring”, I wonder? The second is his assertion that parents do not pay the fees they do for their children to do “andolans”. Really? The third is his observation that “left-liberal values and studying liberal arts are very different. You can be right of centre and still study liberal arts.” And the fourth is his status as a co-founder and trustee, which has given his Twitter post the wide media coverage it received. These four aspects require a critical response. A liberal imagination requires it.
When I began to think about the post, I immediately went to Ashoka’s website to discover how it works. Ashoka has three bodies, a Governing Body (GB), a Management group and a Board of Management (BOM). The GB has 11 members, seven of whom are from the corporate sector, one representative of the Haryana government, and three academics. From this composition, it seems likely (not definitely) that corporate thinking will drive the GB’s policy decisions. The management group has 40 members distributed between academics and administrators. Because this is an unwieldy body, a smaller group, the Board of Management (BOM) – made up of 11 members, five corporate, five academic and one Government of Haryana representative – I presume, runs the university. The GB decides on policy questions and the BOM implements them. The controversies regarding the recent exits of some faculty were policy questions that concerned the university’s position on the boundaries of academic freedom.
Since the renowned academics at Ashoka have remained sphinx-like in their silence on these public controversies, I returned to the website for a clue on how to read the challenges to the university. The website lists three categories of trustees, “Distinguished Founders and Trustees”, “Eminent Founders and Trustees” and just “Founders and Trustees”. The appellation “Trustee” is significant here. Is Ashoka invoking Gandhi’s conception of “trusteeship” here or are they just using a legal term to describe “philanthropists” in the American sense? This distinction is important. Gandhi introduced the idea of a “trustee” in contradistinction to the idea of an “owner”. A trustee, for Gandhi, had rights to only a part of what he was controlling and the rest belonged to God. It was with him only in trust. The trustee’s actions were, therefore, to be judged primarily in terms of whether they served the public purpose. In contrast, the philanthropist has no such constraints. The object of her philanthropy is solely dependent on her, the philanthropist. They give the money. They decide the terms. Andrew Carnegie set out this thinking in his book The Gospel of Wealth and it still drives American philanthropy. Bill Gates’s philanthropic work is a good example of such thinking. The question then is: Does Ashoka subscribe to Gandhian Trusteeship or Carnegie’s idea of philanthropy? The regularity of Bhikchandani’s public statements, which remain unrefuted by either the GB, BOM, VC or chancellor, suggest that it is Carnegie who is favoured. Ashoka is a favourite hobby for the trustees. Or so it seems.
The second is Bhikchandani’s assumption that parents do not send their children “to do andolans”. Whatever may be the motivations of parents, his understanding of the role of andolans in human history is very narrow, if not primitive. His public statements only show the arrogance of an owner and not that of a trustee. Andolans are at the heart of human creativity. They emerge from dissent and develop into movements against any order whether it is philosophical, scientific, technological, cultural or political. The sexual revolution that liberated women and sexual minorities was an andolan. As was the human rights movement. In our time, the climate change protests by Greta Thunburg are an andolan. Bhikchandani may want to reflect on this proposition that andolans are constitutive of the human species. So don’t knock andolans. Broaden the conception. Andolans have given us poetry and music and art and philosophy. Parents should, in fact, send their children to Ashoka to “do andolan”. The more andolanjeevis Ashoka produces, the greater will be its legacy.
The third is his observation that a liberal education can support both left and right ideological thinking. This is correct. A liberal arts institution should not privilege one ideology over another. It must, in fact, invite equal critical scrutiny of both. Common to both in a liberal arts university is the absolute commitment to academic freedom, to the right to argue a viewpoint and to have it challenged peacefully. This commitment, unfortunately, was abandoned in the case of Sabyasachi Das. Although Bhikchandani said of Ashoka, in a Financial Times (FT) interview on March 8, 2018, that, “It’s about building a better democracy. You need people who are willing to question power…” Yet when Das questioned power he was thrown under a bus. Sadly, of the reputed scholars at Ashoka, only Pulapre Balakrishnan resigned in protest.
Isaiah Berlin, the great champion of liberty, elaborating on J S Mills’ thesis ‘On Liberty’, argued that the extent of negative liberty — the minimum area in which no external authority should be allowed to interfere because it would violate that which is essential human — is a measure of freedom in that society. Academic freedom is within that minimum area. Ashoka allowed interference by external authority in that minimum area. IIM-A, Bhikchandani’s alma mater, some months ago denied the Ministry of Education’s request to withdraw a PhD thesis considered objectionable by the regime saying it was not for the Ministry to ask. Another university that Bhikchandani mentions in his FT interview, Cambridge, defended a PhD student who gave a talk on slavery and was threatened with a legal case by a former MP whose family was mentioned as being part of the slave trade. The former MP backed down. Two institutions stood for academic freedom. One did not.
The justification given, a prudential one, is that the university’s FCRA status is at stake and therefore, it is necessary to make pragmatic compromises of principle for future gain. But if this pragmatic compromise diminishes the minimum area and renders it feeble, is it still worth it? Will too much be lost? Will the liberal arts university become another degree awarding shop or a finishing school for Western universities? Is it right for a utilitarian calculus to override a fundamental principle? This is what a liberal arts education should require you to ask.
India needs more Liberal Arts Universities to answer the question. They cannot be boring places since they open up the mind to discoveries, new perspectives, new relationships, and new possibilities. Bikchandani’s initial intuition, stated in the FT interview, that the university should not have been called Ashoka was right. It is a name that carries a heavy moral load. Are the trustees up to the task?
Peter Ronald deSouza is the former director of the Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla (2007-2013)
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