The Indian public university is being quietly consigned to oblivion. The long-term structural pressures, political interference, and academic abdication across all regimes have been hollowing out universities at least since the 1970s. The crisis that first engulfed state universities in the 1960s slowly percolated to the central universities. Tragically, it was UPA-II — with its penchant for centralisation masquerading as reform — that laid the foundations for the assaults that would follow. Despite all this, the public system remained obstinately enduring.
This column has, over the years, dwelt on the systemic issues facing Indian universities: Governance structures, funding cuts, and so forth. But even then, there were modest hopes for a turnaround. The expansion of institutions created severe pedagogical stresses; everyone worried about access, almost no one about quality. But the churn in the social composition of universities was an opportunity. Students, unlike in the “time-pass”, strike-ridden culture of the 1970s, were keen to learn.
That assumption no longer holds. Conversations with colleagues in public universities across the country are now uniformly bleak. Even the minimal institutional form of the university seems to be disappearing. This newspaper yesterday carried a story about the removal of five vice-chancellors (V-Cs) in Rajasthan, prompted by ABVP protests. The episode exposed two trends everyone privately acknowledges but few publicly confront.
The first is the collapse of even the most stolidly boring administrative norms. It used to be a basic procedural principle that inquiring officers had to be senior to those being investigated. Even this norm has been discarded when governments want to dismiss V-Cs.
The second is the unprecedented veto power the ABVP now wields in many universities. Student unions have always been significant actors in campus life. But almost every public university professor I speak to, across several states, now says the ABVP has a virtual veto over what happens in their institutions. Pre-censoring of speakers is routine, driven by real or imagined fear of protest. In Rajasthan, the allegations go further: That the ABVP effectively functions as a front for political extortion. Perhaps the only historical precedent for this level of domination is the Left Front’s decimation of what should have been a global education hub in Kolkata. What was once practised in some states is now the national norm. Students ought to engage in politics; it is an extraordinary civic education, and many will, in their individual capacities, work for political parties. But we must still ask whether the form of party politics that dominates student life in India is counterproductive. Should student bodies be formally affiliated with political parties at all?
Part of the decimation of the university stems from the fact that both student and teacher politics became partisan all the way down. Student politics was a conduit to political careers; the reverse was also true, with parties using unions to control universities or manufacture mayhem. This is as true of the SFI and the NSUI as it is of the ABVP.
The largest unintended casualty of this arrangement was the disappearance of the “student” as a category in public consciousness. Student unions were mostly about everything except protecting the long-term interests of students. Teachers’ unions, also party-affiliated, fared no better. As a result, the two groups that ought to have had the strongest stake in academic excellence — students and professors — could rarely speak as collective academic actors. They existed as individuals, but their collective avatars were party appendages. The tragedy of the Indian public university is that the very constituencies that might have defended it were structurally prevented from doing so.
The state universities are, of course, undergoing their moment of schadenfreude, as they watch party rule descend upon once-hallowed institutions like Delhi University and JNU. As this column has argued before, these universities were far from perfect; they were unconscionably short-changing their students. In some areas, there are, of course, pockets of achievement. But to hear about their current condition is to descend into a kind of unimaginable institutional dystopia: Students afraid to organise seminars; faculty required to submit papers months in advance for pre-clearance; pressure to attend RSS-sponsored events; the absolute decimation in the quality of appointments, even by previously uneven standards. The pedagogical mission is more confused than ever: CUET is an exam machine, not a pedagogical solution to any problem. V-Cs behave as if their job were to perform the home ministry’s functions, pointing fingers at ideologically inconvenient faculty.
These can only be reported as conversations, but they are harrowing ones, cutting across the political spectrum. As one colleague put it, “there are increasingly three degrees you need: RSS, Modi and money”. I have seen an economist from the Delhi School of Economics in tears, contemplating what the School once was and what it has become. A left-right confrontation over the university might not be ideal. But at least it could have intellectual content and be compatible with some threshold understanding of what a university is. The worries colleagues now express are far worse.
Perhaps those of us who exited the public system have forfeited the right to speak about it. But the true tragedy is public silence. Delhi University, once a cacophonous arena where a V-C could not move a flower pot without sparking protest, now lies inert before the party-state. The university has been domesticated. And all this in the name of a “Bharatiya tradition” that once insisted rulers lay down their arms before entering a place of learning. We are witnessing a reversal of that ethic: Power marching into the gurukul fully armed, and finding no one left willing to say no. There are no professors or students, only partisans, or worse, nationals and anti-nationals.
The writer is contributing editor, The Indian Express
