The Idea of the University: Histories and Contexts 9781138055384, 9780429444173

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The Idea of the University

What is this ‘idea’ of the university? Why does it need to be defended? Does the work of defence preclude the task of rearranging the idea itself? Drawing on these essential questions, this volume traces the historical transformations of the university from medieval Europe down to current debates on its existence and sustenance in a neoliberal India. It challenges the liberal humanist ‘ideal’ of academic exchange to inquire into long befuddled debates on the true nature of the modern university. Along with its companion The University Unthought: Notes for a Future, this brave new intervention makes a compelling foray into the political future(s) of the university. It will be of interest to academics, educators and students of the social sciences and humanities. It will also be of use to policymakers and education analysts, and central to the concerns of any citizen. Debaditya Bhattacharya teaches literature at Kazi Nazrul University, India. He has previously taught at Sri Venkateswara College, University of Delhi, India (2010–­ 2012), Central University of South Bihar, India (2013–­ 2015) and Nivedita College, University of Calcutta, India (2015–­ 2018). Debaditya’s doctoral work engaged with the relationship between literature and death, and with specific reference to the testimonial speech-­act. He researches on continental philosophy, and writes on contemporary modes of political articulation as well as practices of mobilization in the Indian context. His current interests economic history of higher education, with cohere around a social-­ specific attention to Indian policy-­contexts. He is co-­editor of Sentiment, Politics, Censorship: The State of Hurt (2016).

The university is in crisis everywhere. Pushed by the demand for new technology-­ driven skills and hugely expanded aspirations for college degrees, the traditional university is being squeezed by a mercenary sector that supplies education for profit and shrinking state support. These two volumes, containing essays by a stellar list of contributors, provide the most comprehensive discussion I have seen of this crisis, particularly in India but also covering the neighbouring countries and the global scene. –­ Partha Chatterjee Professor of Anthropology, Columbia University, New York, USA and Honorary Professor, Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Kolkata, India These landmark volumes offer a veritable smorgasbord of deep and original thinking about the question of what a university is for. A stellar cast of essayists explores the university’s historical embeddedness in the nation-­state, critiques its present imbrication with global capital, and provides a richly imagined manifesto for its future. –­ Niraja Gopal Jayal Professor, Centre for the Study of Law and Governance, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India This invaluable and extraordinarily thought-­provoking collection offers many critical readings of not only the idea but also the ideology of the university in the global south, and especially India. It not only brings out the ‘consecration’ of nationalist and neoliberal commonsense in the university today, but also provides a vocabulary to challenge and question this consecration. One of the great pleasures of the collection is also the tension and implicit conversation between the various readings, which differ from each other, sometimes subtly and sometimes emphatically. An indispensable set of volumes for anybody concerned about the stakes of ‘higher’ education today. –­ Ajay Skaria Professor, Department of History/­Institute of Global Studies, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, USA Asked to blurb these volumes, I made the mistake of reading them. They are such rich collections I have no idea where to start my praise. Suffice to say that they are must-­reads for anyone seeking to understand the programs of governments, corporations and international agencies to de-­educate the global citizenry in the name of economic efficiency. As a U.S. reader, I was particularly enlightened by the careful analyses of higher education in India, whose education systems will have a major influence on the planet’s future. Seen from here, the first volume could be called ‘Provincializing America’. The second shows that another higher education is possible. Superb work that will help policy turn the corner. –­ Christopher Newfield Professor, Department of English, University of California-­Santa Barbara, USA

The Idea of the University Histories and Contexts Edited by Debaditya Bhattacharya

First published 2019 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2019 selection and editorial matter, Debaditya Bhattacharya; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Debaditya Bhattacharya to be identified as the author of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. The views and opinions expressed in this book are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of the publisher. The text representations and analyses are intended here to serve general educational and informational purposes and not obligatory upon any party. The authors and publisher have made every effort to ensure that the information presented in the book was correct at the time of press, but do not assume and hereby disclaim any liability with respect to the accuracy, completeness, reliability, suitability, selection and inclusion of the contents of this book and any implied warranties or guarantees. The authors and publisher make no representations or warranties of any kind to any person or entity for any loss, including, but not limited to special, incidental or consequential damage, or disruption  –­ physical, psychological, emotional, or otherwise  –­ alleged to have been caused, directly or indirectly, by omissions or any other related cause. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-­in-­Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN: 978-1-138-05538-4 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-429-44417-3 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by Apex CoVantage, LLC

. . . to all who fight the ‘borders’ of thought

Contents

Contributorsx Preface and acknowledgmentsxiv Introduction The university in history: from ‘idea’ to impossibility

1

DEBADITYA BHATTACHARYA

PART I

Historicizing the contemporary41   1 The vocation of the public university

43

WENDY BROWN

  2 The surplus university

63

NANDINI CHANDRA

  3 Perils and prospects of the modern university: African and Asian contexts in a world-­historical perspective

92

MUSHAHID HUSSAIN

PART II

Understanding contexts117   4 Divide and educate SUKANTA CHAUDHURI

119

viii  Contents   5 Of utopias and universities

130

ANIA LOOMBA

  6 Audit cultures and the Indian university as credit-­capital

143

RINA RAMDEV

  7 Of feudal intellectual capital: the history of the new provincial universities

155

DEBADITYA BHATTACHARYA

PART III

(A)politics in/­of the university?179   8 Is there a calling on the left?

181

PRASANTA CHAKRAVARTY

  9 The university as passivity? The role of students’ political activism

199

ANAND TELTUMBDE

10 The convergence of unequals: struggle for rights in the university space

217

HANY BABU MT

PART IV

Reflections and memoirs231 11 Bearing witness to the university-­‘idea’: some personal reflections

233

LAKSHMI SUBRAMANIAN

12 Don’t study, be happy

242

VIJAY PRASHAD

13 The Presidential transition PARAMITA BANERJEE

247

Contents ix 14 University: the state’s kitchen?

264

AKANKSHA AHLUWALIA, ISHAN MOHAN AND SAGAR SACHDEVA

Index279

Contributors

Akanksha Ahluwalia completed her Masters in English Literature from Ramjas College, University of Delhi, India in 2016. She is currently teaching English at a charitable school. Her areas of research interest include gender politics, popular culture and media studies. Hany Babu MT teaches in the Department of English, University of Delhi, India. Apart from language and linguistics, he takes an active interest in issues related to social justice and law. He is the co-­editor of Linguistic Theory and South Asian Languages (2007), and contributes to scholarly journals like Economic and Political Weekly. Paramita Banerjee, currently an Ashoka Fellow and previously a MacArthur Fellow for Leadership Development, shifted from academics to the social development sector way back in the early 1990s and has been working in that sector since  –­ with a focus on child rights, gender justice and queer activism. She has worked with children living in red light areas of Kolkata, and dreams of using her pen to ruffle status quoist feathers. She has written a column titled ‘Qafe’ in The Kindle Magazine and another, ‘Trailing Lost Footprints’, for Coldnoon Travel Poetics. She also writes and publishes short stories in both English and Bengali on issues of gender and sexuality. Paramita has translated children’s stories by Mahasweta Devi, published as a volume Our Non-­veg Cow and Other Stories (2009). A couple of her translations have also been included in Elizabeth Bumiller’s book May You be the Mother of a Thousand Sons (1990). Wendy Brown is Class of 1936 Chair at the University of California, Berkeley, USA where she teaches political theory. Her most recent books include Walled States, Waning Sovereignty (2010), The Power of Tolerance, with Rainer Forst (2014), and Undoing

Contributors xi the Demos: Neo-­Liberalism’s Stealth Revolution (2015). She is currently writing a book theorizing the hard right political turn in the Euro-­Atlantic world. Prasanta Chakravarty edits the web-­journal Humanities Underground. He also teaches English literature at the University of Delhi, India. His work on early modern radical heretic culture is published as Like Parchment in the Fire: Literature and Radicalism in the English Civil War (2006), while his reflections on the aesthetic imagination have been recently compiled as an anthology titled The Opulence of Existence: Essays on Aesthetics and Politics (2016). He has also edited a volume of contemporary writings on humanities, Shrapnel Minima: Writings from Humanities Underground (2014). He nurtures a particular interest in poetry and poetics, and enjoys translating significant contemporary literary writings into English. His poetry is anthologized in two books: Tetherings (2018) and Rules of the Game (2014). Nandini Chandra teaches in the Department of English, University of Hawaii, Manoa, USA. She has previously taught at the University of Delhi, India and her areas of research include the history of childhood in northern India, twentieth century print culture and theories of popular visual media. Her book The Classic Popular: Amar Chitra Katha (1967–­2007) was published in 2008. Sukanta Chaudhuri is Professor Emeritus in the Department of English and Founding Director of the School of Cultural Texts and Records, Jadavpur University, Kolkata, India. He works in the fields of European Renaissance studies, translation and textual studies. His books include​ Infirm Glory: Shakespeare and the Renaissance Image of Man (1981), Renaissance Pastoral and Its English Developments (1989), Translation and Understanding (1999), The Metaphysics of Text (2010) and many edited volumes including the Third Arden edition of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (2017). He has chaired a Subject Panel and a Curriculum Development Committee of the University Grants Commission (UGC), served as a Peer Team assessor for the National Assessment and Accreditation Council, and visited universities throughout India and abroad on academic visitorships and assessment exercises. He writes on higher education, urban development and social issues in scholarly journals, as well as Bengali and English public media. Mushahid Hussain is a doctoral researcher at the Department of Development Sociology, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, USA. His

xii  Contributors current research explores the confluence of labour precariousness, informal markets and the politics of subsistence in emergent industrial regions in contemporary Bangladesh. This confluence provides a point of departure for historically tracing processes of state formation, global economic reintegration and socio-­ecological shifts characterizing critical aspects of a political economy of development in South Asia. He also writes on politics, education and popular culture, and is a contributor to a recent volume titled What Is Education? (2017) edited by A. J. Bartlett, J. Clemens and J. Whyte. Ania Loomba is Catherine Bryson Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, USA. She is the author of Revolutionary Desires: Women, Communism, and Feminism in India (2018), Shakespeare, Race and Colonialism (2002), Colonialism/ Postcolonialism (1998), and Gender, Race, Renaissance Drama (1989), and numerous articles on early modern studies, race, colonial histories and feminism. She has co-­edited Rethinking Feminism in Early Modern Studies (2016), South Asian Feminisms (2012), Race in Early Modern England: A Documentary Companion (2007), Postcolonial Studies and Beyond (2005) and Postcolonial Shakespeares (1998). Ishan Mohan is currently pursuing his Ph.D. degree in Cinema Studies at Jawaharlal Nehru University, India, after finishing his Masters in Mass Communication from AJKMCRC, Jamia Millia Islamia, Delhi, India in 2016. He is working on digital media and aesthetics in the age of web 2.0, specifically Vaporwave, and hopes to continue research in shifting vocabularies and cultures around the media and communications. Vijay Prashad is the Chief Editor of LeftWord Books and Executive Director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. He is a columnist for Frontline, Alternet and BirGün. His books include Untouchable Freedom: The Social History of a Dalit Community (1999), The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World (2007), Arab Spring, Libyan Winter (2012), The Poorer Nations: A Possible History of the Global South (2013), No Free Left: The Futures of Indian Communism (2015) and The Death of the Nation and the Future of the Arab Revolution (2016), among several others. Rina Ramdev teaches literature at the Department of English, Sri Venkateswara College, University of Delhi, India. She has co-­edited Sentiment, Politics, Censorship: The State of Hurt (2016). She has

Contributors xiii worked on the politics of post-­coloniality, the writings of Arundhati Roy and the relationship between literature and social movements. She is also interested and involved in exploring the intersections of academic practice and political resistance within institutional spaces. Sagar Sachdeva studied Sociology at Ambedkar University Delhi, India. He works at Azad Foundation, mobilizing young men from resource-­poor communities in Delhi to reject hegemonic masculinities surrounding them and support non-­traditional livelihoods for women. Lakshmi Subramanian retired as Professor of History at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Kolkata, India, and is currently Associate Fellow at the Institute of Advanced Study, Nantes, France. She has taught economic and cultural histories of India for three decades at Visvabharati, Calcutta University and Jamia Millia Islamia, Delhi, India before joining CSSSC. Her books include The Sovereign and the Pirate: Ordering Maritime Subjects in India’s Western Littoral (2016), Three Merchants of Bombay (2012), A History of India 1707–­1857 (2010), Ports, Towns and Cities: A Historical Tour of the Indian Littoral (2008), New Mansions for Music Performance, Pedagogy and Criticism (2008), From the Tanjore Court to the Madras Music Academy: A Social History of Music in South India (2006), Medieval Seafarers (1999) and Indigenous Capital and Imperial Expansion: Bombay, Surat and the West Coast (1996), among others. Anand Teltumbde is a writer, political analyst and civil rights activist with the Committee for Protection of Democratic Rights. His work revolves around issues of class, caste, communalism and the political economy of development. He has held top management corporate position before moving to academia at IIT Kharagpur, India. Currently, he is Senior Professor at Goa Institute of Management, Goa, India. His publications include Dalits: Past, Present and Future (2016), Mahad: The Making of the First Dalit Revolt (2016), The Persistence of Caste: India’s Hidden Apartheid and the Khairlanji Murders (2011), Khairlanji: A Strange and Bitter Crop (2008) and Anti-­Imperialism and Annihilation of Castes (2005). He writes regularly for magazines like Outlook India, Seminar and Frontier, as well as for academic journals like Economic and Political Weekly.

Preface and acknowledgments

Let me open this collective of two companion volumes  –­ The Idea of the University: Histories and Contexts and The University Unthought: Notes for a Future  –­ on an intensely personal note. Early in 2017, a cousin brother of mine (staying in the northeastern state of Tripura) scraped all of his life’s savings to finance his son’s higher education. He hadn’t been a ‘successful’ father, by any means, and had barely managed to put his son through a government-­run secondary school in Agartala  –­ all the while complaining about the failing ‘quality’ of public education in a then-­communist-­ruled state and the thriving racket of private tuitions. He still tried saving up a meagre fortune for what lay ahead, and eventually decided to chase my nephew’s desire for a professional programme in a private technical college in Bangalore. There were ‘rumours’ about this college not having the necessary affiliations, and  –­ on probing further  –­ I realized that the off-­campus affiliating university was embroiled in litigation with regulatory bodies over the extent of its territorial jurisdiction. This is a routinely familiar story, and one that shrouds the inception and future of several private colleges and universities in a strange mist of confusion. The courts of the country have, on a number of occasions, issued injunctions against such for-­profit institutions of higher education and deemed them illegal. I went about my usual rounds of cautionary counsel with my brother’s family, till they landed in Bangalore for the necessary admission formalities. The warnings were ignored, the loan papers signed, the money arranged, the papers filled out, the son admitted  –­ and on his way back to the hotel that evening, my brother suffered a cardiac arrest and died before he could be taken to the hospital. I went over, and cremated the body. Perhaps, medically speaking, there wasn’t really a connection between the depletion of a bank account, a debt bond, an only son’s education and a father’s untimely death. I also know that this story

Preface and acknowledgments xv has little news-­value, and perhaps even lesser discursive value for the ceremony of a ‘preface’. Because, there are far more poignant stories that scream out of the graves and remains of many a lost life and lost career, or a promise of a future never even dared and dreamt. Recounting this rather-­personal episode here might apparently hold only a cathartic significance, but I believe this chronicle of a death retold sounds an adequate dirge to all that is dying with/­within the ‘idea’ of the university today. To crisply put it, the death is of the public university, and the constitutive ‘publicness’ that helped it survive. It is fairly understandable why now is a good time to get talking about the ‘idea of the university’, given the everyday onslaughts on both its liberal traditions of autonomy and its radical possibilities for a different politics. The legacies of social exclusion made possible by the university’s histories of ‘disinterested’ intellectual labour also beg relentless questioning. There has been substantial academic work on the neoliberal university (relating its history with questions of democracy and the exact policy-­ directions in higher education) in the European and North American contexts, but very little concerted research  –­ plumbing positions from different disciplines  –­ exists in the Indian context. Journalistic pieces and op-­ed articles have come out regularly in the print and electronic media on recent incidents as well as legislative implications of policy, expressing the massive discomfiture of acclaimed scholars, public intellectuals and activists over current trends in public-­funded higher education the world over. However, attempts to bring together thoughts from within varied disciplinary ‘silos’ about the perceived ‘crisis’ of university education are largely wanting. Furthermore, the recent political resurgence of right-wing forces across continents provokes greater alarm and is accompanied by routine incidents of social-­ economic discrimination on university campuses or state-­sponsored clampdowns. It is this climate of rabid anti-­intellectualism that makes a renewed historiographic intervention necessary and timely. While the triumphalist intrusion of the Hindu Right into spaces of Indian academia has called for intense solidarity movements over the past few years, the neoliberal directions in policy are neither new nor tied to the electoral fortunes of specific party-­regimes or political actors. In fact, as we all know, cultural conservatism has been an old and trusted ally of ruthless corporatization  –­ advertising the ‘free marketplace’ of ‘excellence’  –­ and this is as true of the Anglo-­American academy as of a ‘third-­world’ economy committed to ‘developmental’ agendas. Our resistance movements thus need to forge international alliances in the cause of generating a creative-­critical archive that

xvi  Preface and acknowledgments could re-­imagine a progressive politics of higher education across the world  –­ in terms of quality, access and the principles of social justice. Equally important is the need to measure the pits and promises of tertiary education against the historical mutations charted by primary and secondary levels of schooling, in grossly unequal contexts of privilege and opportunity. It also warrants remembering that the university today does not merely call for specialized academic-­analytical discourse alone, but also personal reflections/­reminiscences of change as well as journalistic reportage of events. At a time when the mainstream public media have been unabashedly beholden to corporate-­political patronage and have routinely run state-­engineered propaganda by ‘doctoring’ sentiment against public university communities, it is imperative that popular opinion be exposed to forms of ethical-­critical reporting. Also, when the state has tried hard to outlaw all modes and means of expressing alternative opinion as constitutive of ‘sedition’, one may only call forth the ghosts of ‘experience’ to rewrite history away from populist prejudice. Consequently, this has been made part of the rationale of these volumes  –­ since, now more than ever, it is crucial to strike a chord among non-­academic constituencies of public opinion. The content of these two volumes will therefore include some reflective or impressionistic pieces, coming from authors who range across academia and ‘serious’ journalism or occupy the cusp between the two. There is a deliberate convergence of objective-­critical work with the form of testimonials and manifestos  –­ spanning the recollected pasts and imaginable futures of the university. With contributors from widely variant professional persuasions and areas of scholarly interest  –­ and yet, tied by their physical proximity with the everyday contortions of university structures!  –­ these volumes hope to take the reader through a broad spectrum of writing genres. The literary is pitted against the statistical, policy-­analysis is coupled with historical minutiae, the archival is played out alongside the memoir, and a terseness of expression often juxtaposed with shades of argumentative vigour. This is a necessary politics of discourse, in order to reach out to diverse publics  –­ who might associate better with truth-­claims based on first-­hand contexts of experience. Now, to come to the task of acknowledging debts, there have been so many that every attempt at cataloguing them will only leave me terribly indebted to an agony of unfair selection. As every editor worth her salt knows, an anthology is like a performance  –­ the mettle of which is not her doing at all. The individual actors might only be thanked evermore for filling the hours of the evening with their magic,

Preface and acknowledgments xvii and the failings may squarely be laid on the one who conceptualized the possible alchemy of their labours. The actual ‘work’ exceeds the final event of the performance  –­ and likewise, for these books, it covered the space of years. Never a moment between the darkness of the womb and the light of day, in this passage towards the final object in your hands now, has been dulled by the lack of patience or the impatience of achievement. I can only blame the infirmity of language for not being able to thank the authors, with any degree of completeness. They remain the promise of this collective, and the reason for its being there at all. Perhaps, a collective on the university has been in the hatching, ever since  –­ by one of those many permutations of privilege  –­ one walked into the precincts of one such space. It has raged through the years of sitting within classrooms and looking at their windowed outsides, writing examinations and seeking revaluations, marching with comrades into imaginary struggles and real ones, living the first throb of democracy at student union elections, mixing excitement and dread in the aftermath of conversations and impassioned arguments. We did not change the world, as we thought we would through our phantasmal trysts with the university  –­ and, which is why this collective shaped up while we walked the streets with our colleagues, raised slogans, held placards over our heads, taught and unlearnt the ways of the classroom, lived the life of an ‘ad hoc’ teacher, clenched our teeth through daily routines of indignity, gulped down our angst sometimes in silence and sometimes in incoherent blabber, fought at teachers’ council meetings and through petty proceedings of committees, and then braced up for the next day’s struggle. Every time, there was hope laced along the ends of the night that passed. The first thought of compiling or converting these hopes into these volumes was chanced upon, when  –­ in the early months of 2015 and just before leaving a university job in Bihar  –­ I participated in a discussion with students on the ‘idea of the university’. My talk on the occasion was intended as a parting rebuttal to a university that cared too little for what its idea stood for. Kamlanand Jha, a senior colleague and a most trusted comrade, urged me to consider expanding that immediate cathartic outburst into the stuff of a book. And thus, it began! I knew from the beginning that this ‘book’ cannot be a monograph, because there was so much outside of my experience of the university that needed to be accounted for. When Rohith Vemula left a nation sleep-­walking into a bloodied ‘collective conscience’ and the cries of sedition rent newspaper columns, I collaborated with Cafe Dissensus Magazine to bring out an online archive of essays on the theme in

xviii  Preface and acknowledgments September 2016. Most of my collaborators from that edition have unquestioningly stayed on since, while the editors of the webzine  –­ Mosarrap H. Khan and Mary Ann Chacko  –­ have been exceptionally nice to hint at a book-­future for the work thus shared. Over time, conversations with Ajay Skaria, Romila Thapar, Niraja Gopal Jayal, Apoorvanand, Pranab Bardhan, Geetha Nambissan, Ravindra Karnena, Chirashree Dasgupta, Ayesha Kidwai, Tejaswini Niranjana, Franson Manjali, Vinita Chandra, Upal Chakrabarti and Sukanya Sarbadhikary added much to the act of thinking through these volumes and strengthened the resolve behind them. Back in Bihar  –­ where I (un)learnt more about the university than its metropolitan monumentality assures  –­ Yogesh Pratap Shekhar, Richa, Shanker Asish Dutt, Vinay Kanth, Daisy Narayan, Muniba Sami, Anuj Lugun, Prashant Thakur, Kanupriya Jha, Samta Rai, Amrit Ghoshal, Prabhat Jha and Abhyuday have braved the agony of many a debate with soldierly resilience. Coming to teach at a fairly nondescript college in Kolkata and slipping into a relationship with the university that gets more rarified by the day, friends and colleagues  –­ Nilanjana Sen, Sudakshina Ghosh, Piyalee Das Sharma and Joyita Mitra being but a few  –­ remained as the sounding-­board for ideas and worldly failures. Through all these leaps and shifts, snatches of conversations with Partha Chatterjee, Harbans Mukhia, Sundar Sarukkai, Tanika Sarkar, Rochelle Pinto, Jawed Naqvi, Saugata Bhaduri, Simi Malhotra and GJV Prasad have meant a world of encouragement and permanent solidarity. The most intimate alliances are best left unsaid. But, were it not for Rina Ramdev, the university may have never been a place for me to want to belong to. She is what redeems the work of ideas beyond the realm of the odious, with her abiding friendship. My students have been fellow-­travellers through the dense recesses of every ‘idea’  –­ and so will they continue to inspire every other. Kalpana Jha has been a living workshop of the imagination; and, because she escaped the life of the university, she taught me out of my disillusionments with it. My family has clung on to me, despite not knowing why these years have felt like an exercise in calculated disengagement. I can only assure them here of my constancy. Shoma Choudhury, from Routledge, has been at the receiving end of my frenzied outbursts on email  –­ and has evidently still not given up. I cannot thank her enough for this wonderful bond of collegiality and faith. Brinda Sen, from the editorial team, still continues to battle the storm out. There have been four anonymous reviewers, who  –­ at various points in the claying up of these two volumes  –­ have propped

Preface and acknowledgments xix me with the most insightful suggestions and criticism. Their comments ring through my wakeful moments of anticipation, as the volumes go in for print. Wendy Brown’s essay originally appeared in an anthology that consummately belongs to these times of neoliberal conquest and our possible resistances to it  –­ titled What is Education? (2017)  –­ and, compiled by students voicing their disenchantments with the university through such pedagogical activism. Anton Bech Jorgensen, one of the editors of the volume, has since injected much of his deeply political enthusiasm into this ‘work’, and I may only sound a renewed pledge of alliance here. For those interested (and, those unsure or indifferent yet!), the aforementioned volume is freely downloadable and does not claim much memory space beyond the necessary life of the mind. Sukanta Chaudhuri’s contribution here was published in an earlier version in Economic and Political Weekly (Vol. 52, No. 24) and there’s enough to vindicate its continuing readership. Postscript: Through my childhood years, I responded to the interlocutors of ‘ambition’ by saying that I want to become an educationist. When queried why, I self-­assuredly said  –­ without the faintest clue of what it meant  –­ that I want to better the state of education in the country. Now, for some inexplicable reason, I hate that word  –­ ­‘educationist’. Perhaps, because I know there is none by that name. I dedicate this book to all who did not want to become ‘educationists’. Debaditya Bhattacharya 2 January 2018

Introduction The university in history: from ‘idea’ to impossibility Debaditya Bhattacharya

The first thing that one notices about a book  –­ whether in encounters with the material object-­world of print, or via its insertion into a technological ‘sensorium’  –­ is, of course, its title. Going by structures of such bibliophilic titillation of a ‘desire-­at-­first-­sight’, the impatience of a book’s immediate appeal, this first volume of a two-­part series might resonate with the memory of a repetition. Predictably, the title of this collection is as old as the early nineteenth century ‘idea’ of the object under analysis. As early as in 1810, Wilhelm von Humboldt spoke of the ‘idea of a university’ (1810: 3), in order for it to be then appropriated into an official Euro-­American manifesto for centuries. In choosing an identical coinage for this work, I deliberately shun the market-­rule of titular ‘novelty’  –­ in order to emphasize that the destiny of an ‘idea’ lies in its circulation through a history long lived and remembered. I pluralize this entry into ‘history’ in the subtitle, because as I will go on to show, the several instantiations of the idea behind its renewed telling also occasion an acknowledgment of successively divergent ‘contexts’. The ‘idea of the university’, in its very phraseological aspect, has routinely commissioned analytical rigours and hermeneutic anxieties in many a thinker and philosopher of modernity, alongside Humboldt  –­ namely, John Henry Newman (1996 [1852]), Karl Jaspers (1959 [1923]), Helmut Schelsky (1963), Jurgen Habermas (1987) and Jaroslav Pelikan (1992), among others. My re-­cycling of the same phrase to mark the appearance of a volume of contemporary essays does not in the least suggest an ideological continuity of positions expressed herein, but is a necessary reference to the history of public discourse that precedes the ‘here-­and-­now’ of an intervention. In this, the origin of our current collection participates in a strategic avowal of debt and difference that might singularly serve as the starting-­point for any rethinking of the university today. What follows, by way of

2  Debaditya Bhattacharya an introductory passage into the book proper, will argue that the university’s history through modernity is concurrently a history of twin losses  –­ not just of an ‘originary’ idea that necessitated its own crisis, but also of an ontological self-­presence of what a university means. The story that unfolds, through historical detours, is of the modern university receding into a zone of conceptual impossibility in the present-­day ‘world-­class’ institution of World Bank lore. The consequent tone of a work of this kind, however, does not belong to the space of lament. Nor does it consist in the aura of a romantic return, the valorization of a past as the heroic ideal of reference. Nostalgia cannot be the work of the present. Mourning, though an affective act of reinstating faith in the face of loss, cannot be the grounds for thought. What, then, animates the spirit of a recounting  –­ such as this volume hopes to represent? At the heart of every archive is an effort to legislate memory as the minimal indivisible trace of the unthought. We come together to voice our discomfort with the present conjuncture of history, while at the same time reposing our belief in it as the only opening towards distinctly ‘other’ futures.

The ‘state’ of birth: a divided freedom When, in 1809–­1810, Wilhelm von Humboldt enjoined the modern research university in post-­revolutionary Berlin to an exalted national ideal of cultural progress  –­ through what he named as a moral-­spiritual commitment to the cause of ‘Bildung’ (Sorkin 1983: 55–­74)  –­ he instituted a deep contradiction within its historical destiny. While, on the one hand, the university communities were called upon to organize themselves in the consciousness of a single ‘idea’ of ‘true science’ (Humboldt 1810: 3), there was on the other a residual distrust of such self-­regulation as potentially working in the interests of a dominant ‘spirit’ (ibid.: 3). Humboldt, in his classic treatise on the structural principles of ordering higher scientific institutions in the model of the University of Berlin, reiterates the value of disinterested scholarship and a life of intense scientific research as internally resting on a non-­ utilitarian condition of academic freedom: Since these institutions can thus achieve their purpose only if each one, as much as possible, faces the pure idea of science, solitariness and freedom are the predominant principles in their circle. But since the intellectual work within humanity flourishes only as cooperation . . . the internal organization of these institutions must bring forth and sustain a collaboration that is

Introduction 3 uninterrupted, constantly self-­renewing, but unforced and without specific purpose. (ibid.: 1) The mandating of the university as a community ‘without specific purpose’ was ironic, to say the least: because while it accurately separated the spheres of the intellectual and the professional along a hierarchy of knowledge-­objectives, it also made the ‘national cultural’ agenda of university education relatively impalpable as a spiritual striving and not a functionalist pretext. Contributing to the state’s mission of large-­scale ‘common progress’ (viz. allgemeine bildung) was, in the Humboldtian schema of things, free from the objective-­calculative trappings of ‘utility’. Following Frederick Wilhelm III’s dictum, the new German institution for higher scientific instruction was designed to win back through intellectual conquests what was lost in national defeat on the military front (Rothblatt and Wittrock 1993: 317). Consequently, Humboldt urges the government to desist from interfering in the ‘internal organization’ of the university and in favour of a clinical isolation of the academic from the political, insofar as the final dividends were to be enjoyed by the state alone  –­ in terms of a civic-­national character-­building of the citizen-­subject, as well as a ready supply of bureaucratic-­administrative personnel for functions of governance. On the whole, . . . [the state] must not demand from [the universities] anything that relates directly and straightforwardly to itself, but must nurse the inner conviction that when they achieve their final purpose, they will also fulfil its purposes, namely from a much more elevated perspective, one from which much more can be brought together and very different forces and levers can be applied than the state is capable of setting into motion. (Humboldt 1810: 4) Despite a straitjacketed insistence on the structural autonomy of the university from the pressures and priorities of the state, the modern German university perceived a possible danger in the self-­enclosed ‘unity’ of university communities. That a self-­consciousness of the university’s ‘idea’  –­ rooted as it was in the integration of scientific practice within the philosophical faculty!  –­ might give way to an impatience with antagonistic points of view and a stifling of difference is what Humboldt feared. The medieval university’s penchant for maintaining a safe balance of ecclesiastical privilege (Rashdall 1895; Haskins

4  Debaditya Bhattacharya 1927; Swanson 1979; Pedersen 1997), through what is popularly understood as a guild-­mentality, could be imminently reproduced by the Bildungsburgertum (the elite academic community, or the German ‘mandarins’) within the institutional design of its modern counterpart (Ringer 1969: 44–­45). Humboldt sees this “collision that occurs between teachers” (1810: 5) as particularly relevant in the context of faculty appointments, and therefore decides to grant the state full arbitrational powers over matters of recruitment. The legitimation of state control as a structural component of the purportedly ‘autonomous’ university is, quite unsurprisingly, a legacy of the Humboldtian ‘idea’  –­ notwithstanding apparent declamations of self-­sufficiency and disinterested claims to truth: Now, as far as the externality of the relationship to the state and its activity in all of this is concerned, it must only ensure the wealth (strength and variety) of mental power through the choice of the men that should be assembled. . . . The appointment of university teachers must be reserved exclusively to the state, and it is surely not a good practice to allow the faculties more influence on it than a perspicacious and reasonable committee would exercise on its own. . . . Moreover, the make-­up of the universities is too closely tied to the immediate interests of the state. (Humboldt 1810: 3, 5) By making academic appointments incumbent on the ‘immediate interests of the state’, a fundamental paradox is introduced into the very imagination of the rejuvenated German university. It is this cleaving of academic autonomy (as a necessary precondition for the ‘free’ functioning of the higher scientific institution) that granted the gradually emergent nation-­state a right to name and define the exact amplitude of ‘freedom’ with regard to internal organization. Externally, the state was to remain both the patron-­preserver and the limit-­ condition of the form of a university’s inner being. Understandably therefore, historians and reformer-­activists of education have severally argued that the birth of the modern Humboldtian university idea[l] was proximately tied to the rise of the nascent nation-­state and its historical claim to sovereignty  –­ “whether in newly-­formed polities on the European continent, such as Italy or Germany, or through the reform of older State organisations, such as France or the United States of America” (Wittrock 1993: 305; see also McClelland 1980; Rothblatt 1989, 1997; Wagner 1990; Brooks and Gagnon 1990; Wagner et al. 1991).

Introduction 5

The ferment of precedence Humboldt’s conceptual lay-­out for the University of Berlin, with its dual emphasis on graduate training and organic-­integrative research, and by combining the public lecture-­method alongside the system of the seminar (1810: 5), was to become the predominant model for university reform across Euro-­American countries through the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It survived, though with a variety of critical detractions, the maddening tendency towards academic specializations within scientific practice. While the branching out of disciplinary specialism with an increasingly forceful alienation between the natural and the human sciences seemingly endangered the university’s syncretism of purpose, the paternalistic structures of the nation-­state guarded the university’s self-­understanding as a community of engaged practitioners of truth. That the politico-­cultural imagination of the modern nation-­state  –­ spiritually committed to a project of moral regeneration and an allied task of structurally embedding citizenship-­practices through its own institutions  –­ was responsible for a massive overhaul in higher education systems around this period could be borne out in a brief historical survey. Napoleon’s rise in France and the ferment produced by the revolutionary upsurge led to a radical questioning of the near-­ defunct French university system, and a large-­scale decentralization of higher learning in the grandes ecoles (Vaughan 1969: 93). These were ‘higher schools’ meant for imparting professional education in technical disciplines  –­ primarily, engineering and industrial sciences  –­ to selected students with distinctly ‘higher’ potential (Lundgreen 1990: 36–­41; Heilbron 1991). Though the ecoles dated back to the seventeenth century, it was only after the Revolution that the model of the Ecole Polytechnique (established in 1794, with the declared aim of training military officers) and the Ecole Normale Superieure (1795) gave newer impetus to such dedicated centres for professional training, working outside of the French universities but within the administrative purview of the redrawn nation-­state. It is interesting to note on this account that while the faculties of law and medicine were incorporated in the university’s structure, the fields of technical training were left solely to these ecoles which in turn were expected to provide necessary personnel for the nation’s industrial progress (Clark 1973; Weisz 1983). The British Empire, on the other hand, called for a thorough re-­ examination of its oldest elite universities (Oxford and Cambridge) and their affiliated colleges to entrench a liberal curriculum of humanistic

6  Debaditya Bhattacharya value, such that these institutions could serve the interests of the colonial state’s administrative bureaucracy at home and abroad (Halsey and Trow 1971; Price 1986; Soffer 1987). There was a strict emphasis on the values of Christian liberalism and its civilizational mission through the subjects studied in these colleges (Rothblatt 1968), whereas a uniform standard of evaluative metrics and embodied learning ensured that the graduating students could become fit agents of the imperial enterprise. Once the lofty ideals of empire-­building were entrusted to the care of the college-­ system, the British universities could be redesigned and marked out as spaces for specialized scientific research (Forgan 1989: 405–­34; Tribe 1991: 273–­302). If the English project of knowledge production thrived on a careful separation of intellectual labour along differentiated tiers of institutional infrastructure, the American university system took inspiration from the Humboldtian model to evolve a new prototype of higher learning that successfully merged all prerogatives of teaching and research. The late nineteenth century saw the rise and eventual dominance of the American vision of the university  –­ which effectively became the singular site of multiple forms of liberal, professional, technical and vocational training (Barber 1988). While this ironically represented a far cry from the German model of syncretic ‘universalism’, the American ‘pastiche’ achieved a concentration of the full range of state interests in the site of the university (Skowronek 1982; Kerr 1991). Contributing to all spheres of intellectual, cultural and economic activity through a streamlining of diverse departments within a single infrastructural unit, the early American example has occasioned the charge of condemnation and disapproval from educators and reformers alike (Flexner 1930). However, the assimilationist assumption in such a university model has logically lent itself, in later decades of the twentieth century, to a parasitism of external financial claims on certain ‘performing’ departments while consigning others to exclusive state support or eventual dissolution.

From ‘culture’ to ‘service’: re-­appropriating the university Having witnessed the gradual convulsions within Humboldt’s model of the public research university under an increasingly tenuous cult of specialization, Friedrich Nietzsche rued its estrangement from the ‘path of true culture’ (1872: 4). In a series of five public lectures delivered at the University of Basel in the early months of 1872 (later published as Anti-­ Education: On the Future of Our Educational Institutions), Nietzsche embarked on despondent meditations on the

Introduction 7 contemporary state of German public schools. Structured for the most part as an impassioned dialogue between a philosopher and his pupil, the lectures are unsparingly trenchant in their critique of scientific specialisms as fundamentally opposed to the essential purpose of public education  –­ that is, the cause of cultural enlightenment and the service of genius. Nietzsche sees in the mass expansion of public education a threat to the “aristocratic nature of the mind” (ibid.: 17) and a utilitarian conspiracy hatched by the state to affirm a life of immediate material profit. He scathingly discerns: [T]he State, in its turn, strives here and there for its own preservation, after the greatest possible expansion of education, because it always feels strong enough to bring the most determined emancipation, resulting from culture, under its yoke, and readily approves of everything which tends to extend culture, provided that it be of service to its officials or soldiers, but in the main to itself, in its competition with other nations. (ibid.: 4) Extending his attack on the nexus of interests between the educational apparatus and the nation-­state, Nietzsche urges a crusade against the banalization of German culture by returning to the spirit of ‘classical education’. He advocates a rigorous study of the German language  –­ and through it, an attempt to answer the beckoning of the “classical Hellenic and Roman world . . . as the highest and most instructive of all morals” (ibid.: 10). In this, the dangers of a journalistic prose and the supercilious appeal of triviality must be transcended as inherently damaging to the quest for German high culture. In his fifth and final lecture, Nietzsche moves to a vituperative rejection of the university’s contemporary idealization of ‘academical freedom’ as being slavishly united, at heart, to maintaining a statist order of obedience. In a passage that resonates with tremendous relevance to our own times, he diagnoses the university’s pathology in the invisible omniscience of ideological guardianship by the state. “How is the student connected with the university?” We answer: “By the ear, as a hearer”. . . . One speaking mouth, with many ears, and half as many writing hands  –­ there you have to all appearances, the external academical apparatus; the university engine of culture set in motion. Moreover, the proprietor of this one mouth is severed from and independent of the owners of the many ears; and this double independence is enthusiastically

8  Debaditya Bhattacharya designated as ‘academical freedom’. And again, that this freedom may be broadened still more, the one may speak what he likes and the other may hear what he likes; except that, behind both of them, at a modest distance, stands the State, with all the intentness of a supervisor, to remind the professors and students from time to time that it is the aim, the goal, the be-­all and end-­all, of this curious speaking and hearing procedure. (ibid.: 28–­29) Hitting hard at the Humboldtian contract between the public university and the nation-­state and its chimerical fantasies of autonomy, Nietzsche’s call for a return to the spiritual mission of ‘true culture’ is not without its own dangers. In his vehement opposition to the mid-­ nineteenth century proliferation of knowledge-­ specializations and a concurrent championing of the Graeco-­Roman route to cultural redemption, one can almost hear the Nazi undertones of a plan for ‘national regeneration’ as resounded by Martin Heidegger almost 60 years later. In his public address upon assuming the office of the Rector at University of Freiburg im Breisgau in 1933, Heidegger began on a Nietzschean note by appealing to the true essence of the German university as the ‘will to science’ and a consequent realization of its spirit in the “beginning of our spiritual-­historical existence . . . [as] the departure, the setting out, of Greek philosophy” (1990 [1933]: 6). In much the same vein, he castigates the “encapsulation of the sciences in separate specialities, . . . their boundless and aimless dispersal in individual fields and corners” (ibid.: 9), but only to finally reassert its eventual destiny in “the historical spiritual mission of the German people as a people that knows itself in its state [Staat]” (ibid.: 5). It is here that Heidegger’s imagination of the modern university veers close to the Nazi agenda of re-­integrating ‘knowledge-­service’ (Wissensdienst) as service to the German nation. Reinstating the Greek origins of science as a will to relentless questioning “in the midst of the constantly self-­concealing totality of what is” (ibid.: 7), the phenomenologist and Rector of Freiburg opens up a fascistic quest for a truly German beginning for scientific research as the ‘historical mission’ of the university. He likens this quest to a battle for the spiritual self-­assertion of the German people as primordial being, the highest principle of existence  –­ a message that would soon compound in the ‘purificatory’ horrors of the Holocaust. The faculty is a faculty only if it becomes capable of spiritual legislation, and, rooted in the essence of its science, able to shape the

Introduction 9 powers of existence that pressure it into the one spiritual world of the people. . . . All abilities of will and thought, all strengths of the heart, and all capabilities of the body must be unfolded through battle, heightened in battle, and pre-­served as battle. . . . This battle community of teachers and students, however, will only recreate the German university into a place of spiritual legislation and establish in it the centre of the most disciplined preparation for the highest service to the people in its state. (ibid.: 12)

Liberal fantasies of a consensus If the Humboldtian ‘idea’ of the university was particularly susceptible to being subversively appropriated by fascistic ends  –­ for its laboured insistence on a self-­conscious totalism, as well as its subterranean intimacies with the nation-­state  –­ Max Weber had already discerned its untenability as infrastructural monolith within a successively fragmentary order of modernity. That the incessant rationalization of ‘productivity’, as commanded by a modern-­bureaucratic apparatus of the state, must of necessity lend itself to specialist obfuscations of science is something that Weber accurately pointed out as the internal aporia of the Humboldtian conception. In a hugely acclaimed lecture on ‘Science as a Vocation’ (1917), he compared the contemporary contortions of the university-­ideal in German and American contexts, only to hint at the inescapable failings of the same (Owen and Strong 2004). While Helmut Schelsky  –­ faced with a disillusioning realization of the disintegrative potential of the ‘modern’ German university  –­ still clung on to an essential philosophical ‘reflexivity’ as the binding ethic across disciplinary divisions (Schelsky 1963, 1969, 1971), Jurgen Habermas went on to find the corporative self-­consciousness of the university as ideologically hostile to any consideration of material practice. In his elaborate account of how Humboldt’s (and subsequently, Jaspers’) ‘idea’ fell short of an appropriate understanding of teaching-­learning ‘processes’ at the university, Habermas pointedly questions: The corporative self-­understanding of the university would be in even deeper trouble if it were anchored in something like a normative ideal, for ideas come and go. The essence of the old university idea was that it was supposed to have been grounded in something more stable than just the content of particular ideas  –­ it was to be anchored, procedurally anchored, in the scientific process itself. But if science or the scientific method is no longer suitable

10  Debaditya Bhattacharya as such an anchor, since the multiplicity of disciplines no longer leaves room for the totalizing power of either an all-­encompassing philosophy or even for the mere self-­reflection of science arising from the individual disciplines themselves, what could then possibly serve to ground an integrated self-­understanding of the corporative body? (1987: 20) The answer lies, for Habermas, in the communicative rationality at work within university settings  –­ and its inherent capacity for dialogue and the “productive power of discursive disputes that carry the promissory note of generating surprising arguments” (ibid.: 21). The liberal autonomous public spheres that bind the university into an ever-­possible ‘community of investigators’ is attested as the only ‘idea’ that the modern university might survive as. The dialogic principle at the heart of a critical social conscience is what the post-­war public university came to be regarded as an embodiment of. The Keynesian model of welfare reforms transformed higher education both in terms of greater access and quality, and in the process accrued public legitimacy for the state through something of an intellectual consensus. Forms of scholarly opinion at the university achieved significant dominance through state-­sanctioned spaces of planning and policy, and an ideological hegemony was secured in favour of a state that strategically allowed a public culture of critique. The 1960s and 1970s saw a deepening of the state’s welfarist role through increased social spending as well as a thoroughgoing expansion of higher education demographics in the form of constitutional safeguards or guarantees. Subsidization of educational costs enabled social-­economic mobility among representative sections of the formerly disenfranchised, while the state-­sponsoring of university research was believed to substantially bolster the trajectories of national ‘growth’ patterns. Social justice was routinely invoked as a policy-­concern governing the fortunes of education, and the exponential increase in enrolment statistics was paraded as evidence of success on that front (Wittrock 1993: 303–­62; Busemeyer and Nikolai 2010: 494–­508; Kwiek 2006: 225–­67). The public university finally seemed to settle on a delicate fantasy of balance between state financial support and a substantive democracy of intellectual rights. The subsequent decades, beginning from the late 1970s in continental Europe, however, worked out a complete negation of the welfarist consensus, through policy-­reforms that successively opened crucial public services to the global flows of capital. With attempts at deregulating

Introduction 11 national economies in the cause of free trade within all social sectors, the logic of the market came to redefine the ‘public good’ of education as a purchasable commodity. Accompanying slashes in state funding forced universities to constantly prove their ‘credit-­worthiness’ to potential private investors  –­ and play unto an entrepreneurial ethic of ‘value-­for-­money’ education. Wholesale bureaucratization, academic managerialism, self-­ financed courses of study, corporate-­ industrial auctioning of intellectual ‘property’ as license/­patent, increased student fees, lack of tenured appointments, massive contractualization of faculty  –­ became the exhaustive content of ‘university reform’ with the demise of the welfare-­state through the late twentieth century. Under the aegis of international financial institutions like the World Bank, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the public university was expected to consistently live up to parameters of ‘efficient’ performance (for example, revenue generation and direct social outputs) in order to ensure continuity of funding (Brennan 2007: 19–­28; Krücken and Meier 2006; Lane 2007; Martens, Rusconi and Leuze 2007; Krücken, Kosmützky and Torka 2007; Rizvi and Lingard 2010; Molesworth, Scullion and Nixon 2011). The setting up of the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 1995 and its formulation of a General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) furthered the deregulation of labour-­markets and paved way for a consequent withdrawal of state-­ regulations in the services sector of all its member economies. It was with the intention of facilitating multilateral trade that public sectors came to be freed of considerations in domestic interest, thus creating a ‘level playing field’ for global-­international corporations. Having identified education as one of the potential tradable services with immense investment opportunities for corporate capital, the GATS arrangement made possible a contest of profiteering initiatives around education, by arguing for a gradual evacuation of state provisioning altogether. As Marek Kwiek poignantly puts it: The university, surely enough, still functions, but in an increasingly defective manner: it either refers to the logic of production and consumption (of knowledge), that is to say, sells its product with better or worse results, or struggles violently with the State that is generally, all over the world, less and less willing to support the university. . . . The university is no longer the partner for the State; it becomes a petitioner, and is treated like a petitioner. . . . Does the university really have to drift toward the model of a better and better managed corporation, a bureaucratic structure

12  Debaditya Bhattacharya fighting in the marketplace with the competition of other, similar, isolated bureaucratic structures in search of consumers of educational services they want to keep selling? Is the help in gaining professional knowledge as significant as a social mission as until recently crucial help in gaining national consciousness? What would in a social sense a (potential) university of mere consumers be like? (2000: 28–­29) The answer to Kwiek’s question lies in an ‘idea’ of performance that has refashioned the post-­Humboldtian model into a spectre of the ‘world-­class university’. It is precisely this ‘idea of the university’ that now appears as the officially ‘desired’ future of higher education.

University as capital, learning as dead labour But what is this successful policy-­example of the ‘world-­class university’, which must parade as the only imperative of higher education ‘reform’ under the lengthening shadows of advanced globalization? What are the exact features that distinguish such a model  –­ and one that has now come to parasitically inhabit the carcass of an early nineteenth century conception of the ‘modern’ university? Put differently, is there an ‘idea’ of the world-­class university that defines its structural composition, its teleological ends and its epistemological condition? How must we define this ‘new’ (and painfully over-­advertised) variant of the ideal institution for higher education? A close look at successive policy-­documents that undertake this definitional task  –­ as I shall now do!  –­ leaves the reader in a state of far greater puzzlement than s/­he begins with. It would be rather befitting to say that the policy-­definition of the ‘world-­class university’ is precisely what consists in its necessary indefinability. The ‘world-­class’ is meant not as a term of explanation/­elucidation of constitutive ideas or principles, but merely as a metric of self-­reference. It is a measure of quantifying the superlative as a transcendental signified, such that ‘quality’ is voided of its relativistic contexts of commensurability. In other words, the ‘world-­class’ is what it means and no other  –­ because, it can only tautologically conceive of itself in its own glorious image. As an ideal, therefore, it signifies a moment of cognitive indistinction and semantic impossibility  –­ a self-­absorbed totality of reference, in terms of both language and substance. It is an exhilaratory paranoia that is exhausted in its own excessive fantasy. It knows no outside from which to approach an ideal; it is the moment of legislation of a

Introduction 13 ‘norm’ as the primordial event of calling into immanence a deep cognitive chasm. That the essence of the world-­class university is the mere fact of its insistence requires us to probe no further than its policy-­trail of documentation. In an elaborate 136-­page World Bank report, titled The Challenge of Establishing World-­Class Universities and published in 2009, Jamil Salmi credits the global financial institution with “promoting tertiary education for development and poverty reduction since 1963” (2009: ix). The apparent vagueness of such a linguistic formulation notwithstanding, there is absolutely no viable evidence of how the World Bank’s philanthropic mission of ‘poverty reduction’ is materially related to hollow claims of ‘economic growth’. Quite on the contrary, the report goes on to betray its ideological presumptions by cursorily positing that “tertiary education helps countries build globally competitive economies by developing a skilled, productive and flexible labor force” (ibid.: 2). The developmentalist perspective towards goals of poverty alleviation is now clear, in as far as it advocates the creation of a cheap and outsourceable  –­ that is, ­‘flexible’  –­ labour force that may successfully auction its skills in the global marketplace. The fiction of ‘national’ economic growth is finally surrendered at the altar of global competition  –­ because the underlying economic condition of labour-­mobility suggests that the cheaper the cost of labour-­power the more flexible it becomes. Tertiary education, by being declaredly aligned to the cause of ‘competitive’ performance, can only culminate in reducing the costs of a globally available labour-­ power (and correspondingly, the wage-­liabilities of corporations) and thus entrenching relative levels of poverty. In trying to enshrine the principle of ‘competition’ as the sole discursive paradigm for understanding the needs of a knowledge-­economy, Salmi cites a plethora of World Bank reports and vision documents  –­ Higher Education: Lessons from Experience (1994), World Development Report: Knowledge for Development (1999), Higher Education in Developing Countries: Peril and Promise (jointly published by UNESCO, 2000) and Constructing Knowledge Societies: New Challenges for Tertiary Education (2002)  –­ to eventually approach the phenomenon of the ‘world-­class university’. Having taken note of the “emerging power of league tables and rankings” as ‘global comparison indicators’ (Salmi 2009: x; Wang et al. 2012), the basis for identifying the ‘world-­class’ is sought in a rating framework that can evaluate institutional performance across national borders and local material contexts. In this presumptive criteriological framework that can potentially overlook real contexts and material conditions

14  Debaditya Bhattacharya of intellectual production, there is already a tendency to pre-­mark ‘quality’ not as effect but as a self-­causal principle. ‘Performance’ being the ground for evaluation, there is no need for an evaluation of the grounds that make performance possible  –­ except for that the best faculty must be compounded with the best students and concurrently, with best infrastructures and governance mechanisms. What results is an abstraction of the ‘world-­class’ as the best possible concoction of all the best elements in their best proportions and to the best degree  –­ a self-­governed myth of internal co-­legitimation. Salmi proceeds to furnish “an operational definition of a world-­class university” (ibid.: 3) thus: [T]he term ‘world-­class university’ has become a catch phrase, not simply for improving the quality of learning and research in tertiary education but also, more important, for developing the capacity to compete in the global tertiary education marketplace through the acquisition and creation of advanced knowledge. With students looking to attend the best possible institution that they can afford, often regardless of national borders, and with governments keen on maximizing the returns on their investments in universities, global standing is becoming an increasingly important concern for institutions around the world. . . . [R]anking focuses most heavily on international reputation, combining subjective inputs (such as peer reviews and employer recruiting surveys), quantitative data (including the numbers of international students and faculty), and the influence of the faculty (as represented by research citations). . . . [W]orld-­class universities are recognized in part for their superior outputs. They produce well-­qualified graduates who are in high demand on the labor market; they conduct leading-­edge research published in top scientific journals; and in the case of science and technology-­oriented institutions, they contribute to technical innovations through patents and licenses. (ibid.: 15–­17) The terminological glossary that provides a cue to the demarcation of the ‘world-­class’  –­ viz. ‘improved quality’, ‘capacity to compete’, ‘best possible’, ‘maximizing returns’, ‘global standing’, ‘international reputation’, ‘influence of the faculty’, ‘superior outputs’, ‘well-­qualified’, ‘high demand’, ‘leading-­edge’, ‘top scientific journals’, ‘technical innovations’  –­ not only conjures a chillingly familiar portrait of the university as a market for buying and selling the best products at best prices, but also revels in a range of qualitative metrics that have no referential frame beyond

Introduction 15 self-­ascribed standards of ‘value’. What results of this is, as I maintained earlier, a cognitive voiding of ‘quality’ as its own signifier  –­ a “culture of quality” (ibid.: 18), as the report calls it, working to reinforce differing degrees of self-­combination as the surest objective guarantee of highest production values. A fetishization of ‘performance’  –­ solely and entirely geared towards competitive self-­branding  –­ is the key to becoming the ‘world-­class university’. This is evident in the subsequent efforts made by the author to formulate a “more manageable definition of world-­class universities” as effectively combining three complementary sets of factors at play in top universities: (a) a high concentration of talent (faculty and students), (b) abundant resources to offer a rich learning environment and to conduct advanced research, and (c) favorable governance features that encourage strategic vision, innovation and flexibility and that enable institutions to make decisions and to manage resources without being encumbered by bureaucracy. (ibid.: 19–­20) The free-­ market of talent-­as-­skill, unregulated by considerations of justice and equity, precipitates the ‘world-­class’ paradigm as the highest concentration of the best resources in the hands of the fewest possible stakeholders. It is no wonder that such a university works through a ‘class’-­consciousness of privilege in its very naming. That the university-­world (or, the world’s universities?) must be ordered around a ‘class’ category of the ‘most superior’ is but pre-­ordained by the very logic of capital that runs it. Also, if this elite network of ‘performing’ universities must by default articulate itself in and through a self-­conception of ‘class’, there must be an allied claim to ownership of capital underwritten within its own functioning. Not only is the ‘world-­class university’ an asset worth investing in for purposes of capital accumulation, it also possesses and generates at the same time a claim to what Marx called ‘fictitious capital’. In his third volume of Capital, Marx discerningly  –­ albeit a little sketchily!  –­ examines the advanced stage of capitalism represented by credit-­institutions and the circulation of fictitious capital. Here, he prophetically touches upon the workings of speculative loanable money-­capital as abstract wealth and its relationship with the material processes of commodity production: With the development of commerce and of the capitalist mode of production, which produces solely with an eye to circulation,

16  Debaditya Bhattacharya this natural basis of the credit system is extended, generalised and worked out. Money serves here, by and large, merely as a means of payment, i.e., commodities are not sold for money, but for a written promise to pay for them at a certain date. For brevity’s sake, we may put all these promissory notes under the general head of bills of exchange. Such bills of exchange, in their turn, circulate as means of payment until the day on which they fall due; and they form the actual commercial money. Inasmuch as they ultimately neutralise one another through the balancing of claims and debts, they act absolutely as money, although there is no eventual transformation into actual money. Just as these mutual advances of producers and merchants make up the real foundation of credit, so does the instrument of their circulation, the bill of exchange, form the basis of credit-­money proper, of bank-­notes, etc. These do not rest upon the circulation of money, be it metallic or government-­issued paper money, but rather upon the circulation of bills of exchange. (1996 [1894]: 275) The ‘world-­class university’  –­ by virtue of its supporting structures of ‘international reputation’  –­ issues such ‘bills of exchange’ as credit-­ claims to corporations willing to invest in the field of higher education, in lure of an ‘exponential growth imperative’. The WTO’s machinations towards creating a climate of multilateral trade in higher education constitute adequate proof in this regard. However, more importantly, these ‘bills of exchange’ are also doled out as fictitious capital to the ‘well-­qualified graduates’ (in associated parlance, the ‘consumers’) of the world-­class university, in the form of degrees, certificates and institutional title-­documents. They represent a claim to realization of future value, to be monetized on completion of highly accredited courses of study. Insofar as this anticipatory promise of future value does not rest on an actual and immediate translation into commodity-­capital, it must necessarily await a deferred sale of labour power by the student ‘at a certain date’. The redundancy of living labour in the present, however, does not affect the process of capital accumulation for the guarantor of the ‘bill of exchange’  –­ that is, the world-­class institution. Despite the implosion of the use-­value of the commodity (in this case, the ‘degree’ that certifies a skill-­quantum) in the mere process of consumption, the credit-­institution of the university accumulates more and more capital investment without any real production in the present. This is speculative accumulation, which needs no basis in the social mediation

Introduction 17 of labour  –­ thus displacing the relationship of mutual dependence between capital and labour. With the reserves of fictitious capital growing within the world-­class university through a mere promise of production in the future, the costs of living labour decrease. Consequently, it becomes more likely that the labour-­power thus generated though ‘world-­class’ skill-­training will get cheaper and cheaper with fewer ‘proportionate’ employment-­options in the present. The ‘high demand’ of ‘well-­qualified graduates’ in the ‘labour market’  –­ as the World Bank report jubilantly maintains  –­ does not therefore mean greater assured returns, because the original exchange itself was based on a self-­referential form of fictitious capital. The world-­ class university’s definition of ‘excellence’, as I have delineated previously, is testimony to this voiding of reference as self-­ exhaustive  –­ where, as Norbert Trenkle says, “the commodity that has the magic quality of augmenting capital comes about within the sphere of capital itself” (2015: 7). Furthermore, when the anticipated future value of credit-­claim (as promised to the student) does not match the wages for real labour in commodity production, there is a further debt-­burden incurred by the student  –­ either in order to offset the opportunity-­costs of investment in fictitious capital, or to meet the resulting gap between earnings and expenditure. In any case, the student of the ‘world-­class university’ functions under a loan-­liability in relation to both the acquisition-­costs of labour-­power as well as the shortfall in its realized value-­as-­wage. This sets in motion what Marx referred to as a process of ‘secondary exploitation’ by credit-­ institutions  –­ through a certain claim on the student-­worker’s alreadyunderrealized ‘value’ as income. The complex web of fictitious transactions that bulwark the ‘world-­ class university’ is hinged on the form of the ‘myth’  –­ an essential replacement of the Humboldtian ‘idea’ and a consequent event of cognitive impossibility. The ‘myth’ of the ‘world-­class’ defies all semantic closure in the present, and can only manufacture meaning as self-­ referential transcendentalism. It seems to come together, in Marx’s words, as the proximate symptoms of a ‘crisis’: In a system of production, where the entire continuity of the reproduction process rests upon credit, a crisis must obviously occur  –­ a tremendous rush for means of payment  –­ when credit suddenly ceases and only cash payments have validity. At first glance, therefore, the whole crisis seems to be merely a credit and money crisis. And in fact it is only a question of the convertibility of bills of exchange into money. But the majority of these bills

18  Debaditya Bhattacharya represent actual sales and purchases, whose extension far beyond the needs of society is, after all, the basis of the whole crisis. At the same time, an enormous quantity of these bills of exchange represents plain swindle, which now reaches the light of day and collapses; furthermore, unsuccessful speculation with the capital of other people; finally, commodity-­capital which has depreciated or is completely unsaleable, or returns that can never more be realised again. (1996 [1894]: 337)

Outside the ‘world-­class’: the case of India It is hardly astonishing that the ‘mythical’ norm of the world-­class university must necessarily be resounded across national contexts, through structures of desire that run parallel to the political economy of ‘growth’. Within developmental paradigms of policy wisdom and their accompanying indices of human capital, ‘third world’ economies are prone to measure their entry into the international scene by mimetically lusting after ‘world-­class’ status. In India, for example, successive heads of governments have sounded a rehearsed note of alarm and lament over the truancy of Indian universities among the top 200 (or 500) of global rankings. Way back in 2012, President Pranab Mukherjee expressed dismay at the supply-­deficit of ‘quality’ graduates from a ‘rising economic superpower’ like India, and urged universities to scramble up the ladder of the ‘world-­class’ (Gupta 2012). Soon afterwards, in early 2013, former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh met the Vice Chancellors of some 40 central universities to discuss the invisibility of Indian institutions within the ‘top 200 in the world’ (The Hindu 2013). In October 2017, the present Prime Minister visited the Patna University (PU) centenary celebrations only to further drive home the point about India’s unsuccessful romance with the ‘world-­class’ category of ‘top 500 institutions’ (Tewary 2017). He went on to deflate the Bihar state government’s demand for granting ‘central university’ status to PU (running on over Rs.300 crores of deficit budget for years!) by ironically ‘inviting’ it to participate in a competition for ‘world-­class’ status. Then, adding a sentimental flourish to the nation’s misadventures with international ranking charts, he called on the cultural self-­respect of a people belonging to the land of ancient universities like Nalanda and Vikramshila  –­ which “attracted students from all over the world” (Business Standard 2017). It is here that the myth-­making potential of the ‘world-­class’ (as discussed in the previous section) is coupled with a culturalist anxiety

Introduction 19 of the historical ‘origins’ of the university  –­ a perfect recipe for staking the priority-­claims that pass for nationalistic ‘commonsense’! To conjure the myth of a golden age of education in the ancient cultural pasts of an imagined ‘nation’ performs a dual sleight of hand: first, it displaces the historically grounded idea of the university onto a time beyond recall and fetishizes it as the telos of a national identity-­project; and second, the reference to its appeal to ‘students from all over the world’ traces the roots of the ‘world-­class university’ to an indigenous archive of ‘tradition’. We are made to believe that not only was the idea of the university a product of Indian soil and thought, but that we have also had the world-­class university much before the rest of the world ranked itself into such catalogues. The ‘idea’  –­ of the university, as such  –­ is imploded into a sovereign felicity of myth-­making. To engage with Nalanda or Takshashila as an allegory for the ‘world-­class university’ would be to slip into the classic trap of adjudicating history with myth, and therefore I would deliberately steer clear of it. However, the impunity of populist narratives around the birth of the university-­idea in Takshashila or Nalanda does beg a challenge on historical grounds. Though archaeological records and epigraphic-­ numismatic evidence have, beyond a doubt, proved the acclaim that both these places (as also Vallabhi, Vikramshila, Odantapuri and Jagaddala) enjoyed as centres of intellectual instruction, there may be precise historical arguments against discerning in them the early lineaments of a modern ‘university’. Let me dwell on this point rather briefly. What is understood as Takshashila ‘University’, in common parlance, dates back to the lifetime of the Buddha in the sixth century BC. Much of our knowledge of this place and its fame as a preferred destination for learning the Vedas and the Silpas (arts) comes from the Jatakas  –­ where several tales recount the journeys of princes from Benaras, Rajagriha, Ujjaini, Mithila and kingdoms in the north and central regions to one ‘Takkasila’ for pursuit of higher education (Fausboll 1877–­1896: vols. i–­vi). That the Buddha must have lived through the peak of its reputation is indicated by the Mahavagga, insofar as Bimbisara offered the services of the royal physician Jivaka  –­ a student of Takshashila  –­ to the “Community of bhikkhus headed by the Buddha” (DeGraff 2013: 1016). It is amply clear from the Jataka accounts that though specialized studies in theology, medicine or law were available at Takshashila, learning-­practices were merely localized around the abodes (ashramas) of individual teachers and far from being organized into any integrative consciousness of a community. In fact, the most reputed scholars had largely Brahmins and Kshatriya elites for students, while the Chandalas were

20  Debaditya Bhattacharya explicitly disallowed from enrolling in these higher schools (Mookerji 1947: 481–­82). What was taught at Takshashila ranged between the three Vedas (barring Atharva Veda) and the eighteen Silpas or vocations (Fausboll: vols. 1–­5). The training of technical crafts like archery, hunting and medicine again produced something like competing guilds of professional knowledge, none of which could come together in the university-­forms of communitarian exchange. Nalanda  –­ variously dated to a ‘beginning’ in the early fifth century AD (most accurately, around 425 AD)  –­ did overcome the structural discreteness of Takshashila as a seat of higher education, by being architecturally enclosed into a set of proximally connected Buddhist viharas (Sankalia 1934: 52). But, such a production of monastic space does not bear the originary evidence of being imagined as a community of learning. In fact, the viharas grew out of a collective resting-­ place for the bhikshus  –­ termed as the sangharama  –­ and that is how it retained the external semblance of a community (Tsiang 1906: 168). Historically speaking, though the Nalanda monasteries are believed to be founded by Sakraditya (that is, Kumaragupta I) and thereafter expanded and enlarged by the later Gupta rulers, the place was already famous as one of Buddha’s favoured sites for religious disputation with Jaina adversaries like Dighatapassi and Upali (Dutt 1925: 125). For over 800 years, therefore, Nalanda was the site of a famed rain-­ retreat for the Buddhist monks, a sangharama; and over time, it saw more and more bhikshus settling down permanently at the site and engaging in practices of religious knowledge-­dissemination. It is by no original plan for something like a ‘university’-­centre that viharas were constructed at Nalanda, but instead a historical accretion of scholarly disciples (of Buddha) made possible a convergence of intellectual professions around here. Nonetheless, Nalanda’s fortunes remained tied to the interests of a patronage-­economy under the Guptas, Vardhanas, Palas and Senas (Smith 1914: 308–­13; Raychaudhuri 1923; Samaddar 1927; Thapar 1990, 2002)  –­ though, owing to its increasing religious significance, resources raised through local philanthropy were never under the threat of drying up. In fact, one of the founding myths behind the naming of Nalanda  –­ as mentioned by the Chinese traveller and resident scholar of Yogasastras in Hiuen ­Tsiang  –­ traces its etymology to the phrase ‘na-­alam-­da’, meaning ‘insatiable in giving’ (Mookerji 1947: 558). Yet, despite the abundance of land-­grants and royal benefactions bestowed on Nalanda, the latter’s self-­consciousness as a religious institution  –­ and not a site of secular knowledge ­production  –­ perhaps made it wary of sudden changes in the political balance of power and privilege. Though the bhikshus’ practice of begging for

Introduction 21 alms from nearby villages was supposed to offset the daily needs of sustenance at the monastery, I-­Tsing’s controversial observation (from his prolonged stay for 10 years at the monastery) that every student had to pay for his personal upkeep explains the fear of an imminent disavowal by royal patrons (I-­Tsing 1896: 105–­106). It is true that the gates of Nalanda were open for non-­Buddhists as well, and secular branches of study like Sabdavidya, Hetuvidya and Chikitsavidya were taken up by students who did not wish to enlist for religious professions (Li 1914: 112). However, the pursuit of secular learning was only held secondary to the Buddhist doctrine of Mahayana and the 18 sects, to be compulsorily undertaken by all students of Nalanda (ibid.). The emphasis on theology  –­ and in particular, on the philosophies of Sunyavada (nihilism) and Vijnanavada (idealism) within the Mahayana school  –­ defined the curricular thrust of a Nalanda education (Sankalia 1934: 67). The institutional quest for knowledge was unambiguously co-­extensive with the propagation of a particular faith, and therefore Nalanda  –­ for all its current-­day championing as a precursor to the ‘university’-­idea  –­ was not really far from the ecclesiastical guilds of medieval Europe.

The (first) world-­class versus the (third) world-­class? If, contrary to what the Indian Prime Minister believed, the first ‘world-­class’ universities in Nalanda and Takshashila might only turn out as the nationalist tools of a collective cultural unconscious, how else might a ‘rising economic superpower’ take to the international policy-­discourse of higher education reform? When the current government  –­ playing out an apparent paradox of aggressive cultural nationalism tied to the economic interests of neo-­liberal capital and foreign private investments  –­ decided to do away with the post-­independence framework of state-­planned development by dismantling the Planning Commission, it proposed the creation of a substitute advisory platform in the National Institution for Transforming India (NITI). The visible focus of economic policy shifted from ‘planning’ to ‘­transformation’  –­ and one which, as the Cabinet Secretariat Resolution suggested, envisioned an “administration paradigm in which the government is an ‘enabler’ rather than a ‘provider of first and last resort’ ” (2015: Paragraph 6a). The process of ‘transformative’ enablement included, in the new Commission’s first three-­year Action Plan, the setting up of ‘world-­class institutions’ in India. In this, the NITI Aayog referred back to the 2016 budget speech of the Union Finance Minister which claimed to upgrade

22  Debaditya Bhattacharya 20 ‘best’ universities of the country as ‘world-­class’ institutions for teaching and research (Jaitley 2016: 11). The same speech, however, screamed out a starkly different tale in statistical figures. The resource support apportioned in the annual plan outlay under ‘General Education’ was paradoxically slashed by Rs.75 crore as against 2015–­2016, whereas non-­plan grants to the University Grants Commission (UGC) were staggeringly reduced to less than half of the previous year’s estimated expenditures (Union Budget Outlay Documents 2016–­17). Subsequent budgetary allocations point towards further cuts in the UGC’s booty, to the tune of Rs.200 crore in 2018–­2019 as compared to the revised estimates of 2017–­2018 (Tavares 2018)  –­ even while public investment in education lumbered below 3% of GDP for around 17 years now (Bansal 2017; IE 2018). The Secondary and Higher Education Cess (SHEC), levied by the Indian government in 2006–­2007 as part of direct tax collections, has remained unspent for over a decade with a cumulative fund of Rs.83,497 crore (CAG 2017: Para 2.3.3). The cess, renamed now as ‘health and education cess’ and hiked by 1% to ease the government’s declared commitment to social infrastructures, has in fact offset allocations in the sector for an effective downward plunge  –­ when adjusted for inflation (Peri 2018). The obvious question that would strike anybody seriously invested in the country’s educational fortunes is: how is a rhetorical ideal of the ‘world-­class’ to be achieved with successively depleted funds and yet an ever-­proliferating number of institutions? Though this might seem like an irresolvable contradiction in terms, the answer lay squarely in the ranking methodology for the ‘best’ institutions. The Subramanian Committee Report that prepared a Draft National Education Policy (NEP) in 2016 argued that funding must be linked to the ‘performance’ of institutions. In effect, it was implied that the ‘best’ institutions for higher education must be delinked from state financial support and left on their own to decide on fee structures and enter into revenue-­generating collaborations (National Policy on Education 2016: 143). This is the substantive meaning of ‘autonomy’ that a set of UGC Regulations, published in February 2018, promised as reward for high rankings (GoI 2018a, 2018b). Arguing that top grades by accreditation agencies or international rating boards can ensure a complete deregulation of institutional finances  –­ by allowing universities and colleges to open new programmes or certificate courses or skill-­ training modules or off-­campus centres, fix student fees, hire foreign faculty on variable salaries and admit foreign students  –­ the legislation maintained, however, that “no demand for fund [be] made from the

Introduction 23 government” to enjoy these benefits of autonomy (2018a: 8). Superior performance, being made into a ground for self-­generation, could only permanently push the ‘best’ institutions away from any constitutional commitment to access. The increased fee-­revenues could be escrowed to a non-­banking finance company (NBFC) called Higher Education Funding Agency (HEFA)  –­ which in turn “will leverage funds from the market and supplement them with donations and CSR funds” in order to sanction infrastructural loans to ‘top institutions’ (GoI 2017a). The incurred loans are to be then repaid by enhanced ‘internal accruals’ (fee receipts and research profits) from within the institution, thereby signalling a shift from a subsidy/­grant-­model of public higher education to a self-­financed debt-­paradigm that successively displaces the onus of the funding state to individual ‘user-­pays’. This was further vindicated when, soon after the 2016 budget proposal, the UGC issued provisions and procedures for the ‘recognition’ and ‘Establishment of World Class Institutions’. While bringing government-­owned and state-­aided public institutions within its legislative ambit, the Regulations lifted sections off World Bank documents in order to specify the ‘objectives’ of a world-­class institution (UGC 2016: 15, Clause 3.0). Expectedly, the document laboured under the same referential aporias of the ‘world-­class’ that a ‘culture of quality’ voided of context lent itself to  –­ namely, that the ‘best’ institution was to be a self-­validating combination of ‘highly qualified faculty’, ‘excellence in research’, ‘high quality of teaching’, ‘high levels of funding’, ‘most reputed global rankings’, ‘world-­class library’ and such other great ingredients in the greatest proportion. The economic rationale of the ‘world-­class’ is borne out a little later in Clause 6.1 of the Guidelines, where it is categorically mandated that “World Class Institutions would have the freedom to determine the domestic student fees” (ibid.: 6) and that “no existing fee regulation guidelines are to be applicable to such World Class Institutions Deemed to be Universities” (ibid.: 25). Granting ‘complete financial autonomy’ to such institutions demonstrates a conscious move towards their intended privatization, just as provisions for a “credible and robust programme of financial assistance” would in the final instance institute the same vicious cycle of ‘secondary exploitation’ that I explained earlier. In fact, what we see in this policy-­conundrum is a gradual scramble away from funding institutions to funding individuals, such that the loaned student-­ investment might then be escrowed as security for gaining access to bigger networks of debt-­capital (like HEFA) by institutions. The consequent ballooning of ‘world-­class’ higher education on the basis of a purely self-­generating loan-­market cannot but await the fatalism of a

24  Debaditya Bhattacharya ‘recession’ (as has historically happened with real estate sectors, not so long ago)! The glorious charge of the ‘world-­class’ finally also comes to regulate the social classes that are to be entitled to the ‘best’ education as paying clients, while the historically deprived and structurally excluded could be safely eliminated through the meritocratic protocol of ‘need-­blind admissions’ (ibid. 2016: 5, Clause 4.1.6) or consigned to a mortgaged future. Last heard, a university yet to be established by corporate tycoon Mukesh Ambani and his Reliance Foundation  –­ and to be named ‘Jio Institute’  –­ has already been crowned by the Indian government as a world-­class ‘institution of eminence’ on the basis of its proposed ‘vision’ for the future (Roy Chowdhury 2018). Marx’s predictions for the nature and order of fictitious capital, as I have examined, cannot ring any truer and closer home. With such a vision as this parading as the national[ist] narrative of ‘development’, it is no wonder that 66 students of Panjab University who were protesting against an absurd 1100% fee hike for certain courses were charged with sedition. Not surprisingly, early in 2017, the Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) administration declared an 83% seat cut for research admissions in the following session  –­ with an understandable intention of curtailing the harvest of ‘anti-­ national’ students from its own bastions. While statutory procedures were violated in order to selectively accommodate a UGC regulation from 2016, a Delhi High Court stay order on the unconstitutional admission-­parameters had been flayed in the administration’s desire to go ahead with a potentially zero intake for most courses. Delhi University (DU) too, on the other hand, has had its ‘best’ colleges queuing up for the holy grail of ‘autonomy’, despite its teachers coming out in the streets to protest such a move. The central government’s latest proposal to abolish an independent regulatory authority like the UGC, and transfer its funding prerogative entirely to the ministry, ties the future of public provisioning in higher education to the infirmities of political will and ideological co-­optation (Vijayan 2018). The puppet-­body imagined in its place, a Higher Education Commission of India, would perforce be stacked with government functionaries (and an Advisory Council headed by the human resource development minister himself!)  –­ such that any trace of dissent on university campuses may be punished with threats of fund-­cut or even notices for ‘closure’ (GoI 2018c: 7, 11). And, while the ‘best’ of the nation’s universities and colleges have been enlisted towards reducing the government’s financial liability, what portends the fate of the anonymous non-­‘world-­class’ institutions? For

Introduction 25 example, a certain Central University of South Bihar (CUSB)  –­ one of the 16 new public universities established in 2009, none of which found mention in the government’s latest annual rankings  –­ had its students sitting on an 82-­hour-­long hunger-­strike, demanding statutory ‘recognition’ for ‘illegal’ courses that they had been enrolled in for four years (Bhattacharya 2017). Now, this sounds like the setting of a Beckettian absurd play, doesn’t it? Sadly, this penchant for the absurd is the everyday condition of governance within these non-­urban provincial public universities, existing within local feudal contexts of power and privilege. The hunger-­ striking students were to graduate out of ‘unrecognised’ B.Ed. courses in less than a month, even as they continued to attend classes in a temporary campus visited by its Vice Chancellor (VC) once in several months. The VC, an appointee of the current political regime, operated from yet another temporary campus in Patna  –­ and only sent in his deputies to bargain students into submission whenever they disrupted a contracted ‘peace’ of daily functioning with their demands for a valid degree. In the state of Gujarat, the government saw its financial imperative of funding non-­‘world-­class’ public institutions as the excuse for brazenly attacking every remaining vestige of autonomy and academic freedom. Whereas one executive order instructed all state universities to mandatorily ensure doctoral research from among topics listed out by the state government, the Gujarat State Higher Education Act 2016 cemented the ruling party stranglehold on academic spaces through legislative fiat on the other hand. The latter instituted a State Higher Education Council under the direct patronage of the Chief Minister, with all 22 members of its Executive Committee being appointees of the state government. The jurisdictional purview of this committee extended beyond all statutory bodies within the internal organization of universities/­colleges, thus granting unlimited emergency powers to the functionaries of the state (Rai 2017: 17–­19). In a strikingly similar fashion, The West Bengal Universities and Colleges (Administration and Regulation) Act 2017 used a bureaucratic idiom of “uniformity and standardisation” in order to ensure ruling party control and surveillance over state-­aided institutions of higher education. By edifying a nominee of the state government as the executive head of every college, reducing the ratio of teaching and non-­teaching representation as against government nominations on statutory policymaking bodies, the Act went on to secure overarching veto powers for political intervention within educational institutions. At the same time, any form of potential dissent was now liable to be

26  Debaditya Bhattacharya proscribed through a unilateral authorization of the state’s adjudicatory role over “terms and conditions of service”, “code of conduct and discipline” as well as “manner and procedure for holding disciplinary proceedings” (The West Bengal Universities and Colleges Bill 2017: 8). Holding to ransom all previous legislations and UGC regulations, the Act  –­ in a desperate bid at self-­legitimation  –­ announced the annulment of even constitutional rights-­frameworks like the Security of Services Act and Payment of Salaries Act (ibid.: 9). The ad hoc structures of administrative rule within these institutions, excluded from the ambit of the ‘world-­class’, are not without adequate reason. There is cold bureaucratic reason to the leaps of faith scaled by such regimes of governance. It only goes to show how the ‘idea’ of the public-­funded university, in our times of transnational global capital, must be beholden to the erratic inconsistencies of political will. In order to ensure the patronage of the funding state, the outsides of the ‘world-­class’ must unashamedly pay routine obeisance to feudal bonds of loyalty. And while the nation sits in judgement to rate institutions unto their proper rank and file, the lives of those that make up these material spaces might either be auctioned in the global marketplace or fumed off in fasts and suicides.

A heteroglossic history: chronicling the idea The present collection seeks to evolve discussions around this felt ‘crisis’ of the university-­‘idea’, as it convulses into a misshapen future through myriad historical routes. Recalling the Weberian idea of Beruf (vocation) as central to a reclamation of the public university today, Wendy Brown inaugurates a debate against the etymological contortions imposed by the charge of the ‘vocational’ within neo-­liberal universities. That the modern-­day incursions of ‘vocation’ as job training have eaten into the ethic of the public university’s ‘calling’ is what she points towards, through an elaborate discussion on the modes of successive privatization and financialization of higher education. The shift from a profit-­generating order of corporate takeover to an abiding preoccupation with shareholder value is evidenced within the governance practices of universities, and grounded in a metrical reproduction of rating/­ranking parameters that extend across institutions, disciplines, infrastructures, publications, learning-­‘outcomes’, placements, students and professors. Ranged against this relentless instrumentalization of scholarly pursuit in deference to investor attitudes, Brown urges for a reimagining of the university’s vocation as living ‘for’ the public rather than ‘from’ it.

Introduction 27 Nandini Chandra offers an unsparing critique of the moment of ‘GATS-­ification’ of higher education in India, and the eventual shift from an old liberal university format of Nehruvian lineage to the neo-­ liberal factory-­image. Underwritten in this is an integral change in the nature of the commodity form peddled by the university  –­ such that what is on sale is no longer simply the labour power of the formally educated worker, but the value represented by the university itself at the site of entry. The depreciation of productive (specialized) labour as only secondary to the circuits of ‘value’ generated by the university-­as-­ commodity results in systematic creation and preservation of a ‘surplus population’. This ‘population’ consists in the reserves of unabsorbed labour that must perpetually lie outside the field of capital’s valorization, despite being part of informal processes of production. It is for such a ‘surplus’ of human non-­capital  –­ produced and sustained by the university  –­ that policy instruments like the Foreign Education Providers (FEP) Bill are manoeuvred as providing alternatives of technical/­vocational incorporation. Chandra consummately holds that the university’s claims to future capital and job-­creation exhaust its current re-­invention as the shadow-­form of a factory  –­ thriving on ‘pockets of de facto slave labour’. Mushahid Hussain’s essay emplots the elaborate developments in public policy that prefigure the neo-­liberal turn within postcolonial university-­contexts across sub-­Saharan Africa and Bangladesh. Despite the distinctiveness of historical conditions that drive the fortunes of the public university within divergent developmental trajectories, Hussain’s comparative approach attempts to trace the ‘logic of pre-­emption’ that conjoins the imagined futures of the postcolony. While within the African context, the declaredly anti-­colonial university system and its redistributive agendas of social-­economic justice face rebuttal in the structural adjustment programmes unleashed by the ‘Washington Consensus’, a South Asian case-­study in Bangladesh sees an opportune coincidence between mass movements against military authoritarianism and the geopolitical dreams of ‘growth’ peddled by liberalization regimes. With privatized public universities striking the middle class conscience as hotbeds of ‘dirty politics’  –­ through devious mechanisms of state support  –­ intellectual communities are left to fight massive resource cuts, adjunctification of teaching labour, religious-­extremist witch-­hunts and corporate research lobbies. In his piece ‘Divide and educate’, Sukanta Chaudhuri takes a close look at policy-­directions and their underlying implications for the Indian public education sector. Through a calculated impoverishment of government-­run primary and secondary schooling, accompanied by

28  Debaditya Bhattacharya an insidious entrepreneurialism of ‘lower’ skill-­training, the vision of current-­day educational planning aims at a re-­entrenchment of class, caste, gender and communal hierarchies. In this, Chaudhuri works out a crucial conjunction of palpable trends within the primary and tertiary education sectors, through detailed analyses of recent budgetary allocations and expenditures for schooling schemes vis-­a-­vis state, central or ‘world-­class’ universities. What is alarmingly betrayed by the unravelling of this data is a politics of ‘planned underdevelopment’ that seeks to structurally exclude the bulk of the nation’s youth from both access to and benefits of public-­funded higher education. In her essay ‘Of utopias and universities’, Ania Loomba compellingly argues that the task of defence  –­ demanded of us by empirical instances of right wing violence on Indian university campuses –­­cannot afford to obviate a critical attentiveness to the failings of public-­ funded higher education in the country. It is crucial, therefore, that we constantly redirect our attention to the structural problems that have resulted of the legislative-­institutional priorities of public ­policy  –­ alternating between an incomplete decolonization of university pedagogies, unthinking mimicry of American educational models, increasing centralization of unwieldy structures through top-­ down bureaucratic fiat, systemic curtailments of academic autonomy, gaping resource-­disparities between different tiers of public institutions and a half-­hearted attempt at strategic inclusion that falls far short of the will to substantive social justice. Drawing occasional parallels with the Euro-­American directions in higher education, Loomba establishes that the ‘idea’ of the university  –­ as a free space of self-­determinative practice  –­ has historically existed as a ‘compensatory ideal’ for the public spheres excluded from rights of access to such practice. These constitutive tensions that define the imaginative and material ‘limits’ of the university must be engaged with, through diverse disciplinary traditions that make visible its everyday contradictions and ruptures. Rina Ramdev’s argument around the fetishization of ‘excellence’  –­ as the only legitimating rationale of the neo-­liberal university  –­ takes recourse to the audit practices that have come to determine funding patterns for Indian public higher education. The increasing significance of a model of punitive audit for public universities, as evidenced in the workings of NAAC or NIRF, only goes on to confirm the state’s withdrawal from both ‘performing’ and ‘non-­performing’ institutions in the excuse of ‘autonomy’ or ‘austerity’. Furthermore, Ramdev argues that the logical inversion of ‘autonomy’ as reward for ‘performance’ cannot but make the former seem like the privilege of the elite few, as opposed to the inescapable networks of control and surveillance that

Introduction 29 mark the destiny of the public university. Notwithstanding the logic of competitive self-­auctioneering that this ‘politics of ranking’ subjects both institutions and its individual participants to, the author sees the public university’s future in a movement beyond its own safe enclosures of intellectual retreat. In the next chapter, I posit that the history of India’s romance with the ‘liberal’ university model (of European provenance) is structured by a mutant ‘secular-­feudal’ consensus. A close look at successive bodies of legislative discourse, from the university’s colonial moment of ‘origin’ to its post-­independence inscription in policy-­parlance, confirms the route charted by the largely non-­metropolitan public infrastructures of higher education until now. In this, I take for analysis the events and conditions that lead to the establishment of Patna University in 1917 against larger debates on social access or demographic reach. What results is a historical chronicle of the liberal-­urban university’s mischievous encounters with the materiality of caste and the social limits of intellectual labour. The postcolonial policy on education, from the Radhakrishnan Commission Report of 1948–­49 to the presently debated third National Policy on Education (2016), further demonstrates the continuing legacy of the ‘liberal university’ in independent India. The essay returns, in its final section, to the provisions of the Central Universities Act of 2009, and what it forebodes for the state of democracy and the quest for justice in Indian higher education. Taking the discursive histories around the ‘origin’ of Banaras Hindu University (BHU) as demonstrative of the modes of organizing a ‘radical irrationality’ of tradition, Prasanta Chakravarty charts a political chronicle of the non-­metropolitan university in India. Pitting such a case-­example of the university’s alignment with material histories of moral ‘calling’ against the Heideggerian-­McIntyreian imagination, Chakravarty traces the idiom of a genuine political dissidence that might emerge out of these contexts. He takes recourse to a fascinating novella by Kashinath Singh, Apna Morcha  –­ documenting the moral-­ political effervescence on BHU campus through the bhasha andolan of the 1970s  –­ in order to imagine an alternative vector of transformative passion that runs counter to the spiritual apparatuses of institutionalized ‘calling’. Tying in his analysis of Singh’s fiction with the contemporary realities of aggressive right wing mobilization on university campuses today, Chakravarty articulates the possibility of a left ‘calling’ that might insert the university into the associative life of community. Anand Teltumbde foists a thoroughgoing critique of the governmental demand for ‘depoliticizing’ the university through evacuation

30  Debaditya Bhattacharya of student dissent, as ranged against the fundamental principles of participation. The organconstitutional ethics and democratic self-­ ized repression of student activism by right wing forces and ruling party hegemonies in Indian university campuses undermines the university’s necessary relationship with a socially transformative agenda. In this, Teltumbde succinctly holds, the imaginary estrangement between politics and academics as mutually exclusive domains of university ‘activity’  –­ relayed in the relevant registers of ‘activism’ versus ‘­passivism’  –­ not only falsifies a world history of sustained student engagement with issues of social-­material significance, but also amounts to a brazen defence of the status quo. With changing student demographics on university campuses  –­ owing to large-­scale privatization and punitive-­administrative regimes of censorship  –­ student struggles are increasingly relegated to the outsides of neo-­liberal reason, parading through lessons of competitive individualism and narrow economic self-­interest. Insofar as forms of social exclusion continue to proliferate, the muffling of student voices resisting such violent incursions can only turn the idea of the university against itself. The structures of social discrimination that the university  –­ in its liberal exhilaration of ‘freedom’  –­ is believed to be exempted from, have to the contrary historically moulded its fortunes. Hany Babu MT draws our attention to the assumptions of caste privilege that underlie public discourse on higher education in India, whereby anti-­reservation campaigns across campuses have routinely made news, while repeated instances of Dalit suicides within institutional spaces have provoked little outrage or alarm. That constitutional mandates for affirmative action have often translated into popular perceptions of ‘disentitlement’ for privileged student groups is evidence of the university’s relationship with social justice. Hany Babu surmises that the happenings at IIT Madras and University of Hyderabad throw up an interesting case for the self-­ assertion of Dalit Bahujans and a coming-­of-­age of identity struggles for marginalized student populations. The demographic shifts in higher education have enabled students from socially oppressed groups to move from a rights-­framework around basic questions of equality (of opportunity) to ‘citizenship’-­claims based on freedom of expression. The inconstancy of progressive liberal politics on issues of social justice factors into Hany Babu’s plea an urgency for the ‘convergence’ of interests and struggles, in order to re-­make the university. Unfolding in the form of a personal memoir, Lakshmi Subramanian’s essay contours the transformations within the university-­‘idea’ from the 1980s up until now. She recounts her professional engagement with diverse institutional settings  –­ ranging from central to state universities and independent research institutions  –­ to bear witness

Introduction 31 to the ways in which formative cultures of reasoning and a spirit of cross-­disciplinary dialogue were central to the building of that ‘idea’. Despite internal administrative lapses and occasional torsions specific to contexts and regimes, what fundamentally characterized the university space was an amplitude of academic freedom that consisted in deep structures of collegiality, commitment and intellectual conviction. Anxieties of influence did not come in the way of one’s self-­investments within a discipline, nor were departures of thought derided for their non-­allegiance to dominant methodologies of ‘work’. In all of this, Subramanian sees a mode of being-­at-­the-­university that was allied to the visionary project of its future  –­ something that now faces the threat of erasure by organized practices of ideological censure and their spawning cultures of thuggery. On a different note and in a sardonically impassioned appeal, ‘Don’t study, be happy’, Vijay Prashad documents student struggles ranging from South Africa to India that contest the neo-­liberal vision of higher education as private good. While fee hikes are only a tangible manifestation of this economic policy-­agenda, Prashad rues the larger assault on a democratic political ethos that university students must necessarily articulate and perform. The anathema that ‘student-­politics’ has come to signify for a public perception around public universities is what needs to be vehemently resisted, because it is only through the former that a practice of critical citizenship may be approximated. Drawing from the resources of both personal and historical memory, Paramita Banerjee attempts to examine the moment of ‘autonomization’ of Presidency College and the structures of political enthusiasm that have routinely propped up its elitist nostalgia for excellence. Positioned within its current contexts of autonomous functioning as a ‘university’, Presidency has only come to witness a radical separation from its own meritocratic privilege of ‘dissent’ even as the exclusivist euphoria of its ‘excellence’ continues unabated. In this, Banerjee sees the turf-­war between political parties over the issue of ‘autonomy’ as chronically symptomatic of an indifference to embedded structures of meritocracy within a left-­progressive imagination of the ‘university’. The history of Presidency’s colonial past bears out this tryst with a hegemonic consensus, until a fiction of ‘autonomy’ now enjoins it directly to the whims of the funding state. In a jointly authored essay, Akanksha Ahluwalia, Ishan Mohan and Sagar Sachdeva evolve a theoretical prism to understand the often-­ invisible ‘effects’ of subjectification that structure the disciplinary space of a university. Using anecdotal entry-­points from their experience, the authors examine how the university produces itself in space and time  –­ and simultaneously, collaborates with the state to generate

32  Debaditya Bhattacharya normative orders of reason and citizenship. The anxieties constitutive of a prison-­industrial complex are accurately reproduced within the neo-­liberal instance of the university  –­ with its emphasis on instrumentalizing academic fields of inquiry to the near-­elimination of ‘non-­ strategic’ disciplines like humanities and social sciences. The ways in which enumerative surveillance-­mechanisms trump the ‘ideal’ of free speech/­debate is made apparent in a recent move by the Indian state to link biometric data to all student records (including applications, admissions and certifications). With the state’s self-­proclamation as the entrepreneurial ‘origin’ and ‘limit’ of the university, what remains for us  –­ the authors suggest  –­ is an alternative pedagogy or perhaps, something radically ‘other’ than the university.

Moving on: towards The University Unthought Any attempt at historicizing the university must also be, at the same time, a history of the ideas that made or unmade it  –­ albeit within widely different contexts of monastic, imperial, anti-­ colonial and capitalist relations of power. The colonial template of modernity that produced its own intellectual-­political forms of immanence and legitimation through a large-­scale export of the university has been deeply interrogated by the essays in this volume. So have current-­day ascriptions of ‘value’ and ‘purpose’ to the public mission of higher education been brought to serious debate and intense collective scrutiny in what is being presented to the reader. The effort in bringing together these engaged reflections and investigations  –­ from scholars and activists belonging to varying disciplines and methodologies of thought-­ practice  –­ has been to re-­trace a history that has now largely come to rest on a shared perception of ‘crisis’. We do recognize that a crisis  –­ as is evidenced in an ‘angry’ mass-­disenchantment with the workings of neo-­liberal capital today  –­ is the most productive moment of history. But, such a moment can also bring in its wake aborted and missed opportunities, as we see in the veritable electoral rise of the Right across the world. The event of ‘crisis’ requires those of us who are on the other side of history to engage in the labours of the imagination as the only preparatory task of overcoming it. While market recessions produce the collective outrage that is proper to a life of indignity and perpetual precarity, the historian must work towards a telling of the present in the hope of an alternative future. This is a future bound by, as I said, the work of imagination. The history we ‘do’ in this volume is of course committed to recording the material life of transformations at the university, at home and

Introduction 33 abroad. But, it is not restricted to the objective ‘calling’ of scientificity that passes history for textbook-­material. Our archives of experience and evidence, that we lay bare in this volume, are finally filamented into discourse through the fire of a common passion. It is the passion towards an alternative ‘idea’  –­ or, if you like, a ‘counter-­idea’ of what the public university stands for  –­ that filters our historiographic endeavour. Our history does not claim to stand on the shore of incontrovertible ‘facts’ alone; it stands on the declaredly political convictions of the historian. The essays included here are testimony to that work of imagination that precedes the writing of history, as always already summoned into the trial-­room of a future. To end with a frightening trace of the anecdotal, I am reminded (yet again!) of the Indian government’s recent tryst with pedagogical innovation on university soil. Soon after the spectre of political dissent on public university campuses was sought to be controlled through a repressive-­punitive vocabulary of ‘sedition’, government legislators collaborated with university administrators and army officials to suggest an experimental pedagogy of ‘lived’ nationalism. It was first decided that tower-­length poles of national flags be inserted with ceremonial vengeance into university-­entrails and then army tanks be put on display in the middle of campuses (almost spitting imaginary fire on ‘anti-­national’ student-­traitors!), before it was accurately settled that ‘walls of valour’  –­ lined with portraits of soldier-­martyrs and gallantry-­award-­winners  –­ be cemented into a thousand institutions of higher education (GoI 2017b). The assumed agenda was to re-­model the future of the university as a war-­front  –­ where students and teachers could be readily conscribed into a performance of patriotic masculinity which, if disobeyed, might have them evicted or arrested or killed with impunity. Needless to say, the ferocity of such visionary futures for the university needs to be confronted by more than a historiographic intervention. We continue therefore, into yet another volume of essays  –­ ­simultaneously published, and titled The University Unthought: Notes for a Future  –­ carrying the pledge forward. I call upon the interested reader to feel the throb of our collective histories here against the flow of what we imagine as their imminent futures, hereafter.

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36  Debaditya Bhattacharya Jaitley, Arun. 2016. Budget Speech 2016–­ 2017. New Delhi: Ministry of Finance, GoI. Available at http:/­/­indiabudget.nic.in/­ub2016-­17/­bs/­bs.pdf (accessed on 31 December 2017). Jaspers, Karl. 1959 [1923]. The Idea of the University. (trans.) H. A. T. Reiche and H. F. Vanderschmidt. Boston: Beacon Press. Kerr, Clark. 1991. The Great Transformation in Higher Education 1960–­ 1980. Albany: State University of New York Press. Krücken, Georg, Anna Kosmützky and Marc Torka. 2007. ‘Towards a Multiversity? Universities between Global Trends and National Traditions’, in Georg Krücken, Anna Kosmützky and Marc Torka (eds.) Towards a Multiversity? Universities between Global Trends and National Traditions (pp. 7–­16). Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag. Krücken, Georg and Frank Meier. 2006. ‘Turning the University into an Organizational Actor’, in G. S. Drori, J. W. Meyer and H. Hwang (eds.) Globalization and Organization: World Society and Organizational Change. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kwiek, Marek. 2000. ‘The Identity Crisis? Philosophical Questions about the University as a Modern Institution’, in Zbigniew Drozdowicz, Peter Gerlich and Krzysztof Glass (eds.) Europaisierung der Bildungsysteme (pp. 23–­36). Wien-­Poznan: Österreichische Gesellschaft für Mitteleuropäische Studien/­ Humaniora Foundation. ———. 2006. The University and the State: A Study into Global Transformations. Frankfurt-­am-­Main, New York: Peter Lang. Lane, David (ed.). 2007. The Transformation of State Socialism: System Change, Capitalism or Something Else? Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Li, Hwui. 1914. The Life of Hiuen Tsiang. (trans.) Samuel Beal. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner and Co. Ltd. Lundgreen, Peter. 1990. ‘Engineering Education in Europe and the USA, 1750–­1930: The Rise to Dominance of School Culture and the Engineering Professions’, Annals of Science, 47: 36–­41. Martens, Kerstin, Alessandra Rusconi and Kathrin Leuze (eds.). 2007. New Arenas of Education Governance: The Impact of International Organizations and Markets on Educational Policy Making. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Marx, Karl. 1996 [1894]. Capital, Volume 3. (trans.) David Fernbach. New York: International Publishers. McClelland, Charles E. 1980. State, Society and University in Germany, 1700–­1914. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Molesworth, Mike, Richard Scullion and Elizabeth Nixon (eds.). 2011. The Marketisation of Higher Education and the Student as Consumer. London: Routledge. Mookerji, Radha Kumud. 1947. Ancient Indian Education: Brahmanical and Buddhist. London: Macmillan and Co. National Policy on Education 2016: Report of the Committee for Evolution of the New Education Policy. 2016. New Delhi: Ministry of Human Resource Development (MHRD), GoI.

Introduction 37 Newman, John Henry. 1996 [1852]. The Idea of a University. (ed.) Frank M. Turner. New Haven: Yale University Press. Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1872. ‘On the Future of Our Educational Institutions’, The Nietzsche Channel. Available at www.geocities.com/­ thenietzschechannel/­ fed1.htm (accessed on 31 December 2017) [Later published as Nietzsche, Friedrich. 2016. Anti-­Education: On the Future of Our Educational Institutions. (trans.) Damion Searls. (eds.) Paul Reitter and Chad Wellmon. New York: New York Review of Books]. Owen, David and Tracy Strong. 2004. Max Weber, the Vocation Lectures. (trans.) Rodney Livingstone. Indianapolis, Cambridge: Hackett Publishing. Pedersen, Olaf. 1997. The First Universities: Studium Generale and the Origins of University Education in Europe. (trans.) Richard North. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pelikan, Jaroslav. 1992. The Idea of the University A Reexamination. New Haven: Yale University Press. Peri, Mahesh. 2018. ‘Budget 2018: With Just 4% Hike in Education Allocation, Modi Govt Is Hoping to Earn Dividend without Investment’, Firstpost (February  2). Available at https:/­/­www.firstpost.com/­business/­budget-­2018-­ with-­j ust-­4 -­h ike-­i n-­e ducation-­a llocation-­m odi-­g ovt-­i s-­h oping-­t o-­e arn-­ dividend-­without-­investment-­4332831.html (accessed on 9 July 2018). Price, Don K. 1986. ‘A Yank at Oxford: Specializing for Breadth’, The American Scholar, Spring: 195–­207. Rai, Dhananjay. 2017. ‘Gujarat State Higher Education Council Bill: An Atrophied Autonomy’, Economic and Political Weekly (EPW), 52(13): 17–­19. Rashdall, Hastings. 1895. The Universities of Europe in the Middle Ages Volume 1: Salerno-­Bologna-­Paris. Oxford: The Clarendon Press. Raychaudhuri, Hemchandra. 1923. Political History of Ancient India. Calcutta: University of Calcutta Press. Ringer, Fritz K. 1969. The Decline of the German Mandarins: The German Academic Community, 1890–­1933. Hanover, London: Wesleyan University Press. Rizvi, Fazal and Bob Lingard. 2010. Globalizing Educational Policy. London: Routledge. Rothblatt, Sheldon. 1968. The Revolution of the Dons, Cambridge and Society in Victorian England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1989. ‘The Idea of the Idea of a University and Its Antithesis’, in Conversazione. Bundoora, Australia: La Trobe University. ———. 1997. The Modern University and Its Discontents: The Fate of Newman’s Legacies in Britain and America. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rothblatt, Sheldon and Bjorn Wittrock (eds.). 1993. The European and American University since 1800: Historical and Sociological Essays. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Roy Chowdhury, Shreya. 2018. ‘Reliance’s Jio Institute Gets Government’s Institution of Eminence Status but It’s Yet to Be Set Up’, Scroll.in (July 9). Available at https:/­/­scroll.in/­article/­885897/­reliances-­jio-­university-­gets-­governments-­ institute-­of-­eminence-­status-­but-­its-­yet-­to-­be-­set-­up (accessed on 9 July  2018).

38  Debaditya Bhattacharya ‘Rs 10,000 Cr Will Be Given to Top 20 Universities to Make Them World-­ Class: Modi’. 2017. Business Standard (October 14). Available at www. business-­standard.com/­article/­news-­ians/­rs-­10-­000-­cr-­will-­be-­given-­to-­top-­ 20-­universities-­to-­make-­them-­world-­class-­modi-­117101400559_1.html (accessed on 02 January 2018). Salmi, Jamil. 2009. The Challenge of Establishing World-­Class Universities. Washington, DC: The World Bank. Samaddar, Jogindra Nath. 1927. The Glories of Magadha. Patna: Patna University Press. Sankalia, Hasmukh D. 1934. The University of Nalanda. Madras: B.G. Paul and Company. Schelsky, Helmut. 1963. Einsamkeit und Freiheit. Idee und Gestalt der deutschen Universitat und ihrer Reformen. Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt Verlag. ———. 1969. Abschied von der Hochschulpolitik oder Die Universitat im Fadenkreuz des Versagens. Bielefeld: Bertelsmann. ———. 1971. Einsamkeit und Freiheit, Idee and Gestalt der deutschen Universitat, 2nd ed. Dusseldorf: Bertelsmann. Skowronek, Stephen. 1982. Building a New American State: The Expansion of National Administrative Capacities: 1877–­1920. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Smith, Vincent A. 1914. The Early History of India: From 600 B.C. to the Muhammadan Conquest. Oxford: The Clarendon Press. Soffer, Reba. 1987. ‘The Modern University and National Values, 1850–­ 1930’, Historical Research, 60: 166–­187. Sorkin, David. 1983. ‘Wilhelm von Humboldt: The Theory and Practice of Self-­Formation (Bildung)’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 44: 55–­74. Swanson, Robert N. 1979. Universities, Academics and the Great Schism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tavares, Avinash. 2018. ‘How the Modi Govt. Reduced the Budget for Higher Education Without Anyone Noticing’, Youth Ki Awaaz (February 6). Available at https:/­/­www.youthkiawaaz.com/­2018/­02/­why-­is-­the-­government-­ not-­spending-­enough-­on-­higher-­education/­ (accessed on 9 July  2018). Tewary, Amarnath. 2017. ‘Patna University Must Compete among 10 Best Public Varsities to Get 10,000 Cr. Central Grant, Says Modi’, The Hindu (October  14). Available at www.thehindu.com/­news/­national/­other-­states/­ patna-­university-­should-­compete-­to-­be-­in-­top-­10-­best-­universities-­says-­ modi/­article19860001.ece (accessed on 02 January 2018). Thapar, Romila. 1990. A History of India, Volume 1. London: Penguin Books. ———. 2002. The Penguin History of Early India: From the Origins to AD 1300. London: Penguin Books. The West Bengal Universities and Colleges (Administration and Regulation) Bill. 2017. Kolkata Gazette. Kolkata: Government of West Bengal. Trenkle, Norbert. 2015. ‘Labour in the Era of Fictitious Capital’, in Krisis: Kritik der Warengesellschaft. (trans.) Joe Keady. Available at www.krisis.org/­2015/­ labourintheeraoffictitiouscapital/­(accessed on 31 December 2017).

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Part I

Historicizing the contemporary

1 The vocation of the public university* Wendy Brown

This essay will reflect on the vocation of the public university in the twenty-­first century. The theoretical wellspring for these reflections is Max Weber’s thinking about vocations developed in his well-­known lectures, ‘Science as a Vocation’ and ‘Politics as a Vocation’. Weber delivered the lectures just a little over a year apart  –­ in November 1917 and January 1919  –­ at the behest of a left-­liberal student organization at the University of Munich. In them, he examines the conditions, motivations, purposes and ethics contouring lives dedicated to scholarly knowledge and to politics in his time. His examination centred on Beruf, translated into English as vocation but, in the original German, signifying both calling and profession.1 Weber understood the distinctly Protestant notion of ‘calling’, or Berufung, as something originally given by God and through which individuals serve divine purpose on earth (Weber 2003 [1905]). Transmuted into secular or even atheistic terms, as it would have been for Weber, a calling retains the quality of emanating from the soul or at least somewhere deep within, of serving a cause greater than need satisfaction, and of appropriately hewing to an ethic distinctive to the realm in which it is practiced. Politics as a calling is in this way contrasted by Weber with politics as something one might do for a living but also with politics engaged in for sport, vanity, thrills or sheer love of power, and with politics pursued irresponsibly, without attunement to the particular qualities of political life  –­ that is, power, violence and effects of action that inevitably exceed its animating motives (Weber, Politics, 40, 76–­92). Similarly, Wissenschaft, science in the German sense of scholarly inquiry and knowledge, is contrasted by Weber with polemicizing, preaching, advocacy or political organizing, and with research or teaching contoured by anything other than ‘plain intellectual integrity’  –­ the pursuit of objective knowledge and sober consideration of the implications of various moral or political principles (Weber, Science, 19–­27, 31).

44  Wendy Brown For Weber, having a genuine vocation for something means being compelled by and dedicated to the activity’s worldly value, combined with a willingness to navigate and withstand often miserable conditions or rewards for pursuing it. Being animated by a calling is precisely the opposite of an egoistic or self-­benefiting pursuit. Further, Weber’s account of political leadership and scholarly inquiry involved bringing into relief how beset and even imperilled both endeavours were in his time, and how small the possibilities were for recognition or success in either domain. This led him to formulate the calling for politics and scholarship as requiring a capacity to simultaneously reckon with and resist these conditions  –­ facing them squarely without submitting to them. The sobriety, maturity and asceticism he established as comprising the ethic appropriate to each extends, then, even to their uptake; those seeking glory, glamour, wealth, certainty of success or simple gratification should look elsewhere. Weber also analyses both vocations in the context of an increasingly ubiquitous instrumental rationality in modernity, a form of reason and reasoning that he understood to gradually strip everything in the world  –­ including knowledge and politics  –­ of meaning and purpose as it converted human endeavour to unrelenting instrumentalism without end or ends (Weber, Science, 28–­30; Politics, 54, 62, 66, 71, 75). And yet, with the very idea of vocation, Weber aims to move against this destruction of meaning and purpose  –­ both in the world and in the specific fields of activity he is analysing. More than merely withstanding difficult conditions, vocations are Weber’s bid to recover something of what he understands the age to be ­vanquishing  –­ ardent passion for inordinately difficult and potentially world-­changing endeavour and a deep sense of responsibility in following this passion (Weber, Politics 76–­7; Science, 31). Vocations are also his bid to contest contingent developments within the fields he is analysing  –­ corruption, politicization and routinization  –­ as well as developments each field inherently generates  –­ disenchantment of the world by science, and unprecedented machineries of domination (bureaucracy and capitalism) in politics. There is, then, both sober idealism and amor fati in Weber’s thinking about vocations, both a steely-­eyed confrontation with existing conditions and a forceful rejection of them as determinant. These are the coordinates I want to draw upon for thinking about the vocation of the university in the twenty-­first century. Weber is uniquely attuned to the importance and the challenges of vocations in potentially rescuing noble fields of human endeavour from destructive tendencies imminent within the fields themselves and from toxic forces of the age.

The vocation of the public university 45 This makes him a vital intellectual companion in developing the calling and the attendant ethos of the public university today, particularly given its imperilled state. * We begin by marking the counter-­intuitive meaning of vocation in the educational context today, where the term has come to signify job training as opposed to other kinds of learning and human development. In both secondary and tertiary institutions, vocational education refers to what were classically termed mechanical arts (artes mechanicae, considered appropriate for unfree men), as opposed to the liberal arts (artes liberalis, considered essential for free human beings to exercise their freedom). Even when the United States Morrill Act of 1862 struck a compromise between the vocational and liberal arts, as it founded scores of land grant colleges for the education of non-­elites, the Act itself specified that concern with developing practical knowledge must not supplant but rather supplement “research and education in the liberal arts for the industrial classes”.2 The etymological irony we face today, as we will see, is that the contemporary vocation of the public university is precisely opposite to the new forms of vocational training it is being externally pressured to offer. In addition to minding the etymological tensions, we need to mark the difficulties of shifting from an individual to an institutional register in considering Beruf. What does it mean to say an institution has a vocation in the Weberian sense? To imbue it with a secularized version of a divine calling? Far from contradictory, I will argue that discerning, articulating and culturing the vocation of universities has rarely been so important  –­ or neglected. More than a mission, and certainly the opposite of a brand, logo, motto or ranking, a careful and strongly iterated vocation would fill every fibre of universities with dedication to worldly purposes. This is all that will prevent them from becoming complicit in a time and world increasingly voided of such purposes and voided too of thoughtful, educated democratic human beings. It is all that will prevent them from becoming handmaidens in replacing democracy with plutocracy, technocracy and autocracy, and in elevating capital appreciation  –­ human, corporate or financial  –­ as the value governing all entities large and small. If we turn back to Weber’s two lectures now, we will see how this goes. ‘Politics as a Vocation’ and ‘Science as a Vocation’ share an organizational and rhetorical arc. Both begin by mapping the abysmal contemporary conditions of each field and the meagre chances for gratification offered to those endeavouring in them. Modern politics

46  Wendy Brown Weber describes as organized by machines, guilds and parties, as shot through with commercialization and corruption, and as dominated by the apparatuses of bureaucracy and capitalism. These features, combined with the requirement that contemporary leaders have mass demagogic appeal, mean that anyone with a talent for political leadership will find it difficult both to realize their aims and to maintain their integrity (Weber, Politics, 75–­6). The pursuit of a scholarly vocation presents a different and more complex set of problems. First, its organization by patriarchal guilds in Germany prevents meritocracy and tends instead to reward slavish mediocrity (Weber, Science, 4–­5). Second, science does not and cannot deliver meaning to a world increasingly voided of it; rather, the pursuit of objective knowledge desacralizes as it demystifies its objects of study, whether religion or biology, history or physics. Abetting this nihilism is the unbreachable requirement that scholars submit all values, convictions and principles to analytic scrutiny, treating them not as sacred or fundamental but as testable positions with implications and consequences. Finally, consequent to the progressive nature of knowledge formation, every knowledge discovery is destined to be eclipsed; there are no final or permanent truths in scientific paradigms of knowledge (Weber, Science, 11). Wissenschaft, understood on a progressive and objectivist model, thus paradoxically erases truth even as it presses toward truth. In sum, science necessarily evacuates the scientist from the work, the work itself is constantly overcome by and in time, and worldly meaning is eviscerated by the work. Commitment to Wissenschaft is a commitment to oblation  –­ the emptying out of the world, truth and self. For Weber, the combination of these existential and historically specific contexts of the two vocations shapes the ethical bearing appropriate to each. Following his lengthy discussion of conditions, he articulates what he calls the currency or ‘lifeblood’ of each domain  –­ power and violence for politics, truth for science. (It is significant for Weber that, pace Nietzsche, whom he read closely, power and truth are diametrically opposed and mutually contaminating. This establishes the ethical necessity of keeping the domains of science and politics radically separated: politics in the classroom is as unethical as are supervenient principles or totalitarian truths in politics.) Weber turns finally to the ethos and ethics of each vocation, which are determined by both the conditions and the currency of the domain. His famous insistence on an ‘ethics of neutrality’ for professors and an ‘ethics of responsibility’ for political actors, is born of each activity’s endemic features but honed by the specific challenges of the present (Weber, Science, 19–­25; Politics, 79–­92).

The vocation of the public university 47 At the heart of both ethics is relentless responsibility for the effects, intended and inadvertent, of one’s conduct in the sea of powers contextualizing each endeavour. This responsibility is no abstract care for the world, but highly concrete. Attention to milieu, to chains of consequences, and to the vulnerability of innocents are all part of it: there is, for Weber, no room for ‘oops!’ in politics and no room for Socratic tricks or charisma in the classroom. Responsibility in each domain is also stipulated by two very different chains of opposites: vanity, profiteering, corruption and power-­mongering on the one hand; and recklessness, illusion, idealism inappropriate to context, exploitation of the powerless and collateral damage on the other. The first comprises the sin of narcissism and self-­indulgence, the second of failure to grasp the nature and currency of the domain. The ethic of responsibility Weber builds for each vocation simultaneously shapes commitment, animates conduct and establishes restraint. Let us now gather up what we want to borrow from Weber as we think about the vocation of universities today. First, vocation itself is a calling featuring passion and sobriety vis-­a-­vis a particular field of endeavour, and resting on an ethos specific to that field. Second, while having certain enduring, transhistorical qualities, vocation is always carved against historically specific conditions with which it must comport and yet which it also must resist: the task is to face and navigate these conditions without submitting to them, becoming a cog in their machineries. Third, almost everything in modern life threatens to derail or corrupt august human vocations. Articulating and protecting vocations matters, because both the concept and the practice of vocations are so imperilled by the disappearance of substantive values in a world ordered by rationalization, bureaucracy and capitalism. Fourth, without animation by vocation, the activity at stake is worthless or worse. There is no reason to be in politics without a cause, without the yearning to have one’s hand ‘on the wheel of history’, even as one may fail and even as one bears ceaseless responsibility for everything unleashed, intentional or not, in pursuit of this cause. There is no reason to be a scholar without passion for truth and understanding, even as this passion will neither yield meaning nor principles by which to live. Let us now see how we might draw from Weber’s appreciation of the importance of vocations, and his formulation of their requirements, to frame the predicaments and possibilities of the public university today. * Following Weber, we inaugurate our thinking about the vocation of the twenty-­first century university by considering its current conditions. It

48  Wendy Brown is a commonplace that the past three decades have featured a steady submission of universities to business models, metrics and practices, a process that has all but eliminated the moat that for centuries kept universities modestly apart from markets, if not from churches and royal courts. The familiar formulation here is that of neo-­liberal privatization: universities have undergone a sharp transformation from public goods supported by public funding to private investments supported by a combination of student tuition, philanthropic donors, corporate investors and public-­private partnerships.3 This transformation has meant a number of things. First, the principles of value governing almost every dimension of the privatized public university are now capital appreciation and capacity to attract new investors.4 The public model was dedicated to building a professional workforce, to be sure, but also to educating citizens for democracies and conducting research in the public interest. Privatization tends to drain the latter purposes from universities for the obvious reason that the new revenue streams carry private rather than public purposes. These purposes push everything about curriculums, programmes, pedagogy, learning and research toward return on privately made investments, a concern driven by students, investors, families and institutional governance alike. Once they have become reliant on private rather than public money, it is nearly impossible for privatized public universities to culture the purposes of a well-­ educated democracy or of research on public problems  –­ though they may continue to brand themselves with these things in a competitive market where they no longer have enormous price advantage over private institutions. Thus, precisely when democracy is deeply imperilled from other sources, and requires knowledge and intellectual tools for fathoming the unprecedented complexities of the world, privatized higher education withdraws from this mission. Second, the skyrocketing tuition rates of privatized public universities generates new access models that re-­stratify societies for which higher education was a mode of generating upward mobility through equality of opportunity across class divides. Instead of a universal right that tempers these divides, education becomes an intensifier of inequality as it becomes the private investment of those who either have means or are willing or able to gamble with debt. Debt becomes its own driving force, of course, bending both curricula and student conduct sharply toward income-­generating concerns and thus further marketizing the subject, including the subject of learning.5 Third, privatization breaks apart teaching and research, decreasing the value of the former for scholars and graduate programmes, which

The vocation of the public university 49 means outsourcing teaching to marginally paid, insecure, devalued adjuncts. Of course, this shrinks academic job markets, which compresses graduate programmes and makes them ever more dependent on outside donors, which in turn reduces their scholarly independence. Meanwhile, researchers and research programmes are increasingly pressed to search out private funds, which means foregrounding commercial and applied inquiry. This in turn depreciates basic research and open-­ended critical inquiry across all fields, and especially depresses the value of the arts and humanities. Campuses increasingly become publicly subsidized research plants for commercial undertakings, even as most in universities mistakenly believe the opposite, namely that private money supports university undertakings rather than drains them.6 There is much more to be said about the political economic transformations of public universities over the past three decades, but in order to properly contextualize the question of vocation, we need to address a second feature of the age, namely financialization, which can be understood as an inadvertent outgrowth of neoliberalization  –­ though it is far from identical with it.7 While the original meaning of financialization was simply conversion of an asset into a financial instrument, e.g., the conversion of expected future earnings into a home mortgage, financialization now also designates the dramatic recent growth and importance of the financial sector  –­ banking, asset management, insurance, venture capital and derivatives  –­ relative to the economy as a whole. Like neo-­liberalism and privatization, however, the effects of financialization vastly exceed the economic sphere. The financialization of capitalist economies since the 1970s has radically transformed almost every feature of contemporary societies, including the nature of conduct, incentive and value for human beings, social institutions, states, business and labour. Most importantly, financialization generates economies and economic entities driven by shareholder value, and not only by profit. It transforms what was, in an earlier iteration of neo-­liberalism, entrepreneurial and consumer conduct into investor and investee conduct, and it does this across every feature of organizations and human existence (Feher 2018). For investors, financialization shifts concern from profit and price to concern with the future value of the investment; for investees  –­ the object of investment  –­ it alters practices from concern with attracting customers at prices that exceed costs to concern with attracting investors who in turn increase the value of the stock and hence the firm. With these fundamental shifts, privatizing public universities in a financialized era entails more than replacing public with

50  Wendy Brown private funds and rationalizing higher education according to value for money. It entails more than importing business practices and metrics into every fibre of the university. Certainly, these things have occurred and are consequential. However, with financialization, universities, like everything else, are less governed by return on investment or ‘the bottom line’ than by their attractiveness to investors  –­ students, faculty, donors, partners, creditors, even states. This attractiveness is registered by a plethora of rankings and ratings with which universities and every programme and niche within them are therefore necessarily obsessed. Let me explain briefly. Shareholder value  –­ the value of one’s investment in a particular entity based on the speculative future of this value as determined by markets  –­ is not equivalent to profit, and is not determined by profitability. This is clear enough from the frequent divergence between a company’s posted earnings and its stock price. Amazon can post losses but see its stock jump. Uber can be ‘worth’ US$50 billion while only losing money  –­ it is living off its investors, who are speculating about its future, and doing so in part by speculating about others’ speculations about its future. In the stock market  –­ the theatre of financialized publicly owned corporations  –­ firms are valued according to a great range of tangibles and intangibles including how the company is run, what it has just acquired or divested from, its perceived risk exposure, who is bidding to take it over, who its new competitors are or might be, how certain gambles with products and pricing are regarded by the industry, what future product lines it claims to be developing, what reputational advantage or damage it may be undergoing, what new market share it looks likely to acquire and more. This great array of factors determining ‘value’ makes clear that what matters is not a firm’s bottom line but calculated speculation about its capacity to enhance shareholder value in the future. What matters is the market’s assessment of a company’s future, an assessment that is based on speculators’ beliefs or guesses about that future. Above all, what determines share price in the present is would-­ be-­investors’ beliefs about other would-­be investors’ beliefs about the future of a particular stock (Ascher 2016). Shareholder value  –­ so different from the kind of value Marx charted in Volume One of Capital  –­ while emanating from the stock market, has spilled into every dimension of contemporary existence. As any savvy college applicant, head of a start-­up or university development officer can tell you, what is crucial today is not their revenue/­ expenses ledger. Rather, what is decisive is their credible capacity to attract investors based on the market’s assessment of the predicted

The vocation of the public university 51 future value of what one is or might become. In a financialized world, this is equally true for educational institutions, research sites, apps, consulting firms, individuals and large corporations. And it is why branding, reputation and above, all, ratings, have become so important to every entity and endeavour  –­ from the local dry cleaner to the local newspaper, from an Airbnb host to Wells Fargo, from the city of Chicago to Boeing, from a law school to a nation teetering on the brink of economic collapse. The great shift from corporate capitalism to financialized capitalism, from concern with profit margins to concern with shareholder value, has revolutionized universities which, as they have been neoliberalized and privatized, have adopted the governance practices, metrics, preoccupations and imperatives of financialization. As a financialized economy and culture generates ratings for investor calculations in everything (which is why every purchase you make, service you obtain, and experience you have is surveyed and ranked today), ratings have not merely proliferated in academic life but have come to govern each part of it.8 There are rankings of whole academic institutions, of course, as well as rankings of departments, institutes and scholars. There are rankings of graduate programmes and rankings of subfields within them. There are job placement, publication, citation and postgraduate income ratings. There are ratings for ‘network advantage’  –­ what students gain from rubbing shoulders with one group of fellow investors rather than another, say from Harvard rather than CUNY, Oxford rather than Birkbeck. There are bond ratings for public institutional borrowers, essential to every university’s capital building projects but now also driving their tuition increase schedules.9 For undergraduates, there are ratings for campus dining halls, housing, recreation facilities, cultural and social life, political values, student services and, of course, professors. The steadily growing importance of ratings in conditioning every decision, revision and allocation in university life means that shareholder capitalism transforms who and what governs the university, as well as what it is for. The result is profound mission confusion in both the research and educational arms of universities, and a radical delinking of the two since they are governed by different investor groups. Indeed, the quaint faculty insistence that they are related refers to a university holism dis-­integrated by shareholder capitalism and the ‘nexus of contracts’ model of corporations by which financialization was ushered into the corporate world. More than simply dividing teaching from research, and disorienting the aim or purpose of both, however, ratings and rankings increasingly shape every aspect of

52  Wendy Brown universities: student ethos and conduct; pedagogy; curriculum design and offerings; hiring and promotion of faculty; programmes developed, nourished or abandoned; fields of study and lines of research developed or dropped; university partnerships and the programmes they generate; and levels of regard (or disdain) for ourselves and our colleagues. Disciplines themselves are increasingly private niche industries with their own ratings and ratings agencies. In an increasing number of disciplines, there are ratings of individual scholars; these are determined by ‘published research impact’, which is determined by citations in ranked journals, all of which is a reminder that this order of value is generated by expectations about others’ expectations about what is and will have value in the future. That is, the value of a scholar, indexed by citations, is linked to the value of publication venues, which is generated by an ensemble of ratings comprising journal ‘impact factor’ (citations, library acquisitions, hits and downloads, etc.), which in turn is largely driven by the valuation of the journal by the leading (highly ranked) members of the profession, and has precisely nothing to do with anything we might quaintly call the actual value of the journal or the scholarship to the world.10 Governance of disciplines, scholars and scholarship by rankings discourages research engaged with public problems or written for an educated public as opposed to research valued by the disciplines, its journals, and its rating agencies. Disciplinary rankings also deter the creative interdisciplinarity so essential for our times and its problems. For example, it is not possible to address the multiple crises besetting the European Union without linking approaches and insights from economics, politics, sociology, religion and geography. We cannot address the scandalous warehousing of humanity in urban and suburban shanty towns without drawing from economics, politics, sociology, geography, urban studies, anthropology and public health. The prospects for effective approaches to mitigating climate change require drawing from international relations, climate science, social psychology, domestic political analysis, public policy and political economy. Yet scholars who work across several disciplines tend to be less read and cited within their disciplines, and hence less likely to be highly ranked, than are scholars who work inside disciplinary confines. This has a cascading effect: graduate students and young scholars are discouraged from such work and are hence not trained to do it, and the prospects of breaking down disciplinary silos becomes ever more remote. Perhaps the most serious casualty of being governed by rankings, however, rests in undergraduate education. Universities formerly devoted to

The vocation of the public university 53 developing worldly and educated human beings become sites for developing human capital, measured especially by postgraduate job placement and income levels. Being governed by these rankings is at odds with the cultivation of classrooms, curriculums and student orientation toward exploring meaning, the nature of knowledge, the condition of the world, human relations or the human spirit, or coordinates of existence different from those of the status quo. At the same time, in addition to return on investment, universities are measured by other rankings that lead to misbegotten priorities and often near-­corrupt practices. These include rankings of competitiveness that lead institutions to try to boost applicant rates (so they can have a higher score for being competitive) and boost test scores, even as both practices are widely acknowledged as deleterious for students themselves. These also include rankings that drive the building of ever more elaborate recreational facilities, glamorous dorms, food courts and student services, while resources for education and research are steadily compressed. In short, if universities are no longer cities on a hill due to privatization and financialization, they have not been pulled from their cloistered worlds into more public purposes. To the contrary, as their every function becomes indexed and governed by a financialized order of value in which investor confidence and expectations dictate survival or failure, they become steadily less oriented to research or teaching in the public interest, less able to set their own course, less organized by a clearly focused purpose and more bound to a set of drives that are often unjustifiable by any measure other than the rankings and, as is generally the case in financial markets, not even good indices of institutional health or productivity. The ratings by which they are governed generate neither priorities nor efficiencies that comport with rational institutional aims, let alone with that to which we now turn: the vocation of the public university in the twenty-­first century. * Let me compress the argument made to this point. Consequent to the particular time when public universities underwent their transformation by privatization, a time featuring ubiquitous financialization, universities are governed less by old-­fashioned utilitarian principles of cost/­benefit (for internal allocations and for consumers) than by principles and metrics of shareholder value. The conversion of universities from public to private purposes, in both research and education, has been shaped both by the demands that accompany private funding and by governance driven by the ratings accompanying financialization. The combination has not only drawn universities away from public

54  Wendy Brown purposes but has generated deep irrationalities in university organizing dynamics and priorities. Neo-­liberal privatization along with financialization constitutes the fundamental condition of public universities today. Following Weber, this condition is the context through which we should consider the vocation of the public university today. I believe this vocation has two basic features in the twenty-­first century. The first is research and education oriented to worldly predicaments and challenges. Examples of such predicaments include the unprecedented transnational powers and forces  –­ political, social, cultural, discursive, economic  –­ that have been humanly created but are not humanly controlled; global integration and the dangerous interregnum that globalization generates between nation-­states and their successor form; stratification and strife along economic, cultural, religious, racial, gendered and other lines  –­ ever-­increasing global inequalities and volatilities related to them; climate change, resource depletion, species destruction, and unsustainably organized geographies and demographies that both perpetuate these problems and deter reckoning with them; human bodies that can be kept alive but without adequate conditions for their care or their thriving; diseases challenging the well-­being or survival of entire populations and regions; widespread existential and political anxiety and fear, with its profound social, psychological, political and theological effects; the difficulty of finding economic and political forms that both acknowledge a globally connected world and provide the possibility of local self-­determination and democracy. This list of predicaments is a bare beginning, far from comprehensive. The point of inaugurating it is to imagine a university oriented by worldly cries, perils and needs, and to imagine the research and education  –­ basic and specialized, humanistic and technical, big picture and local  –­ that would be responsive to these cries, perils and needs. This focus contrasts with research and education contoured by the aim of human capital appreciation (in students or faculty) and the shareholder value of departments, programmes or whole institutions. It concentrates instead on the predicaments identified with planetary and species survival, with the disintegration or usurpation of democracies, with minimally decent and modestly egalitarian and free forms of human existence, and on the knowledge needed to fathom, historicize, probe, narrate, illustrate and address these things. This kind of education and research spans almost all the knowledges currently featured in research universities: technical, professional, scientific, social, humanistic and aesthetic. Far from being a mandate to focus universities on technical solutions to grave worldly

The vocation of the public university 55 problems, the claim here is the opposite. This aspect of the public university’s vocation comprises examination of the epistemological and ontological assumptions securing the existing orders of things as natural and inevitable; analysis of the grammar, representations and methods that secure this givenness; inquiry into how different orders of knowledge are valorized or discredited, elevated or buried; study of diverse and contested formulations of religion, culture, gender, race, caste and sexuality; exploration of the foundations and content of various humanisms and posthumanisms, natural histories, ecologies, cosmologies and more. Thus, work on Aristotle, Darwin or Chakrabarty, on colonialism and sexual divisions of labour, on various iterations of markets and their alternatives, on history and reading practices, and on poetry and music, are as important as work on solar and wind energy technologies, sustainable cities, cancer cures, food sovereignty, or the precise mechanisms by which technocracy, autocracy and plutocracy are usurping democracy in this century. The particular disciplines, subjects and topics are not decisive in determining whether this aspect of the vocation of the university is activated and realized. What matters is the calling, purpose and ethos by which curricula and research are animated and organized. Put somewhat differently, if public universities are not only to survive but contribute to the public world  –­ which they are bound to do by virtue of being public  –­ university research and teaching cannot be subordinated to the kinds of knowledge needed by current economic and political regimes. This is not to say that all public university inquiry must be critical, only that it must be uncontracted, that it must operate at a modest distance from the dominant interests of those regimes and also must aim at worldly problems rather than mainly at immediate commercial or state applications. Such uncontracted knowledge, until recently embodied in the relative autonomy of universities from markets and politics, is what privatization and financialization threaten in governing the conduct of students, faculty, donors and even taxpayers today and in their organization and governance of universities themselves. In fields ranging from forestry to physics, engineering to economics, literature to neurophysiology, and on issues ranging from climate change to the rise of non-­state terror, university research and teaching hold inordinate potential through their generation of publicly oriented research and its education of citizens. This generativity, however, is at odds with being held hostage to markets. Developing and teaching publicly oriented knowledge is, then, one aspect of the vocation of public universities today. The second is bringing the outsiders in. Public universities must be consummately

56  Wendy Brown dedicated to educating and including in their research ranks those historically excluded by virtue of caste, class, religion, region, race, ethnicity, gender and body. Why? Not only to redress historical hierarchies, dispossessions and prejudice. Not only to make the university a significant venue and vehicle (again) for overcoming disparities in opportunities for those on the wrong side of social hierarchies and exclusions. Not only to intellectually and socially integrate those who otherwise become candidates for hostility to stable, equitable societies. Not only to develop knowledges that challenge dominant perspectives with knowledge from dispossession or exclusion, knowledge focused on sites and scenes of existence often occluded by dominant perspectives or paradigms. This aspect of the public university’s vocation is animated by all four of these: historical rectification and repair, equality of opportunity, social inclusion and incorporation, and democratic and diverse knowledge production. It is animated by equal opportunity combined with true (rather than rigged) meritocracy, yet is also an engine for egalitarianism. It challenges white and male standards for knowledge excellence at the same time as it affirms the value of educated intelligence for all people everywhere. It holds the promise of building worldly knowledge and addressing worldly predicaments in ways that repair rather than reproduce the hierarchies and exclusions that stratify populations, generate intense civil and political conflicts, and prevent the possibility of sustainable futures for humanity and the planet as a whole. It is impossible to overstate how severely privatization and financialization challenge this dimension of the vocation of the public university. Privatization limits access and funnels the historically excluded toward technical training rather than broad education in the sciences and letters.11 Financialization induces universities to prioritize faculty, students, programmes and research areas that boost rankings; this means favouring those with the test scores, publications or rankings in the field that generate this boost. Put the other way around, institutions or programmes that reach for non-­traditional students or faculty, or struggle to feature and even centre research and curriculums that attract and empower them, will suffer from lower rankings, resulting in diminished investment from states, private donors and the very students and faculty they want to attract. In a university governed by the ratings, faculty and student ‘diversity’, along with public interest research, may be part of branding; however, these things cannot comprise the institutional core of the privatized publics without suicidal effects. Again, the issue is not primarily money but shareholder value, measured by ratings of faculty, programmes and students and

The vocation of the public university 57 generated by applicant SATs, GREs, LSATs, postgraduate placement and income streams, and faculty prestige and productivity. Notwithstanding financialization’s ostensible reward of economic conduct that is disruptive and innovative, rankings produce profound conservatism in values and choices, reproducing existing social hierarchies, along with mainstream methods and criteria of excellence. * I have argued that the vocation of the twenty-­first century public university is the generation of publicly oriented knowledge and the broad incorporation of publics, both of which are undermined by privatization and financialization. Of course, the university does other important things, such as developing skills and knowledges for particular professions, or developing research applications for both commercial and non-­commercial purposes. However valuable, these cannot be said to rest at the heart of the vocation of the public university qua public university. In fact, they often do not require universities at all, and are increasingly taking place on non-­university sites –­­institutes, corporate campuses or virtual campuses  –­ dedicated to technical training and research.12 The two dimensions of the public university’s vocation we have been considering, worldly knowledge and incorporating the excluded, are also fundamental to democracy  –­ reviving it, renewing it, and rescuing it from the frightening alternatives on the contemporary horizon. To avoid despotism  –­ whether by authoritarian anti-­democratic forces or those of technocracy  –­ citizens must have honed the intellectual capacities to minimally parse a complex world. Moreover, to avoid the development of new neo-­feudal race-­and caste-­based orders, consecrated and secured by the ideas of the dominant, knowledge must be widespread and worldly, and the historically excluded must be among those both generating and gaining access to such knowledge. Although it may sound, at times, nostalgic, I want to insist that this brief for the vocation of public universities in the twenty-­first century is not a lament for a golden age. If twentieth century universities aspired to certain aspects of the calling I have outlined, these aspirations were severely cross-­cut by their reproduction of white male hegemony, especially in the scholarly guild and the forms, methods and content of research prized by that guild. Public universities have never comported with a vocation to be fully of and for a democratic public. Purity is also inappropriate here. Universities will also always have other aims and interests specific to their time and cannot be held to a standard of purity. They will always be engaged in some compromises with

58  Wendy Brown their sources of survival and with the powers organizing them. What is certain, however, is that cultivating democratic access and worldly knowledge is wholly at odds with the neoliberalization and financialization of higher education. We are thus at risk of losing universities as sites for the generation of democracy in any meaningful sense of the word, and are also at risk of universities becoming vocational in the familiar modern sense of job training. With this turn completed would come a loss of freedom itself, carried by the loss of learning appropriate to free people, those capable of self-­government. It would be a tragedy of monumental proportions  –­ for knowledge, humanity and the future of the world  –­ were universities to suffer this inversion at this moment in world history. By way of concluding, let us make a brief return to Weber. In ‘Politics ­ olitics  –­ as a Vocation’, he distinguished between those who live ‘for’ p those for whom politics is a vocation  –­ and those who live ‘from’ politics  –­ those for whom politics is a job, an income source (Weber, Politics, 40). Weber understood that the two might converge in places, but argued that they must not be conflated, lest the vocation for politics be lost as it is reduced to a means of individual survival. A calling ceases to be a calling when it becomes a means to some other end. Administrators of universities today risk instrumentalizing both the ‘public’ and ‘education’ for the survival of universities that would serve neither and in fact would have no distinct purpose at all. This is what the combination of privatization and financialization have generated, an ever-­intensifying drive to entrepreneurialize and financialize both the form and substance of the university, to follow the money and the rankings regardless of the value to education or to the public of this pursuit. Without re-­establishing the vocation of universities, and doggedly insuring that this vocation contours every important aspect of their existence, public universities will increasingly live ‘from’ the public and ‘from’ education rather than for them. Hawking their brand and wares like every other commercial entity, and trading on speculative value like every other financialized one, what began as one of modern civilizations’ richest venues of human endeavour, and most important contributions to human freedom, may end as an expensive scam  –­ one the public altogether ceases to support because nothing about it remains public.

Notes * Originally published in Anton Bech Jorgensen, Jakob Juel Justesen, Nana Bech, Niels Nykrog and Rasmus Bro Clemmensen eds., What Is Education? (Copenhagen: Problema, 2017), pp. 55–­89. This timely anthology

The vocation of the public university 59 of essays on the current torsions within the philosophical-­political idea of education has been supported by Dansk ungdoms fallesrad (DUF) and Snabslanten, and is available for free download at www.whatiseducation. net/­wp-­content/­uploads/­2017/­09/­what-­is-­education.pdf (accessed on 31 December 2017). 1 The focus on vocation was not Weber’s own choice. The public forum providing the auspice for his lecture was a series on ‘geistige Arbeit als Beruf’  –­ intellectual or spiritual work as a calling. David Owen and Tracy Strong, drawing on Wolfgang Schluchter, also note that Weber’s lecture was prompted by an essay by Alexander Schwab which had argued for the incompatibility of a calling and scientific conduct. See David Owen and Tracy Strong, ‘Introduction’, in Max Weber, the Vocation Lectures, eds. David Owen and Tracy Strong (Indianapolis, Cambridge: Hackett Publishing, 2004), p. xiii. Hereafter, the lectures are cited in the text as ‘Weber, Politics’ and ‘Weber, Science’. 2 From the Morrill Act: “without excluding other scientific and classical studies and including military tactics, to teach such branches of learning as are related to agriculture and the mechanic arts, in such manner as the legislatures of the States may respectively prescribe, in order to promote the liberal and practical education of the industrial classes in the several pursuits and professions in life” (United States Code Sec. 304). 3 The critical literature on privatizing public education is now substantial and excellent. My own contributions include, among others, Wendy Brown, ‘Educating Human Capital’, in Chapter Six of Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution (New York: Zone Books, 2015) and Wendy Brown, ‘Neoliberalized Knowledge’, History of the Present 1.1 (May 2011). 4 Michel Feher has theorized the fundamental change in value that accompanies the financialized phase of neo-­liberalism. See Michel Feher, Rated Agency: Investee Politics in a Speculative Age (New York: Zone Books, 2018). 5 Ever more indebted educational institutions are themselves pushed toward policies that qualify them for borrowing and service their debts, in particular steady and predictable tuition increases. See Bob Meister, ‘They Pledged Your Tuition’, http:/­/­cucfa.org/­news/­2009_oct11.php (accessed on 31 December 2017). 6 Christopher Newfield has been tracking and analysing this phenomenon for some time. See his last two books, Christopher Newfield, Unmaking the Public University: The Forty-­Year Assault on the Middle Class (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011) and The Great Mistake: How We Wrecked Public Universities and How We Can Fix Them (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016). Out of the now enormous literature on the transformation of private universities in the past decade, Newfield’s work stands apart for its meticulous research, clear-­minded analysis, and appreciation of the larger political and social forces  –­ not only economic ones  –­ generating public divestment from public universities. For recent work on privatization and higher education, see Andrew Leyshon and Nigel Thrift, ‘The Capitalization of Almost Everything: The Future of Finance and Capitalism’, Theory, Culture and Society 24.7–­8 (2007); Bob Meister, ‘Debt and Taxes: Can the Financial Industry Save Public Universities?’, Representations 116.1 (Fall 2011), pp. 128–­155; Susanne Soederberg, ‘Student Loans, Debtfare and the Commodification

60  Wendy Brown of Debt: The Politics and the Displacement of Risk’, Critical Sociology 40.5 (September 2014), pp. 689–­709; Ivan Ascher and Will Roberts, ‘Critical Exchange: Education and Scholarship in the Twenty-­First Century Marketplace’, Contemporary Political Theory 14 (2015), pp. 409–­433; Arunima Gopinath, ‘Who’s Afraid of Public Education?’, The Wire (March 3, 2017), https:/­/­thewire.in/­113311/­public-­higher-­education-­privatisation/­. 7 For analysis of how financialization has changed the governance and principles of value in organizations, see Randy Martin, Financialization of Daily Life (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2002); Edward LiPuma and Benjamin Lee, Financial Derivatives and the Globalization of Risk (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004); Robin Blackburn, ‘Finance and the Fourth Dimension’, New Left Review 39 (May–­June 2006); Gerald F. Davis, Managed by the Markets: How Finance Re-­Shaped America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009); Greta Krippner, Capitalizing on Crisis: The Political Origins of the Rise of Finance (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011); Michael Hudson, Finance Capitalism and Its Discontents (Dresden, Germany: ISLET, 2012); Dimitris P. Sotiropoulos, John Milios and Spyros Lapatsioras, A Political Economy of Contemporary Capitalism and Its Crisis: Demystifying Finance (London: Routledge, 2013); Joseph Vogl, The Specter of Capital, trans. Joachim Redner and Robert Savage (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2014); Miranda Joseph, Debt to Society: Accounting for Life Under Capitalism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014); Melinda Cooper and Martijn Konings, ‘Contingency and Foundation: Rethinking Money, Debt and Finance after the Crisis’, South Atlantic Quarterly 114.2 (April 2015); Ivan Ascher, Portfolio Society: On the Capitalist Mode of Prediction (New York: Zone Books, 2016); Feher, Rated Agency; and a dissertation in progress by UC Berkeley Political Science graduate student Brian Judge. 8 Articles on how to improve university rankings abound on the web. A sample: Amanda Goodall, ‘Top 20 Ways to Improve Your World University Ranking’, Times Higher Education (November 29, 2013), www. timeshighereducation.com/­features/­top-­20-­ways-­to-­improve-­your-­world-­ university-­ranking/­410392.article#; Nick Baker, ‘7 Ways to Improve University Rankings in the EECA Region’, QS (n.d.), www.qsdigitalsolutions. com/­b log/­7 -­w ays-­t o-­i mprove-­u niversity-­r ankings-­i n-­t he-­e eca-­r egion/­. And on improving personal rankings: ‘Get Found  –­ Optimize Your Research Articles for Search Engines’ (November 6, 2012), www.elsevier. com/­connect/­get-­found-­optimize-­your-­research-­articles-­for-­search-­engines (all accessed on 31 December 2017). 9 The University of California system’s bond rating was severely downgraded by Moody’s when an agreement between the California governor and the UC President capped tuition in 2014. See ‘Rating Action: Moody’s Downgrades University of California to Aa2 and Assigns Aa2 to $950M of GRBs’, statement posted at, www.moodys.com/­research/­ Moodys-­downgrades-­University-­of-­California-­to-­Aa2-­and-­assigns-­Aa2-­-­ PR_294817 (accessed on 31 December 2017). 10 There are also amalgamations and algorithms built from wildly skewed, partial and distorted databases, such as Google Scholar. Yet this very rating agency has become increasingly important in institutional decisions about the hiring, tenuring and promotion of scholars.

The vocation of the public university 61 11 While high fee-­high aid programmes are supposedly aimed at assuring access by the poor, these packages do not cover the whole cost, thus imposing jobs and loans on those in the middle and the bottom. Moreover, price tags alone are a mighty deterrent for poor families. The ever-­growing private industry supporting college preparation and application also gives applicants from well-­off families tremendous advantages in accessing prestige universities. 12 Medical schools and those of the other health professions, for example, can be located in hospitals and other medical ‘campuses’, as some already are. There are also many free-­standing law schools. And the rise of phenomena like Apple University may bode a future in which corporations find it beneficial to contour what used to take place in generic business schools to their own corporate styles and products. See Brian X. Chen, ‘Simplifying the Bull: How Picasso Helps to Teach Apple’s Style’, The New York Times (August  10, 2014), www.nytimes.com/­2014/­08/­11/­technology/­-­ inside-­apples-­internal-­training-­program-­.html?_r=0 and www.business insider.com/­heres-­what-­its-­like-­to-­attend-­apples-­secret-­university-­2015-­2 (accessed on 31 December 2017).   The contemporary obsession with investing in and enlarging so-­called STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) fields, especially as the breakthrough area for women and minorities, is symptomatic of recasting universities as domains for the enhancement of human capital. Many have also mistakenly tried to defend liberal arts curriculums along these lines, trying to make the case for the arts and humanities as building critical thinking and analytic capacities sought by employers. We ought instead to be articulating their value in building an educated citizenry, addressing public problems, and saving the world from the barbarism of being ruled by finance, or simply from extinction altogether.

References Ascher, Ivan. 2016. Portfolio Society: On the Capitalist Mode of Prediction. New York: Zone Books. Ascher, Ivan and Will Roberts. 2015. ‘Critical Exchange: Education and Scholarship in the Twenty-­First Century Marketplace’, Contemporary Political Theory, 14: 409–­433. Blackburn, Robin. 2006. ‘Finance and the Fourth Dimension’, New Left Review, 39 (May–­June). Brown, Wendy. 2011. ‘Neoliberalized Knowledge’, History of the Present, 1(1): 113–­129. ———. 2015. ‘Educating Human Capital’, in Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution. New York: Zone Books. Cooper, Melinda and Martijn Konings. 2015. ‘Contingency and Foundation: Rethinking Money, Debt, and Finance after the Crisis’, South Atlantic Quarterly, 114(2). Davis, Gerald F. 2009. Managed by the Markets: How Finance Re-­Shaped America. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Feher, Michel. 2018. Rated Agency: Investee Politics in a Speculative Age. (trans.) Gregory Elliot. New York: Zone Books.

62  Wendy Brown Gopinath, Arunima. 2017. ‘Who’s Afraid of Public Education?’, The Wire (March  3). Available at https:/­/­thewire.in/­113311/­public-­higher-­education-­ privatisation/­(accessed on 31 December 2017). Hudson, Michael. 2012. Finance Capitalism and Its Discontents. Institute for the Study of Long-­Term Economic Trends (ISLET). Joseph, Miranda. 2014. Debt to Society: Accounting for Life under Capitalism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Krippner, Greta. 2011. Capitalizing on Crisis: The Political Origins of the Rise of Finance. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Leyshon, Andrew and Nigel Thrift. 2007. ‘The Capitalization of Almost Everything: The Future of Finance and Capitalism’, Theory, Culture and Society, 24: 7–­8. LiPuma, Edward and Benjamin Lee. 2004. Financial Derivatives and the Globalization of Risk. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Martin, Randy. 2002. Financialization of Daily Life. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Meister, Bob. 2011. ‘Debt and Taxes: Can the Financial Industry Save Public Universities?’, Representations, 116(1): 128–­155. Newfield, Christopher. 2011. Unmaking the Public University: The Forty-­Year Assault on the Middle Class. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ———. 2016. The Great Mistake: How We Wrecked Public Universities and How We Can Fix Them. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Soederberg, Susanne. 2014. ‘Student Loans, Debtfare and the Commodification of Debt: The Politics and the Displacement of Risk’, Critical Sociology, 40(5): 689–­709. Sotiropoulos, Dimitris P., John Milios and Spyros Lapatsioras. 2013. A Political Economy of Contemporary Capitalism and Its Crisis: Demystifying Finance. London: Routledge. Vogl, Joseph. 2014. The Specter of Capital. (trans.) Joachim Redner and Robert Savage. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Weber, Max. 2003 [1905]. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. (trans.) Talcott Parsons. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications. ———. 2004. Max Weber, the Vocation Lectures. (eds.) David Owen and Tracy Strong. (trans.) Rodney Livingstone. Indianapolis, Cambridge: Hackett Publishing.

2 The surplus university Nandini Chandra

The only worker who is productive is one who produces surplus value for the capitalist, or in other words contributes towards the self-­ valorization of capital. If we may take an example from outside the sphere of material production, a schoolmaster is a productive worker when, in addition to belabouring the heads of his pupils, he works himself into the ground to enrich the owner of the school. That the latter has laid out his capital in a teaching factory, instead of a sausage factory, makes no difference to the relation. The concept of a productive worker therefore implies not merely a relation between the activity of work and its useful effect, between the worker and the product of his work, but also a specifically social relation of production, a relation with a historical origin which stamps the worker as capital’s direct means of valorization. To be a productive worker is therefore not a piece of luck, but a misfortune. Karl Marx, Capital Volume I (1990: 644)

This essay is about the Indian university at the crossroads of a neo-­ liberal transformation. It illustrates how the Indian state responds to international pressure from WTO-­GATS (World Trade Organization’s General Agreement on Trade in Services 1995) by introducing a microfinance model for the university. Beyond the stated terms of the alliance with GATS, which proposes university education as desirable only for the minority who can pay (Ambani and Birla 2000), I argue that the Indian state is now targeting low-­income, low-­tech populations for this venture. In the process it widens the scope and diversity of the university’s offerings rather than narrowing them down. Education becomes a substitute for loans in this new balance. The poor invest at high interest rates in order to reap supposed benefits at a future date. Education and its promise of socio-­economic mobility is meant to seduce the poor, and also to prime poor people for extracting

64  Nandini Chandra their wage-­less service in the exponentially expanding service industry. The essay looks at the unfolding developments in the university (based on ethnographic and media evidence) in light of its past roles  –­ derived from cultural documents such as the novel Sara Aakash (1959) by Rajendra Yadav and the web series Honest Engineers (2017)  –­ to suggest that the neo-­liberal university for all its rhetoric of high-­tech productivity has been gutted and reduced to the production of absolute surplus value. The essay highlights the toxic effects of this newly redundant university precisely, and the pressing need for a critical university education to help make sense of the world we live in. From the point of view of state planning, the university is a site of research and development, but also a temporary place to park a segment of the surplus population. In the current regime of financialization, the second function of the university becomes more prominent, a key means of re-­organizing the relation of labour to capital. This is especially critical in the context of what the Endnotes collective describes as the permanent crisis of capitalism; that is, its inability to make a recovery in and through the periodic cycles of boom and bust. Usually, the bust corresponds with the freeing of labour and capital from old lines of industry, and the boom with its absorption into new industries. Increasingly, the freed labour  –­ say, the 600,000 engineers slated to be laid off from the IT sector in India over the next three years  –­ either does not have the skills to enter the new industries, but more importantly, the new industries such as fintech or insurance do not have the capacity to absorb more than a fraction of this cast-­away population. While there is no available data on the changing class composition of graduates emerging from the technical schools, studies show that an overall expansion in the educational market fuels educational aspirations among low-­income groups as well (Mendelsohn and Vicziany, 1998: 119). According to a 2013–­2014 Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FICCI) document titled Higher Education in India: Vision 2030 (FICCI 2013), student enrolment has grown 12 times in the last four decades, increasing at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 10.4% since 2000–­2001 (FICCI 2013: 58). This kind of trickle-­down effect by no means directly entails a more equitable presence of Dalit and Adivasi students in the various newly established institutes of technology and management. Yet the diversified nature of these institutes’ expansion, especially the growth level private universities of distance education and unaided state-­ (CAGR 44% since 1995) (ibid.: 59), inevitably involves a class and caste recomposition whose contours we can at least try to infer.

The surplus university 65 In a scenario of growing unemployment, first-­generation technical learners from low-­income Dalit and Adivasi households provide a large share of the educated surplus population (the students who are taken in only to be thrown out). Owing to the growing expropriation of land and the extension of debt-­monetization in formerly peasant societies, this population finds it harder to fall back on agricultural land as a means of subsistence (Federici 2014: 238). Thus it remains at large as a source of ready labour. This essay, rooted in recent developments in India, looks at the re-­organized university as well as the re-­ organization it sets in motion in light of this “crisis of the reproduction of the capital-­labour relation itself” (Endnotes 2 2010: 20). What does the university look like in this context, when the relative decline in the demand for labour is no longer reversible? The context of jobless growth makes the present essay, mutatis mutandis, relevant to global trends in the advanced capitalist countries, as well. Since labour is increasingly thrown off and made redundant, the university emerges as a key instrument for reconciling labour to its surplus status. Far beyond students simply paying money to receive an education, the neo-­liberal university trains them in the rhythms of flexibility and self-­exploitation. As such, students are trained to work for capital without in any way benefiting from it. The ten sections which follow trace the various contours of the university’s Sisyphean task: normalizing an ultimately absurd coercive and punitive relationship. Unique possibilities might emerge from the inevitable crisis.

I.  The GATS-­ification of higher education in India The 1995 General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) is deemed to have changed the rhetoric of the postcolonial state’s commitment to higher education, from a public service to a ‘non-­merit’ and ‘tradable commodity’. While India has still not made a formal commitment to education under GATS, there is already an enhanced monetization and privatization of educational goods in keeping with the GATS framework, mostly in the domestic private sector. The entry of Foreign Education Providers, or FEPs, (the central piece of the GATS agreement) is still subject to regulations pending legislation in the parliament, and Special Economic Zone (SEZ)-­like conditions of tax exemption and full repatriation of foreign capital and profits are yet to be formalized. One could say that this is still a reconnaissance period for the majority of the FEPs, while the full terms (100% Foreign Direct Investment [FDI] in higher education) of the GATS agreement are gradually being operationalized. If the threat posed by GATS is of unrestrained access

66  Nandini Chandra to the market of another country without any reciprocity or quid pro quo (Tilak, 2011: 88), then the current arrangement  –­ exchange programmes, the opening of knowledge hubs, research collaborations  –­ seems more altruistic, motivated by an NGO-­like concern for equity and underprivileged communities. While there is no doubting that the GATS terms and conditions are almost pure evil, I argue here that the privatization of higher education in India should not be seen in terms of nationalism versus imperialism debates. These debates see the state (the regulator of higher education policies) either as completely independent of capital or totally identical with it, obfuscating the state’s differing functions in different phases of capitalist accumulation.1 Higher education, among all the other sectors of capitalism, seems to give a special priority to the qualitative dimension of value: learning as an end in itself. But that high priority should not be taken to mean an indifference to the quantitative dimension. Conversely, when the opposite happens  –­ that is, when higher education succumbs to the overwhelming indifference to use values rampant within the global movement of capital as such  –­ it is taken as a dramatic sell out, activating a nostalgia for a nationalist past defined by state-­subsidy. When we look too closely at either side, we are in danger of missing the contradictory dynamic of the historical capitalist state. At different historical junctures, the state creates different conditions and means for the production and circulation of national capital. If formerly the Indian state was predominantly invested in creating a pool of specialized workers, it is now reversing this process through the active creation and appropriation of a semi-­ educated surplus population. For the university, this means both increasing the numbers of those allowed entry into the undergraduate or basic degree ­programmes  –­ as a source of enhanced revenue  –­ and simultaneously setting up mechanisms to preclude any further study as a waste of time. One can speak of this process as the GATS‑ification of higher education; its terms pose an always yet-­to-­be threat of foreign domination that, with consummate irony, offers precisely the justification for the privatization process at the domestic level. The GATS-­ification of higher education then is not simply a movement from a beneficent to an extractive state policy, but one in which the point of sale shifts from the university’s exit to its entrance. Students confront the university as an academic market in which they can buy various resources for their self-­enhancement. This is an assured sale. But the secondary transfer of raw materials in the form of trained labour to other industries is less reliable. The university is not entirely

The surplus university 67 indifferent to this sale at the point of students’ exit, since students’ successful absorption into the different industries serves to strengthen its own speculative investment as well as its overall stock value.2 However, the sale at the entry point (in the form of enrolments) becomes primary, creating a relative indifference to the subsequent sale of the students’ labour power. This renders the university redundant in terms of its avowed function of supplying productive labour to other industries. At the very least, it produces a fundamental change in the way value is accumulated in the reconstituted university: releasing students from productive work, and yet targeting their ‘free’ time. The privatization of the university is meant to subsidize its capital outlay, making the ‘wealthy’ student an investor or buyer in its shares. Hypothetically, for a member of the ideal elite student body, the very fact of entering as a buyer-­investor makes the prospect of the eventual sale of her labour power redundant. Her self-­interest does not take the traditional form of anxiety about the sale of her labour power, but rather is modified into a concern about raising the brand value of the university to which her fate is tied. From being a teaching factory in which students are prepared to become more productive as specialized workers, the model of the university becomes one of the stock exchange in which not value-­creation, but the adjudication of new measures of value becomes the blueprint. This is akin to what Jason Moore terms the creation of “particular historical natures through science, technology and new forms of territoriality and governance (abstract social nature)” (Moore 2016: section 2, para 8) at the beginning of a new cycle of accumulation. Yet GATS cannot be grasped in a one-­sided way, since the making of a new historical nature is a contradictory and manifold process. It may even entail vaguely liberating potentials. The new pedagogy, for instance, attacks the very essence of embodied cultural capital: the cultivated part of our social personality that requires time and sacrifice to form.

II.  The loss of embodied cultural capital If in a previous state-­funded period, the university was more aligned to selective nationalist goals, in this phase of neo-­liberalism, it commands the total abstract field of social production, including the swathes worked by those who are not part of the formal production process  –­ the so-­called surplus population. With the extension of the labour process into the immaterial zones of speculation and finance  –­ and the domain of the surplus population, as I will discuss

68  Nandini Chandra in detail ahead  –­ control over the labour process becomes even more tenuous. The autonomization of specialized activities spells not just a shortage and erosion of careers, but also the possibility of swift and unpredictable downward social mobility. There is a peculiar paradox working itself out in the neo-­liberal economy, owing to the polarization in the availability of surplus capital and surplus labour. On the financial side, there is surplus capital, and the tendency to minimize the human investment in time, to effect value conversions in infinitesimal fractions of time. At the other end, there is surplus population with a potential for maximum investment of time suited to the chronic lack of constant capital. While the university prepares to consign students to the wasteland of the surplus population  –­ enforcing a willingness to work both aimlessly and incessantly  –­ its pedagogic framework is aimed to be highly technologized: higher productivity through e-­learning. Here the system wittingly and unwittingly trains students in a form of flexibility that straddles the movement from finance technology to surplus population, and where new forms of employment and unemployment mirror each other in uncanny ways. In the process the necessity is eroded of what Bourdieu (1986) calls “embodied cultural capital”, or a form of learning that is less flexible and profoundly time consuming. Embodied capital is cultural capital acquired first-­hand, through “an investment, above all, of time, but also of that socially constituted libido, libido sciendi, with all the privation, renunciation and sacrifice that it may entail” (Bourdieu 1986: section 3, para 2). But while it is acquired and not a direct inheritance, the advantage of hereditary class power in gaining embodied cultural capital is obviously inestimable, skewing it in favour of the ruling class. And yet, when cultural capital was so clearly defined and objectified, universities could offer training in embodied forms of cultural capital for those without hereditary class privilege. The new pedagogy agrees to let go of this embodied capital as a primary learning goal precisely because it is not immediately transferrable and convertible into other forms of capital. You cannot pass it on to your children or siblings without the investment of substantial time and labour on their part. Embodied forms of cultural knowledge can die with a person’s death. It takes time to learn a language, to perfect pronunciation and accent through conversation practice, and to develop a learnt vocabulary through progressively more advanced readings in the language. It is much easier and more profitable to design online language courses that are goods in their own right, where the process of learning is itself the commodity, and we

The surplus university 69 are hardly concerned with a real outcome beyond documentation of the course’s completion. In these modules, learning is delegated to a general ­intelligence  –­ a website, software or app  –­ to be consumed as a do-­it-­yourself kit when required. The aim is to invest the minimal possible time, or no time at all, and this is why ‘faking it’ becomes the objective of the new pedagogy. ‘Faking it’ also implies remaining open to the flexible and short-­term opportunities of the neo-­liberal economy, eliding possible interferences that might be caused by a slow bodily absorption of knowledge. If learning Mandarin is profitable one semester, then learning Korean becomes the need of the next, and maybe they both become redundant at some future point. While the aspiration for embodied cultural capital traditionally used to draw (and still continues to draw) students to the university, the newer format eschews the ‘belabouring’ needed to acquire that individual distinction. The evacuation of belabouring arises from a need to accelerate the learning process, cutting time and costs, respectively. But cutting time is not just about smart learning  –­ it also allows people to lapse into their hereditary or primary culture without the same anxiety about being disqualified for not possessing the standard form. This aims at the very heart of a singular standard implied by embodied cultural capital. In other words, it is harder to sustain or validate the hegemony of Euro-­centric, English-­speaking cultural models when the expectation is that of an accelerated turnover. Concomitantly, it figures that the critique of Euro-­centric worldviews is not fuelled by the banner of ‘cultural diversity’ alone, but radical structural shifts. Learning so-­called minority or colonized cultures is also a matter of rigour and practice. A true multiculturalism would not just be about the permission to speak in one’s mother tongue or follow one’s cultural practices as a default or negative condition. But the discourse of multiculturalism within postcolonial theory commonsense invariably locks cultures into parochial pseudo self-­transparency in the service of an organic particularity. While this cultural ownership may be a good thing, it marks it as un-­teachable, at least within an objectified university setting. The postcolonial notion of plural incommensurable cultures and temporalities thus ends up reifying the hereditary bias of embodied cultural capital, even as it does this on behalf of the subaltern. As a result, it not only prevents the subaltern student from acquiring embodied forms of cultural capital not yet her own, but deems the embodied learning of other (especially dominant) cultures itself as an act of bad faith. For example, Dalits’ learning and valuing of English is

70  Nandini Chandra often seen as a sign of insincerity. To be good Dalits, they must display unerring pride and virtue in their subaltern bodies and consciousness, an almost impossible demand of purity, and quintessential unhappy consciousness. oriented Nehruvian university The inclusive and employment-­ enforced the imperative of English on everybody. In principle, everyone could acquire English. The neo-­liberal university denies inclusiveness by cynically acknowledging the fact that capitalist development does not guarantee inclusive growth or employment. In the old university, students were regarded as a temporary surplus population, a reserve army that would eventually be integrated into the production process. In the present format, students are idealized as self-­financing entrepreneurs. They do not necessarily need to work or create value, and therefore, are not obliged to learn anything except how to run a business. As the Ambani-­Birla report on higher education (2000) bluntly puts it: a university education is not necessary for everybody and that it should follow the principle of ‘user pays’ (841). While the new policymakers are clear about the form of this new education, they are not clear about its content. They are able to formulate a rationale for going to the university only within the framework of business administration. What about students who want to acquire critical and cultural skills and knowledge that will help them rise in the social hierarchy and/­or threaten that very hierarchy? Why should they finance themselves? The purpose of going to the university is mysterious in the new dispensation, and it seems to be at least in part about forging a special relationship with the surplus population, or carving out a privileged sphere within that surplus population. This seems to express something about the new accumulation cycle: an enhanced dependence on the appropriation of the surplus population’s unpaid labour.

III.  The surplus population and the labour market The original violence of separating workers from the means of production is considered instrumental to the process of creating wage-­labour, free workers who have nothing to sell but their labour power. Marx calls this process “the so-­called primitive accumulation”. But only a fraction of the free workers created by repeated cycles of primitive accumulation can now be absorbed in the formal production process. Capital’s capacity to absorb labour is constantly shrinking with changes in its composition brought on by the rapid growth in technology, which leads to what Marx explains as the problem of a surplus

The surplus university 71 population in Chapter 25 of Capital, ‘The General Law of Capitalist Accumulation’: it is capitalist accumulation itself that constantly produces . . . a relatively redundant working population, i.e. “a population that is superfluous to capital’s average requirements for its own valorization, and is therefore a surplus population. (1990: 782) For Marx, this surplus population is at once the lever of capitalist accumulation in the form of “the disposable industrial reserve army, which belongs to capital just as absolutely as if the latter had bred it at its own cost” (ibid.: 784, italics mine). This surplus population  –­ usually imagined as a sociologically identifiable population of uneducated subalterns or idlers  –­ is therefore not merely the victim of primitive accumulation, but a continuously circulating reserve army moving between low-­paid low-­tech jobs. The so-­called idlers straddle a range of social classes: from those who cannot afford a formal schooling, let alone university education, to all those who enter the university as a temporary reserve army, and finally, those destined to remain part of that reserve army even with their university degrees. One of the key characteristics of the surplus population is that it is continuously at work, despite being formally unemployed. Its labour creates value, but insofar as it is mostly self-­ employed or part of a household economy, it does not create surplus value. Its production process is not immediately capitalist, even though it is integral to capitalism, since it does not directly valorize capital. Its production is for direct consumption. Historically, the realm of capitalist production has always appropriated value from such sectors, which lie outside of immediate valorization. The Nehruvian policy of the selective development of a few individual big capitals with an overtly nationalist orientation has systematically rested on the transfer of value from agriculture and other petty commodity production to heavy industries in what is easily recognized as an unequal exchange. According to the economists Amit Basole and Deepankar Basu, the large petty commodity producing sector, in the early stages of capitalist development in India, not only provided the inputs necessary for capitalist production, they were also purchasers of some of the output of that capitalist sector. The exchange of the capitalist and less-­than-­immediately capitalist sectors often led to a decline in the ratio of the prices of the petty commodity sector’s products to the prices of the products of the formal capitalist

72  Nandini Chandra sector. Secondly, in the classical reserve army model, the informal sector provided a pool of labour that could be drawn upon when and if needed for accumulation in the formal sector (Basole and Basu 2011: 71–­72). In the current accumulation cycle, the individual capital’s profitability is rather short-­lived. The global access to cutting-­edge technology (that provides it an advantage over others) is so immediate that any single party’s edge is quickly evened out  –­ or else big capital buys out small capital (e.g., Facebook buying various new apps), thus swallowing their temporary advantage. Hence, the need to return to the unusual sites of production that can maintain the differentials in surplus value for a much longer time. These unusual sites are the locus of the surplus population, but they are also no longer clearly demarcated in terms of geographical isolation or discernible backwardness. Nor can they be identified through a concretely defined sector such as the petty commodity producing sector. They exist in more abstract and diffuse ways. This is why the university becomes so pivotal in realizing the potentials of an abstract social capital (capitalism as an ever-­ expanding self-­ relation, with a constantly changing inside and outside). The university is where new relations between labour and capital get framed, and new lines of industry developed. It is the point where the surplus population aspires to enter the formal economy. But in the new dispensation, the university becomes a trap for turning the entire captive population of incoming students into a permanent surplus population. The previous description, of course, puts the state at the centre of synchronizing the big with small capitals, and different capitals with the surplus population. But the micro-­processes at the university level are not mere responses to state diktats, but capitalist self-­relation at work. Given the shrinking of jobs in manufacturing, agriculture and the public sector, there are fewer and fewer possibilities for absorption into white-­collar careers in the traditional sectors. The majority of jobs today are in the service sector. Traditionally, the surplus population has worked and continues to work in these micro-­subsistence economies where personal service often goes without payment. In the current transformation of service into trade, not only has this sector been opened up and professionalized (at times with no more capital inputs than a few computers and a couple of accountants), but the permanent army of the unemployed has been roped in as the shock troopers of accumulation. All this despite the undeniable fact that the surplus population’s motivation for entering the university is often

The surplus university 73 imagined as a respite from the uberization model3, and not a snakes-­ and-­ladders return to it.

IV.  The lure of the service industry The so-­called service sector is a highly incoherent domain made up of very different kinds of activities from professional and business services to personal care, such as accounting, sales, retail, education, security, hospitality, healthcare, beauty and so on (Smith 2017),4 not to mention sex-­work. The service industry represents the part of capital related to the circulation of commodities rather than to their production. The commodities circulated within the university space pertain to books, equipment and software mostly, and not necessarily to students. While the university has always regulated the flow of specialized labour to different industries as a means of capital’s valorization, in its present incarnation as service industry, this flow (of surplus population) is almost exclusively directed at the rest of the service sector, given that it is the only sector in need of labour, and hence productive of absolute surplus value rather than relative surplus value. In historical periods of bust or downturn, university research and development (R&D) was not only supposed to come up with new ideas for growth, but the university also absorbed surplus labour as a way to maintain the unemployed youth. Concomitantly, the greater time spent in the university doing research or learning a specialization predisposed students to earning more than subsistence wages. The reality of the service sector frustrates both these traditional expectations of the university. Since the service sector runs completely on unskilled or semi-­specialized labour  –­ for which a six-­month certificate or a year-­ long diploma course is more than sufficient qualification  –­ there is no promise of either innovation (for production) or higher wages (for producers) as an incentive for university applicants. And yet, the university continues to attract a huge surplus population. Surely even evanescent liberation from direct wage-­slavery  –­ whose nature is newly intensified by capital’s terminal crisis and impossible attempts at recovery  –­ offers some welcome autonomy, and there is room for students to decide what to study and how they want to go about it. And yet this promise of autonomy is unfulfilled. It is ironic that just when the university surrenders its instrumental role in creating new lines of industry as means of economic recovery, it nevertheless pretends to transform its own internal process of production to impersonate a factory amenable to rapid increases in

74  Nandini Chandra productivity. In reality, however, it simply intensifies the work of existing employees or adds more employees, which is only productive of absolute surplus value. To produce relative surplus value, it would have to do away with the concrete aspects of the teaching-­learning process such as teaching hours, and replace these with podcasts and other tailored e-­products. The evacuation of the classroom by teachers and students, however, risks enrolments especially from sections that are not fully trained in digital modes of consumption, and are attracted to the classroom as a real and not a virtual space. This is the structural paradox of the service industry in the present, when it advertises itself based on the provision of a human service, and yet the human is only marginal to the product. Increasingly, the high-­tech classroom becomes the product, and the figure of the teacher is merely that of an administrator. At the same time, these technology inputs are usually superficial, not really intended to increase the university’s productivity. It serves merely as a way to create speculative or fictitious capital, that is, the illusion of a career based on ‘technologies of the future’. In reality, lines are blurred between skilled and unskilled labour, creating a common labour pool that is segmented only along speculative and fictitious lines. The result is that the primary capacities of those on the skilled side remain mostly un-­utilized. At present, the overall functioning of the university betrays a preference for basic, remedial, or vocational teaching over an expansion of existing knowledge-­frontiers (the much touted interdisciplinarity) or labour efficiency. Technology upgrading is confined to ornamental features in power-­point presentations and the elaboration of bureaucratic reason. It would be useful to pause here to look at how the old state-­funded public university, which did not have to bother with enrolments or productivity figures, addressed the question of surplus or loser populations.

V. The earlier university’s ambivalence toward productive work The state-­funded public university is often invoked as the bane of productivity with its legendary bureaucracy, and the stereotyped tardiness and absenteeism of its teachers who are assured easy tenure, promotions and social security benefits. However, the supposed apathy about outcomes among teachers in public institutions goes hand in hand with the discourse of disinterested acquisition of cultural and social capital. The high number of distinguished failures, and the very high possibility of failure in the act of conversion from academic capital to economic capital, are often invoked to increase the prestige of

The surplus university 75 the detached scholar. The detached approach, however, masks the fact that it works to the benefit of those possessing embodied cultural capital with hereditary features at the expense of subaltern first-­ generation learners. For instance, the candidates shown to be the most dramatically successful are portrayed in film and media as renegades and backbenchers accruing their social and cultural capital not from conscious academic pursuits, but through the casual enjoyment of extracurricular activities. The Indian university has been represented in popular culture as simultaneously a place of leisure as well as a gathering point for the rowdy masses, not very conducive to productivity goals. In Rajendra Yadav’s 1951 Hindi novel Sara Aakash, this ambivalence towards the compulsion for productive work (representative of the university overall) is shown through the figure of the protagonist Samar who is a bumbling idealist. He gives highfalutin speeches about nation-­ building inside the university campus, but finds himself caught in a stampeding crowd outside the walls of the employment exchange. In the melee, he observes that 3000 people were waiting there for a mere 63 jobs, of which only three were for salaried clerk, while 50 were for day wage labour, and 10 for carpenter. The people milling about are mostly students like him, enrolled in a B.A. (Bachelor of Arts) degree programme, but who have not completed their education or were finding it difficult to pass their exams. A stranger he meets in the crowd (who serves as his cynical alter ego) tells him that while the university degree promised the prospect of better jobs  –­ engineer, doctor, machinist, scientist  –­ without the adequate social capital and references, the real jobs awaiting them were those of gardeners and chauffeurs. For the student as a member of the surplus population, the university is a place of obfuscation then: it fills you with a lot of misleading imperatives about the need to become a great leader like Nehru, and only afterwards brings up the question of what should be done about one’s basic needs. Greatness, the alter ego concludes, is for people who don’t have to worry about basic needs (Yadav 1951: 113–­15). Thus, in this vernacular imagination, the university is an elite bastion, meant only for those who do not have to bother about finding jobs. Yet, patterns of interrelated heterosexual romance and politics seem to offer some kind of compensation for the evacuation of old-­fashioned cultural capital, since here there is a lot that can be learnt, and there are forms of cultural capital that can be informally acquired in these contexts. The formal inclusiveness of admission policies guarantees the intermingling of different classes and sexes, often the combination of upper-­class women and lower-­class men (since the economically disenfranchised who make it to the university tend to be male, while the

76  Nandini Chandra women who make it tend to be not economically disenfranchised). This meeting point provides the basis for an insurgent politics born in the crucible of frustration: thwarted belief in the state’s capacity to bring everyone up to speed and eradicate poverty. In a way, the formal inclusiveness and the transient political freedom posed by this kind of public university milieu is very much part of its subliminal appeal for the surplus population, over and beyond the lure of secure jobs. In the older model, students might have ended up working as drivers and gardeners, but they would have experienced the full range of the social and political life offered by the university. In the new hierarchized higher education system, those on the subsistence spectrum receive no chance to pass through the corridors of the traditional university as a bastion of leisure and politics. They are automatically integrated into the tight fabric of abstract social capital, which might assign them a place in technical or vocational colleges. One cannot easily say which is worse: the fact of going through the motions of a proper education only to be thrown into the dustbin of the surplus population, or circumventing the false expectations of the traditional university, and starting the grind without any hopes or illusions. Homegrown technical schools have turned into a cottage industry dotting every small town and city by the dozens. The surplus populations coming out of these institutes are assured neither jobs nor romance or politics. In sharp contrast, in a three-­part parody web series called Honest Engineers! (AIB 2017), the third part called ‘Honest Engineering Campus Placement’ presents a biting satire of what happens in placement interviews. The engineer called Average is asked to speak two sentences in English to test whether the students who have cleared the technical round can speak even minimal English. English (not just technical English) here stands for the whole package of cultural and symbolic capital that was the USP (unique selling point) of the liberal university, the heart of the liberal arts education that has been purged from the new institutions. When Average keeps slipping into Hindi, and is repeatedly asked to speak in English, he has a meltdown. We learn that his whole life has been a struggle to get into an engineering college. As a first-­ generation learner (his father fries jalebis in a halwai shop in Jabalpur), he has had no time to cultivate hobbies or speak English in a manner that would attract girls or enable him to clear the aptitude test, which is high on personality and culture-­oriented questions. He blames his lack of confidence on a one-­dimensional curriculum: If the curriculum was a little bit diverse, if the engineering colleges in our country focused on our all-­round development instead of functioning like a god-­damned factory that is just mass-­producing

The surplus university 77 robots by killing their dreams and handing them degrees, I would not be sitting here in this pointless HR interview the likes of which exist only in our country. (ibid.) The series ends by showing that while Average does not get a job, he is doing as well or as poorly as the rest of his friends who managed to enter the formal economy. He is later shown running an air-­ conditioner rental business. While Average, the subaltern character, gains an economic opportunity according to the web series, he misses out on a real university education. The service sector with its promise of start-­ups supposedly looks after the interests of the subalterns entering the university. The implication is clearly one in which the university needs to do something about providing a real education independent of whether it can provide jobs. The two functions have to be seen in separation.

VI. The history of the surplus population within the university Economist Kalyan Sanyal throws interesting light on the class composition of the so-­ called inclusive Nehruvian era policies (2007). According to Sanyal, the surplus/­subsistence population is structurally excluded from the social democratic contract even as the Nehruvian model provides concessional room for the disadvantaged. Further, he says that it was thanks to a World Bank (WB hereafter) consensus in the late 1970s that nationalist economists acknowledged the fact that the surplus population is not likely to ever be integrated into the circuits of capital. The new discourse of developmentalism then focused on uniting this surplus population with a minimal means of production, what Sanyal calls ‘a reversal of primitive accumulation’, an exercise in biopolitics or positive power (Sanyal 2007: 59).5 While the earlier basic needs approach provided subsidies to the poor, the task of the various global aid bodies was now to support the informal economy through capacity building and empowerment; through a transfer of credit, technology and know-­how rather than actual entitlements. This was designed as the opposite of charity, necessary to secure political legitimacy for capital confronted with the enormity of the non-­capital it created (Sanyal 2007: 209). Political legitimacy may be interpreted more compellingly as a crisis in valorization. The significant contribution of Sanyal’s periodization is that it reveals the late 1970s as a time when the surplus population first emerged as a target of higher education goods. Rather than charity,

78  Nandini Chandra they would be schooled in resource-­building knowledge that would at least upgrade their subsistence technologies. Worth noting in Sanyal’s book is the tendency to conflate the surplus population with a sociologically identified subaltern or subsistence humanity, in the sense of social castaways. Samar Thakur (of Sara Aakash), a first-­generation university student and the youngest son of an upper caste, low-­income household, will not qualify as Sanyal’s surplus humanity. In Sanyal’s schema, the subalterns enter higher education only after the WB rhetoric of empowerment. He locates surplus humanity in the peripheral nations as a product of primitive accumulation  –­ the violence of dispossession  –­ rather than the continuously increasing technical composition of capital, which creates conditions of redundancy. Samar will not qualify as a victim of dispossession in the Sanyal sense, insofar as he opted for a university education over his father’s hereditary business. While Average, the drop-­out engineer in the AIB web series, may be historically part of the violence of dispossession, his exit from the engineering pool is directly owing to capital’s shrinking capacity to absorb technical labour. Samar and Average  –­ though separated by the complete lifespan of the nation  –­ have one thing in common. Both are desirous of a university education, which they associate with enhancing the quality of life independent of its capacity to provide employment. Independent of WB thinking, there was a recommendation to expand reservations in higher education for the socially and educationally backward sections in India by the Mandal Commission (1979), an outcome of direct political mobilizations. But these recommendations were not implemented in higher educational institutions until 2008, after a period of almost 30 years. By then, the parallel economy had been reconstituted as a major GDP-­building service sector: 54% of the total GDP. Its denizens were reincarnated as potential consumers who could pay, thus neutralizing any progressive impact of the OBC (other backward classes) reservations, which aimed to facilitate OBC students’ entry into public-­funded high-­quality institutions.6 There is irony in the fact that the education industry is expecting to expand on the basis of an appeal to jobs in the sub-­sectors of the service industries, which are yet to reveal any real growth, characterized as they are by risk and speculation. In the profusion of vocational/­ technical institutions that have mushroomed all over the country, the surplus population has provided the guinea pigs for higher education providers, in sharp contrast to the dynamic of the elite university. It might appear counter-­intuitive to say that the Foreign Education Providers Bill (FEP), introduced in tandem with GATS (1995),

The surplus university 79 facilitates the entry of this peripheral population into higher education, but that is exactly what follows from Sanyal’s argument, and what is significant about it. All the protests and critiques of the 100% FDI in education have argued that privatization will be a death-­blow to the prospects of education for the backward, and how education henceforth would only be for the rich (Prasad 2015; Desikan 2015). While the threat to reservations is real, the mere fact of the bill and its repeated re-­drafting by different ruling parties has created a discursive framework in which the institutions of higher learning are all about technological transfers and capital inputs into the service sector, and in a trickle-­down fashion, to the surplus population, in a bid to reverse the process of primitive accumulation. The truth is that the technology transfers can be of the most rudimentary kind, intended for repairs and maintenance work, or assemblage rather than growth-­producing innovations. Moreover, these first-­generation recruits from the surplus population are expected to share in the costs of the so-­called capital inputs via education loans. In the horizon of the threat of the FEP bill, which is yet to be passed in parliament, we have seen the rapid entry of third-­tier institutions, both domestic and foreign. These institutions of indeterminate quality have succeeded in making short-­term gains by combining programmes of e-­learning and collaboration with Indian institutions of varying quality (Chandra 2011). The piece-­meal programmes, diplomas and non-­diploma short-­term courses are designed to cater to people who cannot afford full-­time study. The surplus student populations  –­ those who are not eligible for the standard and high-­to medium-­quality institutions  –­ are thus forced to pay their way into these shadow degrees, encouraged to be already on the move towards the shadier zones of informal labour from which they were theoretically trying to exit. This is akin to how the lowest paid security guards have to deposit a security amount in order to get the blighted job in the first place, or students who fail several papers in engineering colleges that charge them a capitation fee end up getting absorbed into dubious start-­ups that only begin to pay them when they break even, which may be never. In this strange hologram of workers paying their own wages, there is essentially an evacuation of the wage form, and concomitantly, of surplus value.

VII.  University, a factory for proletarianization? If the new conception of the university as a factory is intended to make wholesale commodities of students (the mass production of robots in

80  Nandini Chandra the example from Honest Engineers) via their equivalence with enrolments, then it compromises this basic principle of ‘free labour’ within the capitalist mode of production. The Marxist definition of wage-­ labour presumes the freedom to sell one’s labour power as commodity, which means that labour is not intrinsically a commodity. Free labour is both the freedom of workers from the means of production, and the freedom to sell their labour power repeatedly, and not merely as a one-­off.7 However, a university education with its promise of skill and specialization is supposed to harness this capacity to sell one’s labour power within the same branch and department of the industry, so that it does not mean starting from scratch all over again, but a protection of seniority and benefits as much as the possibility of the given field’s expansion. The predominance of a technologically challenged service industry as the biggest employer in the market effectively compromises the prospects for a cutting-­edge career in the same department in which the employee is trained. The employee is also tethered to a vicious cycle of unskilled jobs, which in turn hinders the capacity for mobility even if there is renewed sale of one’s labour power in the narrow sense. In the absence of a demand for specialized knowledge, the potential labour power pouring out of the university is equivalent to unskilled labour. The only way to keep proletarianization (a form of living death) at bay is to adopt the model of self-­entrepreneurship, which requires recruiting an army of cheap labour. To maintain the labour’s cheapness, the entrepreneur must project an image of equivalence between herself and her workers insofar as each operator is exploiting her own labour power and working without wages. The university is good insofar as it teaches this relation of self-­exploitation, which enables a form of labour that is not accompanied by either capital investment or the payment of wages. It is the microfinance model of the university based on a combination of self-­financing and high interest rates. The evacuation of wages is compounded further when we consider the credit model on which all start-­ups are based. The university encourages this debt-­paying habit by making it incumbent upon its poorer customers to take loans.8 In an age of un-­subsidized private loans, the wages are consumed between self-­reproduction and the paying off of debts, a double subsidy to the owner of the means of production. This wage in the form of a debt-­payment leads to an exchange of commodities between two capital-­owners. The student becomes a commodity rather than disposing of his labour power as commodity. With the evacuation of wages, surplus value  –­ “the gap between the wages and the value produced by the workers” (Murray 2000:

The surplus university 81 131)  –­ also disappears since there are no real wages to speak of.9 The university then compromises the basic conditions of capital’s valorization through which generalized commodity production takes place. These conditions of proletarianization and destruction of value are, however, in consonance with the law of value. Capital finds it preferable to seek out or create a surplus population or areas of absolute surplus, rather than revolutionize the production process to gain a temporary edge in the competition with other capitalists, i.e., relative surplus value (Tomba 2009: 60).10 It seeks to revamp the relations of reproduction rather than the forces of production as is clear from the market-­policing and self-­policing involved in the financialization of the economy. The self-­financing model is a rampant instance of this trend applied universally to both students and teachers. The spate of activities in the higher education sector in India under the inspiration of WTO/­GATS is an instance of this financialization model, beginning with a wanton destruction of value. It attempts to bring together disparate universities, so that they can be realigned on a scale of differential surpluses. The FEPs need the public universities in order to mark their own products as superior. The violence of realignment is necessary so that universities on different measurement scales can be made commensurable: the annual system changed roughshod to the semester schedule, the three-­year undergraduate programme to four years, all of it subsumed under the common grade system, etc., to translate it into the standard American model. Delhi University  –­ one of the most successful public universities in the country  –­ has been systematically targeted by the state to become a producer of absolute surplus value. The Nigavekar report (2016) has proposed an increase in the number of teaching hours, surrendering all pretence of the reforms process as creating the conditions of real subsumption.11 The fact of public university standards being in flux and a site of struggle has created a less competitive atmosphere for private providers to open a range of low to medium status shops, absorbing students who would have otherwise gone to a public university.

VIII.  Contradictions in the logic of the factory The university was traditionally conceived of as ‘a sphere of restricted production’ rather than an outright factory:12 a zone of reproduction where one surveys different kinds of knowledge in a field before learning a specific skill or gaining mastery over a specific topic. The centrality of the humanities  –­ liberal, or general education  –­ can be likened to interacting with the whole field of capital before one is prepped

82  Nandini Chandra for one of its branches. The skills required to make a successful sale of one’s university-­acquired skills consist in being able to relate the specific branch to the whole of capital. This simultaneously ensures the relative scarcity, i.e., ‘difference’ or uniqueness of one’s own commodity. If everyone acquired the exact same skills, there would be a damaging loss of value for each individual’s skills. Structurally then, if it is to serve as a medium of social mobility, the university must be remote from the mass production logic marked by uniformity. The hue and cry about the commercialization of education in the wake of GATS needs to be viewed in the perspective of this shift from a restricted mode of selective production (akin to the production of luxury goods) to the installation of education as a full-­blown factory where mediocrity and uniformity prevail (mass products). The hue and cry also relates to the timing of the commercialization to the deliberate betrayal of the greater expansion of higher education promised through the implementation of OBC reservations. The potential introduction of high tuition fees shifts the criteria for expansion, registering the fact that the prestigious university as we know it (and try to defend) is not for everyone. It cannot function either with full laicization or with full commercialization. According to Andre Gorz (1970), the right to education for all and the promise of social mobility cannot go together. If everyone can get a Ph.D., then the degree has no worth, and no exchange value for the candidate, either. In the recent Indian context, if laicization through opening the gates to subaltern populations seemed imminent, then the state tried to sabotage it by lowering the standards and making subalterns pay for the rest of the university even before they could enter it. At Delhi University, funds dedicated to the OBC expansion were blatantly misappropriated for beautification drives during the Commonwealth Games, as well as for buying laptops for general category students.13 While the destruction is orchestrated by the state, a more insidious destruction is brought about by the skewed sense of meritocracy: an automatic assumption that merit (an obsession with a particular kind of intelligence) rests with the upper castes. While reservations have been the only weapon to fight this entrenched privilege, ironically they have also ensured that the ‘scheduled categories’ continue to subsidize the unmerited value-­appreciation of the ‘general category’ candidates. The reservation-­students identified as lower quality create a sense of relative scarcity for the supposedly better candidates, appreciating the already greater value of the upper caste students. The new education policy creates another two-­tier system, which attempts to separate

The surplus university 83 those who can pay from those who will borrow or take out loans to gain entry. This potentially creates a more complex and abstract segregation, which while not overtly defined along caste lines, arguably folds in the logic of caste, insofar as it is about segregation and appropriation of value from those the system expels. The neo-­liberal university’s obsession with the factory form  –­ as represented in its obsession with the point system of academic performance, and rankings based on technological upgrades such as e-­learning, etc.  –­ is actually its reverse image or shadow-­form.14 The university is the opposite of a factory where workers and capital enter into contract as free agents. The more it tries to set itself up in free contractual terms of rational evaluation and efficiency, the more authoritarian it becomes. This is because education is wittingly or unwittingly burdened with the challenge of capital’s losing battle against unemployment. It needs to prop itself up as a meta-­ industry for guaranteeing jobs precisely at the moment when there are no jobs, and fewer lines of new industry. In fact, its projection of a hyper market-­ responsiveness consists in reimagining itself as the creator of new lines of industry on the principle of supply creating demand. For example, the newly launched Sandip University in Nashik was opened without any actual courses, but in the pipeline are design, actuarial sciences, nano-­technology, bio-­technology, cloud-­computing, ethical-­hacking, etc.: “It will also focus on courses necessary for local industries like wine technology and sugar technology” (Balajiwale 2016). The “it will also” is a grudging concession to local needs and industries that have not been able to generate any actual employment. Education as an industry, then, has to cater to the generation of wholly fictitious future capital. Whether or not it actually transfers any relevant skills, it promotes itself as a new panacea for the current crisis of capitalism. The education industry anticipates this simultaneous creation of a surplus population and tries to extract profit from precisely this potentially redundant population.

IX.  Responses to the impasse of the university It is clear by now that technical schools are not a guarantor of jobs.15 This structural delinking of universities from jobs paradoxically expresses itself in an aggressive articulation of its opposite: there will be jobs only if educational outcomes are properly showcased in attractive bullet points. This is the basic principle through which new private schools promote their superiority over public universities. But whether

84  Nandini Chandra high or low-­status, public or private, all universities suffer from the same structural limitation of being at the mercy of market forces, and thus never quite autonomous. There is the perpetual threat of closing down departments and programmes, alongside the perpetual panic over proving oneself competitive. In this, we have come full circle from the days of the university as the domain of detached knowledge. Fortune magazine recently reported the inability of leading US business schools to design a financial technology course because the area is still ill-­defined and relatively new. . . . The burgeoning industry is so diverse that academics say it is difficult to construct a syllabus for a course on financial technology 101. There are no textbooks and few professors have fintech expertise. (Fortune Magazine 2017) This seems like a perfect allegory for the impasse of the university. In a bid to be answerable to its masters, the academic world ends up showcasing its own limitations vis-­a-­vis the financialized market for which it is supposed to prepare students. It desperately tries to play catch-­up with the unfolding market developments, but inevitably falls short. This is because a course based on a study of extremely volatile empirical data is by definition un-­teachable. The students might as well jump directly into these financial markets as unpaid interns, bypassing universities altogether. Despite the evidence of a jobless spiral for close to three decades now,16 administrators and policymakers have still not learnt to appreciate the delinking of university education from existing jobs in the market. Their paving the way for new lines of industry such as fintech, etc., backfires since these new lines are evanescent and short-­lived, and ends up bordering on gambling and speculation. The bosses at the university seem to be totally indifferent to capital’s lack of capacity to absorb surplus labour. Does this incapacity portend the end of education as a means for accumulation of capital? This would warrant a radical and experimental rethinking of education. In many ways, today’s students  –­ call them millennials or igens  –­ are already attuned to the requirements of flexibility and economic insecurity. They may not be active on the streets or campus to the same extent as their more firebrand counterparts from earlier decades, but their socialization into the rhythms of financial insecurity also might prepare them to walk more easily out of abusive situations or instances of harassment. Objectively, there is now less at stake building a career than was the case with former generations. This has the

The surplus university 85 potential of equipping today’s students with a better understanding of the world we live in free from the obstructions of sentimentality and vacant idealism, and not just reconciling them to the necessity of jugaad or improvization for survival at the micro-­level. It is no surprise that the present reform and restructuring process began by systematically targeting the most established public institutions of higher learning, precisely those that have accumulated years of credibility through fidelity to the idea of knowledge as intrinsically useful. The MHRD (Ministry of Human Resource Development) plan is to deliberately create space for newcomer private institutions more openly married to market needs in the education industry, ironically by trying to intervene in that market. To make room for the makeshift new universities, the whole playing field of higher education  –­ whether public or private, high-­end or low-­end  –­ must undergo a seismic transformation; in other words, a ‘disaster capitalism’ hollowing out. For example, the new institutions deny reservations, and a renewed, synchronized attack on reserved-­category students takes place in the public institutions, along with attacks on the more politicized student body as whole. What amounts to the cultivation of passivity is most explicitly demonstrated in the lower-­tier private universities, where rich student-­consumers are pampered like guests in a luxury hotel rather than being subjected to learning and education as a discipline. Teachers are initiated into hostess-­like training and grade inflation, and discouraged from adopting methods that go against the comfort levels of their primary clientele.17 In contrast, a more elite institution might present progressive models of high student-­teacher ratio, and more enabling working conditions for its faculty, yet this does not automatically contribute to a more qualified or critical knowledge base. The sharply differentiated skill levels among students at low and high-­quality/­status institutions add up to different brand values and different price realizations, but the overall indifference to use values leaves the students equally incapable of confronting the task at hand. Structural reform is not merely engineered from above; it is ironically, unwittingly facilitated by the progressive sections within the university, as well. The new university demands a high responsiveness from its student body. Students are asked to evaluate teachers’ performance on the American model. This has begun in the private institutions, and there is talk of it being applied in the public ones, as well. This can, and has already, generated an obsessive personal interest in students. Students’ surveillance thus increases as they are themselves asked to conduct increasing surveillance. And yet ironically this is also the moment when the relationship between student and

86  Nandini Chandra teacher is being made more legal and contractual, via the introduction of rules and regulations regarding teacher and student conduct, interaction, etc. Unlike the earlier form of the university in which accidental pleasures and idleness were possible (whether in the form of politics or romance), and one could do things and learn informally precisely because nobody was looking on; within the present structure, politics is not outlawed but it comes under such obsessively close scrutiny, especially from those in the business of providing pastoral care and leadership that the end result is a closely monitored self-­censorship. In both the new and old systems, subaltern students fall by the wayside and enter the surplus population, but in the new one, the added danger is that even the temporary idleness afforded by not being part of the immediate production cycle evaporates.

X.  The promise of a new university? The compulsion of putting young people through the grind of acquiring all kinds of bogus skills and technology is a desperate way to stall capital’s inability to absorb all but a tiny fraction of labour. The expanding education industry may succeed in creating isolated profits for itself, but in the long run, it creates pockets of de facto slave labour.18 From the depths of our collective experience, it appears that the university has turned into a sweatshop or a nineteenth century factory. There is no opportunity for even play-­acting a respite from its ruthless rationality. One feels nostalgic for the leisure and snobbery the university used to connote. Given Marx’s warning about the misfortune that is productive labour, one should perhaps welcome this destruction of value. But this is a destruction, which is integral to the continuity of the value form, intended to produce a more integrated social fabric whereby social oppression and capitalist exploitation become seamlessly intertwined. The offer of social mobility has become crudely ideological. Higher education has already objectively delinked itself from the goal of social mobility, not simply by making it just another bad investment, but also through the extremely manipulative, crudely ideological illusion of meaningful work it manufactures. To demand a return to the goal of social mobility might seem progressive in terms of creating dignity for those subjected to exclusion and degradation for millennia, but it is important to recognize that this kind of apologetic, relative social mobility is intrinsic to the workings of an overall abyss of immobility. As we approach the end of the epoch of skilled jobs, we can come to terms with our ultimate collective equality as

The surplus university 87 potential surplus humanity within the present order, united in life or death antagonism with the neo-­liberal university which becomes a more and more immediate expression of capital. This is indeed an education in itself. Social mobility cannot now be imagined within the present order, which means that reimagining it is newly meaningful and potentially revolutionary.

Notes 1 Chris O’Kane gives a very comprehensive account of the capitalist state as a form-­determined instrument of capital rather than being simply subsumed into capital. As such, he argues that the neo-­liberal state exemplifies the political purpose of the capitalist state, and financialization corresponds to a recomposition of the state, not its retreat; ‘State Violence, State Control: Marxist State Theory and the Critique of Political Economy’ (October 29, 2014), www.viewpointmag.com/­2014/­10/­29/­state-­violence-­state-­control-­ marxist-­state-­theory-­and-­the-­critique-­of-­political-­economy/­ (accessed on 31 December 2017). 2 According to a report in The Times of India (Mayur Shetty, ‘Education Loans Attract Specialist Lenders’, July 12, 2017, https:/­ /­ timesofindia. indiatimes.com/­business/­india-­business/­education-­loans-­attract-­specialist-­ lenders/­articleshow/­59553526.cms), student loans have grown at a measly rate of 2.7% in the FY2017 compared to other kinds of loans. Banks have been pulling away from education loans because they are unsecure leading to a high default rate owing to the low quality of most technical and management schools and the uncertainty of employment. 3 Gerald F. Davis (2016: 502) explains: “Uberization . . . allows on-­demand labor to be contracted by the task via online platforms. Uberization threatens to turn jobs into tasks, to the detriment of labor. Every input into the enterprise becomes possible to rent rather than to buy, and employee-­free organizations are increasingly feasible. Enterprises increasingly resemble a web page, a set of calls on resources that are assembled on demand to create a coherent performance.” 4 In a two-­part article titled ‘Nowhere to Go: Automaton, Then and Now’, Jason Smith argues that the service sector which comprises almost four-­ fifth of the economy in the US is high on employment but technologically stagnant. He raises doubts about the threat of automation that hovers around these low-­paid services, especially because they run purely on minimum wages, with negligible capital inputs. But were this sector to be replaced by machines, then we could be looking at an explosion in the segmentation of all human activities into occupations. http:/­/­brooklynrail. org/­2017/­03/­field-­notes/­Nowhere-­to-­Go (accessed on 1 March  2017); http:/­/­brooklynrail.org/­2017/­04/­field-­notes/­Nowhere-­to-­Go-­Automation-­ Then-­and-­Now-­Part-­Two (accessed on 1 April 2017). 5 Sanyal (2007: 59, emphasis in original): While primitive accumulation seeks to transform the means of labour into capital and subsume them within the domain of capitalist relations, this process of transfer is a reverse flow that extricates them from the

88  Nandini Chandra space of capital and reunites them with labour. I characterize this decapitalization of means of labour as a reversal of primitive accumulation. 6 According to the Department of Industrial Policy and Promotion (DIPP), as commodity-­based industries reach a glut, service industries have to be promoted. The share of service sector in India’s GDP is expected to reach 62% by 2020. The Indian service sector has attracted the highest amount of FDI equity inflow in the period April 2000–­September 2015, amounting to about US$45.38 billion, which is about 17% of the total foreign inflows (2015: 9, Annexure B; IBEF). 7 Marx (1990: 271): labour-­power can appear upon the market as a commodity, only if, and so far as, its possessor, the individual whose labour-­power it is, offers it for sale, or sells it, as a commodity. In order that he may be able to do this, he must have it at his disposal, must be the free proprietor of his own labour-­capacity, hence of his person. He and the owner of money meet in the market, and enter into relations with each other on a footing of equality as owners of commodities, with the sole difference that one is buyer, the other a seller; both are therefore equal in the eyes of the law. For this relation to continue, the proprietor of labour-­power must always sell it for a limited period only, for if he were to sell it in a lump, once and for all, he would be selling himself, converting himself from a free man into a slave, from an owner of a commodity into a commodity. He must constantly treat his labour-­power as his own property, his own commodity, and he can do this only by placing it at the disposal of the buyer, i.e., handing it over to the buyer for him to consume, for a definite period of time, temporarily. In this way he manages both to alienate [veräussern] his labour-­power and to avoid renouncing his rights of ownership over it. 8 The Head of Retail at Axis Bank reveals that they have “a good relationship with several trusts and educational institutions which makes it easier to partner with them for education loans” suggesting this secondary nexus (Shetty 2017). 9 Patrick Murray (2000: 102): “Value producing labour is not simply abstract labour, but socially necessary abstract labour. And the social necessity is not generic  –­ there is no society in general  –­ but pertains to the specific aim of producing surplus value. 10 Tomba (2009: 60): “The difference between capitalists who exploit labour of different productivity is therefore necessary so that it will be possible to extract relative surplus value from the advantage that springs from technological innovation.” 11 About the Nigavekar Report on the Academic Performance Index, Ramdev and Bhattacharya (2016) write: The real intention of the Nigavekar Committee is clear: far from bolstering teaching learning activities through an apparent increase in teaching hours, it merely sought to cut down teaching jobs while at the same time delegitimizing the ‘value’ of teaching within the API-­based PBAS scheme for promotions. 12 Bourdieu (1993: 112–­41) argues that two separate fields of production exist in the modern world: “the field of restricted production”, which

The surplus university 89 produces specialized goods for and by specialists, and “the field of large-­scale cultural production”, which produces goods for the public at large. 13 “Laptops for distribution among students enrolled under FYUP were procured under the Budget Head OBC expansion Grant for University Department and OBC Expansion Grant for colleges,” the RTI reply said. Registrar Alka Sharma said that OBC funds are meant for the use of all students of all categories and not for the sole use of the OBC students, Daily Mail (April 29, 2014), www.dailymail.co.uk/­indiahome/­indianews/­ article-­2616219/­DU-­diverts-­Rs-­172-­crore-­OBC-­expansion-­fund-­buy-­62-­ 600-­LAPTOPS.html (accessed on 31 December 2017). 14 I take my understanding of the ‘shadow-­form’ from Patrick Murray (2000, 2011). According to him, unlike ‘value forms’  –­ the commodity, price, money, wage labour, profit, interest and rent  –­ capital’s shadow forms are not constitutive of capitalist society; they might even outlive capitalism. “These shadows cast by the value forms belong to capital’s retinue and are further expressions of capital’s power to shape and subsume society and the ways we represent” (2011). 15 The IT sector in India is looking to lay off 200,000 employees annually over the next three years. The McKinsey & Company report (Business Today 2017) says that “nearly half of the workforce in the IT services firms will be ‘irrelevant’ over the next 3–­4 years” since “the growth in digital technologies like cloud-­based services is happening at a much faster pace”, requiring reskilling of even the workforce’s younger members. 16 Despite incremental pay packages, the boom in the private vocational education sector (since the 1990s)  –­ in both digital and media technology  –­ has not been able to sustain the kind of career options that were provided by the public sector enterprises and big private industries in earlier decades (with assured promotions and pensions). Entering these boom industries is more like joining a pool of unskilled workers since the demand for a particular skill-­set can be so short-­lived. 17 Personal communication with friends and students who work in various middling to low-­grade private universities in the Delhi NCR region. 18 Prasad (2015) maintains that within the domestic education market, India expects to increase its gross enrolment ratio in higher education from a then-­18% to 30% by 2020.

References All India Bakchod. 2017. Honest Engineers, Web Series Podcast in Three Part. Available at www.youtube.com/­ watch?v=raKI3sgoNGAs (accessed on 4 June 2017). Ambani, Mukesh and Kumarmangalam Birla. 2000. A Policy Framework for Reforms in Education. Available at http:/­/­indiaimage.nic.in/­pmcouncils/­ reports/­education/­(accessed on April 2010). Balajiwale, Vaishali. 2016. ‘First Self-­Financed Varsity of North Maharashtra Launched’, DNA. Available at www.dnaindia.com/­mumbai/­report-­first-­self-­ financed-­varsity-­of-­north-­maharashtra-­launched-­2222146 (accessed on 11 June 2016).

90  Nandini Chandra Basole, Amit and Deepankar Basu. 2011. ‘Relations of Production and Modes of Surplus Extraction in India: Part II-­“Informal” Industry’, Economic and Political Weekly, 46(15) (April 9): 71–­72. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1986. ‘The Forms of Capital’, Marxists Internet Archive. Available at www.marxists.org/­reference/­subject/­philosophy/­works/­fr/­bourdieu-­ forms-­capital.htm ———. 1993. ‘The Market of Symbolic Goods’, in The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature. Columbia University Press. Business Today. 2017. ‘IT Companies to Layoff Up to 2 Lakh Engineers Annually for Next 3 Years’ (May 15). Available at www.businesstoday.in/­ sectors/­it/­it-­companies-­layoff-­engineers-­india-­jobs/­story/­252108.html Chandra, Nandini. 2011. ‘Private Nation, Public Funds: The Case of the Foreign Education Providers (Regulation of Entry and Operation) 2010 Bill’, Sanhati. Available at http:/­ /­ sanhati.com/­ excerpted/­ 4108/­(accessed on 9 September 2011). Daily Mail. ‘DU Diverts Rs 172 Crore from OBC Expansion Fund to Buy 62,600 Laptops’. Available at www.dailymail.co.uk/­indiahome/­indianews/­ article-­2616219/­DU-­diverts-­Rs-­172-­crore-­OBC-­expansion-­fund-­buy-­62-­ 600-­LAPTOPS.html (accessed on 29 April 2014). Davis, Gerald F. 2016. ‘What Might Replace the Modern Corporation? Uberization and the Web Page Enterprise’, Seattle University Law Review, 39: 501–­515. Department of Industrial Policy and Promotion. 2015. ‘Fact Sheet on Foreign Direct Investment (FDI): From April, 2000 to September, 2015’. New Delhi: Ministry of Commerce and Industry. Available at http:/­/­dipp.nic.in/­ sites/­default/­files/­FDI_FactSheet_JulyAugustSeptember2015.pdf (accessed on 31 December 2017). Desikan, Shubashree. 2015. ‘Will the GATS Close on Higher Education?’, The Hindu. Available at www.thehindu.com/­opinion/­columns/­will-­the-­gats-­close-­ on-­higher-­education/­article8042337.ece (accessed on 30 December 2015). Endnotes 2. 2010. ‘Misery and Debt’, in Misery and the Value Form. Available at https:/­/­endnotes.org.uk/­issues/­2/­en/­endnotes-­misery-­and-­debt (accessed on 31 December 2017). Federici, Silvia. 2014. ‘From Commoning to Debt: Financialization, Microcredit, and the Changing Architecture of Capital Accumulation’, South Atlantic Quarterly, Duke University Press, 113(2): 231–­244. FICCI. 2013. Higher Education in India: Vision 2030: FICCI Higher Education Summit 2013. EY. Available at www.ey.com/­Publication/­vwLUAssets/­ Higher-­education-­in-­India-­Vision-­2030/­$FILE/­EY-­Higher-­education-­in-­India-­ Vision-­2030.pdf (accessed on 31 December 2017). Fortune Magazine. 2017. ‘Business Schools Are Embracing Fintech to Fill Gaps on Wall Street’ (June 8). Available at http:/­/­fortune.com/­2017/­06/­08/­ business-­schools-­fintech-­wall-­street/­ Gorz, Andre. 1970. ‘Destroy the University’. Available at www.marxists.org/­ archive/­gorz/­1970/­destroy-­university.htm (accessed on 31 December 2017).

The surplus university 91 India Brand Equity Foundation (IBEF). ‘Service Sector in India’. Available at www.ibef.org/­industry/­services.aspx (accessed on 31 December 2017). Marx, Karl. 1990. Capital, Volume I: A Critique of Political Economy. Penguin Classics. Mendelsohn, Oliver and MarikaVicziany. 1998. The Untouchables: Subordination, Poverty and the State in Modern India. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Moore, Jason. 2016. ‘Nature, Geopower, & Capitalogenic Appropriation’. Available at https:/­/­jasonwmoore.wordpress.com/­2016/­11/­08/­nature-­geopower-­ capitalogenic-­appropriation/­(accessed on 8 November 2016). Murray, Patrick. 2000. ‘Marx’s “Truly Social” Labour Theory of Value: Part II, How Is Labour That Is under the Sway of Capital Actually Abstract?’, Historical Materialism, 7(1): 99–­136. ———. 2011. ‘Abstract Submitted to the Eighth Historical Materialism Conference’. Available at www.historicalmaterialism.org/­conferences/­8annual/­ submit/­capitals-­shadow-­forms/­?searchterm=None (accessed in November 2011). Prasad, Madhu. 2015. ‘Why Higher Education in India Must Not Bow to the Market?’, Sabrang India. Available at https:/­/­sabrangindia.in/­indepth/­why-­ higher-­education-­india-­must-­not-­bow-­market (accessed on 14 December 2015). Ramdev, Rina and Debaditya Bhattacharya. 2016. ‘What the UGC Gazette Notification 2016 Portends for the State of Higher Education in India’, Kafila. Available at https:/­/­kafila.org/­2016/­05/­27/­what-­the-­ugc-­gazette-­ notification-­2016-­portends-­for-­the-­state-­of-­higher-­education-­in-­india-­rina-­ ramdev-­and-­debaditya-­bhattacharya/­(accessed on 27 May 2016). Sanyal, Kalyan. 2007. Rethinking Capitalist Development: Primitive Accumulation, Governmentality and Postcolonial Capitalism. Abingdon, UK: Routledge. Shetty, Mayur. 2017. ‘Education Loans Attract Specialist Lenders’, Times of India (July  12). Available at https:/­/­timesofindia.indiatimes.com/­business/­india-­ business/­education-­loans-­attract-­specialist-­lenders/­articleshow/­59553526. cms (accessed on 31 December 2017). Smith, Jason. 2017. ‘Nowhere to Go: Automation, Then and Now Part I & II’, The Brooklyn Rail. Available at http:/­/­brooklynrail.org/­2017/­03/­field-­notes/­ Nowhere-­to-­Go; http:/­/­brooklynrail.org/­2017/­04/­field-­notes/­Nowhere-­to-­Go-­ Automation-­Then-­and-­Now-­Part-­Two (accessed on 31 December  2017). Tilak, Jandhyala B. G. 2011. Trade in Higher Education: The Role of the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS). UNESCO. Tomba, Massimiliano. 2009. ‘Historical Temporalities of Capital: An Anti-­ Historicist Perspective’, Historical Materialism, 17: 44–­65. Yadav, Rajendra. 1951. Sara Aakash (Hindi), Radhakrishna Paperbacks Reprint 2012.

3 Perils and prospects of the modern university African and Asian contexts in a world-­historical perspective Mushahid Hussain Influences both political and sociological transform the university. Yet behind its many changing forms looms the timeless ideal of intellectual insight which is supposed to be realized here, yet which is in permanent danger of being lost. The historical conflict between this philosophical impulse and society’s ever-­changing demands is marked by alternate periods of fruitful cooperation, each in its own way unique, and periods in which the philosophical ideal suffers utter defeat. Karl Jaspers, The Idea of the University (1959: 123) [T]he cultural shift is plain: replacing measures of educational quality are metrics oriented entirely to return on investment (ROI) and centred on what kind of job placement and income enhancement student investors may expect from any given institution. The question is not immoral, but obviously shrinks the value of higher education to individual economic risk and gain, removing quaint concerns with developing the person and citizen or perhaps reducing such development to the capacity for economic advantage. Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution (2015: 23)

The university as contested space Writing in 1946, the German-­Swiss philosopher Karl Jaspers confronted, along with his colleagues, a truly formidable task  –­ that of rebuilding the institutional space of the modern university in post-­war (West) Germany. Reading his monograph today, one is struck by a deep tension that underpins its essence, a tension which seeks to retain a normative justification for the modern university while dealing with the devastation wrought to its immediate, purposive adequacy at the hands of Nazism. While his observations may appear hopelessly quaint in postcolonial contexts, and his general thesis questioned

Perils and prospects of the modern university 93 on numerous grounds, one cannot but appreciate the gravity of this tension and the provocation it generates. Over seven decades later, the modern university has indeed been reconstructed from the ruins wrought in by the likes of Nazism. Nonetheless, one cannot dismiss the creeping sensation that it is today coming to terms with a new kind of remaking under what is perhaps a much more insidious form of authoritarianism. As the excerpt from Wendy Brown’s recent book indicates, this is an authoritarianism emerging from a very peculiar understanding of the ‘economic’ that nevertheless reproduces a tension akin to the one we find in Jaspers  –­ one between normative claims on the existence and legitimacy of the modern university versus its specific adequacies as an institution inextricably mired in the dynamic transformations of our social world. While Jaspers confronted this tension by asking what the role of the modern university ought to be, scholars like Brown today approach it rather differently. This shifting approach is invoked by a reframing of the questions asked  –­ how are institutions like the modern university (re)constructed in their specific spatial and historical instances? Does this emphasis on historical processes of institution-­building allow us to identify key social actors which, in terms of their complementing and conflictual relations, constitute the central tension? And finally, does such an approach generate glimpses through which we can begin to envisage new normative claims for the existence of the modern university, in ways that transcend its specific constraints? These questions motivate the paper. In formulating responses to them, the paper constructs two synoptic narratives that attempt to examine the modern university amidst specific processes of institution-­making within the colonial histories of sub-­Saharan Africa and present-­day Bangladesh, pushing such histories to confront the contemporary conjuncture. The narratives assume the (re)construction of the university as an inherently contested ‘public’ institutional space, their particularities examined in relation to what Silvia Federici calls the “enclosure of knowledge” (2009: 454). This enclosure is marked by a transition in the normative legitimation of the modern public university based on its purposive adequacy in a changing postcolonial setting. It is characterized by a shift from concerns for social improvement and developmentalism on a national scale to those of an enterprise adapting to labour market considerations within processes of neo-­liberal, capitalist globalization. The narratives here take the form of general sketches that draw their historical flesh from three main sources. Much of the narrative regarding universities in sub-­Saharan Africa is derived from the records, interviews, newsletters and monographs compiled by the

94  Mushahid Hussain Committee for Academic Freedom in Africa in the 1990s. Consequently, observations referencing this narrative do not extend beyond the immediate aftermath of the ‘origins’ of the neo-­liberal conjuncture in sub-­Saharan Africa (apart from being circumscribed by the limited cases/­instances documented in this source as well). In some ways, the narrative on the modern public university in Bangladesh continues from this moment to the present, in an implicit effort to highlight how the similarity of effects can perhaps make visible more generalized processes pertaining to the ‘enclosure of knowledge’. The specific contradictions within and against which normative claims are formulated in discussing public universities today are, of course, the substantive concern here. As far as the second synoptic narrative goes, it emphasizes the establishment of the first such university under colonial rule in Dhaka, drawing mainly on a published interview with the Bengali political philosopher Abdur Razzak. It also draws significantly on the author’s own experiences as a lecturer in a private university in Dhaka and informs strongly the closing discussions on the enclosure of knowledge and the university in the current neo-­liberal conjuncture. The substantive task, then, is to invoke the approach highlighted earlier, in thinking about the modern university as a public institution through a comparative lens. In doing so, the paper is informed by tensions and antagonisms which arise from specific concerns regarding the ‘idea of the university’ and how they shape the framing of normative claims in contemporary discourse and practice. A word on the Committee for Academic Freedom in Africa must be said at the outset. It is widely acknowledged that the dismantling of public education at all levels has been the hallmark of neo-­liberal structural adjustment in the Global South since the 1980s. The Committee for Academic Freedom in Africa (CAFA) was a collective of African, European and North American academics associated with various African university systems. The group was formed in the early 1990s, protesting the World Bank’s loan conditions de-­funding the already-­insufficient systems of public provision in general, and of African public universities in particular. After being eyewitnesses to the egregious, laboratory-­style experimentation with the de-­funding of public higher and tertiary education under the structural adjustment programmes, the group published a series of newsletters that provides invaluable insights for understanding the trajectory of university education in the neo-­liberal conjuncture. These insights, further developed through conversations with some of CAFA’s members, inform the author’s re-­reading of his own experiences as a university lecturer

Perils and prospects of the modern university 95 in the context of a rapid expansion of private universities over the past two and a half decades in Bangladesh. Fundamentally, therefore, and despite the concrete differences in these two narrative contexts, the paper suggests a confluence of structural dynamics which may allow incorporating their historical specificities within more general processes of social change. This is inherent in the paper’s approach to discussions of the university via tensions that are provoked both within and outside its corridors, classrooms and towers. The hope is to transcend the perplexities and problems of the immediate moment without losing sight of them. A task of historical introspection confronts this danger of losing sight of the present, a danger abetted, in Aimé Césaire’s (2010: 152) terms, “by a walled segregation in the particular, or by dilution in the ‘universal’ ”. The scholars and activists at CAFA exemplify an approach that overcomes this danger by avoiding the traps set by either, and the current paper is an attempt to do justice to, as well as carry forward, their initiative.

The African ‘compromise’ Tuition hikes; cutbacks on research funding and staff; discriminatory, mismanaged and corrupt practices of hiring and admissions; suppression of critical perspectives; lack of academic autonomy; massive student mobilizations across campuses against these issues; violent police repression of protestors  –­ such scenarios, characterizing many South Asian university campuses of late, are in fact the precise conditions highlighted in a report on higher education by Africa Watch in 1991. How did African universities get to such a point? The lineage of their colonial histories in the present is indispensable for reconstructing a coherent narrative here. The proliferation of modern universities in much of sub-­Saharan Africa really began alongside the formation of nation-­states that emerged at the heels of anti-­colonial struggles by the mid-­twentieth century (Caffentzis 2000). It is undeniable that the imperial domains of influence over production, exchange and surplus extraction  –­ facilitating capitalist exploitation of labour and mineral resources  –­ by entrenched as well as emergent west European powers shaped much of the rationality for modern higher education in the colonies. Nevertheless, differences in specific relations, motives and practices of the actors involved in these separate domains of European imperial sovereignty by the late nineteenth century generated a complex set of outcomes and possibilities. For instance, Booker T. Washington’s ‘Tuskegee model’ of training post-­slavery African-­Americans in vocational tertiary education

96  Mushahid Hussain resonated both with African nationalists and colonial administrators in Anglophone colonies with settler populations, like Rhodesia, Kenya and South Africa by the turn of the nineteenth century (Alidou 2000a). Nationalists sought self-­reliance or independence from colonial forms of exploitation and envisaged such training as a step towards post-­ independence incorporation of their peoples into the world-­economy in their own terms. The colonialists’ requirement for labour in mining, industry and transportation, on the other hand, made such training attractive in advancing their various economic interests, as well. Moreover, it allowed colonial administrators to propagate racial ideologies in pre-­empting the rise of radical political impulses by discursively entrenching the ‘inherent incapacity’ of Africans for critical and abstract thinking. While such discourse was unambiguously rejected by the nationalists, they nevertheless found common ground with colonial administrators insofar as vocational workers’ training was concerned. Such a conjunctural ‘confluence of interests’, so to speak, however, meant that racialized discourse took a backseat from where its relatively unchallenged propagation enabled it not only to achieve a veneer of respectability, but entrenched further what Edward Said called the “imperial unconscious”.1 As a result, the interests and aspirations of such key actors (crudely lumped, of course, as ‘nationalists’ and ‘colonial administrators’) nevertheless indicate how public higher education began to be envisaged in sub-­Saharan Africa, and the objectives towards which newly established institutions were geared. At the same time, however, historical inferences in CAFA newsletters, especially by Ousseina Alidou, as well as the discussions by Franco Barchiesi, Silvia Federici and Attahiru Jega, historicizing contemporary neo-­liberal changes, indicate (despite the confluence of elite interests) a crucial tension shaping the establishment of higher educational institutions in these specific contexts. This tension can be surmised as one between vocational training geared explicitly towards imperial networks of accumulation in the metropole, versus a liberal arts education that sought to create citizens capable of ushering in economic and political self-­determination within the territorial domains of modern, independent nation-­states. Such tension cannot simply be understood as a polarization emanating from a space beyond rapprochement between ‘elite’ and ‘subaltern’ subjects. Approaching the complex dynamic of relations through such moments of tension allows for dismantling simplistic illusions regarding any ‘intrinsic’ or strictly polarized, and thus separable, domain of interests, aspirations and desires between the colonizer and the colonized. As Frederick Cooper (2014) shows in the context of the

Perils and prospects of the modern university 97 Francophone colonies of West Africa, anti-­colonial struggles mobilizing around increased political representation, material well-­being and social improvement did not envision territorially sovereign nation-­ states as an effective, let alone the only instrument for achieving these ends. In fact, key leaders in these struggles, including Mamadou Dia, Léopold Senghor and Félix Houphouët-­Boigny, even till the late 1950s, sought to turn French imperial sovereignty on its head by claiming full citizenship and inclusion within a ‘multinational state’ (Cooper 2014: 66–­70). They rightly foresaw territorially fragmented nation-­ states as both economically and politically incapable of meeting the desired ends of their anti-­colonial struggles  –­ redistribution of appropriated wealth and retribution for imperial wrongs. Cooper brings out clearly how the emergence of formally independent nation-­states by the 1960s in French colonial (West/­sub-­Saharan) Africa resulted from a range of contingent events and historical processes within a complex dialectic between normative claims for social improvement, and was epitomized by calls for pan-­African unity versus the reassertion of political economic hierarchies within a proliferating (formally egalitarian) international capitalist order. One important consequence of this conjunctural turn of events was the continued dependence of emerging postcolonial nation-­states on erstwhile imperial metropoles at different levels, including in higher education. As some scholars have shown (for instance, Martin Carnoy and Pauline Djite, in Alidou 2000b), the failed materialization of a broader French imperial sovereignty meeting the substantive concerns of anti-­ colonial movements facilitated a system of Francophone education in the erstwhile colonies that was hollowed out from within. This manifested itself in both the discourse and practice around higher education in various forms. Universities and polytechnic institutes in many cases did not concern themselves with including African working peoples within broad-­based processes of political participation and projects of material improvement, but as administrators keeping the gate for specific economic interests domiciled in the erstwhile metropole. Francophone education at all levels took strong undertones of cultural superiority and furthered linguistic domination, marking eventually the return of the ‘civilizing mission’ as ‘development’ without its radical overturning as witnessed in the earlier moment colonial ascendancy (Alidou 2000b: 31–­ 34). The impetus of anti-­ for creating conditions generating socio-­ economic equality, political sovereignty and cultural autonomy within and between classes across the relational domains of French imperialism gave way to a politics of containing such impulses against their possible resurgence

98  Mushahid Hussain via communist/­radical-­socialist national liberation movements in the context of the Cold War. In some postcolonial settings, as in Anglophone Nigeria, the modern public university became an intrinsic apparatus of the state under military rule. Higher education institutions trained administrators managing the extraction of valuable mineral resources like oil, whose revenues created vicious networks of dependencies between transnational corporations, political actors in the erstwhile metropoles and an emergent class of university-­educated, kleptocratic strongmen rulers (Jega 2000). The neo-­liberal conjuncture is characterized by the intensification of such practices that nevertheless brought about crucial qualitative transformations, especially in the conduct and rationale of the postcolonial state. It is true that the substantive content of modern state formation in these contexts  –­ establishing the conditions for different forms of surplus extraction, whether it is directly through the uneven appropriation of labour’s surplus-­generating capacity in export production, or indirectly via the expropriation of mineral resources  –­ remains consistent with the colonial rationale and even extends its scope with the neo-­liberal turn. The change, however, lies in the discursive modality through which such content is both entrenched and remade in ways that are different from the immediate aftermath of the formation of independent nation-­states. Legitimized primarily via dominant modernization narratives, the initial form taken by postcolonial nation-­states (despite elements of continuity in their ‘colonial rationality’ at the systemic level) nevertheless required the partial accommodation of interests, aspirations and desires of the proletarian classes given the varied political, economic and social expediencies of the moment. Emergent forms of the neo-­liberal state undermined these varying degrees of consensus and accommodation that began to be obtained in this moment when redistributive measures, however partial, were actualized. It is therefore unsurprising that this earlier moment generated real possibilities for furthering socio-­economic improvement and mass political participation. The modern public university, despite its limitations, began to emerge here as an important incubator of such possibilities. It became one of the institutional structures which actualized such redistributive logic by directing resources for local material well-­being while simultaneously expanding access to research, education and decision-­ making at different levels of public administration. With the neo-­liberal turn, such institutional spaces  –­ exemplifying in many ways what Gramscian terms might dub as the consensus-­ generating mechanisms of the state in civil society  –­ became an

Perils and prospects of the modern university 99 important site for contestation and change. At a discursive level, the neo-­liberal turn came garbed in the attire of a scarcely veiled authoritarianism of the economic, where every decision for social and material improvement became subsumed under imperatives of reintegration into worldwide capitalist circuits of accumulation structured to produce uneven outcomes along the lines of a now-­entrenched international political order. In terms of rearranging state practices, the emphases on dismantling redistributive measures and public provision, disinvestment from state-­socialized projects of industrialization, agrarian improvement and indigenous research, retrenching of mass education via privatization initiatives and so on took centre stage. This ‘streamlining’ of the publicly administered state, alongside processes of internalizing entrenched economic and political hierarchies at different levels against the claims for social justice, had an important consequence. It meant that the proletarian classes within these territorial nation-­states, carved out of erstwhile African colonies in the context of a formal dismantling of European imperial sovereignty, were no longer accommodated to the extent facilitated from the 1960s onwards. In other words, the accommodation of these classes (whose experiences of European imperialism as plunder and dispossession formed the constitutive basis for anti-­colonial struggles) became a fetter for the intensified forms of capitalist encroachment necessitated by the world-­economic crisis of the 1970s. These new forms, propagated under the legitimizing guise of well-­known neo-­liberal dogmas, hinged on the gestating, politically disintegrating impulses of these differentiated anti-­colonial forces held together weakly by inter-­class compromises and consensus. It is therefore significant that such consensus in the realm of civil society was primarily effected through specific state-­institutional structures, including, of course, the modern public university. The breakdown of the consensus was as much a world-­ economic imperative as it was the outcome of specific processes and contestations within these contexts. Without having to explore the overdeterminations of one by the other, we can still look to ascertain from the realm of effects a broader figurative trajectory of change that very palpably gripped protesting students and teachers across African universities by the mid-­1980s. Universities there, for instance, became increasingly redundant in their role of training administrators, or researchers whose findings were geared towards local administrative objectives, driven in part by the claims for redistributive justice tracing their lineage in the mass movements against European imperial subjugation. Calls for administrative

100  Mushahid Hussain streamlining by the neo-­liberal conjuncture marked the weakening of collective nation-­building projects with roots in these struggles. As CAFA members amply document, such calls were brought most violently in Africa through the structural adjustment programmes of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. The effects have been both immediate and material, as administrative streamlining of the state became contiguous with a general reduction in public provision and a re-­intensification of economic extraction and inequality. Universities, of course, became a central casualty in this process. Long-­term effects at a discursive level involved a reassessment of what higher education should achieve and how those objectives would be fulfilled. In this exercise of reorienting universities as an institutional space, socio-­ economic improvement of the proletarian, African masses within these nation-­states was no longer an objective. This shift in both the purposive adequacy and the normative justification of the African university has thus been a fundamental transformation insofar as higher education in the neo-­liberal conjuncture is concerned. Interviews of prominent African academics documented in the pages of CAFA newsletters indicate how higher education in this context becomes a domain of the few who can access high-­cost private universities. They voice grave concerns about how research agendas are increasingly shaped by transnational agencies unconcerned with requirements of local populations, while teaching takes a hit as more and more students and teachers are forced to deal with dwindling resources. The ‘public’ is not only dismantled, but recast as a burden that does not facilitate new possibilities for accumulation under changing world-­economic imperatives that now encourage either intensified resource extraction or export-­oriented production. The terrain of international finance becomes the potent ground on which much of this is discursively framed and substantively initiated. For instance, interest payments on conditionality-­based loans following the debt crises of the 1970s, in effect, expanded the control over national economies by, and thus a transfer of wealth to, transnational corporations and other metropolitan agencies via balance of payments pressures. It became a harbinger for severe austerity programmes, allowing a plethora of neo-­colonial actors alongside segments of the African ruling classes to disrupt the increasingly fragile bases that once accommodated the anti-­colonial, redistributive sensibilities of Africa’s proletarian classes. As the CAFA newsletters and the Africa Watch report amply document, the undermining of such ‘sensibilities’ clearly began to have their countervailing material effect as struggles for maintaining and economic justice both within and expanding redistributive, socio-­

Perils and prospects of the modern university 101 outside the university found fresh impetus by the late 1980s. Thousands of students and teachers across African campuses launched some of the staunchest resistances against structural adjustment programmes imposed by multilateral agencies like the World Bank, agencies that have been at the forefront of these shifts in bringing about new forms of colonization (Federici and Caffentzis 2000; Federici 2000). This conjuncture, in retrospect, marks the beginning of the end of the short-­lived hopes for a ‘great compromise’ in Africa. More specifically, this moment characterizes the onset of what the Midnight Notes Collective (Collective 1990; Federici 2009) has called ‘new enclosures’. Knowledge itself constitutes a central object for such enclosures insofar as it is neither generated in, nor appropriated for, collective domains of public engagement aimed at socio-­ economic betterment. While the terrain of the public is not innocent of hierarchical appropriations and capitalist encroachment (in fact, it is constitutive of them), its undercutting nevertheless indicates a crucial shift. This narrative tries to reconstruct this shift broadly within African colonial histories through the lens of an important tension, one whose effects could be visibly traced through the limitations and opportunities generated by the university’s various historical articulations. It reveals how the university in its national, public form encompassed countervailing tendencies via which both the purposive adequacy and the normative reasoning for its existence were transformed in the immediate postcolonial aftermath. The neo-­liberal conjuncture here brings another shift, connoting an ‘enclosure of knowledge’ from the perspective of those who are now excluded, or more accurately, pushed out of their constitutive role in shaping the terrain of tension that motivates a dynamic of social change crucial in (re)creating institutions, knowledges and practices collectively. This creative tension, which underlies Jaspers’s concerns, is not detrimentally foreclosed (as in Jaspers) by some abstract ‘philosophical ideal’ or ‘intellectual insight’. Rather, it is enclosed by an emergent normative claim regarding the pervasiveness of a competitive, economic rationality that characterizes capitalist reasoning under neo-­liberalism (Brown 2015; Dardot and Laval 2014). It is this constructivist process of enclosure which perhaps characterizes most poignantly the privatization of higher education in Bangladesh. However, such enclosure is rarely all-­encompassing or unambiguous in its effects, which, as we will see, generate common strains within historical difference where emergent antagonisms themselves provide room for alternate claims on the modern university against the privatizing, neo-­liberal one.

102  Mushahid Hussain

The case of higher education in Bangladesh The colonial origin of the modern university in South Asia has its own complexities. Different as it is from the varied contexts of sub-­Saharan Africa, they nevertheless converge in some ways when we examine emergent antagonisms and their effects. The coming of South Asia under European imperial sovereignty was a centuries-­long affair, and the hegemonic subsumption of most of its polities by the early twentieth century is part of a complex culmination of forces, events and trajectories that can nonetheless be narrated coherently in terms of the rise of accumulation imperatives within a capitalist world-­economy. At this level of generality, it can also be suggested without much controversy that British imperial expansion in South Asia, and the specific modes of the region’s (re)incorporation into the capitalist world-­economy as a colony faced complexities quite different from the contexts of sub-­Saharan Africa. For one, it required the ‘consensual compromise’ between the colonists and the local dominant classes on a greater scale while retaining and even extenuating the political fragmentation of the latter. Hence, besides the similar requirements of and for colonial administration (which expanded when the imperial mandate was passed directly to the Crown in 1858), the domain of ‘civil society’ and its institutions like the university began to play an arguably more important role here in maintaining the legitimacy of colonial rule. This domain of generating consensus also emerged at a relatively earlier moment than in much of Africa and arguably operated more subtly. In other words, it will not be entirely inappropriate to draw historical analogies along a Gramscian notion of civil society here, where the domain of civil society operates “without ‘sanctions’ or compulsory ‘obligations’, but nevertheless exerts a collective pressure and obtains objective results in the form of an evolution of customs, ways of thinking and acting, morality, etc.” (Gramsci 1971: 242). Historians over the years, including Sanjay Seth (2007) most recently, have noted how ‘Western education’ in general and modern institutions of higher learning in particular have been instrumental in consolidating the legitimacy of British imperialism in South Asia by creating a class of loyal, local administrators drawn from the dominant classes. While such a reading of Seth is an oversimplification, it does allow us to generate a synoptic narrative through which the familiar tension between the normative justification and purposive adequacy of the university is rendered visible in specific contexts. It directs us foremost to the political implications or effects of processes legitimating imperial sovereignty, effects that are discernible in the

Perils and prospects of the modern university 103 context under which the first modern university in eastern Bengal was established. Abdur Razzak’s account of the social and political history of Dhaka University shows how the 1905 Bengal partition, and its annulment six years later in the face of popular mobilizations transcending class and religion, had brought to play yet again the tried and tested imperial strategy of fragmenting such potentially threatening political configurations (Karim 1984). In this specific context, the establishment of a university in Dhaka in 1921 sought to ‘assuage the grievances’ of Muslim elites in the eastern domains of the Raj by establishing an institution that would directly cater to their demands for greater incorporation into the middle echelons of colonial administration. Hence, the administrative requirements of the colonial state fuelling the institutional need for personnel ‘training centres’ alongside the contingencies of political expediency were integrally tied to the origins of the modern university in this context. The transition from the colonial to the public university here was driven by similar considerations of legitimating the important continuities that decisively shaped the formation of postcolonial nation-­states. As in the context of sub-­Saharan Africa, this involved accommodating the interests and desires of subaltern or proletarian classes within a nationalist imaginary of modernization and capitalist development. The growth of higher education through public universities from the middle of the twentieth century was consequently based on similar administrative requirements. However, the nature of cross-­class political accommodations and the building of legitimacy within this altered’ world-­ economic and international political con‘formally-­ juncture shifted drastically the objectives of these requirements. For eastern Bengal, the immediate postcolonial moment was marked by the hiatus of the ‘unified’ Pakistani state. While religious identification provided the cover for national liberation in 1947, ethno-­linguistic and economic divisions between west and east Pakistan manifested themselves in various terrains and articulations. The skewed military-­ administrative structures disfavouring the territorially non-­contiguous eastern province, the concentration of accumulation centres and public expenditure in the west and movements for linguistic, cultural and political economic autonomy both reproduced and challenged the structures of imperial subjugation in east Pakistan (Jahangir 1986; Riaz 2016). The culminations of national electoral victory for the Bengali majority in 1969, the suspension of democratic participation thenceforth by the military at the behest (of mainly) west Pakistani ruling elites and the onset of war in 1971 rode the popular support of the proletarian classes in the east. The establishment of a Bangladeshi

104  Mushahid Hussain state thus bore the strong imprint of a nation whose aspirations and desires were inextricably tied to the redistributive and retributive interests of its proletarian or subaltern masses. It is in this context that state institutions in eastern Bengal confronted the countervailing aspirations of these classes in full force. The university at Dhaka was at the centre of this liberating, egalitarian impulse, a space within which such impulse found its first clear articulation through mass student protests and collective action that characterized the beginnings of the language movement in 1952. It is this complex confluence of events, colonial histories and popular movements which set the discursive and practical terms for what the public, modern university is and how it should function within a Bangladeshi nation-­state. At the risk of oversimplifying, it may be stated that the immediate tasks were now geared towards the management of state-­led programmes for modernization and rapid capitalist development  –­ import-­substituting industrialization, nationalization of finance, education and other key sectors, agrarian revival, social justice via economic redistribution, politico-­cultural transition into ‘democratic, secular modernity’ and technological self-­sufficiency. These familiar aspirations of mid-­ twentieth century postcolonial nation-­ building sought to improve the terms under which world-­economic integration of these ‘imagined communities’ were achieved within a now-­entrenched international political order. The university in its public, ‘nationalizing’ form thus became one such institutional space where countervailing tendencies and tensions within and between social classes were brought forth to generate novel normative claims about public institutions, restructuring through such tensions their adequacy for a changing field of actual practices and state actions. Analogous with transformations in postcolonial African universities, the modern university here too became a crucial incubating terrain for contesting as well as accommodating countervailing tendencies between key social actors, forced to negotiate the complexities of their specific interests, desires and aspirations. Knowledge generated within (and beyond) its confines could thus not be enclosed, but proliferated towards objectives other than those exclusively geared towards the interests of specific actors or classes. Nor did it reproduce the imperial imperative of concentrating political power by becoming merely training centres for vocational education or state administration. In other words, the university’s normative claim did not aspire to any absolute or authoritarian ‘philosophical ideal’, but proliferated a whole realm of complementary and competing ideals whose effect was to keep open the realm of alternate possibilities. This sense of the

Perils and prospects of the modern university 105 ‘public’, which at its basis tied together a dynamic socio-­economic project with contested practices of nation-­building, began to transform itself under neo-­liberal capitalism. The turn to this contemporary conjuncture marks the unravelling of the complex politico-­institutional configurations of consensus and accommodation that discursively legitimized the continuities of postcolonial, world-­economic integration to a form conducive to intensified capitalist encroachment via greater socio-­economic and political exclusions. This meant foremost a reconfiguration of the public domain in general, and the university as a space within it in particular. In the context of present-­day Bangladesh, this transformation of the public began in the early 1980s. The rise of private universities by the turn of the century was symptomatic in many ways of such a transformation, marking the onset of the ‘enclosure of knowledge’. In this scenario, the instrumental rationality of higher education changes its form, foreclosing a contested terrain generating alternatives in favour of a singular, normative claim that seeks to construct the subjects of neo-­liberal ‘economic rationality’, in Wendy Brown’s opening terms. As Silvia Federici (2009) notes, this shift indicates the move from catering to the multiple (and often contested) objectives of social improvement to ones geared toward individual attainment through capitalist market participation, within a shifting economic, socio-­cultural and political landscape. We now turn our attention to this shift.

The neoliberal moment The serious problems encumbering African universities by the late 1980s and the conditions of crisis characterizing Indian public university campuses recently are in many ways analogous to what Bangladeshi public universities have been going through at least since the mid-­1990s. The 1990s marked a conjuncture where the legitimacy of a neo-­liberal configuration  –­ driven by privatization, state disinvestment, export-­oriented industrial growth and capital-­intensive, export-­ based agrarian development  –­ became rather fortuitously grounded in popular, cross-­class support in Bangladesh. This fortuitous circumstance can be attributed to the rough coinciding of the neo-­liberal turn in national socio-­economic policy with the rise in popular, cross-­ class political mobilization against authoritarian rule. Two decades of military-­led authoritarian dictatorship since 1976 fomented discontent and initiated mass movements for democratization and greater political participation in socio-­economic decision-­making at the national level by the late 1980s (Jalal 1995; Riaz 2016). Major political parties

106  Mushahid Hussain leading the democratization movements therefore carried a relatively unchallenged mandate to pursue more aggressively the economic transformations sought by the neo-­liberal configuration under what came to be known as the ‘Washington Consensus’. Geopolitically, this was a moment marked by the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the disintegration of the Soviet Union and the triumphalist narratives of liberal capitalist democracy proclaiming the ‘end of history’. Together, it produced an important effect whereby the contradictions intensified by the neo-­ liberal turn could be temporally displaced, or contained within specific institutions, like the modern public university. In fact, this is precisely what happened in Bangladesh, where the fortuitous onset of neo-­liberalism also coincided with massive political unrest in public universities affected by proposals for state disinvestment. Once parliamentary democracy was restored in 1991, the world-­ economic and geopolitical imperatives favouring the neo-­liberal turn garnered support across party platforms, and directed student politics (closely affiliated to such parties) to a detrimental spate of infighting without substantially challenging this larger context of neo-­liberal transformations. Given the historical centrality or leading role of student politics in Bangladesh at least since the 1950s, such a scenario contributed greatly to deeper changes in the political landscape. The ‘plebianization’ of politics based on popular, cross-­class accommodation became increasingly geared towards generalizing the aspirations of newly emerging ‘middle classes’, who were the primary beneficiaries of the neo-­liberal turn. An important casualty here was the erstwhile sense of the ‘public’, now irrevocably delegitimized. Public universities turned into embroiled centres of ‘dirty politics’ within the increasingly dominant discourse generated by, and at the behest of, these ‘middle classes’. This in turn opened the space for private higher education institutions on the purported basis of serving the needs of these aspiring middle classes, whose individual members could now attain market-­mediated opportunities for socio-­economic mobility based on ‘merit’ and ‘professional qualifications’. Hence began the rise of private universities (while public investment in higher education became relatively stagnant), growing from a few institutions in the early 1990s to over 90 universities currently, most located in the city of Dhaka.2 The private university ethos, with its exclusionary nature based on the commoditization of education and substantive (though not rhetorical) eschewal of the developmental, nation-­building project (and its politico-­ institutional arrangements of cross-­ class compacts generating social improvement), is perhaps only too familiar. Business-­ related and professional degrees dominate the curriculum, fostering

Perils and prospects of the modern university 107 the neo-­liberal tenets of individual mobility and trickle-­down prosperity. These reflect larger changes in the socio-­economic arena, where the liberalization of capital flows and a strategy of export-­oriented industrialization facilitate need for managers and technicians for the growing presence of transnational enterprises, multilateral developmental agencies, export and finance industries. By the late 2000s, the neo-­liberal turn had generated a steady growth of job opportunities for youth with higher education (ILO 2013 data from 1999 to 2010 clearly shows this trend). Private universities increasingly catered to changing labour market requirements while public universities were mired in structural resource constraints, debilitating student politics and ‘brain drain’. Some public university departments even began countering this with the same predominant ethos of the private university, and thus embarked on a process of ‘normative privatization’ by eschewing objectives of social and redistributive justice, independent research for local social improvement and critical engagement. The euphoric moment of neo-­liberalism, however, appears to be giving way to disillusionment among middle class youth in these private and ‘privatizing’ public universities in the face of a growing unemployment crisis. The rupture generated between aspirations and capitalist reality is perhaps indicated in the extreme by recent cases of involvement of disillusioned, middle class private university students in right wing, Islamic radicalism.3 Fostering critical perspectives, socio-­cultural engagement and a historical conscience are all stymied to varying extents in the private university, generating an educational content that is qualitatively inferior in many ways to erstwhile public institutions and its objectives of inculcating a modern citizenry. An important aspect here is that the ‘enclosure of knowledge’ is perhaps best understood not as operating in isolation within the institutional space, but as interlinked through myriad processes of dispossession and capitalist encroachment that strengthen each other by dismantling an earlier moment of socio-­economic and political compromise within and between social classes. What is often striking and yet goes unnoticed is the visibility of these processes simultaneously and occasionally even within the same spaces. For instance, in the private university where I was recently lecturing, if we looked out of any classroom window to the west, we could see the majestic river on the banks of which our campus stood being filled up with sand. This visual made Marx’s discussions on the enclosures so much more palpable  –­ its shifting form now fuelled by a speculative, real estate property boom in the suburbs of Dhaka. The people dependent on the river were not completely displaced. The

108  Mushahid Hussain squalid, polythene-­roofed huts of some of their remaining members are still visible. As they try to eke out a precarious existence amidst a severely polluted, disappearing river, it is hard to miss in this visual tragedy how the ebbing flows mean more than just a threat to their material survival  –­ it signifies the erasure of our histories. Legal action by a group of environmental lawyers in 2009 saw the construction of pillars demarcating the boundaries of the river. Yet, one of those pillars today stands almost in the middle of the campus, even donning a national flag on occasion!4 Nonetheless, this tragic panorama is so normalized that it is difficult to imagine anything otherwise, especially for the students who have grown up amidst this milieu of dispossession and ecological destruction. The rapid pace of such transformation is attested by the fact that I was only a few years older than most of my students, and yet remembered a very different river. I also harboured very different ideas about, and expectations from, higher education. The point is that the enclosure of knowledge accompanies new forms of enclosures, and its differentially actualized, adverse impacts should not deceive us of the very real possibilities of their generalization into a severe crisis of social reproduction. When I began lecturing at a private university in the early 2010s, the neo-­ liberal ethos and structural conditions facilitating it were firmly entrenched. Despite variations and the persistence of exceptions within certain universities (both public and private) and departments, a few general observations can be made here as to the kind of practices generated by this hegemonic ethos. In Randy Martin’s (2007) brilliant explication, this ethos is conceptualized as the ‘logic of pre-­emption’ akin to those initiated by practices in the realm of financial risk management. No longer are political or socio-­economic interests constituting the basis for action aimed at mitigating an uncertain future from the relatively stable social coordinates of the present. Rather, pre-­emption acts on an assumed future which suddenly appears to be disturbed by an uncertain present. This so-­called disturbance consequently opens opportunities for gain in the present by those willing and capable of ‘risk-­taking’. Hence the neo-­liberal ethos generates a new discursive register along which imperial sovereignty differentiates populations  –­ those able to constitute a subjectivity out of ‘risk-­taking’ opportunities and others who fail to do so, and are thus constantly ‘at-­risk’. This, of course, shapes simultaneously a whole range of contemporary practices and collective conduct. For university teachers, the assumed future at its minimal is secure employment and a family wage sufficient for meeting the standards of urban, middle class living. The pay at universities for most faculty is far from realizing even such modest

Perils and prospects of the modern university 109 aspirations. In public universities, the effect of state disinvestment is felt most strongly as pay-­scales fail to keep up with inflation, research allocations are cut and hiring dwindles.5 In private universities, the pay in some cases is relatively higher but does not come with benefits like public housing or tenured employment. This is primarily because faculty are the main expendable or variable costs for these profiteering entities, and work under corporate-­style managerial regimes with little collective say in administrative decisions. They face circumscribed control over departmental resources, bureaucratized mechanisms that individualize recourse for ‘grievances’, and often strict surveillance in their curricular and academic decisions. The result is a slew of practices by faculty that proliferates this neo-­ liberal ethos of ‘risk-­ taking’, with detrimental consequences for the future of higher educational institutions in the country. As a participant-­ observer, I noted how university lecturers are often interested in recruiting students for paid, private tutoring sessions to supplement their incomes, deliberately lowering the standard of classroom teaching to achieve such ends. Public university teachers, due to their higher status in academia  –­ both historically and in the context of assumed and actual standards of hiring maintained by these i­ nstitutions  –­ often hop between two or three private universities a week as part-­time lecturers. Higher supplemental incomes by such means are usually inversely proportional to the quality of their teaching, research and overall critical engagement. Travel times within urban and suburban Dhaka are often excruciatingly long even for very short distances, and are physically draining. Hopping between two universities in a day is consequently a taxing exercise and thus has very real, detrimental consequences for a teacher’s effectiveness in the classroom. Another common practice for obtaining additional income, at least for those with relevant experiences and networks within the professional social sciences like applied economics and technical fields like engineering, is to seek affiliation with research projects funded by external (often developmental) agencies. The World Bank, Asian Development Bank and various United Nations departments, as well as numerous official development assistance funds of richer countries, philanthropic and charitable foundations as well as international non-­ governmental organizations (NGOs) conduct a wide range of research in Bangladesh. It is not uncommon for university faculty to find sporadic yet lucrative sources of income through such avenues as they struggle for an assumed future that must now make best use of such uncertain opportunities in the present. With such engagement, however, comes a marked distance of many faculty from engaging in

110  Mushahid Hussain a critique of neo-­liberal policies that inform much of the framing of such research projects. In fact, this has been a key modality for effecting the shift from an earlier moment of relative academic freedom and independent research proliferating a range of developmental and social justice-­oriented goals, observed since the early years of structural adjustment in African public universities. From the perspective of individual faculty members, this distancing is understandable, where even the room for introspective doubt is gradually enclosed under the logic of neo-­liberal pre-­emption. The consequences beyond the individual, of course, are highly problematic. Yet for others, mostly younger faculty members like me, escape often became a preferred route for individual socio-­economic mobility consistent with the desires of neo-­liberalism’s ‘middle class’ subjects. The insecure and inadequately paid university employment is temporarily tolerated for leveraging opportunities and past education in the uncertain present for securing an assumedly better future as researchers and teachers in North American or European universities. The consequences of this ‘brain drain’, while numerous, are perhaps most immediately visible in the practices of those who cannot escape and are thus ‘left behind’. Social norms strongly equate ‘success’ with higher education ‘abroad’ under such emergent middle class ethos, and those unable to use such education for better socio-­economic prospects as expatriates often face social ostracism. In many ways, such norms appear to resemble those prevalent among an earlier emergent middle class with the entrenchment of ‘Western education’ in colonial South Asia. To my knowledge thus far, there is no systematic study yet that explores how these norms may trace their postcolonial lineage to an earlier moment in colonial history. There is a deeper consequence for those who violate or are unable for various reasons to conform to such social norms, and are consequently constituted within this neo-­liberal ethos as the undesirable ‘at-­risks’. This plays out along a distinctive class dimension. The ‘at-­risk’ here usually does not include upper middle class youth who study abroad and return to teach at private universities (mostly). Given their class backgrounds, such youth have supplemental sources of income from profits or rent via ownership directly or through familial ties, and are thus not dependent on their teaching wages. Consequently, they often (though not always) form the bulwark of passive, uncritical educators who constitute an attractive labour force for corporate-­run private universities. The at-­risk, rather, is constituted by those faculty members from lower middle class backgrounds  –­ they are considered a problem due to their inability to abide by this new authoritarian ethos of

Perils and prospects of the modern university 111 the neo-­liberal subject. Importantly, such faculty are often discursively construed as subjects from mutually opposing positions that nevertheless find their common, ‘at-­risk’ attribute by violating this emergent ethos. On the one hand are those whose discontent with the privatizing university is directed towards constructive, critical engagement against the socio-­economic, cultural and political exclusiveness of both the neo-­liberal ethos and those propagated by Islamic religious extremists. Consequently, such academics are both bad for the private university business and their non-­negotiable ideals, as well as for religious bigots who have in recent years turned them into targets for violent attacks.6 The other group at risk are of course faculty members who are themselves perhaps too dangerously close to religious extremism. Actual and suspected charges in this regard imply a swift culling by an increasingly unaccountable state policing apparatus.7 It is important to note that both these ‘at-­risk’ groups are bad for business, and thus for the kind of discursive legitimation which the neo-­liberal ethos seeks to foster within the institutional space of the privatizing university. Students in these private and privatizing universities are of course the other key object of transformation within this emergent ethos. They are usually trained for technical and managerial positions within that narrow spectrum of middle class aspirations fostering the peculiar kind of ‘economic rationality’ indicated earlier. Private universities are largely dominated by business management departments, followed by some professional and technical fields. The criterion of revenue generation achieves primacy in the profiteering university, and the consistency of these fields with middle class expectations of labour market proficiency creates a mutual dependency between discourse and practice that renders such fields dominant in the current neo-­ liberal conjuncture. Such a dependency ensures, therefore, the active encouragement of students to pursue degrees in these fields. Several serious obstacles prevent students from inculcating critical thinking or receiving training in disciplines that encourage such thinking. Curriculum development in these institutions is usually non-­existent; while this is understandable in standardized courses on, say, mechanical engineering, it scarcely makes sense in much of the humanities and social sciences, and even in business management. Plagiarized content from North American and British university curricula create armies of rote learning students. As a result, most students become increasingly disengaged from not just critical thought and historical learning indispensable for confronting ‘social issues’ writ large, but are even misinformed about actual expectations in local labour markets! Unsurprisingly, therefore, student research is practically non-­existent

112  Mushahid Hussain under such conditions in the private and increasingly privatizing public universities. A word on the contemporary structuring of private universities must be said at this point. Most private universities operate as personal fiefdoms of trustee board members with the greatest capital contribution. Much like corporations, these ‘owners/­dominant shareholders’ control management that sets the conditions for faculty engagement, as well as the terms of student enrolment and fees. The latter is crucial, since the profiteering motives in such universities have meant a sharp escalation of costs borne by students in higher education. This, of course, directly counters the earlier tendencies of the postcolonial modern university forged through countervailing tensions like those of social inclusion and redistributive justice, creating an institutional space where the enclosure of knowledge is taken to its extreme. Private universities, in short, have become a highly profitable investment, and have drawn in a range of players capable of making the necessarily significant outlays  –­ from large corporate houses to behemoth NGO-­ business conglomerates engaged in microfinance and other ventures. There have been sporadic incidents of collective action by private university teachers and students against the debilitating environment of these private education factories, confined mostly to specific issues and campuses. There was one such action during my time as lecturer at a private university in Dhaka at the end of 2013. The immediate concerns involved a demand for increase in faculty pay, as well as the cancellation of additional degree completion requirements for students that increased their tuition. The coming together of teachers and students against the blatant motives of the profiteering university did succeed in terms of meeting their immediate demands. But such incidents have been truly exceptional. Both the relatively slow growth of public university enrolment and the greater availability of master’s and doctoral graduates for faculty positions have meant that private universities are in an increasingly favourable position for conducting their business and keeping in check the collective threat posed by faculty-­student mobilizations. However, as the distance between desires, aspirations and actual possibilities widens, such sporadic mobilizations might just be the harbinger of wide-­ranging, alternative possibilities for confronting this crisis of Bangladeshi higher education in the near future.

The enclosure of knowledge The construction and entrenchment of a neo-­liberal subjectivity as highlighted in the last section suggests how it translates into a new

Perils and prospects of the modern university 113 normative justification for the existence of the modern university in its privatizing form. This, as Wendy Brown and Randy Martin (among others) argue, creates a specific understanding of economic rationality whose individualizing, pre-­emptive logic eschews the multiplicity of possible claims for socio-­economic improvement, especially those that invoke any form of collective engagement. The second synoptic narrative here on higher education in Bangladesh, especially its ethnographic component focused on the present, highlights how very specific practices shaping faculty and student conduct simultaneously underpin this normative enclosure. In doing so, such a process of enclosure generates a purposive adequacy that envisages the university in two specific ways. On the one hand, the university becomes a business enterprise whose adequacy is evaluated in terms of profit, while on the other, it is rendered an institutional space bearing crucial synergies that help propel a neoliberalizing social economy. Simultaneously, however, such a vision of the university from the perspective of profiteers and privatizing state actors does not correspond to the desires, interests and aspirations of those key subjects who constitute both the objects of their management, surplus extraction and legitimation. In other words, from the perspective of students and teachers, this evaluative or instrumental dimension of adequacy for the privatizing university rests on tenuous grounds, generating antagonisms in terms of how its normative justification ought to be framed, and for whose benefit. As public universities with their ethos of national developmentalism rooted in anti-­colonial struggles and postcolonial consensus continue to be discursively downplayed (while being increasingly strapped of vital resources), such antagonisms might just yet spill over into the expanding spaces of its privatized/­privatizing form. The overall objective here in tracing such transformations and their historical contours across specific spaces in Africa and South Asia has been to examine synoptically how the modern university is being (re)constructed today. In doing so, the central tension that we began with is substantiated, showing some specific ways it fosters as well as constrains, both in the past and present, possibilities for individual and collective practices against the enclosure of knowledge. While the struggle for the public modern university continues in many parts of Africa and Asia, it is no longer a question of restoring them to some earlier moment of postcolonial inclusiveness catering to social betterment. Rather, the task for those of us engaged critically within and beyond the university today is to confront the changing circumstances, and perhaps resuscitate from the proliferating ruins of neo-­ liberal capitalism institutional spaces for knowledge production and

114  Mushahid Hussain critical thinking against enclosures, and for the commons. What these new relations may look like, or whether they will constitute some new understanding of ‘intellectual insight’, ‘philosophical ideal’ or ‘social improvement’ is beside the point. The urgency today is to revive, sustain and perhaps constructively revisit historical memories, moments and events where antagonisms and struggles themselves become constitutive of conditions transcending their immediate constraints. The lineage of the modern university in its postcolonial instances, and the struggles over its transformation, indicate the need for just as much.

Notes 1 For Said (1994: 6), imperial unconscious lies between the constellation of practices, theories and attitudes that constitute the basis for entrenching imperial sovereignty over distant lands, and the active enlistment of metropolitan populations in their metaphysical obligation to subordinate inferior peoples. 2 See the University Grants Commission of Bangladesh’s recent information in this regard at www.ugc.gov.bd/­en/­home/­university/­private/­75 (accessed on 31 December 2017). 3 For recent media reports of the links between private universities and religious-­ religious extremism, see for instance www.thedailystar.net/­ extremism-­in-­bangladesh-­4677; www.thedailystar.net/­backpage/­nahid-­talk-­ militancy-­university-­vcs-­1252792 (both accessed on 31 December 2017). This is of course not to associate such politics with youth in private universities alone, but to indicate the social, economic and political conditions under which such institutional spaces may become more amenable to the growth of right wing, radical Islamist networks. 4 These pillars were constructed to demarcate the boundaries of the river after the Bangladesh Environmental Lawyers Association (BELA) filed and won a public interest litigation in the Dhaka High Court in 2009 for dredging the major rivers in Dhaka and removing illegal establishments along their banks. The implementation thus far has unfortunately been dismal (see for example www.thedailystar.net/­hc-­orders-­ignored-­20885 [accessed on 31 December 2017]). 5 Some important gains have been made recently by the collective struggles of public university teachers in this regard  –­ see www.thedailystar.net/­front page/­new-­pay-­scale-­gets-­final-­nod-­139666 (accessed on 31 December 2017). 6 These fatal attacks on secular bloggers, publishers, political activists and critical academics have received much attention in the international media of late, though the historical context in terms of the neo-­liberal turn and its consequences are often elided (see, for example, www.theguardian.com/­ world/­2016/­jun/­11/­bangladesh-­murders-­bloggers-­foreigners-­religion). For a more polemical piece that simplistically (and erroneously) tries to pin these attacks on the abstract issue of ‘governance failure’ within Bangladesh’s highly confrontational multi-­party politics, see www.nytimes.com/­ 2016/­05/­20/­opinion/­the-­real-­source-­of-­terror-­in-­bangladesh.html?_r=0 (both accessed on 31 December 2017). These recent attacks are also often

Perils and prospects of the modern university 115 wrongly confounded in the international media with the persecution of religious minorities  –­ as anyone remotely familiar with the political and social history of the eastern Bengal delta knows well, persecution based on religion by both state and non-­state actors has a much longer and convoluted historical lineage. 7 For instance, the involvement of a private university professor has been traced to the recent terrorist attack on a bakery in Dhaka that claimed the lives of 22 people (see http:/­/­indianexpress.com/­article/­world/­world-­news/­ professor2-­others-­arrested-­over-­links-­to-­dhaka-­terror-­attack-­2919304/­). Such connections of both public and private university teachers as well as students to religious extremism and terrorist outfits have been on the rise lately (see for instance www.thedailystar.net/­news-­detail-­55506; www.the dailystar.net/­frontpage/­murky-­road-­radicalisation-­1256950). Also, for a response from leading private university representatives at a recent meeting discussing general issues, problems and criticisms, see www.thedailystar. net/­round-­tables/­private-­universities-­successes-­and-­challenges-­1279639 (all accessed on 31 December 2017).

References Alidou, Ousseina. 2000a. ‘Booker T. Washington in Africa’, in S. Federici, G. Caffentzis and O. Alidou (eds.) A Thousand Flowers: Social Struggles against Structural Adjustment in African Universities (pp. 25–­36). Asmara: Africa World Press. ———. 2000b. ‘Francophonie, World Bank and the Collapse of the Francophone African Education System’, in S. Federici, G. Caffentzis and O. Alidou (eds.) A Thousand Flowers: Social Struggles against Structural Adjustment in African Universities (pp. 37–­42). Asmara: Africa World Press. Brown, Wendy. 2015. Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution. New York: Zone Books. Caffentzis, George. 2000. ‘The World Bank and Education in Africa’, in S. Federici, G. Caffentzis and O. Alidou (eds.) A Thousand Flowers: Social Struggles against Structural Adjustment in African Universities (pp. 3–­18). Asmara: Africa World Press. Césaire, Aime. 2010. ‘Letter to Maurice Thorez’, Social Text, 28(2): 145–­152. Collective, Midnight Notes. 1990. ‘The New Enclosures’, Midnight Notes, 10: 1–­9. Cooper, Frederick. 2014. Africa in the World: Capitalism, Empire, Nation-­ State. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Dardot, Pierre and Christian Laval. 2014. The New Way of the World: On Neoliberal Society. London: Verso. Federici, Silvia. 2000. ‘The Recolonization of African Education’, in S. Federici, G. Caffentzis and O. Alidou (eds.) A Thousand Flowers: Social Struggles against Structural Adjustment in African Universities (pp. 19–­24). Asmara: Africa World Press. ———. 2009. ‘Education and the Enclosure of Knowledge in the Global University’, ACME: An International Journal for Critical, 8(3): 454–­461.

116  Mushahid Hussain Federici, Silvia and George Caffentzis. 2000. ‘Chronology of African University Students’ Struggles: 1985–­1998’, in S. Federici, G. Caffentzis and O. Alidou (eds.) A Thousand Flowers: Social Struggles against Structural Adjustment in African Universities (pp. 115–­150). Asmara: Africa World Press. Gramsci, Antonio. 1971. Selection from the Prison Notebooks. (eds.) Q. Hoare and G. N. Smith. International Publishers. ILO. 2013. Decent Work Country Profile Bangaldesh. Geneva. Jahangir, Burhanuddin K. 1986. Problematics of Nationalism in Bangladesh. Dhaka: Centre for Social Studies. Jalal, Ayesha. 1995. Democracy and Authoritarianism in South Asia: A Comparative and Historical Perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Jaspers, Karl. 1959. The Idea of the University. (ed.) K. Deustch. Boston: Beacon Press. Jega, Attahiru. 2000. ‘Nigerian Universities and Academic Staff under Military Rule’, in S. Federici, G. Caffentzis and O. Alidou (eds.) A Thousand Flowers: Social Struggles against Structural Adjustment in African Universities (pp. 171–­180). Africa World Press. Karim, Sardar Fazlul. 1984. Dhaka Bissobiddaloy O Purbongio Shomaj: Oddhapok Abdur Razzak-­er Alapcharita (Dhaka University and Society in East Bengal: Interviews with Professor Abdur Razzak). Dhaka: University Press. Martin, Randy. 2007. An Empire of Indifference: American War and the Financial Logic of Risk Management. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Riaz, Ali. 2016. Bangladesh: A Political History since Independence. I. B. Tauris & Co. Ltd. Said, Edward. 1994. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Vintage. Seth, Sanjay. 2007. Subject Lessons: The Western Education of Colonial India. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Part II

Understanding contexts

4 Divide and educate* Sukanta Chaudhuri

Primary education: implanting inequality This is an essay on India’s higher education policy. But for a proper perspective, I must first look at primary education. Let me begin with an anecdotal memory. I had taken a taxi to my place of work, Jadavpur University. The cab driver had never been inside the campus, never conceived of such a large space devoted to education. He said he would like his young son to study there. “I want the best for him”, he said. “If he came here, he could learn to repair mobile phones.” I suggested that their local Industrial Training Institute might suffice for that; if he could fund his son through university, the young man might work for a telecom firm, or set up in business himself. I left this dutiful father  –­ a man of some schooling and experience of city life  –­ more confused than encouraged by the prospect. I was reminded of this encounter by a 2016 newspaper report that the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) would conduct a nation-­ wide survey to assess whether vocational training can be introduced in upper primary schools (Statesman 2016). Translated, this suggests a plan to relegate children from age 11 to (at best) a range of bread-­and-­butter skills, barring them from higher education and the upper reaches of the job market. One would be exceptionally naïve to imagine that children of the privileged classes would number among the ‘beneficiaries’ of such a provision. The demographic profile of high school vocational students speaks for itself. We cannot foretell the findings of the NCERT survey; but to conduct such a survey at all is to accept the fallacy of confusing aptitude with social and familial conditioning, particularly in terms of class, caste, gender and economic status. The fallacy is being garbed as painstaking scientific method: even ‘regions and climates’ will be taken

120  Sukanta Chaudhuri into account. In other words, children from Delhi and Bastar, or Gujarat and Arunachal, will be profiled in radically different terms. If all these children then proceed to an Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), how will their curriculum be structured? That is to assume a child from, say, a Bastar village makes it that far. In practice, the proposed new system will block him (and still more her) from any such ambition more roundly than before. If lucky, they may find work in a shop or workshop in the district town of Jagdalpur. Their plans and ambitions, or even their parents’, might be grossly unreal or, conversely, undemanding. My taxi driver would have said he wanted his son to repair mobile phones. We have heard nothing about the project since;1 but if only at a symbolic level, it offers a telling clue to the Union Government’s education policy. India has finally achieved near-­universal enrolment in primary education with a balanced gender ratio (UNESCO 2015: 21). But even in 2014–­2015, the drop-­out rate was 4.3%, rising to over 10% in five north-­eastern states (India Today 2016).2 Surveys consistently report alarming under-­performance in children’s attainments. Child labour, in ‘family enterprises’ fancifully definable, was legalized in 2016. This was the situation after seven years of the Right to Education Act, itself passed 62 years after independence. Underfunding of primary education and child development is virtually being implemented as a policy. Allocation for the Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS) or Anganwadi Scheme fell by 6.5% in 2015–­2016 and a further 6.6% in 2016–­2017. From this low base, it has risen by 15% in 2017–­2018 to its highest ever amount, but only marginally higher than in 2014–­2015 before adjusting for inflation. The Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (SSA) budget fell by 9.5% in 2015–­ 2016, rose 2.2% from this base in 2016–­2017 and a further 4.4% in 2017–­2018, but is still nearly 12% below the 2013–­2014 level, again before adjusting for inflation. It also marks the lowest point (42%) in the steadily declining allocation-­to-­outlay ratio for SSA (CBGA 2017: 22). The 2015–­2016 budget for the Midday Meal Scheme (MMS) was 16.4% below 2014–­2015, with fewer children benefiting: that number had dropped still more sharply the previous year (PIB 2016).The allocation rose by 5% in 2016–­2017 and another 3.1% in 2017–­2018, but remains nearly 18% less than in 2013–­14 before adjusting for inflation. (All figures in this paragraph are based on CBGA 2017: 45 unless otherwise noted.) The central government has also reduced its share in SSA from 65% to 60% (PIB 2015), and in MMS from 75% to 60% (PIB 2016). These cuts (added to those in other sectors) are hardly compensated by the

Divide and educate 121 additional 10% of Central tax revenue that the states now receive. A symbolic factoid says it all: the UPA government withdrew the LPG subsidy for MMS, and its successor has not restored it (Singh 2012). ICDS workers are paid roughly Rs.3,000 a month from Central funds, their assistants Rs.1,500. (Most states supplement this from their own budgets, to greatly varying extents.) Pay commissions ignore their claims because, by a brilliant bureaucratic fiction, these ground-­level workers catering to our poorest 4 crore children and 1 crore mothers are not employees but volunteers. It then bears asking why the state does not feel the need for a stabler, more adequately compensated workforce for the purpose. Since 2004, the Union government has levied a 2% cess on all taxes to fund basic education; since 2008, a further 1% for secondary and tertiary education. As of 31 March 2015, Rs.13,298 crore of the former and no less than Rs.64,288 crore of the latter cess lay unspent (Hindu 2015). Unlike taxes, cesses are not shared with the states: the entire amount accrues to the Centre. Since then, these cesses have been merged in an enhanced service tax whose proceeds need not be spent on education. That reduces accountability but does not solve the challenge of human resource development.

Universities: the world, the states and the Centre The Centre found a way to reduce the cess mountain. It proposed to set up 20 ‘institutions of eminence’, 10 state-­run and 10 private, and feed the former Rs.1,000 crore each over the next five years  –­ i.e., a total of Rs.10,000 crore (UGC 2017). Place this against the Rs.4,692 crore allocated to the UGC in 2017–­2018 (CBGA 2017: 23) for the entire public university system, including full running costs for 46 Central universities and virtually all development grants for 360 state universities.3 In 2015–­2016, roughly 56% of UGC Plan grants and 88% of non-­Plan grants went to Central universities; state universities received 19% and 4.3%, respectively. The figures for 2014–­2015 were still more skewed: 70% and 89% to Central universities and 15% and 3.6% to state universities of Plan and non-­Plan grants, respectively. For colleges, over 85% of Plan grants (83% in 2014–­2015) went to state institutions, but virtually 100% of non-­Plan grants to Central ones in both years (UGC 2015: 235, 240, 244–­45; UGC 2016a: 69, 73, 76–­77). States might be expected to meet the non-­Plan expenses of their own establishments, though they cannot possibly match the mounting salary levels of Central universities. For development funds, all

122  Sukanta Chaudhuri universities in India can reasonably expect major support from the UGC. As the given figures show, this is just not happening. The Rashtriya Uchchatar Shiksha Abhiyan (RUSA) provides additional funds to state universities, but in a 65:35 ratio  –­ 90:10 for hill states, and Jammu and Kashmir (RUSA 2013: 87). Another body under formation, the Higher Education Financing Agency, will actually lend money at interest. It is assumed that only institutions like the IITs and IIMs will constitute its clients. The scheme for 20 ‘institutions of eminence’  –­ of which some private ones may not exist as yet  –­ seems part of an unspoken agenda to dismantle the current higher education system as a whole. Social justice aside, in terms of educational planning and practice, this is a subversive policy that will leave the nation’s human resource pool permanently depleted. The outcome is so predictable that one wonders how it escaped the planners’ notice. We may conclude that they found it a desirable end. We need not waste breath on the crassness of a scheme to conjure up ‘world-­class’ universities by government fiat. If throwing money at new or reinvented campuses could ensure ‘international’ quality, King Saud University in Riyadh would be the world’s leading institution. India itself hosts two formally international universities, South Asian University and Nalanda University, whose budgets are dramatically above Indian norms, taxpayer-­funded through the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) rather than the Ministry of Human Resource Development (MHRD). In 2017–­2018, the MEA allocated Rs.260 crore to South Asian University (up from the original Rs.79 crore revised to Rs.184 crore in 2016–­2017: OBI 2017: 99), with 522 students in 20154 and 56 faculty members. India is committed to US$300 million (approx. Rs.1,930 crore at current rates) to meet its entire capital costs, not to mention a 100-­acre plot in South Delhi (SAU 2015: 6). Nalanda University was allocated Rs.200 crore by the MEA in both 2016–­2017 and 2017–­2018 (revised down to Rs.100 crore in 2016–­ 2017: OBI 2017: 99). The MEA is committed to a total of Rs.1,750 crore towards its capital expenditure (MEA 2016: 14). The scale of Nalanda’s targeted expenditure might be gauged from the fact that the university budgeted for Rs.367 crore in 2014–­2015 (Nalanda 2013: 48), no doubt including contributions from other nations.5 That was over two-­thirds the 2014–­2015 budget estimate of Rs.510 crore of Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU 2014: ‘Budget at a Glance’), a central university with some 8,000 students and nearly 600 faculty in place against some 150 students and 25 faculty at Nalanda in 2017 (15 students in 2014). JNU has headed the National Institutional

Divide and educate 123 Ranking Framework (NIRF) list among ‘universities’ so named6 since the NIRF’s inception. The state-­government-­run Jadavpur University (10,000+ students, some 600 faculty in place), which has topped all Indian universities (so named) in the Times Higher Education (THE) table two years running, had budget actuals of Rs.226 crore in 2015–­ 2016 (Jadavpur 2016: i).7 Clearly, the quantum of funds is not determined even remotely by either need or merit: the mismatch is almost grotesque. I have already noted the gross disparity in levels of UGC support to the Central and the state universities. To compound matters, the UGC’s total actual expenditure declined from a high of Rs.4,967 crore in 2013–­14 (MHRD 2016: 128) to Rs.4,186 crore in 2015–­2016. It has thereafter climbed to a budget estimate of Rs.4,692 crore in 2017–­2018 (CBGA 2017: 23), but the actual expenditure remains to be seen. And most unsettling of all, disbursement of sanctioned funds can be indefinitely delayed as never before. Needless to say, all this does not affect the MEA-­funded Nalanda and South Asian universities. There is also glaring variance between the assessments of various agencies: international rankings like THE or Quacquarelli Symonds (QS), or the MHRD’s own separate assessments through NIRF and the National Assessment and Accreditation Council (NAAC). Not all universities participate in all these ranking exercises; nor do the lists cover the same range of institutions or apply the same criteria. The bizarre result is that there is not a single name common to all four of the QS, THE, NAAC and NIRF rankings of India’s top 10 universities (top six for QS). Only 11 ‘institutions of eminence’ were finally identified and six officially announced, controversially including a non-existent ‘greenfield’ campus (UGC 2018a, 2018b).8 It is not clear how this programme will mesh with the earlier plan for world-­class ‘innovation universities’. Perhaps it does not matter, for no institutions have been identified under this scheme nor any funds disbursed.

Public and private, rich and poor No less bizarre is the specification of 10 private to 10 public universities for bestowal of ‘eminence’. As of now, there would not be 10 or even five private universities among India’s top 20, judged by any criteria. The private ‘institutions of eminence’ can even be greenfield, qualifying solely by the quantum of funds invested (or perhaps merely pledged). The ‘eminence’ tag would be gifted on the strength of future

124  Sukanta Chaudhuri claims, not past performance. In exchange, these universities would be free from all external regulation, academic and financial; have no set criteria for appointments; and effectively charge what fees they liked, provided no meritorious student was turned away. That last stipulation is almost impossible to enforce. It might create the situation threatening the IITs, that steeply enhanced fees might actually lower revenues (Economic Times 2016). But the real problem lies elsewhere. Given the downscaling of schooling for the poor, as I described at the outset, few indigent students could qualify for entry in the first place. There is a seamless and mischievous consistency between the unfolding policies for primary and tertiary education. It cannot be denied  –­ in fact, it should be strongly asserted  –­ that an effective university system fosters an elitism of merit. But for merit to prevail, two other factors are imperative. The first is an equitable system of schooling irrespective of gender, economic or social status. The other is a pyramidal structure of tertiary education  –­ the top rung of institutions supported by many more of only one degree less merit, and so down, tier by tier. There can be peaks of excellence rising from the foothills, but not looming islands in a sea of under-­performance. The current (and even more the proposed) policy seeks to invert this structure by lavishing funds, freedom and attention on a handful of institutions to the detriment of the rest. Social justice apart, such a scenario is pedagogically unviable. It can only undermine the educational edifice as a whole. Two matters call for special thought. One is the feasible extent of private sector tertiary education. Twenty years ago, there were virtually no private universities in India, except hole-­in-­the-­corner outfits in a few ‘rogue’ states. Today, two-­thirds of students at tertiary level study at private universities (in the full sense, excluding private colleges affiliated to public universities). Though the demand for private education seems inexhaustible, sooner or later there will be a shortage of students both able and willing to pay: the market may end up outpricing itself. In the deplorable absence of educational philanthropy in India, funding constraints prevent private campuses from developing into truly full-­fledged universities with a wide range of faculties, above all in the basic sciences (as opposed to lucrative branches of technology). Even prohibitive fees cannot suffice to fund the infrastructure. Hence, the few private universities run on relatively enlightened lines offer a curious mix of technology and the humanities (in one case the latter alone), with (apart from one exception) a yawning gap in the intervening space of basic science and other fundamental studies.

Divide and educate 125 The other disquieting prospect is that the coming dispensation virtually debars our poorer youths from a higher education worth the name. They will continue by default to populate state-­government-­run universities, whose funding has sunk to unviable levels. These universities are also plagued by a host of home-­grown problems. Almost without exception, state governments have played a discreditable role in corrupting the universities in their care, turning them into local satrapies. Even if the Centre were to offer lavish funds, many state governments might decline them for fear of losing political control over the campuses. If a handful of state universities still figure among the nation’s best  –­ seven of THE’s best 10 and four of QS’s best six, though curiously only three of NIRF’s best 10  –­ it is through a heroic effort by the faculty, sometimes virtually fighting their political overlords.

Power and the perpetuation of inequality In effect, the Centre and the states are either competing or conniving to curb campus freedom and academic confidence. As Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar knew, people who think too much are dangerous. The past few years have greatly exacerbated an already growing trend, among authorities at all levels, to crush not only dissent but the unregulated pursuit of knowledge. There can be nothing more perverse than to imagine that ‘world-­class’ institutions, or even ‘centres of excellence’, can be created by thought control on set lines; yet more and more, our rulers seem intent on confining higher education to the rote learning of advanced employment skills. This  –­ apart from the obvious financial benefits  –­ is a major reason for the advocacy of private universities. The latter’s clientele, keen to extract full career advantage from the hefty sums they invest, is unlikely to disrupt the establishment. (This is also true of high-­profile, increasingly costly public sector professional institutions like the IITs and IIMs.) Hence any sign of free thought, let alone dissent, in a private institution causes special alarm in the ruling establishment, as borne out by the experience of India’s only private university devoted solely to the liberal arts. Meanwhile, the aggressive student outfits of all major parties play havoc in the public campuses on their respective turfs. Their aggression should not be construed as an excess of youthful freedom: rather, such license is granted to a disruptive minority as the instrument of a deadening control over the academic community as a whole, stifling all freedom and dissent. This is the very reverse of a viable ambience for higher learning. The institutions (chiefly in the West) held up as models have many

126  Sukanta Chaudhuri insidious restrictions in place, most often through class and economic preconditions; but they project the image, and in good measure the reality, of an arena for free thought and debate. It is folly to think that research initiative and original thought in any sphere of knowledge, even the supposedly value-­neutral realm of science and technology, can flourish if its exponents are barred from exercising their minds freely in all other directions. Originality of thought is a mental faculty to be nurtured, not a set skill to be implanted for a limited purpose. Our higher education system has long been geared to employment skills masquerading as scientific education. We need not contest this purpose by touting a lofty ideal of pure knowledge. Let us, by all means, view the pursuit of knowledge as an economic end. Our current policies will not achieve that end. Rather, such intellectual subservience will perpetuate our economic and political subservience within the global order. Despite innumerable faults, independent India’s public universities held the potential for a genuine knowledge delivery system that could and did engage with the West on an honourable footing and might, in time, have matched it in stature. That prospect has faded with the incursion of three factors: destructive politicization (as opposed to a responsible political culture); misapplication of the principles of free economy; and the insistence of the Indian middle class on reducing education to an employment machine for their young. In the process, the academic profession has allowed itself to be part compromised, part demoralized and disempowered. More and more, India’s higher education system is cosying up to the people already lodged in its bosom, with no call to look further. Incursions from outside the circle are seen as a burden and, worse, a threat. Hence the energetic moves, outlined at my start, to frustrate whatever reformative potential might remain in the government school system. Till now, the public universities had provided some corrective to the inequities faced by the nation’s youth earlier at school or later in the job market. Current policy would divest the universities of that function. We are moving towards a system whereby the most ambitious and privileged students  –­ if they do not head abroad straight after school  –­ will attend expensive private institutions where they might possibly obtain a rich and liberating education, but probably no more than efficient professional training and added social cachet. Something of these benefits will accrue to other such students, plus the luckiest and most ambitious of the underprivileged, in a sprinkling of Central universities. The general run of students will proceed from a restrictive and impoverished school environment to equally impoverished

Divide and educate 127 state-­government-­run universities to nurse their faltering ambitions  –­ or their growing anger, to the nation’s detriment and their own. The irony is that this should happen in the name of human resource creation for economic growth. The unacknowledged assumption is that we can afford to under-­train and under-­employ the greater part of our population. For all our talk of demographic dividend, we have attention only for our Canada-­or Australia-­sized affluent and articulate population, the amorphous ‘middle class’. Such an outlook might suit a vendor of consumer durables, but hardly the makers of a national education policy. It begs two questions. One is that our best human resources reside exclusively within that Canada or Australia rather than the whole of India: a demented fantasy of class-­based genetics to which, one suspects, many subscribe and some openly confess. The other is that even the privileged classes can best prosper, or prosper at all, despite shouldering the burden of an immense band of their countrymen whom they have prevented from improving their own lot or the nation’s. It may be wrong to accuse our planners of a lack of vision. From the primary to the tertiary, each new step is synchronized to a single purpose. Sadly, that purpose seems directed to deprive and exclude rather than to develop and integrate. As a nation, we have decided to short-­change ourselves drastically with respect to human resources. We may rue it if, to say nothing of other losses, we stint on this score and yet, or therefore, end up with empty coffers.

Notes * An earlier version of this essay appeared in the Economic and Political Weekly, 52.24 (June 17, 2017). 1 As of 21 July 2018, there was nothing on the subject traceable in the NCERT website or that of its subsidiary, the Pandit Sundarlal Sharma Central Institute of Vocational Education. 2 The report cites a parliamentary reply by the then HRD Minister. 3 Figures from the UGC website (www.ugc.ac.in), accessed on 5 June 2017. 4 The University has a goal of 7,000 students and 700 teachers (SAU 2017), but reached only the above enrolment in 2015, the latest year for which figures are accessible (SAU 2015: 11). 5 Of course, Nalanda is a university under construction, and the proposed budget was no doubt chiefly for this purpose. Its actual expenditure for 2014–­2015 was under Rs.21 crore (Nalanda 2014: 44), presumably for the same reason as in the previous year (Nalanda 2013: 48), delay in awarding contracts for capital works. 6 With all ranking tables, the ranks cited are among ‘universities’ so named, excluding IITs and research institutes like the Indian Institute of Science.

128  Sukanta Chaudhuri 7 One should add that in 2018, Nalanda charged Rs.1,35,000 as tuition for a two-­year course, and Rs.76,000 per annum for board and lodging. South Asian University charged students from SAARC countries US$2000 (Rs.1,30,000) for a two-­year course including hostel rent but not food costs; non-­SAARC students paid over 10 times this amount. JNU charged an average of Rs.1,000 for a two-­year postgraduate course including hostel rent but excluding food costs. Jadavpur University charged Rs.900 per annum for an Arts postgraduate course, rising to Rs.4,800 for Engineering, and under Rs.4,000 over two years for hostel rent without food costs. In other words, the institutions receiving hugely more public funds per student were also charging hugely more fees from them. 8 The text has been revised in proof to note this new development. All other data remains as when first going to press.

References All website URLs are as accessible on 21 July 2018 unless otherwise stated. CBGA. 2017. ‘Centre for Budget and Governance Accoutability’, What Do the Numbers Tell? An Analysis of Union Budget 2017–­18. Available at www. cbgaindia.org/­w p-­content/­u ploads/­2 017/­0 2/­A nalysis-­of-­Union-­Budget-­ 2017-­18.pdf Economic Times. 2016. ‘HRD Ministry Notes the Difficulties, Tuition Fee Hike May Be Reviewed’, The Economic Times (September 8). Available at http:/­/­ economictimes.indiatimes.com/­industry/­services/­education/­hrd-­ministry-­ notes-­the-­difficulties-­iit-­tuition-­fee-­hike-­may-­be-­reviewed/­articleshow/­54160 885.cms Hindu. 2015. ‘Rs.1.4 Lakh Crore Cess Money Lies Idle’, The Hindu (December  24). Available at www.thehindu.com/­news/­national/­rs-­14-­lakh-­crore-­ cess-­money-­lies-­idle/­article8022477.ece India Today. 2016. ‘School Drop-­Out Rates: National Average Decreases, North East States Increase’, India Today (May 6). Available at http:/­/­india today.intoday.in/­education/­story/­drop-­outs-­in-­north-­east-­india/­1/­660697. html Jadavpur University. 2016. Budget Estimates 2017–­18 and Revised Budget 2016–­17. JNU. 2014. ‘Jawaharlal Nehru University, Financial Estimates 2014–­15’. Available at www.jnu.ac.in/­DataFactSheet/­FinancialBudget2014-­15.pdf. Accessed on 5 June 2017. MEA. 2016. ‘Ministry of External Affairs, Outcome Budget, 2016–­17’. Available at www.mea.gov.in/­Uploads/­PublicationDocs/­26823_1-­MEA_Outcome_ 2016-­17_English_1.pdf MHRD. 2016. ‘Ministry of Human Resource Development, Outcome Budget, 2016–­17’. Available at http:/­/­mhrd.gov.in/­sites/­upload_files/­mhrd/­files/­docu ment-­reports/­Outcome2016-­17.pdf Nalanda. 2013. ‘Nalanda University, Annual Report 2013–­14’. Available at www.nalandauniv.edu.in/­docs/­annual_report_2013-­14_eng.pdf

Divide and educate 129 ———. 2014. ‘Nalanda University, Annual Report 2014–­15’. Available at www.nalandauniv.edu.in/­docs/­nalanda-­english-­annual-­report-­2014-­15.pdf OBI. 2017. ‘Open Budgets India, Union Budget (2017–­18), Ministry of External Affairs’. Available at https:/­/­openbudgetsindia.org/­dataset/­ministry-­of-­ external-­affairs-­2017-­18 PIB. 2015. ‘Press Release, Press Information Bureau’ (December 3). Available at http:/­/­pib.nic.in/­newsite/­PrintRelease.aspx?relid=132416 ———. 2016. ‘Press Release, Press Information Bureau’ (April 25). Available at http:/­/­pib.nic.in/­newsite/­PrintRelease.aspx?relid=142148 RUSA. 2013. ‘Rashtriya Uchchatar Shiksha Abhiyan: National Higher Education Mission, Ministry of Human Resource Development with Tata Institute of Social Sciences’. Available at http:/­/­mhrd.gov.in/­sites/­upload_files/­mhrd/­ files/­upload_document/­RUSA_final090913.pdf SAU. 2015. ‘South Asian University, Annual Report 2015’. Available at www. sau.int/­pdf/­AnnualReport-­2015.pdf ———. 2017. ‘South Asian University website, “About> Overview” ’. Available at www.sau.int/­about/­about-­sau.html Singh. 2012. ‘Dr Amarjit Singh, Additional Secretary, MHRD, Memo to Principal Secretaries’ (December 6). Available at http:/­ /­ mdm.nic.in/­ Files/­ OrderCirculars/­Subsidy_on_supply_of_LPG_cylinders.pdf Statesman. 2016. ‘Vocational Plan for Upper Primary’, The Statesman (October 15). UGC. 2015. ‘UGC Annual Report 2014–­15’. Available at www.ugc.ac.in/­ pdfnews/­2465555_Annual-­Report-­2014-­15.pdf ———. 2016. ‘UGC Annual Report 2015–­16’. Available at www.ugc.ac.in/­ pdfnews/­3710331_Annual-­Report-­2015-­16.pdf ———. UGC. 2017. ‘UGC (Institutions of Eminence Deemed to be Universities) Regulations, 2017’, Gazette of India Extraordinary Part III section 4, 30 August 2017. Available at https://www.ugc.ac.in/pdfnews/5403862_ Gazette-Institutions-of-Eminence-Deemed-to-be-Universities.pdf ———. 2018a. ‘Report of the Empowered Expert Committee’. Available at https:// www.ugc.ac.in/pdfnews/3275454_IoE-EEC-Final-Report11-May20189AM-.pdf ———. 2018b. ‘Extract of the Minutes of the 533rd Meeting, . . . 9th July, 2018’. Available at https://www.ugc.ac.in/pdfnews/2388932_Extract-of-Minutes09-07-2018.pdf UNESCO. 2015. Education for All 2000–­2015: Achievements and Challenges (EFA Global Monitoring Report). New Delhi: UNESCO.

5 Of utopias and universities Ania Loomba

In his book, Astonishing the Gods, Ben Okri offers a vision of the ideal university: The universities were places for self-­ perfection, places for the highest education in life. Everyone taught everyone else. All were teachers, all were students. . . . Research was a permanent activity, and all were researchers and appliers of the fruits of research. The purpose was to discover the hidden law of all things, to deepen the spirit, to make more profound the sensitivities of the individual to the universe, and to become creative. Love was the most important subject in the universities. Entire faculties were devoted to the art of living. The civilisation was dedicated to a simple goal, the perfection of the spirit and the mastery of life. (1995: epilogue) The dreamlike language in which this vision is articulated reminds us that such a university is precisely that  –­ a utopian dream. There is nothing wrong with visions and dreams of utopia. Without them, there is no possibility of radical thought or social transformation. But historically, few communities of learning have been non-­hierarchical, institutions where “all were teachers, all were students”. Indeed, many of our traditional ideals of pedagogy have been unabashedly hierarchical. The Hindu tradition of the guru shishya parampara romanticizes a deeply subservient relationship between the teacher and the taught, even when the latter were really the employers of the former, as was the case with the princely rulers who employed Brahmin teachers. Moreover, as the story of Guru Dronacharya and Eklavya in the Mahabharata brilliantly reminds

Of utopias and universities 131 us, teachers rigidly policed the borders of the status quo and used the traditions of learning to enforce them.1 In Europe too, the earliest universities  –­ in eleventh century Bologna, in Paris and Oxford in the twelfth century and in Cambridge in the thirteenth  –­ trained state and church functionaries “or provided a kind of finishing school for the landed elite” (Collini 2012: 25). But, as Stefan Collini rightly points out: there was the long standing tension between serving a variety of social needs and being in some way withdrawn from society, even offering a form of resistance to the dominant values and practices of that society. Universities had always been practical, providing the church with its personnel or staffing state bureaucracies, and yet always also pursuing studies that did not bear directly on any of those tasks. (ibid.) This last idea, that university education exceeds its most utilitarian application, that as an institution the university has some autonomy from all structures of power, is precisely what undergirds the liberal ideal of the university, an ideal which developed powerfully alongside capitalist and colonial education systems. Both in the East and in the West, those universities we regard as ‘the best’ have been deeply stratified, even as they created possibilities for upward mobility. Yes, in class-­conscious Renaissance England, it was possible for a Christopher Marlowe to go to Cambridge as a scholarship student and write a deeply subversive text like Doctor Faustus. It was even possible for a Moorish slave like Juan Latino to become a scholar of repute at the University of Granada. But such individuals were exceptions who proved the rule, and were usually tolerated only to the extent that they did not rock the boat. Ironically, in our own day, sometimes it is only great inequity that makes possible the most magnanimous gesture of inclusion  –­ the enormous endowment of Harvard allows it to be one of the very few institutions in the United States that provides full scholarships to any student it deems needy of financial assistance. As such, a middle class student admitted to Harvard, will end up paying more at a public university (say the University of Illinois) than at Harvard. But this does not make Harvard a more egalitarian space than the public universities in the United States which have far less money for scholarships. Scholarships are of course a very good thing  –­ indeed, they should be a necessary feature of any educational institution  –­ but we need to acknowledge that both

132  Ania Loomba exclusion and strategic inclusion are part of our highly stratified educational systems. The logic of strategic inclusion works differently when it becomes imperative to educate large numbers of once excluded populations, either because they demand it, or because it is regarded as necessary for social control. That is what happened both in colonized countries, and in Europe  –­ working classes, women and the colonized were taught that they were unequal to their masters, not only by being kept unlearned but also by being schooled in particular ways. I do not want to belabour this point, as there is a vast literature on the way in which education has been closely tied to the maintenance of the dominant social order in nation-­states across the world. However, I do want to reiterate that it is this aspect of education  –­ strategic inclusion  –­ that has shaped the proliferation of different types of institutions, each with its own educational content and pedagogical methods. While the divisions between different institutions of higher education (vocational colleges, polytechnics, community colleges, deemed colleges, correspondence and open universities on the one hand, and research universities on the other) are not identical in different countries and contexts, the histories of all of them speak to the need to differentiate education for various population groups, and thus to regulate social mobility. I would argue that the ideal of ‘the university’ as a place for the ‘free’ exchange of ideas has developed precisely alongside, and as a compensatory ideal to set against, the reality of a hierarchy of learners and places of learning that are in fact excluded from this ideal. And yet, of course, this dynamic is always unstable, always open to being appropriated by those who have been allowed a foot in the door. Colonized subjects, African-­Americans, women, Dalits and a host of other once excluded groups have appropriated education as a powerful tool to rock the boats they were supposed to stabilize, so that, to quote from Collini once more: One begins to wonder whether societies do not make a kind of Faustian pact when they set up universities: they ask them to serve various purposes, but if they are to be given the intellectual freedom necessary to serve those purposes properly, they will always tend to exceed or subvert those purposes. (ibid.: 7) In practice, such appropriation and subversion has often been partial, and incomplete. In independent India, the laudable ideal of public and affordable higher education was not accompanied by sufficient

Of utopias and universities 133 rethinking of the content and structure of colonial education, nor of imagining what a decolonized pedagogy would look like. Nor did we ask how universities would actively redress historical inequities, especially those of caste. The relationship of teacher to taught, of teacher to university authorities, and of university authorities to the government, remained asymmetrical, or became even more so than it had been under a colonial administration. Seventy years later, notable exceptions notwithstanding, our university system is one in which teachers have no pedagogic or intellectual freedom, but also no accountability to students, resulting in very uneven standards of teaching or commitment to pedagogy. Faculty are not rewarded for research, but also by and large are not required to do any, so that there is a sharp separation of teaching and research, quite the opposite of Okri’s dream university. Teachers and students are often at the mercy of petty, bureaucratic and corrupt administrators and therefore also sometimes in league with them to deny fundamental autonomies of thought and enquiry to the university community. Further, there is a sharp inequity in the funding of central and state institutions, with the latter possessing few of the infrastructural systems that support research. Innovation, both pedagogic and intellectual, is rarely encouraged or rewarded, and a plodding mediocrity is all that is expected of faculty. On the whole, we have produced alienated or indifferent educators, unemployable graduates, and  –­ this is often our most visible achievement  –­ inefficient and vindictive university bureaucracies. Of course, compared to many other postcolonial countries, independent India has developed a robust system of higher education, albeit one that is always under pressure from politicians and policymakers who, at worst, wish to curtail independence of thought or, at best, think of universities as vocational or trade schools. We have developed good colleges and universities, as well as known many dedicated teachers and vast numbers of excellent students. In spite of many odds, we have produced real intellectuals across the disciplines. So today, given the political and bureaucratic onslaught on many of our best institutions, many of us are placed in the position of simply defending rather than critiquing and reimagining our universities. What are we defending against? Most progressive educators would argue that we are defending the public university from market fundamentalism, which argues that the market should define not only the kinds of private for-­profit universities that are now proliferating, but also the content of all education. I do believe that the privatization of education will, in the long-­term, always exacerbate rather than ameliorate existing social inequities, if only because there is no

134  Ania Loomba policy mandate and no legal requirements for private universities to address entrenched forms of historical injustice. Those who can afford admission will be the only ones educated, which is a class privilege that we cannot afford to perpetuate. But having said that, we need to also recognize and work to change the fundamentally undemocratic ­features  –­ differential access to education, the insensitive content of education, and unexamined methods of pedagogy  –­ that have structured our public education as well. This directly ties in with the second defence of universities that has become urgent in today’s India  –­ against the dictates of the state. The most contentious recent debates have in fact not arisen from the curtailment of public spending and privatization of education. That has certainly been a key issue of concern over the last two decades, but the crises in Delhi University, Film and Television Institute of India and Jawaharlal Nehru University (to take three recent high-­profile cases) have resulted from attempts by the central and state governments to control the form and the content of education, as well as the modes of university governance. In these universities, we have seen, variously: rushed and authoritarian changes to the syllabi and structure of undergraduate degrees, increased centralization of the content of education, the imposition of unqualified Vice Chancellors’ attempts to muzzle free speech and debate among students, orders to curtail admissions to research programmes, and a complete disregard  –­ in all cases  –­ of student and faculty views. Across the country, talks, film-­shows and debates staged by left wing and progressive individuals and groups have been disallowed by university authorities or disrupted by right wing groups, often with the encouragement of administrators and local politicians. The events at the University of Hyderabad, and the suicide of Rohith Vemula, are spectacular but not unique reminders that the ongoing crisis in higher education stems from the backlash against Dalits as they stake their right to universities and to intellectual activity.2 Both public and private institutions of higher education have been slow to admit students from hitherto disenfranchised communities. When, under pressure, they have done so, they have developed few institutional protocols to help such students navigate both enhanced educational standards as well as the corrosive, rampant prejudices they encounter. There is no question that our public educators have failed in this crucial task, and have been complicit in the continuing denial of educational opportunities for Dalits and others who have historically been excluded from all our institutions. It is also the case that our universities are in fact dealing with massive social and demographic

Of utopias and universities 135 challenges. In a paper called ‘What Is to be Done about Indian Universities?’, a group of teachers called Academics for Creative Reforms (henceforth ACR) writes that the higher education sector in India caters to over 30 million students but: what makes this sector truly remarkable is not its size but the scale of the social revolution it is effecting. We are enacting one of the most dramatic instances of the democratization of access to higher education in human history, as millions of families send children to college for the first time. (ACR 2015: 25) But this expansion is stymied by the problems we see in the country at large. By 2020, India will have the largest tertiary-­age population in the world, and its current gross enrolment ratio is only 21% (AISHE 2015: 25). The gap between demand and supply makes investors of all shades and stripes, be it foreign universities and governments or private investors, virtually salivate at the opportunities in India, as is evident from recent reports by the British Council and Ernst and Young.3 Few of the investors who are eyeing the education market in India are concerned with extending the social revolution that ACR speaks of, although their buzzwords often appropriate the language of social justice. Neither are most of them concerned with protecting or expanding the diversity of the content of education. This is in keeping with worldwide trends post ‘globalization’, that is, the liberalization of access to hitherto protected sectors of economic activity, whereby the arts, humanities and social sciences have been diminished within the university system while professional, business and vocational education have expanded. Even the pure sciences are suffering, compared with those branches of science which can be tied to industries of various sorts. This is the case in both state-­funded as well as privately funded institutions. ACR’s contention is not wrong when it maintains, with respect to Indian governmental bodies, that “the indiscriminate borrowing of blueprints and vocabularies from the West ignores the specificity of our context” (2015: 26). But the problem lies in the fact that our borrowing is not so much indiscriminate as it is highly simplistic, selective and even nonsensical (in the sense that they sometimes invoke Western examples that simply do not exist in practice). The rhetoric and pattern of borrowing is ignorant of or evades some of the key debates that are taking place abroad, ignores some of the lessons that have been learnt there, as well as the forms taken by the crisis of education there.

136  Ania Loomba For example, Western and specifically US educational systems were invoked when the University of Delhi imposed in quick succession a semester system, then a one-­year increase in the undergraduate curriculum, and then a ‘choice-­based credit system’. All these changes were imposed from on high in the face of teacher and student opposition, and none of them took into account that these features are all part of a system (in the United States, for instance) where individual teachers have great autonomy when it comes to designing their courses and assessing students. There was no talk of such autonomy; on the contrary, greater centralization was seen as the answer to the enormous variation in quality of education between one institution and another, or indeed within one of our remarkably bloated universities (Delhi University boasts of some 77 affiliated colleges and over a quarter of a million students). Nor is student evaluation of teachers along the lines of the United States ever seriously proposed, for the assumption is that it would quickly become a punitive tool in the hands of administrators and their faculty henchmen. Such an assumption is not entirely wrong, because the fact is that we have created a system which devalues both the teacher and the student, and which has then created an atmosphere where policing is understood to be the only way of keeping people with independent ideas in check. Of course, there are institutions that are exceptions, but they highlight the larger rule. Perhaps the Jawaharlal Nehru University, winner of the 2017 Visitor’s Award for the ‘Best University’ in India, might offer us a basic, useful example here.4 Why is it that faculty there regularly turn up for their scheduled classes, while teachers in Delhi University colleges routinely skip their lectures? Does this commonly noted teacher absenteeism have something to do with the relative freedom that JNU allows faculty to design their courses, administer them and dovetail their pedagogy to their sense of the potential of their students? I have taught in both institutions, and can testify that both have excellent teachers (as well as indifferent ones), so my point here is simply to indicate one structural reason for our failure to create progressive work cultures in so many of our universities, including Delhi University. I have no doubt that a responsible, pedagogically sensitive and innovative academic atmosphere will only result from greater faculty autonomy and from the decentralization of academic decision-­making. What we need are smaller, more self-­contained, more flexible academic institutions, each different from the other while being responsible to demanding educational standards as well as the priorities of social justice. That is a tall order, no doubt, but there is no reason why we should not attempt to build such institutions, which

Of utopias and universities 137 are, after all, the kinds of institutions that both our public policymakers as well as our educational entrepreneurs swear by. Another crucial point: given our history and social conditions, this sort of institutional development can only happen in a meaningful way if public universities lead the way. They have to set the standards to which our as yet woefully underdeveloped private educations must aspire. To put it more bluntly  –­ it is only if our public universities are viable that they will challenge private institutions to do more than the bare minimum to educate young people, and thus to redress our growing social inequalities. There is otherwise no reason that educational entrepreneurs will hire appropriately qualified faculty to teach their fee-­paying students, for the fact is that at present they get away by appointing manifestly under-­qualified instructors. It is also arguable that only our public research universities can produce the vast number of qualified faculty required to staff private institutions, for they are the only institutions that have the resources to teach the research skills, pedagogic techniques, and social awareness required to produce high-­ quality teachers, whether in the technical, social scientific or humanistic disciplines. We need more, and better resourced, public universities to be the engines that drive tertiary education in the future. Without them, we will create a thin layer of profit-­making teaching shops that will do little for future graduates or their potential employers. I make these observations in a context in which the rich are increasingly sending their children abroad, which they didn’t  –­ or couldn’t  –­ when I was a college student in the 1970s. But there are increasing numbers of the not-­so-­rich-­but-­quite-­wealthy who are the real targets of private investors in the educational marketplace. The universities they establish are unlikely to make space for the children of the dispossessed. Nor can they really offer pedagogic reforms of any kind; there is no reason why they should invest in innovative procedures or indeed in conversations that encourage critical thinking, if the only point is to make money off degrees that are as lightweight as the paper on which they are printed. The ethos of the student as paying customer is now increasingly entrenched in the West, but it is by no means clear that this has resulted in any change other than in the degree of living comforts that are offered to students (fancy gymnasiums or hostel accommodation, for instance). Those are not ‘educational’ innovations, and hardly the way to change the stagnant, even moribund, relationship between teachers and students in India today. Moreover, we need to remember that private universities are very vulnerable to ‘outside’ interference in their agendas  –­ their funders and owners dictate educational policies on a daily basis, and thus deny precisely the

138  Ania Loomba faculty autonomy and innovativeness that each of these institutions claims to be their ‘unique selling proposition’ (USP). It is true that they have learnt these lessons in interference from the self-­serving priorities of politicians and bureaucrats who have suborned the educational mission of public universities. Sadly, many faculty and students have been only too happy to join them in rendering misshapen our public universities. It is going to take a great deal to recover from these ugly histories, but we cannot even begin to do that unless we think clearly about ways in which we can create robust codes of self-­governance for our universities, both public and private. Let me end with a few thoughts about the disastrous marginalization of the humanities and some of the social sciences that is being effected everywhere. This is part and parcel of the diversion of public resources into private hands, as technical and scientific research in our universities is tied into the priorities of private industry. If  –­ and this is a hypothetical example, but one that is part of the basic structure of university research in the United States  –­ Monsanto is to pay our agricultural universities to conduct particular forms of research, the latter are not likely to find ways of rethinking the introduction of genetically modified crops or indeed the usage of fertilizers that are damaging to the environment in the long-­term. Further, a university system that is geared primarily to these forms of research will slowly but surely find ways of marginalizing the social scientific and humanistic discussions that are critical of the hold of multinational capital and goods on our national life  –­ no one wants a critic in the family, so to speak. Thus, for instance, the British Council report on higher education cited earlier included 50 interviews with Indian policymakers and academics. The social sciences and humanities were seen by interviewees to be essential to understanding and preventing conflict and social unrest within and around India’s borders. This is likely to rise up the government’s agenda; one interviewee reported that 100 districts out of 600 in India are conflict-­affected. (2014: 27) This is a chilling and revelatory statement. For the respondents, the reason to maintain the teaching of humanities and social sciences is that these disciplines can help control dissent. Literary education, a host of critics have shown, was always understood to be crucial to maintain social control, be it over women, working men or the colonized. If properly used, it was a weapon of the elite. But in recent years, literary studies and the critical social sciences have become sites for raising

Of utopias and universities 139 profound questions about social justice. It is no accident that it is these subjects that often become the explicit targets of anger by the right wing, whether in India, or Britain, or the United States. In the humanities, questions about radical pedagogy have been widely raised, and university systems and the privatization of education have been most widely critiqued. Precisely those subjects that are criticized for being ‘useless’ or ‘divorced from reality’ have raised uncomfortable questions about the nature of power, be it state power or everyday power. The policymakers and academics cited by the British Council report implicitly recognize these challenges, and are suggesting that we return these disciplines to their ameliorative traditions, and thereby squash dissent and maintain the status quo, both within the university and outside it. One area in which the radical humanities and social sciences have had great institutional and public ramifications is that of the place of women, gender and sexuality. The dominant patriarchal assumptions of various disciplines were challenged by feminist criticism, and these challenges dovetailed and dialogued with the efforts of women’s rights groups in the country at large. Arguably, it was this confluence of radical critique and radical politics that placed questions of gender equality, sexual orientation, and sexual harassment on the agenda of at least some policymakers and lawmakers, and helped create space for it in the public sphere, as well. But as feminists have extensively documented, such efforts were also, to some extent, co-­opted and their cutting edge blunted by a range of governmental and state institutions, as well as by NGOs.5 Nevertheless, there is no gainsaying the fact that it was radical social sciences and humanities that have made it impossible to simply return to the old ways of looking at women’s rights, sexual rights and gendered and sexual violence  –­ the world over, but especially in India. In recent months, the debate on sexual harassment in universities all over the world has surfaced especially sharply. It has become clear that what feminists have achieved institutionally is not enough. But those achievements and the fights that led to them cannot simply be dismissed  –­ a concerted right wing assault on them shows that they have hurt the status quo in many ways. Take, for example, Jawaharlal Nehru University’s Gender Sensitization Committee Against Sexual Harassment (GSCASH), which has been a model for how to organize against sexual harassment in the workplace, partly because it was designed to ensure that the structure of the complaints committee did not simply reflect the interests of those in power. GSCASH was constituted by students and teachers who were elected on the basis of their experience of, and commitment to fighting, sexual harassment. I now teach in the

140  Ania Loomba United States, where universities have elaborate mechanisms to deal with sexual harassment. But in all of them, to the best of my knowledge, redressal lies in the hands of the university administration. The result is that cases of sexual harassment involving senior professors have often been inadequately dealt with. Whereas once we in India looked at the ways in which this matter was handled in Western universities, over the past many years I have often thought that the reverse should be the case. But in September 2017, JNU authorities dismantled this system and changed it to one in which a committee would be largely nominated. They were technically acting in accord with a new law which leaves it to employers to set up internal committees investigating sexual harassment.6 The history of JNU’s committee shows that gender-­sensitive legislation grows out of a dialogue with feminist and democratic movements and scholarship. The onslaught on it must therefore be seen as part of the relentless curtailing of spaces for democratic politics on university campuses and in the country at large. I have suggested that the ideal of the university as a space for free debate, freedom of speech, and knowledge in all spheres is constantly under pressure from, and in tension with, another ideal  –­ that of the university as a place which participates in the creation of a democratic, inclusive society. It is easy to claim that both ideals necessarily go hand in hand; indeed, even elitist institutions pay lip service to their merger and create pockets of inclusion for historically disenfranchised students. In practice, the hierarchy between different educational institutions the world over reminds us that the two ideals cannot easily sit together. In today’s India, if we are truly to grapple with the possibilities of their intersection, we will need to keep alive different disciplinary traditions and ideas, especially those which are threatened by the logic of the marketplace. I am aware, of course, that an education in liberal arts actually has very upper-­class roots. As I pointed out at the beginning of this essay, the ideology of a genteel education that was ‘above’ the vulgar demands of everyday life went hand in hand with a deeply coercive practice. Literature, philosophy, history, languages  –­ all of these subjects that are today often deemed ‘useless’  –­ have been deeply political disciplines, and each has been used to maintain or challenge power. Mathematics and the sciences, on the other hand, are not just practical but philosophical, too. Thus, when I argue for the necessity of keeping alive disciplines that are threatened by the logic of the marketplace, it is not to redraw older disciplinary hierarchies but resist present-­day ones. And when we defend universities, we do so in full knowledge of their difficult histories and their inherent contradictions.

Of utopias and universities 141

Notes 1 For those who don’t know the story: Drona, the great teacher of the Pandava princes, refused to accept Eklavya, a young forest prince, and in some versions a ‘lower’ caste, as his student. But Eklavya practices archery in front of a statue of Drona, and claims that Drona is his teacher anyway. Realizing that Eklavya has surpassed the guru’s best student Arjuna, Drona demands that Eklavya cut off his right thumb as guru dakshina (‘a gift given to the teacher after the completion of one’s formal education’). 2 Ajit Kumar Jha writes in India Today (3 February 2016): “Rohith’s is not the lone tragedy. A spectre of suicide deaths by several Dalit students is haunting India. Out of 25 students who committed suicide only in north India and Hyderabad since 2007, 23 were Dalits. This included two in the prestigious All India Institute of Medical Sciences in New Delhi, and 11 in Hyderabad city alone. Systematic data does not exist for such suicides, but the problem runs far deeper than a few students deciding to end their own lives after being defeated by the system”. https:/­/­www. indiatoday.in/­magazine/­the-­big-­story/­story/­20160215-­dalits-­untouchable-­ rohith-­vemula-­caste-­discrimination-­828418-­2016-­02-­03 (accessed on 31 December 2017). 3 British Council, Understanding India: The Future of Higher Education and Opportunities of International Cooperation (February 2014), www.brit ishcouncil.org/­sites/­. . ./­understanding_india_report.pdf; Ernst and Young, ‘Private Sector Participation in Indian Higher Education’, Presented at the FICCI Higher Education Summit 2011; www.idfc.com/­pdf/­report/­2012/­ Chapter_16.pdf (both accessed on 31 December 2017). 4 Refer to www.business-­standard.com/­article/­current-­affairs/­jnu-­wins-­visitor-­ s-­awards-­2017-­for-­best-­university-­117030200808_1.html (accessed on 28 December 2017). 5 See essays in Mary E. John ed., Women’s Studies in India (New Delhi: Penguin Books, 2008), and especially the Introduction to this book. 6 For more detail, see my essay ‘The Assault on JNU’s Sexual Harassment Panel Is Yet Another Attack on Democratic Spaces in India’, Scroll (September  23, 2017), https:/­/­scroll.in/­article/­851616/­the-­assault-­on-­jnus-­sexual-­ harassment-­p anel-­i s-­y et-­a nother-­a ttack-­o n-­d emocratic-­s paces-­i n-­i ndia (accessed on 31 December 2017).

References Academics for Creative Reforms. 2015. ‘What Is to Be Done about Indian Universities?’, Economic and Political Weekly, 50(24): 25–­29. All India Survey on Higher Education (2012–­2013). 2015. New Delhi: Ministry of Human Resource Development. British Council. 2014. Understanding India: The Future of Higher Education and Opportunities of International Cooperation. Available at www. britishcouncil.org/­sites/­. . ./­understanding_india_report.pdf (accessed on 28 December 2017). Collini, Stefan. 2012. What Are Universities for? UK: Penguin Books (Kindle Edition).

142  Ania Loomba Ernst and Young. 2012. ‘Private Sector Participation in Indian Higher Education’. Presented at the FICCI Higher Education Summit 2011. Available at www.idfc.com/­ pdf/­ report/­ 2012/­ Chapter_16.pdf (accessed on 28 December 2017). Jha, Ajit Kumar. 2016. ‘The Dalits: Still Untouchable’, India Today (February  3). Available at https:/­/­www.indiatoday.in/­magazine/­the-­big-­story/­story/­ 20160215-­dalits-­untouchable-­rohith-­vemula-­caste-­discrimination-­828418-­ 2016-­02-­03 (accessed on 31 December 2017). John, Mary E. (ed.). 2008. Women’s Studies in India. New Delhi: Penguin Books. Loomba, Ania. 2017. ‘The Assault on JNU’s Sexual Harassment Panel Is Yet Another Attack on Democratic Spaces in India’, Scroll (September 23). Available at https:/­/­scroll.in/­article/­851616/­the-­assault-­on-­jnus-­sexual-­harassment-­ panel-­is-­yet-­another-­attack-­on-­democratic-­spaces-­in-­india (accessed on 28 December 2017). Okri, Ben. 1995. Astonishing the Gods. Johannesburg: Phoenix Books.

6 Audit cultures and the Indian university as credit-­capital Rina Ramdev

In December of 2015, on the eve of the many crises to rage across universities in India, a significant development that would impact the future of higher education in this country was consolidating itself at the OP Jindal Global University. A three-­day summit, “Why Emerging Economies Need World Class Universities”, was organized by the ‘The Times Higher Education’, where the THE cohort responsible for enshrining globally a system of competitive ranking among universities announced its successful local India entrenchment by expansively including ‘BRICS [Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa] and Emerging Economies’ in its contexts. Alert to and in consonance with this new lexical infiltration that attempts to make rankings, ratings and excellence watchwords central to institutional discourse, the Indian government in its 2016 budgetary allocation declared a provision to financially promote 20 universities, both public and private, to the stature of ‘world-­class’ teaching and research institutions. Further, the Ministry of Human Resource Development (MHRD) in recognition of the disadvantageously aligned performance of Indian universities within international ranking configurations, set up its own India-­ centric methodology, the National Institute Ranking Framework (NIRF). Appended to this is an initiative that had always been in place but has in recent years acquired a promulgative sanctioning, the National Assessment and Accreditation Council (NAAC). Funded by the UGC as an autonomous accreditation agency, the NAAC was established in 1994 and since October 2010, its five-­yearly assessment has been made mandatory for all institutions of higher learning. As against the ‘recognized’ certifying that had previously sufficed as a one-­step requirement, this demand of a continuous audit now responds to the protocol of raised accountability linked to funding. But before I attempt an understanding of this new turn, a brief history

144  Rina Ramdev of the changes seen in the area of higher education will allow me to trace my argument back to this point.

Reforms and the new economies of knowledge production Rationalized and apace with the larger neo-­liberal shifts globally and transitions into its ‘knowledge-­based economy’ are changes in the name of ‘reforms’ being forced upon universities in India. This is ushering in a transformation that insidiously rides on the backs of the state’s withdrawal from social spending on services of public good, leaving them open to the encroaching logic of the market. In the case of the University of Delhi, salvos like the semester model, the erstwhile Four Year Undergraduate Programme (FYUP) and the Choice Based Credit System (CBCS) have been attempts at ethicalizing the university as an enterprise, accountable to the student, now vocabularized as ‘consumer’. Within this is the move to a technocratized ideal that instrumentalizes learning and pedagogy as end products, while privileging skill over knowledge and performance over critical inquiry. Even as the structure and content of the FYUP was intended to ally with industry through curricula serviced for a vocationalized training, a similar downscaling had already been in place with the semester structure and its emphasis on examination and evaluation over actual learning time. If for students, semesterization fuels a redoubled competitive system of testing, its pressures on teaching encourage a modularized approach that benefits best from lesson plans and power points. With the newly introduced CBCS (now waiting to be implemented country-­wide), there is a clear move at eliding difference and variation and installing instead, a standardized measure of one-­size-­fits-­all. These structural innovations and reforms, imposed top-­down, are shifts within the neo-­liberal imaginary attempting to change the very zeitgeist of the public university, a shift evidenced in the Lyotardian cautionary: The question (overt or implied) now asked by the professionalist student, the State, or institutions of higher education is no longer “Is it true?” but “What use is it?” In the context of mercantilization of knowledge, more often than not this question is equivalent to: “Is it saleable?” And in the contest of power-­growth: “Is it efficient?” (Lyotard 1984: 51) The assessing metrics of the Academic Performance Index (API) for faculty are also framed to quantify growth and output as qualifiable

Audit cultures and credit-­capital 145 measures for promotion. In its enumerative economy, both teaching and the classroom space cede teacherly investment to the ‘profitable’ pursuit of publications and conference participation that serve up points for appraisal. An extreme form of professionalism is asserted through demands on efficiency and productivity, one that rewards and recognizes output and not the liminalities and imaginative devisings that teaching transits through. The API also encourages a competitive academic lay and work ethic in its awarding of a higher set of points to single-­authored publications over joint collaborative efforts. The logic of academic capitalism disregards traditional values of collegiality in the drive to make faculty both entrepreneurial and individualistic. Even as individual responsibility is invoked, research and teaching are audited by normativized mechanisms of assessment that iron cage individuals in a Weberian economy of efficiency, rational calculation and control. Here the paradigmatic concerns of neo-­liberalism make professionalism and standardization de rigeur to its functioning. A system of bureaucratized norms and procedures that define this new managerialism is, as Beatrice Hibou points out, not really at odds with neo-­liberalism: An art of governing based on the market cannot be embodied in laissez-­faire, but rather in a ‘framework policy’ paving the way for an ‘active’ governmentality necessary to ensuring that society as a whole conforms to the principles of enterprise, competition and the market. (Hibou 2015: 13) This has approximated in greatest part a heteronomous referentiality, within which everyday practices selectively alternate between state control and self-­governing laissez-­faire, creating Janus-­faced techno-­ bureaucratic institutions. This concurrence of state control and market-­driven codes and conduct is already in the present moment blurring the boundaries between public and private. And in a deferential nod to its demands, universities are changing their structure as also their modes of functioning. Apropos this, universities are now prone to maintaining a large contractualized adjunct workforce, one that eases their financial liability viz. employee benefits that state-­funded institutions are bound by. This institutionalized precarity signposts the neo-­liberal logic of commercialized education, one that allows for cheap labour and its adjunctification within a business-­ driven model. As an established practice in American universities, Chomsky’s trenchant

146  Rina Ramdev critique of the conditions of this ‘pracariat’ recognizes that, “The idea is to transfer instruction to precarious workers, which improves discipline and control but also enables the transfer of funds to other purposes apart from education” (Chomsky 2014). In India too, there have been attempts at controlling state expenditure on education, reflected again in the 2016 budgetary allocation that hovers around 3.5% of the Gross Domestic Product, as against the recommended 6%. Nudged by this continuing neglect, institutions are forced into the practice of raising funds for events and conferences through sponsorship from corporates, while an array of specialized ‘self-­ financing courses’ outside of curricula are on offer by colleges for a fee. Within this, both teaching and research are wrested from their fundamental preoccupations, their raison d’être that propels them into new critical knowledge. Instead they find themselves forced into the ‘commonsense’ of social demand, one that alternates between the market and statist agendas. The draft of the New Education Policy (NEP) 2016, now in the public domain, makes no attempt at challenging the onslaught of neo-­ liberal values or at countering the new model of the university as a service provider for skilled labour. The proposed changes in the NEP are in fact, drawn out to shape and ready learning in congruence with the vicissitudes of the new ‘knowledge-­based economy’ and its soft power. An inculcative goal of cohesion and status quoism, as against critical thinking, praxis and intervention is aimed at, in a bid to create a docilized citizenry of student-­ consumers. Unsurprisingly, the document is suspicious of campus political movements and student politics that many universities in India are seen to be the breeding ground for. In most part, these are policy changes percolating from recommendations like those of the 2001 Birla-­Ambani report and the 2006 National Knowledge Commission, which had sought to usher in industry-­linked research, private and global investment in higher education, and the setting up of frameworks for rating and ranking institutions. The draft of the NEP reinforces the same, with an added thrust on processes of evaluation for institutions that now link performance to funding.

Anxieties of excellence Indian newsmagazines, like Outlook and India Today, have in the past released rankings, ranking colleges and universities through their own indigenously worked out algorithms. Yet even as these rankings never impacted funding, their metrics went a long way in creating

Audit cultures and credit-­capital 147 pools of elitism and neglect. Within a ranking play off, higher education devolves into a competitive, hierarchically stratified system that institutionalizes competition in ways so profound as to create an entire class of non-­achievers who ‘fail’ by virtue of being ranked low. In highlighting and showcasing the high ranked thus is a covert formula that generates excess demand for the few, while negativizing into oblivion the subjacent others. Far more crucially, from within the politics of this ranking, a system of differential funding and favouring would in the future ease itself into the welfare model, subverting its very foundational ethic. What rankings also bolster is a disciplinary practice that reviews performance through processes of benchmarking and standardization. As far as measuring output goes, the favouring of the STEM subjects  –­ science, technology, engineering and ­mathematics  –­ foundational to the industrial-­corporate world thrives, riding established biases. On the other hand, language departments (barring English) will be thwarted by the limited number of peer-­ reviewed journals that exist in the discipline, as also the number of readers for its publications within the language. In ranging output and performance, what is dismissed and passed over is a history of social and intellectual dispossessions that has gone on to regulate the character of higher education and its strategic alliances with local social capital, its responsiveness to ‘reform’ agendas and its felt aggregations of community interests. This regime of audit, ratings and bureaucratic control selects and separates institutions as estimable through its pitch of ‘best practices’. As a superlative evaluating mechanism, ‘best practices’ assume a convergence of institutional interests in the self-­sufficient norm of ‘quality’, thereby ordering custom and habit within a logic of meritocratic privilege. And yet, there is minimal engagement with the incursive vocabularies of this new regime, evident for instance in the vapid, tedious outlining of the idea of ‘Excellence’ in the NAAC’s guidelines. It means the quality of something being extremely good. In an academic context it means the pursuit of the best strategies to reach higher knowledge and, in a pedagogic context, the best ways of imparting it to learners. This is a universal criterion because in any sphere of life anyone would want the best and none would settle for the second best, if they could so manage . . . this criterion helps to apply rigour in academic activity, in order to ensure the bestness. (NAAC 2017: 65)

148  Rina Ramdev This baggy, ill-­defined categorization gestures at a de facto impoverishment of the university’s content and mission, the ‘dereferentialization’ that Bill Readings had presciently foretold in The University in Ruins. The appeal to excellence marks the fact that there is no longer any idea of the University, or rather that the idea has lost all content. As a non-­referential unit of value entirely internal to the system, excellence marks nothing more than the moment of technology’s self-­reflection. All that the system requires is for activity to take place, and the empty notion of excellence refers to nothing other than the optimal input/­output ratio in matters of information. (Readings 1996: 39) Drawing out a genealogy of ‘The University of Excellence’, Readings points out the emptying of content in the ritualized recall of ‘excellence’, leaving it to function as an empty signifier. Moreover, the idea of excellence, never neutral, feeds into the demands of technological capitalism by processing information and rationalizing activities through schedules and timings, unremittingly aligned to increase output. Excellence is the self-­image of power as a conscious totality, creating a bubble of value torn from any obligation to relativity or difference. The rupture from referentiality leaves it open to the society of the spectacle and the ideological distensions of capital. Because the very idea of ‘excellence’ consists in its internal manipulability, it begs being forced into a sham economy of metrics. In this it exerts a triumphal domination as it hierarchizes work and workers through a graded performance index. The rhetoric of excellence, also reductive in its reach, flattens difference and pushes for competition, on occasion between incommensurables. Departments, colleges and universities are pitted against each other, compelled to prove an excellence that remains ungraspable, but one that makes them rivals forever. Even as competitive logic divests the very idea of excellence jettisoning it into empty signification, it can in radical ways also unsettle research and pedagogical ethics of both individuals and institutions. This was played out in farcical ways during a NAAC team’s interaction with an English Literature department. The team’s one-­point agenda and intent was to know how many members of the department were publishing regularly with the Economic and Political Weekly, in comparison with colleagues from other departments. The facts that the English faculty had several published books to its credit and that the EPW specializes primarily as a social science journal, were reasonings the visiting team summarily dismissed. Within the NAAC’s competitive ethic, it

Audit cultures and credit-­capital 149 views colleagues as rivals and academic work as a contest, commeasuring in its sweep all protean unequables. “Excellence draws only one boundary: the boundary that protects the unrestricted power of the bureaucracy. And if a particular department’s kind of excellence fails to conform, then that department can be eliminated without apparent risk to the system” (Readings 1997). Further, the NAAC’s schema of ratings is projected through the assumption that quantifiable data, as against numerous unaccountable variables, is all that is necessary for assessing quality and distinction. In point of fact, local ethnographies of NAAC inspections at institutions would go a long way in exposing the coercive regimes that orchestrate these seemingly mundane and mechanical audit practices.

Analoguing the crises Even as the academia has never been free of competition or stayed otherwise ethically pristine, what has come in the present moment is a decree that institutionalizes a new culture of competition in the pursuit of ‘excellence’. This finds denouement in the coercive technologies of monitoring auxiliaries like the NIRF, THE and the NAAC. Behind the innocuous vocabulary of quality, efficiency and best practices, the NAAC reviewing carries both rewards and threats for high and poor ratings. The annexing of future funding to ratings also contributes to instances of data tinkering and embellished portfolios, and NAAC teams periodically send out warnings to institutions against the outsourcing of ‘Self Study Reports’. Colleges and campuses have also been known to undertake temporary furbishing and bedecking to spruce up walls and grounds that later lapse back into their pre-­NAAC state of neglect and indifference, even as students and staff are prepped and primed through scripted performances staged for inspection teams. That there is a culture on the make here, feeding off pressures and anxieties, spawning rigged enhancements to meet assessment criteria, is evident. But the ways in which auditing’s panoptic inspective gaze creates political technologies of the self, as individuals internalize its disciplinary practices in their everyday conduct, also begs a perspectival understanding. Furthermore, accountability might not on its own always presage a pernicious agenda, but within untrammelled market metrics its formalization into a culture of auditing, can very easily mobilize structures of surveillance and control. In its originary moment, the regulatory mechanism of the NAAC functioned as a ‘soft law’, placing institutions in a voluntary relation to its auditing  –­ but what is now obvious is the way in which it wields authoritative control

150  Rina Ramdev over institutional funding. The draft NEP 2016 quite clearly mandates greater power to NAAC assessment: An institution will be ranked on a scale of I to VII. VII representing the highest and I the lowest in the category. Those in the top two of the scale should be given full operational autonomy in all academic and administrative matters; those in category VI would be provided incentives, guidance and advice to move to category VII. Those on the bottom of the scale in category I would be put on notice for immediate closure. Those in category II would be given a warning that they are under close watch, and could be considered for closure unless they move up the scale. (GoI 2016: 9.32.2) The new differential logic of funding and the threat of its withdrawal mark the expropriation of the university as a public good. The top ranked are ‘rewarded’ with “full operational autonomy in all academic and administrative matters”, while those ranked poorly face the threat of closure. In effect the imperative played out is the decampment of both, the highest and lowest ranking from the public-­funded model, either in the granting of operational autonomy or by decreeing closure. In the first place, institutions are forced to justify their eligibility for state funding in the present, along with a renewed plea for continued funding in the future; and yet this is accompanied by the knowledge that an excellent rating could result in the withdrawal of that very funding. This is the wily paradox of the neo-­liberal demand, contracted upon all institutions compelled into the audit rationale, one that comes from the longue durée of the state’s collusion with market forces. While the state moves towards reducing its financial liability in higher education institutions, it still attempts to retain ideological control over their day-­to-­day functioning through internal structures of bureaucratic control. In silently operating thus, without actually routing change through a concerted, stated policy avowal, there is a strategic veiling of the move and its cunning futures. With the audit metanarrative’s radical interpenetration of differential funding and financial metrics, the script of private capital is fast encroaching upon the way public universities are being administered. By way of a granted autonomy, institutions would be free to raise private investment as also student fee, and quite decorously commission their own exit from the welfarist ideology of state funding. Furthermore, in acceding to a competitive strain that allows for rankings, ratings and awards of excellence, a volatile, speculative economy opens up carrying in its wake the possibility of the Trojan horse of large-­scale

Audit cultures and credit-­capital 151 private ingression, seizing and changing the ways in which the public-­ funded model works. Wendy Brown reads this as the new ‘speculative’ turn, whereby universities, like other market driven services, showcase themselves through elaborate and often embellished portfolios to attract investment. Today, market actors  –­ from individuals to firms, universities to states, restaurants to magazines  –­ are more often concerned with their speculatively determined value, their ratings and rankings that shape future value, than with immediate profit. All are tasked with enhancing present and future value through self-­investments that in turn attract investors. (Brown 2015b) The market rationality of ‘austerity politics’ and ‘responsibilization’ (vocabularized within neo-­liberal governance globally) could in the not-­too-­distant future demand that universities in India also set up investor models to attract future funding and investment. In fact, this reorganizing to suit a financialized economy is already congealing through directives from the NAAC, NIRF and their setting up of colleges and universities as ‘brands’ through ranked and rated excellence. New guidelines introduced, like student feedback, finds assessing traction both in the API and the NAAC, despite the political reservations expressed by teachers against the inherent social biases within its transcript. When made public, as it is done in Western academia, student ratings of faculty help institutions enhance their branding, the way proliferating customer service feedback models do. Even alumni associations, previously aggregated only through a nostalgia-­imbued networking, are now taken far more seriously by their alma maters, as they are by visiting NAAC teams. In mobilizing profiles of distinguished alumni, the promise of the institution is retrospectively certified to determine prospects for future investment. In all of this, every function of the university is being indexed by a financialized code that turns an existing asset into a mortgage by enhancing its value for future dividends  –­ fitting “themselves in ways that will outperform the competition and align themselves with good assessments about where those markets may be going” as Wendy Brown argues (Brown 2015a: 109).

Without alibis Historically, universities have not been able to remain untethered from broad politico-­ cultural and economic shifts, despite the swaddling

152  Rina Ramdev bands of critical enquiry and radical thought. But contemporary policy changes affecting higher education seem enshrined within a profound immutability which could  –­ unless resisted  –­ severely impact research, pedagogy and also labour laws through the consecrative will of private investment. One of the modes of resistance marshalled by the ‘university under siege’ (now, a familiar image in intellectual folklore) has been in the rallying of critical pedagogy as a space of radical possibility, as the possibility of an adventure outside the known. And yet, the productivization and disciplining of teaching’s labour, existing as it does within the political economy of promotional parameters and timetabled hours, undercuts the very hope of this freedom and excess. That teaching in its aleatory unpredictability could augur secrets dangerous to the regime wilfully elides this compromised materiality, and celebrations of its will to intemperate promiscuity would always be both premature and presumptuous. The study and teaching of the humanities has also historically ascribed itself a messianic status. That there lies in its disciplinary passageways the potential for imaginative activism and subversive critiques has also created aggrandizements that could sever it interminably from more determinate committings. In the romanticization of its transgressive possibilities as against the indurate practices of other disciplines, the grand lament on the state of the humanities, in fact, rides the same moral high-­ground premised upon the liberal humanist hubris of unconditional freedom. But this fetish of the ‘immanent critique’ that the humanities presage unto themselves only internalizes as defence the audit rationale of neo-­liberalism in the language of an imperial self-­consciousness. Within an Enlightenment understanding, the university’s originary moment is in its separation from the social, a separation that in effect creates an allowance for its charter of autonomy. With every encroachment and encumbrance forced upon it, a dark foretelling of the death of its ideal has found easy, resonant circulation. And yet, despite the nostalgia and lament for a lost ideal, the university’s retreat into an insularized autonomy outside of time can only be relayed through the liberal sanction of its privileged rights. The epochal moment of the university’s autonomy remains already subsumed within the neo-­ liberal logic of private capital and its promise of exemption and self-­ rule. Perhaps a new politics of the university is waiting to be founded, one that will be forged from the very idea of public good that defines it, as against the palliatives of ‘social outreach’ programmes that institutions offer the neo-­liberal project. For this, the university will have to exceed its microcosmic context, segue with the social and create

Audit cultures and credit-­capital 153 solidarities with other public infrastructures. Crucially, this cannot be undertaken by a cordoning of either the disciplinary borders of the humanities or those of its own. Bill Readings, while arguing against the university’s self-­projection as a model of free speech and rational discussion, “a site where the community is founded in the sharing of a commitment to a rational abstraction” (Readings 1996: 180–­81) had contemplated the possibility of a ‘community of dissensus’. This community was to function within the perimeters of the university, bringing in ideas of unaccountability and resistance against the regulative frameworks of excellence. But alongside Readings’ directive, perhaps it is also now time for the dissensual community to step outside its own infinitesimal campus spaces and look beyond the university’s penchant for a self-­romanticized beleagueredness, time now to make urgent attempts at forging alliances with larger structural crises outside the university. Beyond its strong trade unionist voice, and also the vanguardist position within civil society movements that it has been able to forge, the university has to also look at the elitism that prevents it from seeing itself as a space of ‘work’. As neo-­liberalism’s demands change the way workers and working conditions play out across both public services and industry, academia’s ivory tower isolationism needs a reimagining of worker consciousness outside of the binaries of intellectual versus non-­intellectual labour. The monastic mode thus far arrogated by the teacher upon herself would do well to forge a collective resistance through a reaching out to other publics combating neo-­liberalism’s many assaults. As the macroeconomic vocabulary of resource crunch, casualization, performance and productivity-­linked work mark the state’s justificatory threat of withdrawing first from its welfare schemes like health and pension for its workers, to the larger foreseeable exit from spending on public infrastructures like education, transport and health, a broad-­based social coalition of workers would strengthen the fight against neo-­liberal restructuring. A linking of struggles through the imagination of ‘work’ could create a viable movement for renewed social action. Critical exigencies at this juncture require a manifesto that looks beyond both a disciplinary structure and the larger infrastructural borders of the university. The SOS sent out, privileging its own distress, is located in a liberal opportunism whereby the university perceives for itself a transcendental position. Perhaps the time has come to go back to the larger metanarrative of crises that has structurally laid siege upon public services, and not retreat into assertions of liberal privilege.

154  Rina Ramdev

References Brown, Wendy. 2015a. Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution. New York: Zone Books. ———. 2015b. ‘What Exactly Is Neoliberalism?’, Dissent (April 2). Available at www.dissentmagazine.org/­blog/­booked-­3-­what-­exactly-­is-­neoliberalism-­ wendy-­brown-­undoing-­the-­demos (accessed on 31 December 2017). Chomsky, Noam. 2014. ‘How America’s Great University System Is Being Destroyed’, Alternet (February 28). Available at www.alternet.org/­ corpo rate-­accountability-­and-­workplace/­chomsky-­how-­americas-­great-­university-­ system-­getting (accessed on 31 December 2017). Government of India (GoI). 2016. Report of the Committee for Evolution of the New Education Policy. New Delhi: Ministry of Human Resource Development (MHRD). Available at www.nuepa.org/­New/­download/­NEP2016/­ ReportNEP.pdf (accessed on 31 December 2017). Hibou, Beatrice. 2015. The Bureaucratization of the World in the Neoliberal Era: International and Comparative Perspective. (trans.) Andrew Brown. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Lyotard, Jean F. 1984. The Postmodern Condition: A Report. Manchester: Manchester University Press. National Assessment and Accreditation Council (NAAC). 2017. Best Practices. Available at www.naac.gov.in/­ best_practices.asp (accessed on 31 December 2017). Readings, Bill. 1996. The University in Ruins. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ———. 1997. ‘Theory after Theory: Institutional Questions’, in Ann Kaplan and George Levine (eds.) The Politics of Research (pp. 21–­33). New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Available at http:/­/­courses.wcupa.edu/­ fletcher/­special/­readings.htm (accessed on 31 December 2017).

7 Of feudal intellectual capital The history of the new provincial universities Debaditya Bhattacharya

I Hashtag: are we JNU? बेटा, जान लो की यह JNU नही,ं CUB है.ं (Son, do bear in mind that this is not JNU, but CUB)

Such was the veiled threat that came from a teacher in Central University of Bihar (CUB), when a student of law urged discussions in class about the legal-­technical merits of the sedition charges slapped against ‘anti-­ national’ research scholars at Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU). While the obvious tenor of intimidation in such a classroom snub is hard to be missed, what is really alarming is that such tactics of verbal persecution have become part of the everyday disciplinary regime around certain university spaces in the country. The Central University of Bihar  –­ renamed in a December 2014 Amendment of its founding Act as ‘Central University of South Bihar (CUSB)’  –­ is one of the 16 new central universities established and incorporated by the Central Universities Act 2009. Nine years into its existence, the university still functions out of two separate temporary establishments in Patna and Gaya  –­ while construction work for its permanent campus is underway in the provincial suburb of Panchanpur. Expectedly, the lack of permanent physical infrastructures to house the functions of the university has been used by its functionaries to justify all kinds of administrative anomalies  –­ and to demand a moral ethic of ‘patience’-­as-­silence from the student community. Basic infrastructural provisions like hostel accommodation, mess meals, power back-­up, drinking water, laboratory equipment, medical facilities and common room spaces have consistently been denied, discontinued or disrupted

156  Debaditya Bhattacharya with the excuse of not having a permanent campus. Whenever students have risen up in resistance, the managerial class of teacher-­ administrators has either resorted to the rhetorical sedative of the ‘happy CUB family’ or openly threatened a suppression of the ‘virus of student protest’ (as one former interim Vice Chancellor quoteth!). Incidentally, the most commonplace expression of disapproval of student activities  –­ ranging from organizing film-­screenings/­panel discussions to protesting against administrative indifference to conditions of hostel living  –­ takes the form of teacherly insinuations like “या बेटा, तुम तो नेता बनने चले हो?” (“So son, you’re grooming to be a [political] leader, right?”) or “JNU जाने की तईयारी मे ं हो?” (“Ah, so you’re readying to go to JNU, is it?”)1 As much as these everyday instances of moral-­behavioural policing work at the anecdotal level to reinforce a populist stereotype around JNU as apparent source and succour of ‘student politics’, what gets performed in the process is more than a symbolic erasure of the history of progressive student movements across other parts of the country. At the heart of this ‘don’t-­be-­the-­JNU-­type’ parable of cautionary import lies a negation of the liberal humanist myth around the colonial origins of the university system in India. With the force of commonsense, the liberal is instead shunned as the condition of possibility of the ‘political’ within education  –­ and the much-­vaunted academic reformism of depoliticizing higher education is advertised in a decisive return to the secular feudal roots of the modern Indian public university. The ‘JNU-­versus-­us’ binary that is conveniently bandied around as a logic of deterrence as well as the bureaucratic rationale of university governance, is not so much a ghettoization of a privileged exception as it is an assertion of a far more living legacy and historicity of the institutional norm. It merely alerts us that no matter how many of those in these lesser-­ known and still-­less-­written-­about Indian universities participated in hashtag campaigns of #WeAreJNU in early 2016, there is precious little in the history of our universities that approximates to what has severally been termed ‘the idea of JNU’. Much to the contrary, most central and state universities located outside media-­circumscriptions of the ‘national’ (or, ‘what the nation wants to know’!) not only work with a perverse self-­consciousness of their abstention from public opinion, but also actively feed into ‘local’ institutional networks of elite alliance and influence in terms of everyday practices of governance. The ‘provincial’ is granted legitimacy by virtue of its structural difference from and distrust of the metropolitan university as a ‘myth’ of ideological immanence. What is suggested here is that the ethnographic

Of feudal intellectual capital 157 precondition of urbanism that went into the making of the ‘idea of the university’ as a colonial experiment is finally worth nothing, because the history of India’s educational reform testifies to the essentially ­secular-feudal character of their material infrastructures. The new central universities, legislated into presence as non-­urban public infrastructures of state-­sponsored developmentalism, play up this spectre of the ‘old established university’ as divorced from material considerations of social context and demography and therefore failing the ‘work’ of the university vis-­a-­vis society. The re-­connection of the university-­as-­colonial-­fantasy with the lives of people-­as-­human-­ capital would thus mandate, through legislations like the Central Universities Act of 2009, a return to autocratic coalitions of elite interests. This paper would argue that public-­ funded higher education in India, despite its urban-­metropolitan instantiations for the most part, has both legislatively and materially been structured by what I call a secular feudal complex of interests. In the following sections, I will attempt to show that the state of affairs in the new central ­universities  –­ rather than striking in us fear of the unprecedented  –­ actually confirms a policy-­trend in public education that dates back to the early nineteenth century. Taking Bihar for a case-­example, the events that lead to the establishment of Patna University in 1917 and its subsequent history of social access with respect to educational opportunities seem only to entrench our suspicions around the ‘liberal’ idea of the university. The postcolonial policy on education, beginning from the Radhakrishnan Commission Report of 1948–­49 to the currently debated third National Policy on Education (2016), will then be briefly taken up for analysis to demonstrate the underpinnings of this ‘liberal university’ in independent India. We shall return in the final section to the provisions of the Central Universities Act (2009), and what it forebodes for the state of democracy and the quest for justice in Indian higher education. The new central universities and the fable of democratization The framework for the Act of 2009 was guided by the Eleventh Five-­ Year Plan (2007–­2012) of the Indian government with its “special focus for improving access and equity [of higher education] in remote regions and geographically disadvantaged places” (GoI 2007: 11, Clause 3.3.1), and it was later bolstered by the 2009 findings of the Yash Pal Committee urging the Ministry to “respond to the needs of different regions in India in order to ensure not only equity and access

158  Debaditya Bhattacharya but also quality and opportunity of growth along the academic vertical” (GoI 2009b: 66, Recommendation xvii, Article 3.4). Pledging to a democratization of higher education, the Act instituted new universities in 12 Indian states and incorporated three more erstwhile state universities as central institutions within their respective territorial jurisdictions. Keeping with its declared purview of expanding reach, each of these universities was set up at a relatively remote location  –­ mostly rural or semi-­urban  –­ with hardly any semblance of an extant academic culture. This was important, in that these places were now expected to benefit from the traffic of cultural and intellectual production as much as the reduced social costs of learning were to make university education affordable and available to many outside dominant class-­constituencies. What happened instead was just the opposite. The newly established universities, with far steeper fee structures than the older metropolitan lot,2 not only aided in structurally excluding those avowedly being catered to  –­ but they also used their geographical segregation to appropriate local feudal modes of functioning in the way of self-­contained personal fiefdoms. A few snippets from the recent history of some of these universities would suffice to bear out the truth in this statement. In the early days of August 2016, around 90 students of Central University of South Bihar went on a nine-­day-­long strike over the demand to have their courses recognized by regulatory authorities. Ten months away from graduating out of these courses, these students did not know if the university’s B.Ed. (Bachelor of Education) degrees would hold any credibility, because of the lack of requisite approval from statutory bodies. The university had, in 2013, instituted a couple of ‘innovative programmes’ at the School of Education  –­ at the behest of the University Grants Commission  –­ without seeking necessary approvals from regulatory authorities for teacher-­training curriculum. The National Council for Teacher Education (NCTE) subsequently issued a public notice deeming the said running courses as illegal and unrecognized, and it later only agreed to grant recognition to the university’s curriculum prospectively from 2015  –­ while leaving two batches of admitted students in the lurch about the validity of their degrees. In the time that elapsed, not only had the university not been able to secure any assurance of positive intervention from the UGC, NCTE or the ministry  –­ but it had instead unflinchingly gone ahead and introduced a Masters course in Education in 2016, again without having received the nod from NCTE. Admissions for the Masters course were completed in June–­July that year, all the while duping the public into believing that all necessary procedures were complied with.

Of feudal intellectual capital 159 When the beleaguered B.Ed. students went on strike, the ­university  –­ fearing an imminent backlash from those freshly admitted into a yet-­ unrecognized M.Ed. course  –­ arbitrarily decided to suspend the new course ‘for the time being’ without cancelling their admissions. It was around the same time that the administration of CUSB decided to discontinue yet another course started in the previous year  –­ Bachelor of Vocational Studies (B.Voc.)  –­ and the students registered in the programme were either handed out one-­year diplomas or forced to write ‘letters of volition’ seeking admission into some other undergraduate course at the university. While the realities underlying the Prime Minister’s flagship of a ‘Skill India’ programme could not be better tested but at a central university, the illegality of manipulating students to write letters expressing their ‘desire’ to migrate to some other course explains the feudal extortions of ‘consensus’ that run these universities. In February–­ March 2016, while university campuses across the country were reacting to the institutional murder of Rohith Vemula (The Hindu 2016) and the social boycott of Dalits on HCU campus, students at Central University of Haryana were brutally attacked and rounded up by local goons of Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP), student wing of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), when the former tried to organize a peaceful candle-­light procession in Vemula’s memory. Soon after, a newspaper report documenting ABVP’s protest rally against ‘anti-­national’ students in JNU appeared on the university’s official notice-­board, almost as a warning to its own students. The university administration, apprehending antagonistic forms of solidarity from its student community and an upsurge of nascent political activism on social media, filed a police complaint against a Facebook community page run by the students of CUH. The step, the Registrar clarified, was necessary to prevent a tarnishing of the ‘reputation of the university’ in social media circles (Sethi 2016), and was followed up by suspending classes for a lecture by a local ABVP leader on ‘rashtra-­ bhakti’ (patriotism) in the presence of Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) activists. In September 2016, barely two months after the death of activist-­writer Mahasweta Devi, the university again made news by unleashing a lynch-­mob of ruling party lumpens and then instituting an enquiry committee to probe allegations of ‘anti-­nationalism’ against a theatrical performance of Devi’s story ‘Draupadi’. On March 28 that year, the Vice Chancellor of Central University of Jharkhand ordered the suspension of a faculty member (citing provisions of the Central Universities Act 2009) on charges of having invited a retired Professor from JNU for a lecture at a university event. The suspension order accused the said faculty of having ‘tarnished’

160  Debaditya Bhattacharya both “the image of the university . . . as well as the reputation of the Vice Chancellor” and deemed her guilty of misconduct for inviting ‘a person of disputed integrity’.3 When, soon after, all these charges were proved to be unfounded and malicious, the Vice Chancellor ordered a corrigendum with a sly insertion that shifted the burden of evidence on what ‘the people believe’4 and not to the facts at hand  –­ which at once belied the aspersions brought upon the invited guest, as well as the presumed guilty. If universities were to begin to recruit and dismiss faculty, arrange lectures and invite scholars, and expel and victimize students on the basis of what ‘people believe’, there can be no misgivings about the conversion of knowledge-­institutions into agents and abettors of popular prejudice. Insofar as disciplinary-­punitive measures are determined not by rational procedures of investigation or institutional principles of justice and fairness, but by the force of local belief-­systems, the new central university seems little different from the khaap panchayats that order the killing and persecution of women for marrying outside of their caste or wearing jeans or carrying mobile phones. The terrorizing vehemence of these forms of everyday censure on the dignity of those working within such spaces is apparent in the fact that the harassed teacher was forced to maintain an uncanny silence both during the ordeal and after. Evidently, her final reinstatement brought in its wake the horrors of an informal machinery of censorship that revels in manufactured lies, unauthorized rumours and petty insinuations in a feudal-­masculinist world of the university. But in truth, this is only a destinal return of the Indian university to its moment of origin!

II Popular prejudice, elite interests and the history of a colonial mimesis Not surprisingly, when on 23 April 1831 the Committee of Managers in Hindu College decided to dismiss faculty member Henry Louis Vivian Derozio, the memorandum for the emergency meeting was drafted by Ram Comul Sen and read as follows: Mr. Derozio, being the root of all evils and the cause of public alarm, should be discharged from the college, and all communications between him and the pupils be cut off. (The Calcutta Christian Observer 1832: 126, emphasis mine)

Of feudal intellectual capital 161 It was the point about ‘public alarm’ that was first vindicated at the start of the meeting through letters of guardians who expressed apprehensions about continuing their sons’ education in Hindu College.5 When the members of the committee failed to arrive at a consensus on the first resolution dubbing Derozio as “an improper person to be entrusted with the education of youth” (ibid.: 126), a proposal was mooted for Derozio’s removal in the context of “the present state of public feeling among the Hindu community of Calcutta” (ibid.: 127, emphasis mine). This second resolution, by using the excuse of popular outrage against the young Derozians, instantly garnered the vote of six members on the committee, led by Radhakanta Deb and Ram Comul Sen. Interestingly, both Deb and Sen vocally championed the introduction of English language education in public-­funded institutions run by the colonial government, while continuing to lead conservative Hindu associations like Dharma Sabha and Gaudiya Sabha, respectively. They were instrumental in the setting up of the Hindu College in 1817, abetting the demand for English as the only medium of instruction in the college. In this, they joined Rammohun Roy, despite their malignant opposition to the latter’s efforts for a legislative ban on sati. Staunch defenders of Brahminical practices constituting the core of the Hindu religion, Radhakanta and Ram Comul sought strategic support in Rammohun’s distaste for the radical agnostics trained in the Derozian school of thought. As Jogesh Chandra Bagal elaborates in his biographical sketches of Radhakanta and Ram Comul in Sahitya Sadhak Charitmala (1951 [1943]), both leaders lent their voice to the Anglicist cause only so far as the liberal effects of such education could be contained through a Hindu upper caste male dominance in the institutions of higher education.6 What is conveniently missed in our Macaulayan narratives around the Charter Act of 1813 (setting aside a grant of one lakh for the education of natives) and the Anglicist-­Orientalist controversy that rages till 1835 is the historical fact that state support for English language education was not a simple colonial ploy to manufacture clerks  –­ “a class of persons Indian in blood and colour, but English in tastes, in opinions, in morals and in intellect” (Zastoupil and Moir 1999: 171). The staunchest advocates in favour of the study of European knowledge-­systems were in fact the local elites  –­ and, as H.T. Prinsep notes in his diary, “a class of Anglo-­Indians and the younger civil servants mostly joined it, who were opposed to Government’s assisting to give instruction in any kind of Eastern literature or science, the whole of which they declared to be immoral, profane or non-­sensical” (Sharp 1920: 133–­34). The local

162  Debaditya Bhattacharya zamindars also jumped in the fray in the hope of retaining their privilege with the colonial administration, and Macaulay’s infamous Minute of 1835 was in truth only giving voice to the most influential representatives of the Indian population. It occasions no wonder therefore that substantial portions of Macaulay’s understanding of vernacular knowledges in the 1835 Minute borrowed from Rammohun’s angst against the proposed opening of a Sanskrit college in Calcutta in 1823. Rammohun Roy wrote in his letter to Lord Amherst, protesting the public funding of classical native institutions: The Sanskrit language, so difficult that almost a lifetime is necessary for its acquisition, is well known to have been for ages a lamentable check to the diffusion of knowledge, and the learning concealed under this almost impervious veil is far from sufficient to reward the labor of acquiring it. . . . Neither can much improvement arrive from such speculations as the following which are the themes suggested by the Vedanta. In what manner is the soul absorbed in the Deity? What relation does it bear to the Divine Essence? Nor will youths be fitted to be better members of society by the Vedantic doctrines which teach them to believe that all visible things have no real existence. (Zastoupil and Moir 1999: 110, emphasis mine) The Minute that Macaulay  –­ as the President of the Council of ­Education  –­ prepared and presented on 2 February 1835, much to the satisfaction of Lord Bentinck and with a dramatic effect of sealing the debate in favour of English education, observed in accents strikingly similar to Roy’s: It is argued, or rather taken for granted, that by literature the Parliament can have meant only Arabic and Sanskrit literature; . . . that they meant to designate . . . only such persons as might have studied in the sacred books of the Hindoos all the uses of cusagrass, and all the mysteries of absorption into the Deity. . . . Why then is it necessary to pay people to learn Sanscrit and Arabic? Evidently because it is universally felt that the Sanscrit and Arabic are languages the knowledge of which does not compensate for the trouble of acquiring them. (ibid.: 163–­68, emphasis mine) The influence that Roy’s opinions had on Macaulay’s denunciation of Eastern knowledge-­systems is more than incidental, in as far as it is

Of feudal intellectual capital 163 often contended that the British bureaucrat’s appreciation of “native gentlemen with a liberality and an intelligence which would do credit to any member of the Committee of Public Instruction” (ibid.: 171) cannot but contain a hint at Rammohun’s habitual eloquence in the English language. Though Lord Macaulay assumed office as law member to the Governor General’s Council soon after Rammohun’s death, much of his initial period as a ‘silent observer’ (as H.T. Prinsep, member of Supreme Council, reminisces in his diary!) was spent in dealing with the ghost of Roy as one of those “men distinguished by their proficiency in the Eastern tongues” (ibid.: 165). His final opinions on the subject, calculated to produce the desired effect on Lord Bentinck, were largely informed by counsel and conversations with the native elite  –­ who desperately wanted to snatch the reins of the instructional apparatus already set in place through informal community-­arrangements and local endowments for vernacular schools in the countryside. With the introduction of English language education in public institutions, the ground was prepared for the emergence of a European-­ model university effectively consolidating the hegemony of the Hindu upper castes in the field of education. It was this grasp over the knowledge-­apparatuses that the Brahminical Hindus saw slipping away during the course of time, and especially with the British Parliament’s declared policy of encouragement to mass native education through public grants since 1813. Caste privilege and the roots of the Indian university To take the case of South Bihar (specifically, with a view to trace current-­day continuities in a Central University of South Bihar that I began by referring to!), William Adam’s Third Report on the State of Education in Bengal and Behar (1838) punctiliously records the presence of 286 Hindi schools, 279 Persian schools, 27 Sanskrit schools and 12 Arabic schools in its nine thanas.7 Appointed by Lord Bentinck to conduct a survey of indigenous educational initiatives in the four districts of Bengal and two in Bihar, Adam compiled an extensive documentation of native efforts towards learning with an ethnographic rigour of purpose and detail. He defined the object of his inquiry  –­ the indigenous schools  –­ as institutions where “instruction in the elements of knowledge is communicated, and which have been originated and are supported by the Natives themselves, in contra-­distinction from those that are supported by religious or philanthropic Societies” (Basu 1941: 6). Adam’s findings were naturally alarming to the Hindu conservatives, in that they succinctly demonstrated the latter’s failing sway

164  Debaditya Bhattacharya over institutions of knowledge-­dissemination. In fact, he concluded by recommending to the British government that an adequate allocation of state bursaries for such forms of mass education was the only way to break out of caste-­hierarchies and ensure equality of opportunities as well as structures of social mobility within the Indian population.8 He discerningly noted that while the 27 Sanskrit schools in the district of South Bihar had enlisted only Brahmin teachers and an overwhelming majority of Brahmin students, the 291 Persian and Arabic schools recorded the attendance of 867 Hindus and 619 Musalmans. Of the Hindu scholars of Persian, not only were there only 11 Brahmins and a majority of Kayasthas (711 in number), but even students belonging to non-­upper caste backgrounds like Koiri, Sunri, Kamar, Napit, Kurmi, Mayra and Aguri found representation (ibid.: 287). Adam closed his analysis of the district in Section IV of the Report with a set of observations that perspicuously maintained: The increase of Persian schools, nearly equalling the number of Hindi schools and accompanied by an increased number of schools of Arabic learning, is the fact which most arrests attention. (ibid.: 226) Notwithstanding the importance of the knowledge of Persian in deciphering revenue records or transactions, what Adam’s meticulous reliance on detail gave away as material evidence was the egalitarian nature of Persian-­Arabic studies as compared to systems of Sanskrit education. It is not without sufficient reason therefore, that Sir Ganganatha Jha’s autobiographical accounts let out in a stray note of lament: We have realised with somewhat like a shock that even in the home of intensive scholarship like Kashi, Mithila and Nadia, the deeply read [Sanskrit] scholar of whom there were large numbers 50 years ago, have practically disappeared and pundits who could be compared to these giants [can] even remotely be counted now on the fingers of one hand. (Jha 1976: 87) Jha’s regret about the state of classical Sanskrit learning strikes one with even greater intensity, when pitted against the context of Adam’s findings about the mass-­appeal and extensive accessibility of vernacular schools in the several districts of Bengal and Bihar. Registering the existence of over a lakh of such schools in just these two provinces,

Of feudal intellectual capital 165 Adam establishes with precision in his First Report of 1835 “that in Bengal and Behar there is on an average a village school . . . for every thirty-­one or thirty-­two boys” of the school-­going age (Basu 1941: 7). Adam’s most potent revelations come in the form of an exhaustive list of the caste backgrounds that its students professed as belonging to. Notably, for example, while the Hindu upper castes constituted around 37.5% of the student population in South Bihar (including as much as a meagre 9% of Brahmin students), the non-­upper caste demography dominated the intake of vernacular schools by close to 61% of the total. Not only that, around 47 Dalit scholars from Dosad, Pashi, Dhoba and Musahar communities gained entry into these vernacular schools and received training in Hindi literature as well as the study of agricultural and commercial accounts besides Bhumihar, Brahmin, Kayastha and Rajput compatriots (ibid.: 245). Jata Shankar Jha, in his magnificent account of ‘Education in Bihar’ (included in Kali Kinkar Dutta, ed. The Comprehensive History of Bihar) comments on the tireless attempts of a certain Headmaster of Patna High School, S. MacIntosh, to expand the infrastructures of indigenous vernacular education: Among the records of the Council of Education for the year 1844 there are many statements which show that majority of the students in these [11] schools belonged to the Hindu community, the total number of Mohammadan boys being 57 only. Of the Hindus, the Vaishyas and Sudras were in overwhelming number. Thus, of the total 647 students in April 1844, 57 were Brahmins, 5 Babhans, 34 Kshatriyas, 128 Vaishyas and 366 Sudras. . . . MacIntosh’s system was a great success for some years in the beginning. But he had to close these schools in the long run for want of funds. (Jha 1976: 396–­400) Given the significant penchant for social transformation apparent in this early nineteenth century system of mass learning, James Ray Hagen’s contention about its distinctly ‘secularized’ nature and potential seems fairly justifiable (1981: 259). Even in the four districts of Bengal that Adam reviewed in his Third Report, he accurately documents the presence of Goala, Mala, Sutar, Chandal, Kalu, Muchi, Sunri, Hari, Bagdhi, Dom, Bauri, Dulia and Mal castes not only among the student-­scholars but also within the community of teachers (Basu 1941: 227–­42). For example, in the district of Burdwan, out of the 12,408 Hindus studying in the Bengali vernacular schools, at least 61 students came from the Dom and Chandal communities each,

166  Debaditya Bhattacharya and another 16 belonged to the Muchi caste (ibid.: 241). There were Chandal teachers in schools of all four districts, giving instruction to upper caste Hindus, Muslims and Christian students. Commenting on the school-­going statistics available from Moorshedabad district, Adam resolutely asserts that, despite the prevailing preponderance of Brahmins and Kayasthas, [the low-­castes] are gaining ground, and are almost imperceptibly acquiring a sense of the value even of that humble instruction which is within their reach, but from which, by the customs of society, they were formerly almost wholly debarred. The time is not distant when it would have been considered contrary to all the maxims of Hindu civilization that individuals of the Malo, Chandal, Kahar, Jalia, Lahari, Bagdhi, Dhoba and Muchi castes should learn to read, write and keep accounts; and if some venerable and aged Brahman . . . were told that these low castes are now raising their aspirations so high, he would deplore it as one of many proofs of the gross and increasing degeneracy of the age. (ibid.: 231–­32) Indeed, the ‘venerable and aged Brahmans’ and Hindu upper caste elites who raised their voices to secure from the General Committee of Public Instruction a system of government-­sponsored English education were unsettled by these growing developments in the vernacular schools. Hardly limited to Bengal and Bihar, such developments had been noticeable even in the 12,498 schools of Madras Presidency (as reported by Thomas Munro in his 1822–­1825 surveys)9 and an equal number in Bombay.10 As an organized attempt to wrest control of infrastructures of education through public investment, the onus for inaugurating a pedagogical shift through the English language cannot be squarely laid on colonial administrative interests  –­ as official historiographic accounts would make us believe. The massive support garnered in favour of the attempt from native conservative elites was in effect aimed at two consequences: first, dismantling the informal practices of vernacular learning that seemed to be working out a silent caste revolution along the countryside; and second, laying the foundations for a social imagination of the Indian university as a ‘secular feudal complex’ following the example of the University of London. The final event of establishing universities in the three Presidencies of Calcutta, Bombay and Madras in 1857 cannot steer clear of charges of an intentional metropolitanism prophesied well in advance. In this regard, the role of Wood’s Despatch of 1854 was no less significant in

Of feudal intellectual capital 167 setting out the goal of public education within universities as “providing the means of acquiring a very high degree of education for a small number of natives of India drawn, for the most part, from what we should here call the higher classes” (Misra 1961: 160). Feudalism and India’s tryst with freedom: the legacy of the colonial university While the public funding of English language training literally contributed to the demise of vernacular systems of schooling through withdrawal of state support and student stipends, the opening up of the ICS examination to English-­proficient native elites in 1869 further contributed to the project of upper caste hegemony in the field of university education. Local Hindu zamindars instituted colleges of European studies in their own vicinity through direct patronage along caste lines. For example, from the 1880s through the first decade of the twentieth century, the Bhumihar Brahmins and Kayasthas in Bihar took on a leading role in reclaiming control over institutional forms of education and thus ensuring a near-­complete percolation of its benefits only to caste Hindus. As Hetukar Jha recounts, the Bhumihar Brahmin Sabha contributed generously towards the coming up of a Bhumihar Brahmin College in Muzaffarpur in 1899, affiliated to the University of Calcutta. Other caste-­associations like the All India Kayastha Sabha (founded in 1889), Pradhan Bhumihar Brahmin Sabha (1889), Sarjupari Brahmin Sabha (1905), Rajput Sabha (1906), Revani Kahar Sabha (1906) and Bihar Hindu Sabha (1911) advocated not only for a representation of elite Hindu interests in terms of the material results of English education in the province, but also accounted for a strident anti-­Bengali sentiment in terms of academic and public employment opportunities in Bihar (Jha 1985: 47–­50). It was this demand for a lessening of the Bengali influence on the material-­cultural mobility enabled by education that finally translated into a concerted attempt to break free of the University of Calcutta. The growing insistence on the need for a self-­contained university in Patna peaked after the Indian Universities Act of 1904  –­ which proposed the introduction of direct teaching facilities and student enrolment in university departments. The Resolution of 1913, whereby the Indian government conceded to the demand for a Patna University in principle, practically acknowledged the mounting pressure from Bihari elites. In the wake of the legislative policy mandating direct student admissions in ‘teaching and residential universities’ (Indian Educational Policy, 1913 1915: 36), the upper caste Hindus in Bihar recognized with renewed force

168  Debaditya Bhattacharya the need to retain provincial dominance by severing all structural ties with Calcutta. Consequently, Patna University was founded in 1917 amidst raging conflicts of opinion, but yet with a script ready to drive it through to a secular feudal destiny. Hetukar Jha, in his painstakingly rigorous analysis of the history of student influx on Patna University campus between 1917 and 1951, makes use of the Reports on the Progress of Education in Bihar and Orissa through two decades (1929–­ 1949), the literacy data from Census reports of the period and the register of admission forms (1929–­1942) available at Patna College to arrive at a sociological understanding of the ‘caste and class composition’ of postgraduate scholars in the Arts faculty. The Reports serve as statistical evidence for the fact that: the percentage of upper-­caste Hindus till 1939 varied from 81.63 to 85.45 and in 1946 rose to 89.82. After that it went on increasing. Indian Christians, non-­upper caste Hindus and Muslims . . . taken together could hardly exceed even 10% of the total student population. (Jha 1985: 68) The overwhelming monopoly of the Hindu elites, when compared with Census ratios of demographic distribution and literacy rates, is corroborated by the information provided by students on admission forms in terms of caste background, occupational status as well as residential location. Having tabulated the details in a comprehensive year-­wise manner, Jha concludes: 91.36% of the total students from 1929 to 1942 were of upper caste cluster. This cluster, though having about only 10% of the total population, had virtually monopolised the higher education at the postgraduate level. . . . The students of lower cluster were only 1.08%. . . . Region-­wise, it was the urban sector (tiny in size in comparison to the rural area) which received disproportionately greater advantage of University education. Among the urban centres, it was only Patna and towns close to this capital city of Bihar which generally availed this opportunity. (ibid.: 80–­81) No wonder we have come a long way from Adam’s Reports of 1837–­ 1838 to Jha’s numbers right before and after independence, and the idea of the Indian university has lived up to the material implications

Of feudal intellectual capital 169 of its originary conception. The story of the independent nation-­state’s policy-­directions with respect to public-­funded university education has defended the status quo and fulfilled the prophecy that the university portended all along. The next and the last section of this paper will briefly outline this post-­independence history of higher educational reform in India.

III A postcolonial future of ‘reform’: the story of the missing caste census and a Dalit-­Adivasi GER A calculated anomaly pervades government data on the present status of higher education. Though statistical figures based on projected census findings cannot be assumed to provide an authoritative insight into the structural forms of institutional discrimination, it will be extremely telling to note the sham in the state’s advertisements of a steadily growing knowledge-­economy through Gross Enrolment Ratio (GER) indicators (GoI 2013, 2014a). While it has been severally pointed out that the GER cannot be an adequate parameter for measuring distribution of educational access or opportunities because of its complete inattention to alarmingly high drop-­out rates at different levels, the situation is obviously aggravated by the increasing costs of education in private institutions. The government’s projections of a rising GER in higher education fail to account for the hundreds of thousands of students who are forced out of colleges and universities on socio-­economic grounds, before completion of their courses. Such a critique of indexing opportunities for higher education stands absolutely vindicated by the historical injustices and epistemic violences of a system long dominated by the elite upper castes, as I have shown previously. But there’s more to discredit this numerical metrics of ‘development’ on its own terms of reference. The All India Survey on Higher Education (AISHE) 2012–­2013, published by the Ministry of Human Resource Development, projects a national GER average of 21.1, and consequently goes on to conjure fictions of enrolment among Dalits and Adivasi students as 15.1 and 11.0 respectively (GoI 2014b: 7, Table 7). Judging by these figures, one seems to get the impression that reservation policies in the field of higher education have substantively forwarded the cause of social justice, especially in the context of Jha’s findings at the close of India’s colonial experience. But, that’s exactly how statistics are used to befuddle the truth of material conditions in the play of

170  Debaditya Bhattacharya fractions and decimals. The obscenely inflated projections require us to understand that the GER figures for Scheduled Castes (SCs) and Scheduled Tribes (STs), instead of being calculated against census figures of the total population in the age group of 18–­23 years, have been manufactured out of the national average of total students enrolled in higher education. It effectively means that if out of a sample of 100 students, only 21 opt for higher education, it is only around 15% of those 21 (which practically means, three students out of every 100) that belongs to Dalit families. Even then, the numbers don’t seem to match against the estimated census projections of the MHRD itself for 2012–­2013. A realistic calculation  –­ not on the basis of an average GER, but in its necessary comparison with census data  –­ reveals that while every 17 of 100 adults in the age-­bracket fit for higher education are Dalits, less than three get to attend an institution meant for the purpose. With the Adivasi population, it is only 1 student out of every 9 (in a group of 100) who has access to university/­college education. To be more accurate in the cause of statistical flourish, contrary to the government’s claims, the Dalit enrolment ratio in higher education is 2.5 and the corresponding figure for ST students is only about 0.9. To now compare this with the Hindu upper caste component in higher education, it comes to an apparently not-­so-­impressive 45.1% of total enrolment average, as per AISHE Report of 2012 (GoI 2013: 10). So, in a sample size of 100, if around 21 students pursue degrees of higher education, the higher castes would only constitute among 9–­10 of them. But given that the census total of Hindu high caste (dwij/­twice-­born) population in the country may be projected at barely 10%, 9 out of every 10 high caste Hindu students (in a designated sample size of 100) have easy access to university/­college education. It is not difficult to guess why the 2011 Census data about upper caste populations continues to elude us! The secular feudal pact as policy: commissioning higher education reports What Hetukar Jha diagnosed in terms of the sectarian composition of the colonial liberal university has hardly suffered any change over the decades of an independent India’s tryst with education policy. Higher education remains, as it were, the privileged preserve of the caste elites  –­ and the hegemonies established by the colonial-­legislative institution of the European-­model university continue to stake their claim in ways as palpable and real.

Of feudal intellectual capital 171 The reasons for this structural feudalism built into the constitution of the Indian university require us to look no further than the sustained policy-­directions charted out by successive commissions, committees and legislative proposals. Beneath the veneer of a ‘reforms’-­agenda that has rhetorically guided all reports and recommendations in the field of higher education, the secular feudal ‘constitution’ of the Indian university has remained unchallenged. The University Education Commission of 1948–­1949, chaired by S. Radhakrishnan and having as its members eminent educationists like Zakir Hussain and Meghnad Saha, deliberated on the “need for more universities on a regional or other basis” (GoI 1962: 2) to come up with a proposal for setting up rural universities in close coordination with local communities of practice and systems of knowledge. But, despite an occasional acknowledgment of the principles of democracy and social justice, the Commission’s Report was hinged on a deliberate denial of the history of social privilege that tempered the university’s fortunes in the postcolonial nation-­state. Instead, it maintained: The fundamental right is the right of the individual, not of the community. . . . To insist on quotas for communities would be to assume that the nation is composed of separate and self-­sufficient groups, which is a negation of our national ideal and democratic principle. Discrimination practices generate tensions and the spiritual damage caused by them is not measurable. Education should not be used for creating or deepening the very inequalities which it is designed to prevent. Progress for the nation requires that access to higher education should be determined by the interest, and ability of the student. There is much to be said for the suggestion that the information about caste and religion should not be asked for from candidates for admission to colleges and universities. (ibid.: 45, emphasis mine) The deliberate erasure of ‘information about caste and religion’ from the collective unconscious of the university amounted to a negation of history  –­ and, in the guise of ‘the interest and ability of the student’, a sanction of meritocratic codes for exercise of the right to intellectual labour. In envisioning the rural university on the Danish model of the People’s College, the Report chillingly disavows its concern for social justice by separating it from the burden of historical justice, and thus reconciling to a bourgeois jingoism of social mobility: “[T]he chief issue is not where young people come from to get an education but where they go with their education” (ibid.: 485, Chapter XVIII).

172  Debaditya Bhattacharya The Report of the Education Commission (1964–­1966), titled ‘Education and National Development’ and exhaustively drafted under the chairmanship of D.S. Kothari, affirmed a bold commitment to addressing forms of social discrimination but structurally reinstated networks of intellectual elitism by proposing the establishment of a few ‘major universities’ (GoI 1966: 279, Section 11.17). Seemingly geared towards creating spaces for knowledge production at par with superior foreign universities and preventing the exodus of talented students from the nation, it reaffirmed a hierarchized referentiality of ‘value’ as qualitative claim to intellectual labour, as if produced in ahistorical isolation. The Kothari Commission justified this feudal circumscription of the ‘best institutions’ as the special prerogative of “the small number of students of superior capacity [who] are usually swamped by the large numbers of those who are not well prepared for intensive higher education” (ibid.: 281). The Report further contends: We recognize that our approach does involve at this stage a certain differentiation between the ‘universities’. This is, however, not only inevitable in an economy of scarcity but is also the only sure and practicable way to benefit all ultimately in the shortest time possible. Moreover, we must recognize that pursuit of excellence implies and requires a discriminatory approach; and that to provide equal resources to all irrespective of the quality of their performance and potentiality for growth merely promotes mediocrity. . . . In fact, we may go further and say that there is always need for elite institutions in every academic system. (ibid., emphasis mine) The 1968 National Policy on Education (NPE), which came close on the heels of the Kothari Commission recommendations, only paid lip service to “develop[ing] education among the backward classes and especially among the tribal people” (GoI 1968: Clause 4a). Expectedly, there was little political intention towards that aim and this was adequately reflected in the absurd lack of outlining concrete mechanisms for the purpose. The subsequently revised NPE of 1986 (amended further in 1992) acknowledged this gaping chasm between declared goals and suggested measures for implementation, and redressed it by ironically apprenticing the state to an informal feudal economy of local patronage and communal aid in rural sectors of underdevelopment. Resources, to the extent possible, will be raised by mobilising donations, asking the beneficiary communities to maintain school buildings and supplies of some consumables, raising fees at the

Of feudal intellectual capital 173 higher levels of education and effecting some savings by the efficient use of facilities. (GoI 1992 [1986]: 35, Part 11.2) The onus of funding was thus attempted to be shifted on the ‘beneficiary communities’  –­ and a devious hint of the state’s withdrawal from non-­urban infrastructures of education was doled out as early as in 1986. The agenda of social justice was explicitly abandoned to private feudal interests or collaborations in terms of mobilization of resources. The liberal sheen of the autonomous public university was already in the process of being unabashedly abandoned, through an encouragement to local political elites and philanthropists for infrastructural investment in the ‘public good’ of education. It was this suggestion, inchoately expressed in the 1986/­1992 NPE, that was soon to give way to a large-­scale financialization of the university and a consequent distancing of the state from constitutional commitment to social provisions since the early 1990s. On the other hand, the government’s gradual retraction from the field of higher education allowed local coalitions of dominant class-­elites in the gentry to re-­emerge as funding agencies and private donors for universities, often in collaboration with corporate capital. The status quo in class-­interests and solidarities was unaffected, while the maintenance-­costs of hegemony were ceded onto elite civil society partnerships with corporations. It is no wonder therefore that the National Knowledge Commission Report of 2006–­2007 openly advocated a model of self-­financing for public universities by stressing on the call for ‘needs-­blind admissions’ (GoI 2009a: 63). The questions of access and opportunity in higher education were to be delinked from a subsidy-­based model of public funding and made incumbent on aid-­packages of scholarships and student loans. The Report of the Committee to Advise on Renovation and Rejuvenation of Higher Education (2009; alternatively known as the Yash Pal Committee recommendations) resolved the issue of social justice summarily, by noting: The primary focus should, therefore be on making education affordable, either through scholarships or loans. An assured loan to every student (and a scholarship based on merit for the needy) in accredited institutions should be the aim (and our recommendation). Institutional funding can then be for capital costs and research, and based on the worthiness of the institution. Once a student qualifies to enter an institution of her choice, she should not be deprived of education for want of money. (GoI 2009b: 39, Section 2.3.4, emphasis mine)

174  Debaditya Bhattacharya The Subramanian Committee Report for Evolution of New Education Policy 2016 follows the same line of argument and makes a pitch for increased student fees to cover institutional costs, while at the same time insisting on a ranking-­based policy of grant-­disbursal. Even more alarmingly, this Report goes on to depoliticize social privilege by explaining instances of structural inequality within the experience of higher education as psychological problems of adjustment to “prevailing circumstances and conditions of urban learning centres” (GoI 2016: 63, Sec. 5.8.5). In this, instead of suggesting definitive policy-­measures to address forms of social exclusion in their structural context, the committee recommends interpersonal efforts at “appropriately designed remedial/­advisory/­guidance/­training facilities” (ibid.: 62, Sec. 5.8.4). Such a step not only disregards the history of organized cognitive damage perpetrated on Dalit and Adivasi populations by prognostically identifying it as a psycho-­ somatic disorder, but also makes every effort at social justice seem like an individual act of charity. The underlying message is clear, in that social justice is no longer the responsibility of the state but of charitable individuals and of benevolent private enterprise within the university. The death of Rohith Vemula, framed in the context of the Draft NPE 2016, was a personal-­psychological ‘adjustment issue’, and therefore a subject of individual moral concern rather than of the state. The university as internal condition of justice? The Central Universities Act of 2009, which actually goes on to incorporate several provincial universities under one umbrella-­legislation, uses the originary secular-feudal impulse at the heart of the university to protect a cult of irrationality through extraordinary amplitudes of power given unto the Vice Chancellor. Autonomy devolves into autocracy, as an undefined ‘code of conduct’ is statutorily made to govern “conditions of service for all categories of employees” and “regulate and enforce discipline among the students and the employees” (GoI 2009c: 5, Sections 6xxi–­xxii). Perfunctory obligations of obedience and loyalty serve to root the university in local matrices of feudal practice, even as the possibility of resistance is left to ‘Student Councils’ with members nominated on the basis of merit, and statutory bodies with no directly elected members. The Act also enjoins the university unto a moment of censure and a space of prohibition against law; it makes disputes relating to conditions of appointment strictly internal matter, with no recourse to civil courts or extra-­institutional infrastructures of justice (ibid.: 12, Section 33[3]).

Of feudal intellectual capital 175 In this, the university becomes the internal reference for justice  –­ and this is the mystical moment of what Derrida would call the ‘founding’ of reason outside of the rational. Insofar as the new provincial central university manufactures the ‘norm’ as exhaustively self-­referential, its claim to autonomy rests on insertions of epistemological violence into the normality of ‘everyday’. The feudal is but an event of cognitive surplus  –­ a moment where the irrepressible equality of the other is aggregated from above into an infinitely recurring sameness, the point where the possible becomes [ac]countable. The university is the life of that irruption of sameness-­as-­community, the promise of the equal as structurally excluding the other. It is an interruption in the life of reason, and not the other way around. Derrida elaborates it thus: [T]o pose the question of the law of law [droit du droit]: what is the legitimacy of this juridico-­rational and politico-­juridical system of the university, and so forth? The question of the law of law, of the founding or foundation of law, is not a juridical question. . . . If there can be no pure concept of the university, if, within the university, there can no pure and purely rational concept of the university, this . . . is very simply because the university is founded. An event of foundation can never be comprehended merely within the logic that it founds. The foundation of a law [droit] is not just a juridical event. The origin of the principle of reason, which is also implicated in the origin of the university, is not rational. (2004: 109) It hardly merits amazement, hence, that the “purely rational concept of the university”  –­ impossible as it is!  –­ must suspend itself in the ab-­ norm of the purely irrational at the moment of its own instituting. The foundational legend of the ‘liberal’ Indian university collapses into the secret of its birth  –­ the historical burden of a dominant consensus that might only convulse into the everyday of lynch-­mobs, enquiries, suspensions, boycotts and police batons!

Notes 1 The anecdotal speech-­extracts in this paragraph are reconstructed verbatim either from personal experience or through first-­person witness narratives. 2 For the sake of a cursory comparison, while a student seeking admission to an M.A. (Master of Arts) programme in JNU is required to pay around Rs.371 as consolidated admission fee, a student enrolling in the same course

176  Debaditya Bhattacharya in CUSB (to take a generic example!) is forced to pay up a sum of Rs.9,100 at the start of the first semester. For a comparative break-­up of hostel living costs, one may simply pit the annual room-­rent of Rs.120 for JNU students (on double-­sharing basis) as against the Rs.12,000 collected as annual lodging rent in CUSB. Notwithstanding the fact that CUSB hostels have students herded into makeshift triple-­sharing rooms with plywood partitions and often without doors or windows, the administration has withdrawn all mess facilities for residents. Computed in its entirety, the annual cost of living incurred by a student of CUSB in Gaya is likely to be more than a lakh, while a residential scholar on JNU campus might well offset his annual living expenses for less than a third of his former counterpart’s. 3 See Central University of Jharkhand Order, File No. CUJ/­VC Sectt./­2016/­ 01/­30/­C, dated March 28, 2016, S/­d Nand Kumar Yadav ‘Indu’, Vice Chancellor. 4 Refer to Central University of Jharkhand Corrigendum, File No. CUJ/­VC Sectt./­2016/­01/­33/­C, dated March 30, 2016, S/­d R.K. Dey, Registrar (I/­c). 5 A variety of letter-­documents, recording such scandalized response to the ‘moral blight’ represented by the young Derozians, was published through 1830–­1831 in Samachar Chandrika and Sangbad Prabhakar. For reference, see the section titled ‘Naitik Obostha’ (Moral Condition) in Brajendranath Bandopadhyay ed., Sangbadpatre Sekaler Katha, Volume 2 (Calcutta: Bangiya Sahitya Parishad, 1970). 6 See Jogesh Chandra Bagal, ‘Radhakanta Deb’, Sahitya Sadhak Charitmala 2.20 (1951 [1943]), pp. 12–­17; See also Jogesh Chandra Bagal, ‘Ram Comul Sen’, op. cit. 6.72 (1951 [1943]), pp. 10–­16. 7 Refer to Section IV, Table 4 of William Adam, ‘Third Report on the State of Education in Bengal’, in Reports on the State of Education in Bengal, ed. Anathnath Basu (Calcutta: University of Calcutta Press, 1941), p. 226. 8 See Adam, ‘Third Report’, Chapter Second, Sections  –­ II (“Plan Proposed and its Application to the Improvement and Extension of Vernacular Instruction”, V (“Application of the Plan to the Instruction of the Aboriginal Tribes”) and VI (“Application of the Plan to Female Instruction”), in A.N. Basu, op. cit., pp. 358–­454. 9 Refer to Dharampal, The Beautiful Tree: Indigenous Education in the Eighteenth Century (New Delhi: Biblia Intex, 1983). 10 See Ramchandra Vithal Parulekar ed., Survey of Indigenous Education in the Province of Bombay (1820–­1830) (Bombay: Asia Publishing, 1951).

References Bagal, Jogesh Chandra. 1951 [1943]. ‘Radhakanta Deb and Ram Comul Sen’, in Brajendranath Bandopadhyay (ed.), Sahitya Sadhak Charitmala (Volume 2(20), pp. 12–­17; Volume 6(72), pp. 10–­16). Calcutta: Bangiya Sahitya Parishad. Bandopadhyay, Brajendranath (ed.). 1970. Sangbadpatre Sekaler Katha, Volume 2. Calcutta: Bangiya Sahitya Parishad. Basu, Anathnath (ed.). 1941. Reports on the State of Education in Bengal. Calcutta: University of Calcutta Press.

Of feudal intellectual capital 177 The Calcutta Christian Observer. 1832. Volume 1 (June–­December). Calcutta: Baptist Mission Press. Derrida, Jacques. 2004. ‘Mochlos, or the Conflict of the Faculties’, in Eyes of the University: Right to Philosophy 2. (trans.) Jan Plug et al. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Dharampal. 1983. The Beautiful Tree: Indigenous Education in the Eighteenth Century. New Delhi: Biblia Intex. Government of India (GoI). 1962. The Report of the University Education Commission (December 1948–­August 1949), Volume 1. New Delhi: Ministry of Education. ———. 1966. Report of the Education Commission 1964–­66: Education and National Development. New Delhi: Ministry of Education. ———. 1968. National Policy on Education. New Delhi: Ministry of Human Resource Development (MHRD). ———. 1992 [1986]. National Policy on Education. New Delhi: Ministry of Human Resource Development (MHRD). ———. 2007. Draft Report of Working Group on Higher Education: 11th Five Year Plan. New Delhi: Planning Commission. 2009. New Delhi: National ———. 2009a. Report to the Nation 2006–­ Knowledge Commission. ———. 2009b. Report of the Committee to Advise on Renovation and Rejuvenation of Higher Education. New Delhi: Ministry of Human Resource Development (MHRD). ———. 2009c. ‘The Central Universities Act 2009’, in The Gazette of India. New Delhi: Ministry of Law and Justice. ———. 2013. All India Survey on Higher Education 2011–­12 (P). New Delhi: Ministry of Human Resource Development (MHRD). ———. 2014a. All India Survey on Higher Education 2012–­13 (P). New Delhi: Ministry of Human Resource Development (MHRD). ———. 2014b. Educational Statistics at a Glance. New Delhi: Ministry of Human Resource Development (MHRD). ———. 2016. National Policy on Education 2016: Report of the Committee for Evolution of the New Education Policy. New Delhi: Ministry of Human Resource Development (MHRD). Hagen, James Ray. 1981. ‘Indigenous Society, Political Economy and Colonial Education in Patna District: A History of Social Change from 1811 to 1951 in Gangetic North India’, Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Virginia. Indian Educational Policy, 1913: Being a Resolution Issued by the Governor General in Council on the 21st February 1913. 1915. Calcutta: Superintendent Government Printing. Jha, Ganganatha. 1976. Autobiographical Notes of Mahamahopadhyaya Dr. Sir Ganganatha Jha. (ed.) Hetukar Jha. Allahabad: Kendriya Sanskrit Vidyapeetha. Jha, Hetukar. 1985. Colonial Context of Higher Education in India. New Delhi: Usha Publications.

178  Debaditya Bhattacharya Jha, Jata Shankar. 1976. ‘Education in Bihar’, in Kali Kinkar Dutta (ed.) The Comprehensive History of Bihar. Patna: K.P. Jaiswal Research Institute. Misra, B. B. 1961. The Indian Middle Classes: Their Growth in Modern Times. Bombay: Oxford University Press. Parulekar, Ramchandra V. (ed.). 1951. Survey of Indigenous Education in the Province of Bombay (1820–­1830). Bombay: Asia Publishing. Sethi, Aman. 2016. ‘Reading Foucault in Mahendragarh, or Why We Need a Public University System’, The Wire (May 10). Available at http:/­/­thewire. in/­34691/­reading-­foucault-­in-­mahendragarh-­or-­why-­we-­need-­a-­public-­ university-­system/­(accessed on 28 December 2017). Sharp, Henry. (ed.). 1920. Selections from Educational Records, Part I (1781–­ 1839). Calcutta: Superintendent Government Printing. ‘Vemula’s Suicide an “Institutional Murder”: Satchidanandan’. 2016. The Hindu (January 23). Available at www.thehindu.com/­news/­national/­Vemula%E2% 80%99s-­s uicide-­a n-­% E2%80%98institutional-­m urder%E2%80%99-­ Satchidanandan/­article14015950.ece (accessed on 26 April 2018). Zastoupil, Lynn and Martin Moir (eds.). 1999. The Great Indian Education Debate: Documents Relating to the Orientalist-­Anglicist Controversy, 1781–­1843. Surrey: Curzon Press.

Part III

(A)politics in/­ of the university?

8 Is there a calling on the left? Prasanta Chakravarty

जाड़ा आ रहा है. जाड़ा सबसे पहले िवविवालय में आता है. (Winter is nigh. Winter first arrives at the university.) Kashinath Singh

The material nature of conflicts within the university spaces in India can be mapped in various ways  –­ sociologically, ideologically and/­or even contingently. But let me try to elaborate a historically charted moral vector that could decide at any given point of time the sway, pull, reach or eventual demise of student movements and determine their life outside of the academe. I shall speculate on a notion of calling and place its coordinates alongside the very notion of the university in contemporary India. Calling, or vocation, words that usually take us to a theology of creative and redemptive work and belief whereby human beings are pulled or led by some irrational force towards some community cause or principle, has also been used as a sociological coefficient of moral and professional turmoil in the ascetic bourgeois mind by Max Weber.1 I am however using calling as an intermediary factor whereby ethical political agents are forced by historical conditions and sociological circumstances to act in a particular fashion. Such acts then may take the dimension of political-­moral exemplars, by means of which a ripple effect might be created in order to foster conditions for socially transformative changes. It is quite obvious that at this point of time, globe-­trotting academics are quite stumped by the new value-­laden nationalist-­utilitarian programmes and policies of education in their respective home countries. Consequently, the very idea of the university in its European liberal format is under attack in large parts of the world. If we look closely though, we shall see that in India, the idea of a humanist university has always been an anomaly, only to be seen in certain metropolitan

182  Prasanta Chakravarty centres, and that too unevenly and sparsely distributed across some parts of the nation. Such universities are more like detached islands even in the cities where they are located, often only thinly connected to the organic realities of our changing times. The other kind of university, though, which is the norm, is rigidly hierarchical and marred daily by sociological inequities and terrain battles, as if such inequity is a way of life. Within these realities, however, there is scope for some divergent political language and practice which one might explore. This other variety also does not and cannot consider itself to be outside of the locality, area or region to which it belongs. In other words, the second variety reserves possibilities of genuine political conflict where the corporative structure of the university must define itself always vis-­a-­vis the social and economic community of which it is but a part. The nature of the conflict within such universities in the Tier II towns of India has evolved considerably over the years. It would be useful to trace two divergent but equally powerful models of activist calling in conceiving the university space in India. Within the scope of this brief survey, I would like to place one of the finest political novellas written in Hindi in the past few decades: Kashinath Singh’s अपना मोचा/­Apna Morcha (Personal Front) (2007). Singh has been writing fiction consistently as a public intellectual for decades now. In his writings, we get a sense of the evolution of Banaras as a city in its literary and political contours. Apna Morcha, its plot unfolding within the context of the angrezi hatao bhasha andolan of the 1970s, however, is unique for two reasons: one, because it takes the Banaras Hindu University as its central focus, not as a gated space, but as a spatial architecture and a psychological metaphor standing in for the whole of eastern Uttar Pradesh; and two, the book shows the full and ferocious dynamics of both a rich idealism and a subdued, fractious violence that seethes within the irrational and disjunctive spaces of the Indian university system. Although this is a work of fiction, the documentary, realist style of the text demands from us several moral-­ philosophical responses about our simultaneous attachment to, and disjuncture from, the university as a space, placed firmly within the texture of the region and its culture. I shall focus only on one of these: the question of calling.

A religious university is born The Banaras Hindu University Act (Act XVI of 1915), approved in the Imperial Legislative Council, stipulated religious instruction and

Is there a calling on the left? 183 examination in the Hindu religion alone. It further underlined that these would be compulsory for all Hindu students. It is a unique moment in modern Indian higher education, since prior to the creation of BHU, there had been no residential or teaching universities, and no examinations in religious subjects used to be allowed.2 The universities in India were merely examining bodies. There was no student life or hostels, no playing grounds or religious scaffoldings or rituals heretofore. And there were no examinations in theology prior to this moment. The idea was that pious and learnt Hindus would mould the character of the students as they were being moulded in the English universities which followed Cardinal Newman’s disciplinary lines. In practice, however, this move would help usher in a far more virulent strain of inductive piety for students who passed through its precincts. Pandit Madan Mohan Malaviya, along with Annie Besant and Bhagwan Das, were instrumental in ushering in a fairly virulent form of nationalist education which at its core was not just revivalist in the ordinary sense of the term, but was asking to inculcate a kind of a calling among students that would make them deeply communal in spirit. Here is loyal Besant, in one of her numerous influential textbooks: Loyalty to the Head of State is equally insisted on in the Sastras. . . . Patriotism, the love of one’s country, and Public Spirit, caring for the nation more than one-­self, are virtues that are so closely akin to loyalty that they should never be separated from it. King and country are the objects of true loyalty.3 Annie Besant’s textbooks were used not only at BHU, but also in colleges in the Indian princely states of Kashmir, Mysore, Baroda and Rajputana. It is in these kinds of universities where one must look for another kind of subterranean political conflict in India till this date. On the other side, Harcourt Butler, when introducing the Banaras Hindu University Bill in the Imperial Legislative Council of 22 March 1915, defended the introduction of religious instruction in the University and told the Viceroy, “I believe, my Lord, instruction in the truths of religions . . . will tend to produce men who, if they are true to their religion, will be true to their God, their king and their country” (Dar and Somaskandan 1966: 282). The point for the British was twofold: to get rid of any anarchist influence over the youth, and also to thwart the proletarianization of the semi-­educated young folk.

184  Prasanta Chakravarty In 1938, Malaviya permitted the RSS to construct a two-­room building on the Banaras Hindu University campus for carrying out its activities. Conceptually, what we are witnessing here is a completely different model from the two prevailing ones available to us: the Humboldtian and the Newmanian  –­ both of which are finally constructed over culturally and theologically Christian rational orders of instruction. Here, we are getting into a zone of radical, organized irrationality and piety that is exclusivist and yet formed on a basis of a unique calling that its founders strongly felt, and its patrons and students responded to. There are other roots to this kind of a virtue-­moralist model of university. The ethical foundations of such a centre-­right calling would be to seek a particularistic way of life, not just who gets to determine the range of pedagogic practice within the curriculum and the campus. Such a calling would stand against all value neutrality and inorganic individualism.

Moral calling of the right: unified essence of the absolute Martin Heidegger in his tract ‘The University in the National-­Socialist State’ of November 1933, begins by stating von Humboldt’s conception of the university that he wishes to overturn. This critique concerns not just the external relation of University to State but also the primacy of research in the modern ‘research university’, as Heidegger had already made clear in ‘The University in the New Reich’. No one had concerned himself with the university as community [Gemeinschaft]. Research got out of hand and concealed its uncertainty behind the idea of international scientific and scholarly progress. Teaching that had become aimless hid behind examination requirements.4 The foundational moral impulses are quite evident: a concern for the inner decline of the university, something that Humboldt or other idealists do not address. Heidegger wishes to highlight teaching, from where research shall develop (teaching-­led-­research), not the other way around. Second, he puts a premium on connecting the university space to, and placing it within, the community and a way of life. University was to be a place for renewal, a place that would bring us back into the heart of life, away from the alienating autonomy of Kantian disinterested research.

Is there a calling on the left? 185 Heidegger’s concern is to trace the Geist or spirit of the university, rather than its ‘external institutions’. For Heidegger, after the liberation from nature and dissolution of tradition in the eighteenth century, in the early nineteenth century German poets, thinkers and statesmen created a new spiritual world in which the power [das Walten] of nature and the powers of history were thought and drawn together in the unified essence of the absolute.5 For such an idea of a moral university to burgeon (quite distinct from the cultural bildung model of Humboldt; nor can this be a mere multiversity), one needed four cornerstones, each of them part of a centre-­ right calling, the collective force of which would be tremendous: First, it had to be founded from scratch, with the idea of tradition incorporated purely from a moral perspective. Second, more important than organizational structures would be the kind of thinkers and teachers who taught there. Third, the faculty of philosophy would be the ‘the determining and pivotal centre’ of the university in the sense that there ought to be a ‘philosophical orientation’ towards ‘the inner context’ [innerer Zusammenhang] of all the domains of knowledge and of the methods [Verfahrungsweisen] proper to their elaboration. Finally, the university was ‘expressly’ conceived as a means for the ‘awakening’ and ‘creative formation’ [schöpferische Ausgestaltung] of the German spirit. Collectively, these moral impulses would fuel a set of people who were driven by a far deeper and sinister cause than what Newman or the idealists could ever imagine. In a way, Heidegger’s calling was deeply Platonic: education (paideia) to both consists not in pouring knowledge into an empty vessel, but rather in turning the soul as a whole away from the sensible world towards truth, and in developing a pre-­existing capacity or inner disposition for knowledge.6 In a very different context but with a similar ardent drive, Madan Mohan Malaviya would carve out a moral spiritual space in Banaras. One is looking for transformation of a human existence itself into a communitarian Hindu way of life. Teaching will make us fully, authentically, what we potentially already are. Such a transformative calling of the nation is married to a notion of an immediate political community of the local/­parochial in Malaviya and the succeeding generations of caretakers of BHU. The closest one can come to this form of parochialism is Alasdair MacIntyre’s notion of a collaborative and cooperative political community. In Chapter 10

186  Prasanta Chakravarty of Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry, MacIntyre makes some ingenuous communitarian proposals for a radical restructuring of the contemporary university  –­ a central emphasis being a deliberate strategy of parochializing higher education.7 He thinks that one can only achieve the universalist end via parochialist means. He sees, much like revanchist nationalists like Malaviya, this condition of radical diversity as disabling: as a form of moral ‘confusion’ or moral ‘disorientation’, which in turn spills over into forms of disability in the political sphere as well. So, both argue for an immersion in our particularisms. It is a pre-­liberal university that he is projecting: [A] set of rival universities would result, each modeled on, but improving upon, its own best predecessor, the Thomist perhaps upon Paris in 1272, the genealogist upon Vincennes in 1968. . . . [W]hat I have imagined is after all in some ways nothing other than a twentieth century version of the thirteenth century university, especially the University of Paris, the university in which Augustinians and Aristotelians each conducted their own systematic enquiries while at the same time engaging in systematic controversy [with each other]. (MacIntyre 1991: 232–­34) One can characterize this broader view as follows: MacIntyre believes that it is the function of a culture to provide normative guidance about what to think and how to live. Different cultures may perform this function differently, but all real cultures qua cultures find some way to supply such normative guidance. Precisely against this kind of a moral and particularistic density, one must place a speculative idea of a left calling. But if a conceptual version the Heideggerian-­MacIntyreian revisionist ways of guiding the university lies at the heart of a university like BHU, what was behind the actual spatial topography of the university and what were the main trends of student involvement and politics in such places?

A sacred geography, karmayoga and the rumblings of a political space BHU was never a university. It always was a sacred topography, and a way of life. A mythic, but ever throbbing light of Hindu antiquity is most vividly displayed in the originary myth of the BHU campus centring on the Maharaja of Banaras and the university. According to local custom, a circumference called the Panchakroshi marks the

Is there a calling on the left? 187 boundaries of the sacred geography of the city. Since the site committee could argue that the proposed site was well within the boundaries of panchakroshi, the campus would indeed be sacred and consecrated automatically. It was also argued that Tulsidas had made a prophecy that Kashi would grow southwards, upstream, past the then boundary set by the Panchakroshi Road. The emblem of BHU chosen by the officials depicts the goddess of learning, Saraswati, as conferring the nectar of immortality while seated on her sacred vehicle, the hamsa (swan), circumscribed by the sacred syllable Om. The motto under the emblem reads, ‘Vidya ya amritam asnute’ (‘one attains immortality through knowledge’). Since Kashi was the city where death resides alongside life, it was argued that goddess Saraswati would help overcome death by imparting knowledge. A myth also developed that the grounds of BHU was the gift of Maharaja Prabhu Narayan Singh of Banaras, the central Hindu figurehead of the area: that ‘poor brahman’ Malaviya begged for the land and the ‘righteous raja’ gifted it. According to records, though, the land on which the university is built was acquired through imposition of a land acquisition order and against the protest of upper caste bhumihar proprietors and tenants of the very valuable and fully cultivated land (Renold 2006). Many tenants were disposed and rendered homeless. These kinds of stories help obfuscate the fact that the ruling authority was not the Maharaja, but the British Raj. Soon the sacral markers of a Brahmanical calling were apparent in the day to day activities in the university. Sadachar had to be practiced within the campus. Smoking, drinking alcohol and eating meat were forbidden at the university. There is a story, for example, that in 1916 at the first meeting of the University Court, where many pandits were present, the Pro-­Vice Chancellor, Maharaja Scindia of Gwalior, was smoking a cigar. One of the pandits, Letin Shastri, stood up and said, “The chairman of this august meeting is smoking a cigar and insulting the members of the Court”. All the pandits walked out and did not return. The meeting could not continue until the Maharaja had disposed of his cigar and apologized to the members of the University Court for his act. Malaviya persuaded a majority of the members to accept the authority of the Manusmriti and effectively barred all non-­Brahmans, including Annie Besant and Bhagwan Das, from teaching in the College of Theology. When Radhakrishnan, the then Vice Chancellor, wanted both genders and all castes to study in BHU, Malaviya opposed it (Radhakrishnan 1956). The campus temple and rituals surrounding it became a focal point of the campus. Soon religion and patriotism

188  Prasanta Chakravarty powered themselves to become the most significant symbol of calling within the campus: the ascetic ideals of karmayoga. The guru and his selfless ideals would ignite a deep spirit of an anti-­colonial, centre-­right force in the whole ambience of university life. Outwardly, no religion was prioritized, but it is obvious that indoctrination was happening in a much more amorphous fashion by means of igniting a disciplinary moral force among the youth. For the students, the campus was the universe. Indeed, the university residences were quite grand and austere at the same time. It must be admitted that the university created a living environment that did not segregate students according to status. The religion, caste and wealth of the families of students were not a factor in determining where a student resided. Fees were considerably lower. But morally things were worked out: students were expected to maintain chaste and upright brahmachari lifestyles, and avoid bad habits such as drinking and smoking. Derogatory remarks and ‘loose talk’ were considered inappropriate in the hostels. A number of religious kathas were held on campus, especially during popular celebrations of Krishnajanmashtami and Basant Panchami. There were many service societies. Physical activities of the students were an essential part of the karmayoga. But in the debating societies, there were some discussions on socialism along with fascism even at this early stage. It is during the 1920s that M.N. Roy was actively recruiting and dispatching emissaries to all over India in order to spread communist thought. At this early stage, Ghulam Hussain tried to form an All India Communist organization. Roy himself trained Shaukat Usmani (who was a Khilafat pilgrim) in Tashkent, and upon Usmani’s return to India in 1922, he turned instrumental in giving shape and direction to communist thought and practice in Banaras and Kanpur, until he was arrested in 1923. When the Government of India banned the Communist Party, BHU’s communist students met secretly on the rooftop terrace under the Hindu temple spire of their college. They decided that though party activity was illegal, discussing and teaching Marxist theory was not. There were communist boys from Bombay in BHU. We would sit up under the mandir on the roof in secret and discuss Marxist theories because they were illegal. I told them we had to make propaganda. They said, “No, you will get us in trouble”. I said, “No, the Marxist party is illegal but Marxist thought is not illegal”. I posted a notice that I was holding a class in the common room. One hundred people came. Some left, but soon many people from

Is there a calling on the left? 189 north and south (like Rajesh Rao) became communists. No one objected. I was thought to be Malaviya’s favourite boy. (Interview with Rustam Satin, qtd. in Renold 2006) Though Malaviya was against student activism, BHU was never apolitical (Hindu Herald 1930). Many jumped into the Gandhian and other swadeshi movements, in spite of the overall loyalist-­spiritual ways of the university. Even the conservative ambience of the women’s college within the campus was fired by nationalist struggles. The quest for an identity passed through the paths of a high moral nationalist calling.

The other kind of calling: Apna Morcha and bhasha andolan Though socialist thoughts were part of the city and the university for a long time even within such an ascetic morass, it really blossomed during the Lohiaite movement and the communist heydays after independence. The politics of Eastern UP was changing in the 1960s through the 1980s. BHU was not exempt from that change. There were some sturdy left-­ of-­ centre leaders in the vicinity. In BHU, under the leadership of Debabrata Majumdar, the late 1960s were an electrifying time. Upper caste politics and class antagonism were met with severe challenge from within the campus, which, as we have seen, was an extension of the city itself, and the region, too. Among the communists, Satya Narayan Singh, Sarjoo Pandey, Raj Kishore, Rustam Saitin, Deena Nath Singh Yadav and Udal made for a formidable and powerful left presence in the past. Land redistribution programmes were undertaken and the restive students were trying to burst forth into something new and idealistic, which was in distinct disjuncture with the older generation of denizens of the city. Chandauli had a tried and tested history of struggle. In Chakia (Chandauli), landless agricultural labourers and Adivasis grabbed the land of Maharaja of Kashi. At one point, people seized more than 600 bighas in Musha Khan, Barat farm and Shadapur. It was a bloody battle. The poorest Musharas and Kols fought bitterly for the last two decades in order to retain their land. As late as in 2005, in Shadapur, the royal family tried to evict the poorest of the poor and forcibly ran tractors in the 200 bighas possessed by the peasants. In a remarkable resistance that ensued, Ganga Devi and Triloki laid down their lives. Varieties of social democratic politics retain their own important trajectory along with communism in that area.

190  Prasanta Chakravarty It is this new (and later ongoing) language and force of political calling that has been magnificently captured by Kashinath Singh’s docu-­ fictive novella Apna Morcha.8 Undoubtedly, this is one of the finest of campus narratives. Right at the outset, we see that the faculty in BHU are oblivious to the fact that campuses around the nation and the other parts of the world are boiling. It is evident that they are cut off from the concerns of young minds. It also becomes clear quite early that the campus is rife with a mixed climate  –­ ennui, anger, hope and the deepest alienation, which is looking for an idealist calling, a way of expression. But more than the ignition, the direction of this cauldron of passion is anticipated. The reason for this angry subterranean flow is what the professor-­narrator tries to delve into but is unable to fathom: why, how and what do the youth get angry at? Can their frustrations be channelized into a purified calling of a new kind or will such tremendous amount of energy be dissipated? Are the students angry at being taught asocial irrelevancies in classrooms? They curse whatever they see around them  –­ plough, bull, hay, buffalo, sun, sister, cow, bells, gamchha, winter, summer, tree, swing, cloud, daughter, daughter-­in law, son  –­ each and every relationship seems bereft of meaning. And the student-­teacher relationship is not anymore that of human beings but that of books and answer-­scripts. There are several exits to this predicament. One is oblivion  –­ there are many students who continue with their rote learning and mofussil sense of fashion, and spend endless hours knitting woollen sweaters. But the other is the more dangerous way for students. With an astounding sense of realism, Singh shows us how in any students’ political movement or uprising there are pragmatic groupuscules, which play a suave mercenary role, foremost in their own minds. When one is seeking meaning in life, there is a crossroad  –­ either you choose a calling which is invariably an ethical political move or you choose this: लोग कुछ सुगबुगा रहे है ं इधर! वे कुछ करना चाहते है ं और या कर बैठे ंगे    –­ इसे हम मे ं और उनमे ं भी कोई नहीं जानता. यह जुर–ू र है िक वे कोई भी चीज जमीन से नहीं शुर–ू करेगं े योंिक खुद उनके पाँव जमीन से शुर–ू नहीं है ं. इतना ही नहीं, वे िवोह और लालच दोनों को साथ लेकर चलते है ं. िवोह की यह लालच देखो, कब टूटती है ं! अब ऐसे मौकों पर तुहे या करना चािहए, यह खुद िनणय करो. बीड़ी पीते हो? (Singh 2007: 48–­49) (Some people are rather agitated in these parts! They want to jump into something and what they will finally end up doing is anybody’s guess; neither do they have any clear idea nor do we. It is obvious though that these people shall not initiate anything

Is there a calling on the left? 191 from the ground up, since they are themselves never grounded. Not only that, such people carry along insurgency and greed simultaneously with them. Let us see at what point this avarice for insurgency comes to an end! During these occasions, you have to take a call on your own about what is to be done. Come, have a biri?) There is a time to choose one’s calling and a time to slip up with false moves. Insurgency is an intuitive move, a moral force. This is the voice of the most powerful choric conscience in the narrative, Jwan. He is conceived by Singh as an outsider and marginal figure who is assessing the fortunes of student politics and the whole socio-­political scenario of his region at that point of time. The whole of BHU’s administration and faculty are non-­committal and pragmatic, the usual scenario on campuses to date. Such is the level of cynicism that it is admitted by Jwan that one can only see fear, manners and humility in the poor student. The rest are completely oblivious to anything that is beyond their immediate interest. We gradually realize that the anger and rage of the students are directed via the concerns of the bhasha andolan, a movement to oust English and English education. Jwan keeps at his choric role: well, one can understand that English is the imperialists’ voice, but what about my own mother tongue? What have the agitators done with their own language? How much of this idealism is opportunistic or unworked? Pray, who is the enemy in this struggle  –­ are we ending up fighting our own? हम से जो भी टकराएगा, चूर चूर हो जायेगा. या मतलब है इस ‘जो’ का? (ibid.: 60) (The one who shall cross swords with me will break apart. What does this ‘the one who’ mean in this slogan?) And yet the power of youth is galvanizing; it fulfils a strange moral force. One fateful day in the narrative, there is a fatal police crackdown and we take unforeseen turns (based on actual events of 29 November 1967); the collective power of the boys in the march is described as an advancing tidal wave, as a dense jungle in which every viewer would like to merge. This is a fearless, clear sighted, dreaming band of human beings, as straight and direct, as good and naïve in their conviction as one can imagine. We feel the power of a calling that will be able to take on the whole weight of the centre-­right

192  Prasanta Chakravarty and colonial tradition of BHU and its surroundings. The whole region seems to be suffused in the light of a rare conviction that is material and yet a matter of giving in to some extraordinary form of calling, a response to a new movement, a new time in the making. And yet, every moment of hope and newness hides within it despair, and vice versa. There is always a fear that the category of ‘student’ and the category of ‘people’ would be forever marked by a chasm since the students may not be there for people who could be by their side at this point of time, and while the ordinary people who could have been part of the whole movement worry about this unstable sociological category called ‘students’. But all doubt is again cleared when one of the most silent backbenchers among the students takes the microphone and utters these words: आप कहते हो  –­ भाषा? भाषा मेरे िलए वह नहीं है जो आपके िलए है. हमारे िपछले अनुभब मुझे यह कहने के िलए बाय करते है ं िक भाषा का अथ िहंदी या अंेजी नहीं है. भाषा का अथ है जीने की पित, जीने का ढंग. भाषा यािन जनतं की भाषा, जनतांिक अिधकारों की भाषा, आज़ादी और सुखी िज़दगी के हक़ की भाषा. हम जीने के इस तौर-­तरीके के िलए लड़ रहे है ं. . . . अपनी भाषा को अिधक से अिधक हमलावर बनना होगा. (ibid.: 100) (What do you say  –­ language? Language to me is not what it is to you. My earlier experience compels me to declare that the meaning of language is not English or Hindi. Language means a procedure of life, a style of living. Language, as in the language of democracy, the language of democratic rights and the language of freedom, the right to spend a happy life. We are fighting for such a way and style of living. . . . [O]ne must make one’s language more and more lashing, assailing.) This is a moment of absolute clarity, when we know we are watching a politically committed and mature viewpoint which has the capability to carry the mass along with it. It is at this moment of synapse that one realizes that the university space and the social space are singing in unison, tuned to the same frequency. Howsoever brutal the authorities might be, eventually a material idea of calling shall carry the day. This is uttered in the spirit of Ram Manohar Lohia, who had a deep respect for English as a language and culture, but wanted to resurrect the pride in regional languages so that the inferiority complex attached to them within each one of us gets decimated once and for all. He used to talk about the soul of each language. In Banaras (around 1967–­1968),

Is there a calling on the left? 193 Debabrata Majumdar was at the forefront of the movement, and for a long time he had to go underground owing to police and administrative crackdown on the students of BHU. By December 1967, Indira Gandhi made an assurance in the Parliament that the main concerns of the bhasha andolankaris would be given due cognizance. No wonder then that the novella, after showing us the nadir of abjectness and humiliation through which the teachers and student community are paraded, ends with this line of material hope: यह जरूर है की तुहारे पास राइफल है लेिकन . . . में मु–कु राता हूँ और अपनी जेब से एक कोरा प–ना िनकालता हूँ , ‘मेरा मोचा यह है’. यह कागज़ िजस पर मैं तुम-­जस ै ों को तो या, अपने और अपनों को भी माफ़ करना नहीं जानता. (ibid.: 128) (It is a fact that you are carrying a rifle. . . . I smile and take out a blank sheet from the pocket: ‘This is my front’. This piece of paper will never ever allow me to forgive you since in this piece of paper I cannot even forgive my own self.)

Moral economy of the left Marxism, Georges Sorel argues in his La Decomposition du Marxisme (1910), is in fact three things: a set of dogmas, a canon of historical interpretation and a heroic social myth meant to promote working-­ class education and strength. The dogmas, Sorel thought, were absurd; the canon could be very useful; the myth was to be judged in terms of its effectiveness, not of its truth. It is significant to rekindle the social myth, the messianic faith of a future state of equity with the growing prestige of objective empirical science, the belief in a just community and fellowship worked out from within inescapable processes of ever-­ increasing post-­industrialization precarity. Any question of ethics that is not grounded in material relations and forces of production would tend to be individualistic and sentimental. Any idea of a utopian leap of faith in a future equitable society that would see itself as countering the powerful Heideggerian-­MacIntyreian model of higher education most certainly must not only shun calling as a way to ossify one’s timeless communal existence but also such traditional moral words like ‘justice’, ‘right’, ‘duty’ and so on. It is striking, nevertheless, that much of Marx’s writings, for example the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, The Communist Manifesto, even Capital and the Grundrisse, sound very much like

194  Prasanta Chakravarty moral tracts  –­ or at least significant parts of them do  –­ even though little ‘moral language’ appears in them. Thus, though Marx does on occasion use the words ‘good’, ‘bad’, ‘right’, ‘wrong’, etc., his main words, his central categories of criticism of bourgeois society are quite different. They include the following: ‘human’, ‘inhuman’, ‘exploitation’, ‘freedom’, ‘slavery’, ‘dependence’, ‘subjugation’, ‘imperfection’, ‘defect’, ‘brutalization’, ‘venality’, ‘corruption’, ‘prostitution’, ‘money-­relation’, ‘self-­interest’, ‘despotism’, ‘repulsiveness’, ‘suffering’, ‘impotent’, ‘involuntary’, and so on. (Brenkart 1983: 15; Selsam 1945; Kamenka 1962) If one is to rekindle the sense of calling in actual left practice, which is an essential requirement in wresting the moral power away from the centre-­right forces in the ongoing student movements in some universities in our nation, then one must once again have a belief in the associative form of life that is transformative in the first place from within, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all. BHU has not been exempt from the structural changes that big public universities in the nation have undergone since the 1990s. In the case of BHU, unlike more visibly liberal places which are detached from the warp and weft of the nation, we know that the trajectory itself has been a deeply communitarian one. The whole Lohiaite socialist vision of the 1970s harboured a tremendous amount of moral force, apart from the real work that was done for social justice. Today the polarization is happening on other grounds. Havan paths (fire sacrifices) and Golwalkar jayantis (Golwalkar anniversaries) are back in a way that has always been part of a certain culture within BHU, right from its inception. To have a concerted voice of the left means to revive local programmes. But there is scant freedom at the local level owing to the bureaucratization of the organized left in the whole of Eastern UP. The caste question, which was simply overlooked by the official left meant that, gradually but surely, issues of dignity and equity arrived as more important social questions than economy pure and simple. In the past few years, we have been noticing a gradual and steady renewal of the ultra-­nationalist ethos at BHU. To begin with, incidents of mercenary nationalist hooliganism in BHU have been recorded, including that of a kidnapping and molestation charge against a BHU employee and his associates in 2015. Sandip Pandey, Magsaysay awardee, was removed from IIT-­BHU where he was serving as a guest lecturer, supposedly owing to his radical leanings and activities. The Badri Narayan episode was a sort of continuation of similar kinds of

Is there a calling on the left? 195 intolerance. But this second case also showed some kind of resistance to these new communal onslaughts within the university space. But it is the demand of a 24-­hour cyber library within BHU which has actually galvanized a broad spectrum of opposition to the status quoist arguments. The administration, though, has been successful in suffocating this nascent movement for all practical purposes. Also, the pressures of moral policing on women students have particularly augmented in 2016–­2017. The then Vice Chancellor, Girish Chandra Tripathi (who has served as a province-­level RSS official) had been active in fomenting and maintaining a climate of extreme repressive ultra-­nationalism in the campus milieu. Particularly worried after the campus unrest in other parts of the nation, he had helped deploy paramilitary forces on campus. Most recently, the present government in Uttar Pradesh has banned all strikes by the employees of state universities and colleges under the stringent Essential Services Maintenance Act, 1968 (ESMA). Under its provisions, any person taking part in a strike may be punished with imprisonment for a term up to six months. The whole region, especially the educational institutes, now remains a place with minimal freedom to express, discuss and dissent ideas. Of course, there is a larger and more long-­standing battle on, as we are able to trace. But one of the issues that have stymied any collective, grass-­root level resistive movement in BHU in recent times is that opposition, spirited as it has been from time to time, largely works on an ongoing event-­to-­event platform demanding a certain kind of quality within the knowledge-­based university. Bandying about freedom of expression or the rights discourse without any mass and strategic mobilization cannot be a sufficient impetus for a long standing warfare against fascism. In fact, that could be counter-­productive. True, until the present government came into being, such platform-­based forces have been able to get crucial support from the intelligentsia and cultural activists of the city and the region. So far, we have seen such reactions working within the parameters of oppositional framework to fascism but going along with the logic of the developmental university. But these contingent pockets of opposition to a certain way of life may only lead to longer ethics of social change if it can be distinguished from an ethics of duty. An ethics of duty is actually a mere formalization of obligations into legal codes. Calling then turns into a law, requiring or forbidding certain actions. Conceptually, an ethics of duty is linked with capitalism. A radical idea of calling cannot be a set of ideals that people aspire to, but rather must be a rejection of all illusory forms of existence and a facing of society and its institutions in their full materiality.

196  Prasanta Chakravarty Paulo Freire, in his Pedagogy of Commitment, has talked about the educative situation, a ripe, opportune moment and condition where there is a possibility of genuinely taking a leap of faith through pedagogic practices and political innovations (Freire 2014). That leap is necessary since ideas have simply dried up while conceiving university spaces as part of a larger socius and conversely, conceiving the society as being nurtured through a committed, creative and critical training that only a certain kind of education can provide. What Apna Morcha shows us vividly and imaginatively is what Freire had proposed about the politicalness of education. There is no shortcut to the power of a singular commitment. It is the very nature of the educative practice that leads the educator to be political in that sense, Freire had said: As an educator, I am not political because I want to be, but rather because my condition as educator so imposes. Politicalness is, thus, inherent to the educative practice. That means that, as a teacher, I must have my own and clear political choices, my dreams. . . . Politicalness reveals two other characteristics of the educative situation. It reveals that, in the educative practice, aesthetics and ethics go hand in hand. The educative practice is beautiful, as is the formation of culture, the development of a free individual. At the same time, such an aesthetic is ethical, for it deals with morality. (ibid.: 21, emphasis mine) This very spirit inheres within it the second kind of calling that I have been referring to  –­ a calling that must arise on the left bank of history. We are all agog with anticipation.

Notes 1 Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (London: Routledge, 2001 [1905]). See also, John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion (Grand Rapids, MI: Christian Classics Ethereal Library, 2002 [1536]); Cotton Mather, A Christian at His Calling: Two Brief Discourses (Boston: B. Green and J. Allen, 1701); Thomas Carlyle, Past and Present (London: Chapman and Hall, 1843). 2 Previous to the foundation of BHU, the existing universities in India offered a strictly Western and secular education. The British established the first three universities of India  –­ Calcutta, Bombay and Madras  –­ in 1857, the year of the Indian Mutiny. As suggested by the Educational Despatch of 1854 (a declaration of the British government for the purpose of higher education in India), the three Indian universities were created for “the diffusion of the improved arts, science, philosophy and literature of Europe; in

Is there a calling on the left? 197 short of European knowledge”. See Despatch of 1854, Selections from Educational Records, Part 2 1840–­1859, compiled by J. A. Richey (Calcutta: Superintendent, Government Printing, India, 1922), p. 366. 3 Annie Besant, Elementary Textbook, p. 118; Besant argues that a fixed caste system was the chief cause of the instability of Indian society in Ancient Ideals in Modern Life, 2nd ed. (Madras: Theosophical Publishing House, 1925), p. 67. 4 Martin Heidegger, Gesamtausgabe, Volume 16 (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 2000), p. 762. For an English translation of ‘Die Universitätim Neuen Reich’, see The Heidegger Controversy, ed. Richard Wolin (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993), pp. 43–­45 (this passage is at 44). See also Alan Milchman and Alan Rosenberg, ‘Martin Heidegger and the University as a Site for the Transformation of Human Existence’, The Review of Politics 59 (1997), pp. 75–­96; Iain Thomson, Heidegger on Ontotheology: Technology and the Politics of Education (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). 5 Mark Sinclair, ‘Heidegger, Von Humboldt and the Idea of the University’, Intellectual History Review 23.4 (2013), pp. 499–­515. See also, Martin Heidegger, Zollikon Seminars, Protocols-­Conversations-­Letters, trans. F. Mayr and R. Askay (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2001). 6 Plato, Republic VII, 521c. For a more detailed discussion of Heidegger’s inheritance of Plato’s pedagogy, see Thomson, Heidegger on Ontotheology, pp.  155–­65. 7 Alasdair MacIntyre, Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1991) and God, Philosophy, Universities: A Selective History of the Catholic Philosophical Tradition (London: Continuum, 2009). This theme is also pursued in Alasdair MacIntyre, ‘The Idea of an Educated Public’, in Education and Values: The Richard Peters Lectures, ed. Graham Haydon (London: Institute of Education, University of London, 1987), pp. 15–­36. See also Ronald Beiner, ‘The Parochial and the Universal, MacIntyre’s Idea of the University’, Revue Internationale de Philosophie 2 (2013), pp. 169–­182. 8 Kashinath Singh, Apna Morcha (Delhi: Rajkamal Prakashan, 2007). A comparable account to Apna Morcha in Hindi literature, on campus activities, is Manohar Shyam Joshi’s memoirs about Lucknow University.

References ‘Banaras Hindu University Satyagrahis’. 1930. Hindu Herald. Lucknow: Education File, UP State Archives (August 9). Beiner, Ronald. 2013. ‘The Parochial and the Universal, MacIntyre’s Idea of the University’, Revue Internationale de Philosophie, 264(2): 169–­182. Besant, Annie. 1899. The Ancient Wisdom: An Outline of Theosophical Teachings. London: Theosophical Publishing Society. ———. 1925. Ancient Ideals in Modern Life, 2nd ed. Madras: Theosophical Publishing House. Brenkart, George G. 1983. Marx’s Ethic of Freedom. London: Routledge, Kegan Paul.

198  Prasanta Chakravarty Calvin, John. 2002 [1536]. The Institutes of the Christian Religion. (trans.) Henry Beveridge. Grand Rapids, MI: Christian Classics Ethereal Library. Carlyle, Thomas. 1843. Past and Present. London: Chapman and Hall. Dar, Shivanandan Lal and S. Somaskandan. 1966. History of Banaras Hindu University. Varanasi: Banaras Hindu University Press. Freire, Paulo. 2014. Pedagogy of Commitment. (trans.) David Brookshaw and Alexandre D. Oliveira. Bounder, London: Paradigm Publishers. Heidegger, Martin. 2000. Gesamtausgabe, Volume 16. Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann. ———. 2001. Zollikon Seminars, Protocols-­Conversations-­Letters. (trans.) F. Mayr and R. Askay. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Kamenka, Eugene. 1962. The Ethical Foundations of Marxism. CT: Praeger. MacIntyre, Alasdair. 1987. ‘The Idea of an Educated Public’, in Graham Haydon (ed.) Education and Values: The Richard Peters Lectures (pp. 15–­36). London: Institute of Education, University of London. ———. 1991. Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press. ———. 2009. God, Philosophy, Universities: A Selective History of the Catholic Philosophical Tradition. London: Continuum. Mather, Cotton. 1701. A Christian at His Calling: Two Brief Discourses. Boston: B. Green and J. Allen. Milchman, Alan and Alan Rosenberg. 1997. ‘Martin Heidegger and the University as a Site for the Transformation of Human Existence’, The Review of Politics, 59: 75–­96. Plato. 2004. Republic Book VII. (trans.) C. D. C. Reeve. Indianapolis, Cambridge: Hackett Publishing. Radhakrishnan, Sarvepalli. 1956. East and West: Some Reflections. New York: Harper and Bros. Renold, Leah. 2006. A Hindu Education: Early Years of the Banaras Hindu University. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Richey, J. A. (ed.). 1922. Despatch of 1854, Selections from Educational Records, Part 2 1840–­1859. Calcutta: Superintendent Government Printing. Selsam, Howard. 1945. Socialism and Ethics. New York: International Publishers. Sinclair, Mark. 2013. ‘Heidegger, Von Humboldt and the Idea of the University’, Intellectual History Review, 23(4): 499–­515. Singh, Kashinath. 2007. Apna Morcha. Delhi: Rajkamal Prakashan. Sorel, Georges. 1910. La Decomposition du Marxisme. Paris: Librairie des Sciences Politiques a Sociales. Thomson, Iain. 2005. Heidegger on Ontotheology: Technology and the Politics of Education. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Weber, Max. 2001 [1905]. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. (trans.) Talcott Parsons. London: Routledge. Wolin, Richard (ed.). 1993. The Heidegger Controversy. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

9 The university as passivity? The role of students’ political activism Anand Teltumbde

Almost everything that is great has been done by youth.  Benjamin Disraeli, Coningsby; or the New Generation (1844)

There are strong signals that the government headed by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) wants to ban students’ political activism. At least one of its senior leaders, M. Venkaiah Naidu, who is the ex-­president of the party, a former Union Minister and the current Vice-­President of India, has repeatedly spoken against students participating in politics. In the wake of the Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) and Hyderabad Central University (HCU) controversies, he said: “They [students] must study and stay away from politics. If they are interested in politics, they can leave studies and join politics” (Business Standard 2016). This is not an uncommon view coming from ruling class politicians; they have always considered student activism as dreaded fire to be smothered with all their might. A report of a government panel on the New Education Policy, headed by former cabinet secretary T. S. R. Subramanian, on which the government has invited public opinion, has also recorded its reservations against students participating in politics. Expressing concern about the increasing number of student protests, the committee, in its report, states: Agitations, disturbances, gheraos and other disruptive movements are being increasingly witnessed on campuses with potential to interfere with normal academic activities. As a result of this, examinations often get delayed or postponed. These disturbances are generally caused by a small section of politically active students and work to the detriment of the majority of serious students. (GoI 2016: 174, Clause 9.5.11)

200  Anand Teltumbde Reflecting the general tone of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) party, it recommended that educational institutions should consider de-­recognizing “student groups that are explicitly based on caste and religion” (ibid., Clause 9.5.13) and also restrict the period for which students can stay on campus. It further says: Most of the disruptive activities on the campus are led by students who remain enrolled for many more years than normally required to pursue the course of study for which they have enrolled. The main interest of such students is not to pursue learning but to use the hostel and fellowship facilities to follow a political agenda. There should be a national debate on the need for students to necessarily achieve the minimum benchmarks for scholastic progress to prevent the misuse of educational facilities established at public expense. (ibid., Clause 9.5.14) Naidu and the RSS represents the ruling establishment and notwithstanding their own students’ organization, Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP), pushing its politics under their nose, would naturally speak against political activism of students. Besides the ruling politicians and the government, the administration of the educational institutions also would see students’ political activism as nuisance and would like it banned. In addition to these two status quoist parties, the parents of students also tend to favour a discouraging of political activism of students on campuses. They would neither like their own children ‘deviating’ from their studies and indulging in politics nor like others to cause disturbance to their wards. Opposed to this camp against students’ political activism are the opposition parties, the educationists, activists and a large body of students themselves. While these politicians crave for change in the present regime and view students as a potential force or at least a vote-­bank working in their favour, the educationists and activists view universities as not merely sites for imparting formal knowledge components, but also as a training ground to prepare them as future citizens. They would like students to step out of campus enclosures and relate with the larger society. A large section of students, barring those who would like to focus on their formal studies, willingly or otherwise, would also like to participate in political activism. Thus, on the issue of students’ political activism, a broad division can be seen between the government, ruling politicians, administrations and parents on the one side and politicians in opposition, activists, educationists and students on the other side.

The university as passivity? 201 This paper intends to deal with right wing arguments against students’ political activism and establish how it is not only desirable, but should also be encouraged and promoted by autonomous educational institutions and welcomed by society at large. The four campus struggles which foregrounded this issue  –­ that is, those at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Madras, Film and Television Institute of India (FTII) Pune, Hyderabad Central University and Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU)  –­ are discussed to expose the political dynamics that produced them.

Student activism and passivism Student activism is as old as the university itself. The word universitas signalled only a collection of students, similar to the guilds of weavers or carpenters (Boren 2001: 8). The students played a politically transformative role in shaping intellectual debates through the sixteenth century Renaissance and Protestant Reformation (ibid.). In the nineteenth century, demonstrations by student organizations demanding national unification and the German constitution had played a significant role in the formation of the German state (Rodriguez-­Amat and Jeffrey 2017: 526–­42). Students played important roles in shaping the twentieth century, too. For instance, one of the most consequential events of that century was also related to student protests. Gavrilo Princip, who committed the assassination of Prince Franz Ferdinand of Austria in Sarajevo, triggering the start of the First World War, was a student. In the 1960s and 1970s, the wave of students’ movements had a global expanse. Alongside the new left, the civil rights movement, the anti-­war protests, women’s rights and gay liberation movements in the United States alone, protesting students created serious disruptions in societies and shook political systems globally in countries as diverse as Japan, France, Mexico, West Germany, Italy, Brazil, Czechoslovakia, China and India (Schildt and Siegfried 2006: 61). Fifty-­six countries and governments had to face thousands of students acting as rebels. Che Guevara, after his death in the late 1960s, became a potent icon inspiring youth to rebel and revolt. The debate over whether students’ political activism should be encouraged or banned may also be as old as the university. If one goes by the basic notion of politics as concern about how power is exercised, by whom and for whom, it will make politics seem homomorphous with any community of people, which is what the ‘university’ was born as. The origin of the word ‘politics’ coming from the Greek word polis, which means a community or populace or society,

202  Anand Teltumbde coheres well with this notion and goes with the famous Aristotelian dictum that man is a political animal. According to the Greek view, the participation of each and every citizen in the life of the community is necessary for the collective self-­realization of human beings. When people say or do a thing, they necessarily take a position, a political position, and as such politics is integral to our community life. Who and for whom is the university, how are students admitted, what is the cost of education, how is the curriculum designed, whether one will get a job, and practically everything apart and beyond, are political questions and they relate with students as important stakeholders. These questions necessarily transcend campus boundaries and connect campus politics to the grand narratives of national politics and even beyond  –­ more so, because we live in a supposedly globalized world. Questions about why the cost of education in our academic institutions is rising cannot be answered without understanding the compulsion of the government to reduce fiscal deficit, curtail budgetary support to the higher educational institutes and make them progressively self-­ financing, and promote private capital and Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) into the sphere of higher education  –­ all as ordained by the Washington Consensus and being pushed by the World Trade Organization (WTO). This extends to every other question like student profile, student mix, faculty, research, syllabi, pedagogy and placements. It follows that what one sees as campus politics necessarily transcends into politics in general. Even the mundane question of how academic research is controlled by grants cannot be divorced from politics. Why our universities have not produced knowledge required for the larger community of farmers and rather frittered their resources to satiate corporate appetite is answered only by politics. Why they have not addressed societal needs and have only become a supplier of human resource to the corporate sectors is verily a political question. Students are the section which has the biggest stake in the future of the world they live in. It is their moral right to shape it with their activism. The excerpted quote from Disraeli, that everything great is accomplished by the youth, proves the point that only the politically alert and active students can turn into youth leaders to influence our material contexts of survival. The votaries of the apolitical student, particularly in such a milieu as ours, are mistaken in imagining anything as sans politics. If students are made to drown in books, and blind themselves to their environment, they should not be construed as apolitical; they are rather made to side by and support the status quo. They are made into automatons

The university as passivity? 203 propping the system against the forces that aspire to better it. They are reduced to becoming an inert mass insensitive to their environment, a glorified slave to the system that maintains it in a reproductive state as it did in the era of chattel slavery. Obviously, those who benefit from the system would prefer them, because they would not pose any threat to their interests.

Student politics in India Student movements in India may go back to 1848 when Dadabhai Naoroji co-­founded ‘The Student’s Literary and Scientific Society’,1 as a forum that discussed questions like the efficacy of colonial education systems. Perhaps the first student protest was mounted in the 1880s, for holding ICS examinations in India (Mohammad and Matin 1995: 4). The first student strike happened at King Edward Medical College Lahore in February 1913 for 16 days, protesting against academic discrimination between the English and Indian people.2 Students had a big role in protests against the partition of Bengal. Out of the 186 persons arrested in Bengal between 1907 and 1917, as many as 68 were students (ibid.). In the first all-­India college students’ conference held in Nagpur in 1920, the resolution to boycott schools and colleges was passed with an overwhelming majority, and accordingly a large number of students had left colleges and taken up organizational work for the Indian National Congress (ibid.). During the anti-­Simon Commission agitation (1928) and the non-­cooperation movement (1930), students led processions, organized strikes and courted arrest in large numbers in Punjab, Bengal, Uttar Pradesh and Bombay (ibid.). In India, organized student movement began in 1936 when the All India Student Federation (AISF) was mooted to “prepare the students for citizenship in order to take their due share in the struggle for complete national freedom” (Chandra 1938: 54). Since then, the students of India have been “arousing their social, political and economic consciousness” (ibid.: 55). Their activism was not confined to issues facing students alone, but reached out to take up wider socio-­political issues, often challenging the government. During the Quit India call in 1942, it was the students who had turned militant. Educational institutions were closed; they took active part in acts of sabotage, disrupted civil administration and helped to maintain liaison with underground leaders to keep the agitation going. Thousands of students were jailed, and hundreds of them were rusticated (Mohammad and Matin 1995: op. cit., 5). After independence, there was a lull for a decade but its agitational spirit again resurged in the wake of a worldwide wave of student unrest

204  Anand Teltumbde in the mid-­1960s. It was a series of rioting by students in the south that forced the central government to postpone its Hindi policy in 1965, a students’ agitation against corruption forced the Orissa government to resign in 1966, and mainly students who brought about a stunning defeat of Congress president K. Kamraj in the 1967 elections. When the naxalite movement broke out in the northern part of West Bengal in 1967, then was brutally suppressed by paramilitary forces in less than two months, it was the students in Calcutta who picked up its spark and turned it into a conflagration that spread far and wide. The Dalit Panthers movement, born around the same time in Maharashtra, was also shouldered by students articulating their rebellion in radical terms. Soon thereafter, the Dalit Sangharsh Samiti in Karnataka rose from being a student movement led by young leaders. The Nav Nirman Andolan (Reconstruction Movement) of Gujarat in 1974, against the corrupt government of Chimanbhai Patel, was spearheaded by students. It started with an agitation by students of an engineering college in Ahmedabad on 20 December 1973 to protest a 20% hike in hostel food fees and spread all over the state, eventually requiring the army to be called in. It was followed by Jai Prakash Narayan’s crusade, which brought the Bihar administration to the brink of collapse and was mainly supported by students. In Assam, the students’ movement brought young leaders to power and again it was the Bodo students who brought them a challenge. These are just a few instances from the recent history of students’ activism in India. There have been reactionary movements as well  –­ such as the anti-­Mandal Commission protests of 1990, the anti-­reservation movement in 1981 in Gujarat and thereafter in 2006, also led largely by students. Interestingly, the Indian right wing that fears student activism does not begrudge it when its own student organization (ABVP), incidentally claiming the largest membership among the students, indulges in reactionary politics and political hooliganism.

Neo-­liberal curbs India adopted neo-­liberal reforms, informally during the mid-­1980s and formally in 1991, which variously weighed against the organized movements. Its impact in the sphere of higher education was seen in pushing public institutions of higher education to be self-­financing and thereby pushing the costs up, and freeing space for the influx of private capital to overcome the freeze. Forces of globalization created opportunities on the one hand, but intensified competition on the other among the culturally discretized individual students. Politically,

The university as passivity? 205 the increasing fascization of the state raised the risk of dissent manifold, and in many ways directly blocked political activism on campuses through some alibi or another. For instance, the Maharashtra government banned student elections in 1992 after National Students’ Union of India (NSUI) candidate Owen D’Souza was murdered during class representatives elections. The ban  –­ which disallows even posters, pamphlets and banners  –­ was enforced by amending the Universities Act of 1974. Most state universities today do not allow elections and nominate students on the basis of their academic performance, making sure there is no dissent whatsoever on the campus. Student union elections encapsulated student politics, and by stopping them the administration effectively foreclosed the potential of students’ political activism. The structural changes that were ushered into the sphere of higher education have also raised barriers for students’ political activism. India has 761 universities, as per the University Grants Commission (UGC) website, with the following break-­up: 46 Central Universities, 350State universities, 123 Deemed universities and 241 private universities. Apart from these universities, other autonomous institutions such as the Indian Institutes of Information Technology (IIIT), Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT), the National Institutes of Technology (NIT), Indian Institutes of Science Education and Research (IISER) and Indian Institutes of Management (IIM) are granted the permission to autonomously award degrees. As of August 2015, India has a total of 18 IITs, one Indian School of Mines, 32 NITs, 18 state-­ funded technical institutes and 18 IIITs. In addition to these, there are institutes which are under the control of the professional councils, without approval of the UGC, which are also higher education institutions. Nearly 30 million students are currently enrolled in these universities/­institutions. There is a virtual class divide among these universities. The state and central universities run by the government charge nominal fees and have relatively better academic standards than the recent crop of private universities. They also attract more meritorious students of all classes and communities, thanks to the constitutional policy of affirmative action. Whatever student politics is observed in India is confined to these university campuses. FTII, IIT (Madras), HCU, BHU, DU and JNU, which were in the news for student politics, belong to this class. But not all of these universities are known for any significant student activity. Student politics is generally correlated to the representation of students from the lower classes, equipped with a social consciousness of the everyday. The former may be due to the lower fee structures,

206  Anand Teltumbde and the latter owing to the academic culture of these institutions. JNU, HCU and DU may easily be cited as examples. Many other state and central universities which also are structurally similar to JNU, HCU and DU do not have student politics because of the lack of a congenial cultural ethos. With rising fee structures, as in the case of the autonomous institutions which are also run by the government and which follow the reservation quotas, students’ politics are transformed into quasi-­academic curricular activities. These are mostly technical institutions with negligible or no presence of social science subjects. This, however, has never been a barrier for student politics, as historically speaking, engineering colleges were far ahead of their social science counterparts in the country in terms of progressive activism. Students from the lower strata who are more prone to agitate do exist in these institutions, but they tend to belong to a different class within their respective communities. These institutions rather insist on a culture and fame of academic rigour, which keeps dissuading students from indulging in political activities. Therefore, we do find student politics in such autonomous institutions, only as instances of exception. The agitation that broke out in IIT Madras because of the administrative ban on the Ambedkar Periyar Study Circle (APSC) is one such exception. Apart from these universities and institutions, there is a virtual ban on student politics in all other universities and institutions run by private agencies. First, the hefty fees charged by them structurally exclude students from lower strata from entering their campuses and create an elitist culture which is inimical to the germination of genuine political expression. Many of them offer courses with seeming concern for political issues, but they are run in a bookish manner and with an NGO-­orientation that eventually reinforces neo-­liberal establishment-­ values. Moreover, such courses act as a safety-­valve for any residual resentment that students may incur. While these private universities and institutions have mushroomed over the last three decades, and today claim almost 50% of student enrolments in higher education, they have not witnessed any student agitation thus far. There is environmental pressure as well, acting against students’ indulgence in politics. The invisible impact of neo-­liberal ideology promotes extreme individualism, and a culture of incessant open competition exerts tremendous pressure on students to ‘perform’. The orientation towards cut-­throat competition begins right from childhood, with parents pressuring students to outperform others. Students have to attend tuition classes in addition to school, which leaves little time for them to relate with anything other than the academic. The entire

The university as passivity? 207 humanizing ethos of education is lost under the neo-­liberal juggernaut making it an investible opportunity to reap maximum returns. Academics thus become examination-­centric, with little to do with learning or grooming critical faculties in children. The competitive ethos which took root in the urban middle classes has now infected even the rural poor, who have also begun seeing education as the only ladder for their children to scale up in life. The current Gross Enrolment Ratio (GER) for higher education (18–­23 years) at 20.4% (GoI 2013: ii) indicates that four-­fifths of the students are dropped out of competition at the level of entry. With the job market becoming increasingly competitive, students are under excessive pressure to get jobs. In addition to these factors, the increasing intolerance of the state which would repress any dissent with brute force, as has happened everywhere that students agitated, also terrorizes them away from politics. These have been dampers thwarting the natural expression of students’ anger, but recent incidents have clearly shown their limits. There is no force on earth that can contain the volcanic energy of students’ anger, and thanks to the self-­obsessed ruling classes, the conditions are being rapidly created for such a catastrophe. The advent and fast proliferation of social media, spread of smart phones and cheapening of data have structurally created a new situation in which as students can react freely and mobilize opinion on any issue. While organized political parties also realized the potential of these media and began using them for their propaganda, the deprived sections like Dalits and Adivasis, who always suffered the neglect of the elitist media, have adopted them in a big way for their self-­ expression. Many people, including scholars, have spoken positively about it in terms of rejuvenating political activism of students, but unfortunately the facts indicate the opposite. Social media, although apparently amorphous and potentially infinite, are not immune to mechanisms of quasi-­control by a sheer flooding of content by powerful groups. While these groups can easily poison the minds of people, activists creating their resistance-­content are often confined to the virtual world and never descend onto the real one. Thus, social media, instead of being a booster, are becoming another damper on material practices of student activism.

Arguments: for and against The usual argument against student politics is that students’ raison d’être in campuses is academics, and insofar as politics distracts attention, they should not indulge in it. This is what Naidu and

208  Anand Teltumbde Subramanian expressly contend. There is another argument in favour of banning ‘party’ politics from campuses. It is argued that politicization of students has the inevitable consequence of imposing a fixed ideology on highly impressionable minds, with the affiliating political party exercising undue influence on its members. This prevents member students from developing an independent and comprehensive outlook, as they are obliged to offer their loyalties to the stance of their respective parties. This linkage makes campuses proxy battlefields for political parties. In a country like India  –­ so sharply divided along castes, communities, races, ethnicities, languages, regions and classes  –­ everyone wears these identities, but it is insisted that they get rabid expression in students’ politics. Some argue that students’ politics infringe upon the rights of the majority of students who want to stay ‘apolitical’. In the competitive world of today, when academic excellence has become the key to a good future, student politics is believed to take away that focus, affecting future prospects. These are the typical arguments one hears in favour of banning student politics. These arguments, however, collapse with a simple statement that students in higher education are voters in elections and are as such constitutionally reckoned as political stakeholders. Higher education campuses are the last posts of training young people to become responsible and enlightened citizens. Whichever branch of education they pursue, they are eventually required to perform the role of a citizen, contributing to the betterment of society. To see universities only as places of bookish learning is myopic. The history of the world, including India, shows that most leaders who eventually became distinguished in public life have been involved in student activism on campuses. Even in India, most of the leaders, past as well as present, have been products of campus political activism. In the case of BJP itself, many of its leaders like Arun Jaitley, Vijay Goel, Alka Lamba and Nupur Sharma, and Venkaiah Naidu himself, emerged out of student politics. The argument that students should focus on their studies may sound incontrovertible, but it is not. It is based on a constricted conception of education. While books embody accumulated knowledge, campus politics bring students face to face with living knowledge-­practices. It is the laboratory to test the efficacy of learning from classrooms  –­ learning how to apply them, learning how to unlearn. The United States, which Indian ruling classes seek to emulate, has the maximum number of universities ranking amongst the top 100 in the world. But it also has an equally glorious history of student activism. It is generally acknowledged that each period of structural and cultural transition

The university as passivity? 209 since its founding has a corresponding story of campus protest and dissent. From the earliest historical accounts, campus-­based activism has reflected grievances based in the political dynamics of the nation. There have been peaks and troughs in students’ political activism, but it never died as such. The anti-­war and racial justice campus movements of the 1960s that came to characterize students’ politics were not a short-­lived product of students’ identities, as thought by some people; they exemplified the university as being a site of imaginative activism and social change. Research shows that students who engaged in activism on campuses develop an inclination to continue their political participation after campus life and acquire a greater sense of social responsibility and identity consciousness (Cole 1996: 130–­40). Some studies have noted that beneath the dissatisfaction that characterizes campus protest, students experience gains in critical thinking (Tsui 2000: 421–­41), civic engagement (Sax 2004: 65–­80) and commitment to the larger community (Barnhardt, Sheets and Pasquesi 2015: 622). Scholars of campus activism characterize its great potential for teaching students about the importance of democratic participation, leadership and the ability to build coalitions amongst a wide variety of individuals on campus (Kezar 2010: 451–­80; Rhoads, Saenz and Carducci 2005: 191–­220). Student activism is a genuine version of what is called ‘extracurricular’ activities, which are accepted as leadership promoting and character-­ building measures on campuses. Cassie Barnhardt of the University of Iowa and Kimberly Reyes of the University of Michigan, referring to higher education research, observe: [student] activism should be viewed as a developmental component of student learning, and that campus unrest must be understood in the context of civic engagement. Campus leaders are right to recognize that in expressing dissent, students are constructing ideas and perspectives that may one day provide solutions to some of our nation’s most urgent and complex dilemmas. (2016: 622)

Nature of student activism Students’ activism is a function of frustrations with the status quo reaching an extreme point. When the status quo is represented by the pervasive intrigues and doublespeak of the ruling classes, by the inhuman oppression and exploitation of the poor, by the wars the state wages on its own people to serve the moneybags, by unscrupulous

210  Anand Teltumbde plays against interests of the country under cover of jingoist patriotism and nationalism, and by inhuman repression of dissent to terrorize people into submission, the frustration is obvious. Here, helplessness itself becomes a motivation for seeking change. When the urge for change within oneself reaches its zenith, it transforms into a collective urge that necessarily precipitates into a rebellious act. Nothing can thwart the tide if it has caught the imagination of multitudes. The recent incidents of students’ activism in four campuses portend this tide in the making. The first is the student protest that erupted in IIT Madras against the administration derecognizing the Ambedkar Periyar Study Circle (APSC). In May 2015, following an anonymous complaint that APSC was instigating protests against the policies of the Centre and creating ‘hatred’ against Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Hindus, the Ministry of Human Resource Development (MHRD) had written to the Director of IIT Madras for his comments. As it happens, the Director crawled when he was asked just to bend and took a decision to derecognize the APSC through the Dean. IIT Madras has had a dubious history of being a monopoly platform for right wing groups to propagate their own ideology and train young minds for their intellectual wings through the Vivekananda Study Circle, RSS shakha, Hare Rama Hare Krishna, Vande Mataram, Dhruva, etc. When some students belonging to lower castes decided to organize themselves as a study circle, the Dean had bared his casteist prejudice, advising the students to change the name of the group, stating that ‘Ambedkar’ and ‘Periyar’ were politically motivated. The APSC remained firm and went ahead exposing the Hindutva overtures and anti-­people policies. They had taken up several issues such as the impact of coal-­bed methane, genetically modified crops on agriculture; implications of the amendment of the Factory Act 1947 on labour, the implication of the beef ban, the Hindutva overtures of the MHRD in promoting Sanskrit Week celebrations, proposal of separate vegetarian mess halls in IITs and IIMs, etc. The widespread protests against and condemnation of the ban that followed over a fortnight brought the administration to its knees and compelled it to withdraw the ban on 8 June. The second case is the indefinite strike of the students of the Film and Television Institute of India (FTII), the country’s premier film education centre, since 12 June 2015 in protest against the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting’s surprise appointment of a minor television actor-­ turned-­ politician, Gajendra Chauhan, as Chairman of the FTII Society. Notwithstanding large-­scale denunciations and widespread support of the who’s who of the film world to the student

The university as passivity? 211 protests, the haughty government did not budge. Gajendra Chauhan’s only credential was that he was a BJP member. His appointment as the Chairman of the FTII Society sent shockwaves across the film fraternity, with many viewing it as an instance of political largesse. It was clearly an attempt by the Narendra Modi-­led BJP government to foist its right wing agenda upon the institute. Students carried on for 139 days and had to withdraw the strike, but not without exposing the undemocratic and fascist style of the BJP government to the people. The third episode of students’ activism is around the Ambedkar Students Association (ASA) in Hyderabad Central University. As in the case of the APSC in IIT Madras, ASA also engaged in exposing the anti-­Dalit, anti-­minorities character of the BJP government. The flare­up in HCU was triggered by an incident on 3 August 2015 when ASA activists demonstrated against the death penalty for Yakub Memon, and condemned the ABVP attack on the screening of a documentary, Muzaffarnagar Baaqi Hai, at Delhi University. In response, ABVP’s local leader Nandanam Susheel Kumar called them ‘goons’ on his Facebook page. The ASA students challenged him in his hostel room and obtained his apology. However, the next day Kumar got himself admitted into a private hospital and projected that he was roughed up by around 40 ASA members. The enquiry set up by the university squarely proved it to be false. However, BJP leaders like Bandaru Dattatreya, MP and a minister in Modi’s cabinet, and Ramchandra Rao, the local MLC, brought pressure through Smriti Irani, the controversial Human Resource Development Minister, to punish five ASA members with an obnoxious punishment, which virtually amounted to their social boycott. It eventually devoured the life of a promising Dalit research scholar, Rohith Vemula. The students became agitated, demanding justice by arresting the culprits under the SC/­ST Atrocities Act. Should such misdemeanour of the government be left to go unchallenged? The police had filed a First Information Report (FIR) against the Vice Chancellor Apparao Podile, Bandaru Dattatreya, Ramchandra Rao, and N. Susheel Kumar for abetting the suicide of Rohith Vemula, but have not acted upon it. Instead, they arrested and thrashed students black and blue when they protested against Apparao’s resumption of his duties, slapped cases on them and kept them in jail for seven days. They further raked up the issue of Rohith’s caste just to derail the issue. The fourth episode of student activism surrounds the jingoist charge of anti-­nationalism and sedition on the students of JNU, who had organized a programme to discuss the controversial hanging of Afzal Guru. Like in HCU, this one also appeared to have been pre-­planned

212  Anand Teltumbde to decimate the leftist students’ domination there. The BJP/­ABVP combine whipped up the bogey of some anti-­India slogans and the obliging state machinery extended it to arrest the students under the draconian charge of sedition. The ruling definition of the sedition charge is that slogans, howsoever detestable they might be, do not constitute sedition until they imminently lead to violence. Despite this, the media, the police and the judiciary continued to harass the students as being seditious. The entire episode exposed the intrigues of the state, yet again. All these episodes of student activism have the misdemeanour of the state at their root. The students came forward to uphold the values of the Constitution and expose the unscrupulous pursuit of power by the rulers to the detriment of the majority of people. However, the state and its minions are unperturbed and persist with their repressive strategies.

Hypocrisy unbounded Like many of its ploys, the BJP’s move to ban student politics on campuses is utterly hypocritical. What it means by politics is simply the resistance to their overtures to saffronize3 campuses and establish the dominance of ABVP, its student wing. The ABVP also represents students’ politics, but Venkaiah Naidu would not refer to it. The BJP’s tacit supposition is that ABVP’s politics is nationalism and every resistance to it is ‘anti-­nationalism’ and even ‘sedition’. This is the precise interpretation that the JNU episode clearly exposes. While in any society, students as future citizens should be encouraged to participate in politics, in India, the amount of injustice, lawlessness and oppression that pervade naturally induces reactions in their victims  –­ manifesting in political activism. How could Dalit students stomach the lynching of five Dalits in Dulina, Jhajjar to death by the Hindutva mob under the very nose of the police? How would they feel about such an episode being repeated in Una in Gujarat? How could they bear two of their community being murdered and five of their women being raped every day? Could any sensible person, regardless of religious allegiance, reconcile with Mohammad Akhlaq’s brutal killing by a cow vigilante mob and leave apart justice, his survivor family being slapped with charges of cow slaughter? Even within universities and colleges, the high-­handedness of authorities, crass commercialization of education and unscrupulous plays within institutions just for petty political gain would provoke anger in anyone. The ruling classes have many ways to suppress student politics. In many colleges, student elections are banned. As explained before, the

The university as passivity? 213 possible domain of students’ politics is increasingly constricted with the proliferation of corporate universities in the country  –­ where there is an undeclared ban on student politics. The political economic paradigm of neo-­liberalism begetting increasing crises has ideologically as well as circumstantially splintered society into discrete and self-­ centred individuals who would contract within their own cells rather than resist the onslaught on them. Students are the only ones with relatively free minds and instinctively bubbling with energy and craving for change. They could potentially defy all of these barriers. However, sensing even the slightest inkling of it, the state can nip their resistance in the bud by unleashing its police and military might. It has adopted the taxonomy of ‘war on terror’ to label any incipient trace of dissent with ‘sedition’ or ‘extremism’ and terrorize people into submission. This is what has been done in every episode of students’ resistance described earlier. Pitifully, what the state does not realize is that with every such vicious attempt to break the back of rebellion, the students and their claim to an idea of the university  –­ as rooted in the idea of justice  –­ have only been steeled in their resolve.

Problems and prospects The global hegemony of neo-­liberalism is a definite problem for all social movements, particularly for the students’ movement. Neo-­ liberalism has already established that higher education is no more a merit good and should only be provided based on the market logic. Way back in April 2000, this policy framework was formalized in the country by the Birla-­Ambani Report, reiterating the World Bank’s then-­maxim that only elementary education which imparts literacy should be the responsibility of the government, and higher education should be completely released to private capital, both domestically as well globally. The government has already offered higher education under the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS), but even before the conclusion of its current Doha round which would make it an irrevocable commitment, higher education has already become an up-­end market. It is mere political expediency that we still have public institutions, as most countries do, but with government funding progressively withdrawn, they too are made to follow market logic. Over the past 25 years, the cost of higher education has gone up by more than 5–­10 times. This high-­cost structure automatically excludes the lower strata, but even deters those who come in from participating in campus politics. The increasing competition for the fast-­drying-­up jobs market further constricts scope for any such activity.

214  Anand Teltumbde These very structural hurdles that sought to decimate campus politics are pushing students to come out to challenge them. The examples of student struggles in FTII, IIT, HCU and JNU are by no means the only ones. There have been struggles of varying intensity on other campuses too. In 2014, the ‘Hok kolorob’ (‘let there be clamour’) movement by students of Jadavpur University, which started off with demands about campus democracy, surveillance and gender justice, solidifying into an insistence on the Vice Chancellor’s removal, is a case in point. Having received no response from the university administration with regard to the demand for effective investigation of an on-­campus case of sexual harassment, students resorted to sit-­in demonstrations outside the Vice Chancellor’s office for a week. They faced police assault and molestation of girl students on the night of 16 September 2014. The gross violation of students’ safety on campus garnered mass solidarity across national and international frontiers, with 100,000 protesters joining a grand march on 21 September that year. Another case may be cited of students’ flash agitation at IIT Kharagpur, which had not seen any student protest for decades. The administration had been raising various fees over a year, under pressure from freezing grants. Finally in 2016, the student groups that formed on campus in the guise of study circles took a lead and mobilized students to protest. The snap protest was so massive that the administration was compelled to take back the proposal. The campus has been seeing symbolic protests and demonstration for the past three years in reaction to instances of onslaught on peoples’ democratic rights. There were such protests against the Rohith Vemula episode, Una atrocities, the suicide of Anitha, etc. The IIT students took a lead in forming an All India Coordination of Science and Technology Students Association (Costisa). Recently, on 5–­6 August 2017, representatives of more than 100 student organizations all over the country had come together for the All India Convention of Students’ Struggles and deliberated on the increasing fascization of the state. They decided to form a council  –­ All India Council of Students’ Struggles, a loose coordination among the students’ organizations  –­ to simultaneously observe protests against the issues of increasing attacks on campus democracy, commercialization of education, saffronization of campuses, etc. The recent struggle of BHU students against the police lathi charge at the instance of a brazenly autocratic Vice Chancellor was greatly amplified by this Council. Surely, silver lines are fast emerging on dark clouds that had gathered on campuses for over three decades now. The Indian ruling classes

The university as passivity? 215 still flaunt the ‘democratic dividend’ in support of their superpower daydream, not realizing that it is already long past and is now turning into a threat against all their misdemeanours.

Notes 1 The others were Naoroji Furdunji, Bhau Daji, and Sorabji Shapurji Bengali; see Mridula Ramanna, Western Medicine and Public Health in Colonial Bombay, 1845–­1895 (Hyderabad: Orient BlackSwan, 1 January 2002), p. 45, note 140. 2 See the website of King Edward Memorial Medical University, Lahore, http:/­/­kemu.edu.pk/­history/­(accessed on 31 December 2017). 3 Refers to the process of Hinduizing curricula, with a specific agenda of establishing the priority-­claim of dominant Vedic Hindu religious traditions.

References Barnhardt, Cassie and Kimberley Reyes. 2016. ‘Embracing Student Activism’, Higher Education Today (March 2). Available at www.higheredtoday.org/­ 2016/­03/­02/­embracing-­student-­activism/­ (accessed on 28 December  2017). Barnhardt, Cassie L., Jessica E. Sheets and Kira Pasquesi. 2015. ‘You Expect What? Students’ Perceptions as Resources in Acquiring Commitments and Capacities for Civic Engagement’, Research in Higher Education, 56. Boren, Mark Edelman. 2001. Student Resistance: A History of the Unruly Subject. New York: Routledge. Chandra, Prabodh. 1938. Student Movement in India. Lahore: AISF Publication Depot. Cole, Elizabeth R. 1996. ‘Meanings of Political Participation among Black and White Women: Political Identity and Social Responsibility’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 71(1): 130–­140. Government of India (GoI). 2013. All India Survey on Higher Education 2011–­12 (P). New Delhi: Ministry of Human Resource Development (MHRD). Available at http:/­/­mhrd.gov.in/­sites/­upload_files/­mhrd/­files/­ statistics/­AISHE2011-­12P_1.pdf (accessed on 28 December 2017). ———. 2016. National Policy on Education 2016: Report of the Committee for Evolution of the New Education Policy. New Delhi: Ministry of Human Resource Development (MHRD). ‘JNU Row: Stay Away from Politics, Naidu Tells Kanhaiya’. 2016. Business Standard (March 4). Available at https:/­/­www.business-­standard.com/­article/­ news-­a ni/­s tay-­a way-­f rom-­p olitics-­g ovt-­c autions-­k anhaiya-­1 160304 00280_1.html (accessed on 31 December 2017). Kezar, Adrianna. 2010. ‘Faculty and Staff Partnering with Student Activists: Unexplored Terrains of Interaction and Development’, Journal of College Student Development, 51(5): 451–­480. Mohammad, Noor and Abdul Matin (eds.). 1995. Indian Youth, Problems and Prospects. New Delhi: Ashish Publishing.

216  Anand Teltumbde Ramanna, Mridula. 2002. Western Medicine and Public Health in Colonial Bombay, 1845–­1895. Hyderabad: Orient Longman. Rhoads, Robert A., Victor Saenz and Rozana Carducci. 2005. ‘Higher Education Reform as a Social Movement: The Case of Affirmative Action’, The Review of Higher Education, 28(2): 191–­220. Rodriguez-­Amat, Joan Ramon and Bob Jeffrey. 2017. ‘Student Protests: Three Periods of University Governance’, Triple C. Communication, Capitalism and Critique, 15(2): 526–­542. Available at www.triple-­c.at/­index.php/­tripleC/­ article/­view/­771/­1015#Boren2013 (accessed on 28 December 2017). Sax, Linda J. 2004. ‘Citizenship Development and the American College Student’, New Directions for Institutional Research, 122(Summer): 65–­80. Schildt, Axel and Detlef Siegfried (eds.). 2006. Between Marx and Coca-­Cola: Youth Cultures in Changing European Societies, 1960–­1980. New York: Berghahn Books. Tsui, Lisa. 2000. ‘Effects of Campus Culture on Students’ Critical Thinking’, The Review of Higher Education, 23(4): 421–­441.

10 The convergence of unequals Struggle for rights in the university space Hany Babu MT

Among the various struggles that the universities and higher education scene in India witnessed in the past few years was a movement called ‘Occupy UGC’ echoing the ‘occupy movements’ initiated with the ‘Occupy Wall Street programme’  –­ fundamentally, a protest against social and economic inequalities. ‘Occupy UGC’ was a movement launched against the decision of the University Grants Commission (UGC)  –­ the agency that disburses grants to ­universities  –­ to discontinue fellowship programmes for conducting research in various universities across India. This was a move that would have unarguably had an adverse effect on the prospects of students from underprivileged backgrounds seeking to conduct research in universities.1 However, universities in contemporary India have been bastions of caste privilege as the percentage of upper caste people, both in the teaching and student communities, is proportionately higher than their percentage in the general population. That is to say, the upper castes have always occupied the higher educational institutions in India. Sukhdeo Thorat quotes data from the National Sample Survey and shows that in the year 2000, “the attainment rate at the graduate/­diploma level was 4.19 per cent for the SCs [i.e., the Scheduled Castes], 3.81 per cent for the STs [the Scheduled Tribes], 4.55 per cent for the OBCs [Other Backward Classes], and 13.37 per cent for the others” (2006: 2433). That is to say, the percentage of graduates among upper castes is more than three times that among the SC, ST and OBC population. This raises an interesting question regarding the semantics of ‘occupy’. The Cambridge Dictionary of English defines ‘occupy’ as ‘to fill, to exist in, or to use a place’, or as ‘to move into and take control of a place’. While in the international scenario the ‘occupy’ movements were definitely intended for the people hitherto excluded to move

218  Hany Babu MT into and take control of economic resources, the ‘Occupy UGC’ movement was clearly not led by those who did not have access to university spaces. On the contrary, it was led by students who have already found their entry into universities. Thus, in spite of the fact that a large number of Dalit Bahujan students had started to come into universities due to the reservation policy, the ‘Occupy UGC’ movement was not spearheaded by Dalit Bahujan student groups, but by leftist organizations. The point is not to discredit the ‘Occupy UGC’ movement, but to highlight the fissures in the political formations that purportedly strive for egalitarian spaces. A truly radical ‘Occupy’ movement would have been one in which the excluded classes of people move into and take control of the institutions of higher education. However, what in reality transpired was more of a group of people fighting for their right to fill in, exist, or use the university space. My main contention is that the various struggles that the university space in India has been witnessing in the recent past have been unable to reconcile the issue of social inequality and exclusion. In fact, we can discern two strata  –­ one kind of struggle against attacks by the state on the freedom of expression within university spaces, and another that targets the dilution or at times the violation of inclusive state policies. I draw a parallel between the two senses of ‘occupy’ that was outlined in the previous paragraph and these two strata of struggles. The struggle against a politics of exclusion within academic spaces resembles the Occupy movement that moves into and takes control of spaces, as it will lead to changes in the character of the institutions dominated by upper castes. The struggle for the freedom of expression seems to be a struggle that is led by those who are already occupying the hallowed university spaces. This parallel is made non-­trivial on two accounts. On the one hand, a few incidents have unfolded within universities in the recent past that saw the convergence of these struggles, as the groups that have been leading those struggles on both fronts came together. On the other hand, the differences between these struggles, I argue, emanate from the different status accorded to the rights co-­implied by them within the constitutional scheme. We shall first look at the constitutional status of these rights and then turn to recent incidents. Although both the right to equality and the right to freedom of expression are guaranteed by the Constitution of India, there is an interesting contrast between the jurisprudential import of these rights. While equal protection before the law is granted to all ‘persons’, the right to freedom of speech and expression is guaranteed only to the

The convergence of unequals 219 ‘citizen’. The contrast between the language of Articles 14 and 19 of the Constitution makes this clear: Article 14: The State shall not deny to any person equality before the law or the equal protection of the laws within the territory of India. Article 19(1): All citizens shall have the right to (a) freedom of speech and expression; Such discrimination between citizens and non-­ citizens in terms of rights is a well-­established practice, but countries differ with respect to what rights are guaranteed to the citizen and what rights to the non-­ citizen. For instance, the Constitution of the United States: does distinguish in some respects between the rights of citizens and noncitizens; the right not to be discriminatorily denied the vote and the right to run for federal elective office are expressly restricted to citizens. All other rights, however, are written without such a limitation. . . . the First Amendment’s protections of political and religious freedoms and the Fourth Amendment’s protection of privacy and liberty apply to ‘the people’. (Cole 2003: 367) In contrast, the Constitution of India grants the right to freedom of speech and expression only to citizens. According to Cole, “[w]hile some distinctions between foreign nationals and citizens are normatively justified and consistent with law, most are not” (ibid.: 366). The distinction that the Constitution of India makes between the right to equality and right to freedom of expression is not warranted by international law. For instance, the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights 1948 holds both equality (Article 1) and right to freedom of opinion and expression (Article 19) as part of the “common standard of achievement for all peoples and all nations” (Preamble). Yet the Constitution of India holds ‘equality’ as a more basic right that is available to all ‘persons’ by virtue of being human beings, while the freedom of speech and expression is only guaranteed as part of a civil rights ‘contract’ with the individual, i.e., through the attainment of citizenship. That is to say, if denying the basic right of equality is tantamount to not treating someone as a ‘person’, denial of freedom of speech and expression is tantamount to denial of citizenship. Therefore, the struggle for the right to equality is of a more basic nature as it is part of the struggle to be recognized and treated as a human being,

220  Hany Babu MT while the struggle for the right to freedom of speech and expression is a struggle to attain a higher order of political right that is granted only to the citizen, always already recognized as a ‘person’. I would like to correlate this with the distinction that was made regarding the two senses of ‘occupy’. For the underprivileged citizens, ‘occupy’ is meaningful only if it leads to moving into and taking control of spaces they did not have access to. That is to say, historically speaking, underprivileged citizens are still fighting their battle to attain equality  –­ a struggle that does not concern those citizens who have already occupied positions of privilege. As Thorat puts it, The problems of the lower castes (the scheduled castes  –­ SCs  –­ and the OBCs) are unique and distinct and as such have to be understood in terms of their being excluded from having equal rights in the ‘past’. Also, such forms of exclusion, even if not in all their original forms, continue to perpetuate themselves in the ‘present’. (2006: 2432) The policy of reservation followed by the Union Government (which is mandated by the Constitution of India) can be seen as state action in order to bring the Socially and Educationally Backward Classes on an equal footing with others, by setting right the historical injustice and providing for affirmative action in education as well as employment. 15% of seats and posts are reserved for the people belonging to the Scheduled Castes and 7.5%t for the Scheduled Tribes. In 1991, the Government of India introduced 27% reservations for the Other Backward Classes (OBC) in posts in the Central Government. In 2006, this was extended to seats in Higher Educational Institutions funded by the Central Government. Even though the legislature has mandated a reservation policy, its implementation has always been met with more resistance than enthusiasm. As I have argued elsewhere, we can see this happening at the undergraduate level, research level, and in the case of teaching positions. Thus, “[a] right policy can be made entirely infructuous if there is inordinate delay in its implementation, or if it is implemented in a distorted manner” (Hany Babu 2013). Even when there is gross violation of reservation policy as in the case of the IITs or Central Universities like the University of Delhi, which is a violation of the equality clause enshrined in Articles 14, 15 and 16, there is a deafening silence in the media and in the public sphere. There are very few voices crying hoarse about the violation of one of the most fundamental rights of the Scheduled Castes, the Scheduled Tribes, the Other Backward

The convergence of unequals 221 Classes, or the Persons with Disabilities to be treated as equal in terms of educational or employment opportunities. The struggle for reservation is almost always fought by smaller groups that fight for social justice. These groups are then quite often accused of promoting ‘identity-­based politics’ and sidelined by mainstream political groups. A classic example for this is the sorry state of implementation of reservation in the University of Delhi, especially through the first half of this decade. For instance, in 2011, more than 55% of the seats at the undergraduate level reserved for the Other Backward Classes (OBC) in the University of Delhi were not filled by deserving candidates from the category, but were diverted to the candidates from the forward communities.2 Similarly, data regarding number of admissions done to the PhD programme at Delhi University show that in the period from 2009 to 2012 (i.e. the first three years after the implementation of 27% of reservation for OBC), out of the 2,476 admissions made, only 266 (that is, 10.74%) belonged to the SC category, 103 to the ST category (that is, 4.15%), and 322 (that is, 13%) belonged to the OBCs, whereas 1,733 (totalling 69.99%) belonged to the General Category. At the level of Assistant Professor appointments in the University of Delhi, out of the 374 posts that were filled, 209 went to the General Category, 44 to the Scheduled Castes, 14 to the Scheduled Tribes, and 16 to OBCs. That is to say, while the Scheduled Castes occupied only 11.76% of the posts (against their legitimate share of 15%), the Scheduled Tribes occupied only 3.74% (against their share of 7.5%), and OBCs occupied only 4.27% (against their share of 27%), the General Category occupied 77.27% (ibid.). As shown by this data, what is really needed is a movement that enables the Socially and Educationally Backward Classes of persons (i.e., the SC, ST and OBC) to move into and ‘occupy’ the space of higher education. However, it was only small splinter groups that came together to fight for social justice that took up the issue and fought the battle in the streets and in the courts. The implementation of OBC reservations in Delhi University is one of the best examples to illustrate this. Thousands of seats meant for OBC students were left vacant at Delhi University due to the misinterpretation of the word ‘cut-­off’ that was used in the Government notification. The confusion arose when Delhi University (along with many other institutions) interpreted the ‘cut-­off’ as the score of the last admitted candidate as opposed to ‘minimum eligibility’ marks.3 Thus, if admissions in the General Category stopped at 85% in a particular subject in a particular college, OBC candidates below 75% were not admitted even when hundreds of seats were vacant. It was only in 2011 that the

222  Hany Babu MT Supreme Court clarified this and reiterated that ‘cut-­off’ in the context of admission can only be read as meaning ‘minimum eligibility’, which led to the reserved seats being given to deserving candidates who met eligibility criteria.4 What is really interesting is that the struggles for proper implementation of reservation not only fails to garner support, but even gives rise to political antagonisms. This is not surprising, given that such movements are almost always against the acts of omission and commission by dominant classes of people who control the administrative machinery. This has been borne out in the nation-­wide protests that followed the adoption of the Mandal Commission Report by the V. P. Singh Government (often referred to as Mandal I), as upper caste locations suddenly became locations of disentitlement in terms of public employment, and the 93rd Constitutional Amendment that allowed the government to make special provisions for the “advancement of any socially and educationally backward classes of citizens” in admission in aided or unaided private educational institutions. The latter, too, had threatened to erode the upper caste hold on higher education. In both instances, the upper caste student groups took to the streets in protest, and mainstream media gave extensive coverage of the protests. The years that followed also brought into focus several stories of discrimination and suicides by Dalit students in higher educational institutions.5 Discrimination in terms of violation of reservation policy seldom evoked any protest from the upper caste dominated mainstream student groups. Dalit suicides evoked the same kind of scant attention that instances of caste atrocities (like that of Khairlanji) had done.6 There were no sustained campaigns or protests in any university against these instances. It is also interesting to note that universities have started becoming battlegrounds only when affirmative policies (i.e., reservation in education and employment) have begun to change the caste composition of student cohorts, with almost half of the seats in Higher Educational Institutions funded by the central Government reserved for Socially and Educationally Backward Communities. There have been a few incidents in the recent past that have belied rehearsed patterns of mobilization on university campuses, in which the struggles initiated by Dalit Bahujan student groups have created reverberations in larger circles. The first of these was the controversy regarding de-­recognition of the Ambedkar Periyar Study Circle (APSC) in IIT Madras, an independent student body created by the students of IIT Madras to “promote Ambedkar-­Periyar thoughts and to initiate debates on socio-­economic-­political and cultural impacts which affect

The convergence of unequals 223 common mass within [the] academic fraternity”.7 The body was created in 14 April 2014, the birth anniversary of Dr B. R. Ambedkar, and organized meetings, movie screenings, and distributed pamphlets regarding issues ranging from impact of genetically modified crops on agriculture to language politics in India. The group was also very critical of certain directives issued by the Ministry regarding having separate mess for vegetarian students in IIT. It was the pamphlet they issued regarding a talk on ‘Contemporary relevance of Dr. Ambedkar’ which seemed to have irked certain Hindutva organizations. An anonymous complaint letter sent to the Ministry of Human Resource Development (MHRD) after the study circle conducted a series of lectures stated, “APSC is trying to de-­align the ST, SC students and trying to make them to protest against MHRD and Central government and trying to create hatred against honorable prime minister and Hindus”.8 The Under Secretary to the Ministry wrote to IIT seeking comments on the “distribution of controversial posters and pamphlets in the campus of IIT Madras and creating hatred atmosphere among the students” by APSC.9 The IIT authorities promptly derecognized APSC, alleging ‘misuse of privileges’ given to them by the Institute. This incident not only captured widespread attention, but also triggered a series of protests against the action of the IIT authorities. An online petition regarding this was able to gather more than 7,500 signatures in less than a week’s time, and editorial pieces were written in many leading magazines. The University of Hyderabad witnessed cataclysmic incidents in the year 2015. This time it was another Ambedkarite organization, called the Ambedkar Students’ Association (ASA), that was in the centre of the storm. Tension had started brewing when ASA had organized a protest against the hanging of Yakub Memon, who was sentenced to death for his role in the Bombay blasts of 1993, which were purportedly in retaliation to riots in the wake of the demolition of Babri Masjid.10 The ASA also organized a protest against the disruption of the screening of the documentary film on communal riots in Muzaffarnagar. The Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP)  –­ the student wing of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), a right wing Hindu group  –­ had already disrupted the screening of the documentary titled Muzaffarnagar Baaqi Hai at Kirori Mal College in Delhi University. An elected Member of Parliament of the ruling BJP, Bandaru Dattatreya, wrote to the Minister of Human Resource Development that the University of Hyderabad had become a ‘den of casteist, extremist and anti-­national politics’.11 Disciplinary action was taken against some students, and it culminated in the suicide of one Rohith Vemula,

224  Hany Babu MT a research scholar at the university and also a member of the ASA.12 This was not the first incident in which a Dalit student had committed suicide in one of the premier institutions of higher education. In fact, the University of Hyderabad itself had witnessed nearly a dozen suicides by Dalit students, half of which took place since 2008.13 However, unlike the earlier instances of Dalit suicide, the suicide of Rohith Vemula triggered a nation-­wide outrage, which saw organizations of almost all hues (except the ruling saffron brigade) and their national leaders joining the campaign, and the “fever of political dissent . . . swept India’s universities” (Sethi 2016).14 The issue even rocked the Parliament and Smriti Irani, the HRD Minister, tried to defend the ruling party in her own histrionic style.15 The protest against Afzal Guru’s hanging in Jawaharlal Nehru University was almost a replay of the happenings at the University of Hyderabad, except for the fact that the main players in this action belonged to the left radical groups.16 Although one would think that this was the most opportune time for alliances to be built between two divergent groups that fought against the hegemony of the upper caste State, fissures were soon visible when accusations were hurled about JNU hogging the limelight and the Rohith Vemula issue getting sidelined. A meeting announced by the JNU Students’ Union to draft an anti-­discrimination bill (labelled the ‘Rohith Act’) had to be called off in the wake of allegations that the main stakeholders (i.e., the Dalit Bahujans) were not involved in the process.17 As argued by Pinto, it is possible to look at the JNU incident as orchestrated by the right wing ruling party in order to see “whether support to Dalits [i.e., Rohith Vemula] evaporated when the rights of Kashmiris [i.e., Afzal Guru] are added to the mix” (2016). However, the failure of a larger alliance against the right wing forces is attributable to the lack of ground-­level unity in terms of struggles at various levels. As we have already seen, the struggle of Dalit Bahujan groups at a fundamental level is the struggle to attain the right to equality  –­ equal opportunity in education and employment through reservation. Their struggle is to get adequate representation and a proper share of resources, as they do not have a share in proportion to their strength in the population.18 In fact, the only place where SC, ST and OBCs have more than adequate (or proportionate) representation is when it comes to prisons. The data published by the National Crime Records Bureau shows that among those convicted in the year 2014, 21.3% belonged to the SCs, 11.9% to the STs, and 33.5% to the OBCs. That is to say, together, their share among convicts is 66.7%  –­ two-­thirds of the total. Their combined share among detenues is as high as 81%.19

The convergence of unequals 225 In a way, the struggle of APSC at IIT Madras and ASA at University of Hyderabad has to do with the coming of age of Dalit Bahujan student politics in our universities. While most of the earlier struggles were to attain equality  –­ be it to implement reservation or end ­discrimination  –­ the struggle against the banning of APSC at IIT Madras and that of ASA at University of Hyderabad involved issues that had to do with freedom of speech and expression. This shift indicates the readiness of these Associations to take up issues that affect ‘citizens’ at large as opposed to classes of people (i.e., the SC, ST or OBCs) who are still struggling to attain equality. And the dominant student groups which never fought for reservation or against caste discrimination in higher education readily came in support, or rather hijacked the struggles of the Dalit Bahujan student groups when it came to fight for freedom of speech and expression. As equal citizens, they are vigilant about their civil rights to freedom and when the question is about freedom of speech and expression, they sense a danger to the rights that circumscribe their intellectual ‘privilege’. This is not to say that freedoms of speech and expression are not issues that affect Dalit Bahujans. It is just that winning more basic fights is what they are largely occupied with. The same kind of apathy can be seen from dominant classes towards the struggles of the religious minorities and tribals, against illegal arrests and prolonged incarceration in the name of terrorism and state security. The controversy regarding the Ambedkar cartoon in the NCERT textbook (that happened before the IIT Madras and University of Hyderabad incidents) offers a study in contrast, as in that case it was the Dalit Bahujan groups who wanted the cartoon to be removed as it was alleged to insult Ambedkar. The liberal upper caste discourse in this instance did not come to the support of Dalit Bahujan groups. On the contrary, they held the view that freedom of expression was paramount, and it should not be compromised. It was beyond them to imagine that curbing certain kinds of freedom may be necessary to protect groups that are vulnerable, just as equality involves unequal treatment to different social segments in terms of protection for the socially and educationally backward groups. Such a lack of imagination is not unexpected from privileged groups who, due to their location, are immune to the threat posed by free speech or expression. As K. Satyanarayana puts it, The left-­liberal intelligentsia, historically, does this always whenever dalits raise their issues. They collapse it into saying fight against imperialism is important or fighting against state censorship is

226  Hany Babu MT important. This argument . . . now dalit scholars and activists will not accept. You really have to address the dalit concerns. (2012) In a more recent development, Human Rights Watch (HRW), an NGO that conducts research and advocacy on human rights, in its 2016 report classified the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act 1989 as a law that restricts freedom of expression. The report holds as problematic the 2015 amendments in the Act that ban an expression that “promotes or attempts to promote feelings of enmity, hatred or ill will against members of the Scheduled Castes or the Scheduled Tribes” and that “disrespects any late person held in high esteem by members of the Scheduled Castes or the Schedule Tribes” (HRW 2016). The incident in which the sociologist Ashis Nandy was booked for his comment about Dalit corruption is cited as an instance for the law being misused. It is interesting to note that this report puts the Prevention of Atrocities Act in the same basket along with draconian laws like the sedition law (section 124A of the Indian Penal Code). What is missed here is the obvious fact that while the former is meant to protect the vulnerable sections of society, the latter is intended to uphold the might of the state and is often used to further crush the vulnerable sections of the society (given the large number of tribals and Muslims who are charged under the sedition law). As Gautam Bhatia puts it: the freedom of speech is not contingent only upon the laws of a nation. The dull compulsion of social relations, and the informal pressures of conformity, exerted in a pervasive, almost unconscious way, perhaps determine to a much greater extent, the limits of permissible speech in a society. (2016: xxx) The crux of my argument is that the phenomenon that makes anti-­ reservation groups look at the provision of reservation as violating the principle of equality and liberals look at freedom of expression as a paramount principle stems from the same underlying inability to temper liberal principles with the social realities. To the upper caste mind, equality is a given phenomenon, as they never are discriminated by virtue of being member of a social group. Hence, they not only fail to see the struggles of the unequal citizens to attain equality, but they also fail to see the need to curb freedom to protect vulnerable sections of society from such discrimination. Thus, in a curious turn of events,

The convergence of unequals 227 when Dalit Bahujan student groups take up issues related to freedom of expression, the groups dominated by upper castes flock in support. However, they remain half-­hearted (if not totally apathetic) about the struggle of the Dalit Bahujan students to attain equality. What I have tried to show here is that even while the struggles of various student groups seem to be converging, their basic interests still diverge. The dominant upper-­caste-­led groups are yet to take an active role in the struggle to make universities a more inclusive space. And till the time universities begin to represent social diversity proportionately in all the rungs of their hierarchy, they will only continue to replicate social inequalities and prejudices.

Notes 1 See Pisharoty (2015) for details. 2 The data was obtained by an organization ‘Academic Forum for Social Justice’, by filing applications under the Right to Information (RTI) Act. Out of 7059 seats in 31 colleges in Delhi University, 3901 seats were left vacant and diverted to the General Category candidates. See June 2011 issue of Forward Press for details. URL, www.forwardpress.in/­2016/­08/­ loot-­of-­obc-­seats-­at-­du/­ (accessed on 31 December  2017). 3 See Hany Babu (2010) for details. 4 Judgement delivered by the Supreme Court on 11 August 2011 in PV Indiresan vs Union of India. 5 See Anoop Kumar (2009) and various articles and documentaries available on the blog ‘Death of Merit’, https:/­/­thedeathofmeritinindia.wordpress. com as well as the report by Thorat et al. (accessed on 31 December 2017). 6 See Teltumbde (2008). 7 Statement issued by APSC on 30 May 2015 titled: ‘Ambedkar-­Periyar Study Circle Ban in IIT Madras: The Real Story’, www.vinavu.com/­ 2015/­05/­30/­comprehensive-­report-­from-­apsc-­iit-­madras/­ (accessed on 31 December 2017). 8 Ibid. 9 See subject line of letter of MHRD letter (Ref. F. No. 5–­3/­2014-­TS-­1, dated 15 May 2015), addressed to Director of IIT Madras, https:/­ /­ i0.wp.com/­t hewire.in/­w p-­c ontent/­u ploads/­2 015/­0 5/­1 1203003_3874 60964770384_967266858669462988_n.jpg (accessed on 31 December 2017). 10 See Zaidi (2014) for a detailed story on Yakub Memon. 11 Refer to letter dated 17 August 2015, from Minister of State (Independent Charge) Labour and Employment to former MHRD minister Smriti Irani, https:/­/­i2.wp.com/­www.indiaresists.com/­wp-­content/­uploads/­2016/­ 01/­fb_img_1453095562004.jpg (accessed on 31 December 2017). 12 The series of events that led to Rohith Vemula’s suicide is chronicled in an article in the The Wire by Vikram Chukka, ‘The Chain of Events Leading to Rohith Vemula’s Suicide’, https:/­/­thewire.in/­19580/­the-­chain-­of-­events-­ leading-­to-­rohith-­vemulas-­suicide/­ (accessed on 31 December  2017).

228  Hany Babu MT 13 See ‘Suicide of Dalit Students Not New in University of Hyderabad’, The Hindustan Times (January 20, 2016), www.hindustantimes.com/­ india/­suicides-­of-­dalit-­students-­not-­new-­in-­hyderabad-­university/­story-­ cbPCCWPAF98q22uDihzb9L.html (accessed on 31 December 2017). 14 Jenny Rowena (2013) tries to correlate caste and outrage in the context of the rape of Dalit women, as opposed to that of caste Hindu women. 15 See ‘Impassioned Irani Takes Opposition to Task’, The Hindu (February 24, 2016), www.thehindubusinessline.com/­news/­national/­impassioned-­irani-­ takes-­opposition-­to-­task/­article8276629.ece (accessed on 31 December 2017). 16 See Roy (2013) for the details regarding Afzal Guru’s case. 17 See ‘Does JNU Intend to Draft the Rohith Act without Including HCU?’, The Quint (July  15, 2016), www.thequint.com/­news/­india/­does-­jnusu-­ intend-­to-­draft-­the-­rohith-­act-­without-­including-­hcu (accessed on 31 December 2017). 18 This is not to imply that ‘adequate’ representation and ‘proportionate’ representation mean the same. As pointed out by Justice Reddy in the famous Indra Sawnhey case that upheld the implementation of the Mandal Commission report, Article 16(4) of the Constitution talks about ‘adequate’ representation of the Backward Classes and not ‘proportionate’ representation. 19 Data, http:/­/­ncrb.nic.in/­StatPublications/­PSI/­Prison2014/­Graphs-­2014.pdf (accessed on 31 December 2017).

References Bhatia, Gautam. 2016. Offend, Shock, or Disturb: Free Speech under the Indian Constitution. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Cole, David. 2003. ‘Are Foreign Nationals Entitled to the Same Rights as Citizens? Georgetown University Law Center’, Thomas Jefferson Law Review, 25: 367–­388. Available at http:/­/­scholarship.law.georgetown.edu/­ cgi/­viewcontent.cgi?article=1302&context=facpub Hany Babu, MT. 2010. ‘The Curious Case of OBC Reservation’, Economic and Political Weekly, 45(47): 15–­18. ———. 2013. ‘Slips between the Cup and the Lip: The Sorry State of Reservation in Central Universities’, Roundtable India. Available at http://roundtableindia.co.in/ index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=7039: slips-between-the-cup-and-the-lip-the-sorry-state-of- ­reservationin-centraluniversities&catid=123&Itemid=139 (accessed on 31 December 2017). Human Rights Watch. 2016. ‘Stifling Dissent: The Criminalization of Peaceful Expression in India’ (May 24). Available at https:/­/­www.hrw.org/­report/­ 2016/­0 5/­2 4/­s tifling-­d issent/­c riminalization-­p eaceful-­e xpression-­i ndia (accessed on 7 July 2018). Kumar, Anoop. 2009. ‘Caste Discrimination in IIT: A Report’, Insight: Young Voices. Available at https:/­/­thedeathofmeritinindia.wordpress.com/­2011/­05/­ 01/­caste-­discrimination-­in-­iit-­delhi-­a-­report/­ (accessed on 7 July  2018).

The convergence of unequals 229 Pinto, Rochelle. 2016. ‘Iceberg Democracy: How the BJP Has Tried to Use JNU to Undermine Rohith Vemula Protests’, Scroll.in (February 18). Available at https:/­/­scroll.in/­article/­803725/­iceberg-­democracy-­how-­the-­bjp-­has-­ tried-­to-­use-­jnu-­to-­undermine-­the-­rohith-­vemula-­protests (accessed on 31 December 2017). Pisharoty, Sangeeta Barooah. 2015. ‘What Lies behind the “Occupy UGC” Protest’, The Wire. Available at https:/­/­thewire.in/­16135/­what-­lies-­behind-­ the-­occupy-­ugc-­protest/­(accessed on 31 December 2017). Rowena, Jenny. 2013. ‘The Protests in Delhi and the Nationalist Paradigm’, Roundtable India. Available at https:/­/­roundtableindia.co.in/­index. php?option=com_content&view=article&id=6138:the-­protests-­in-­delhi-­ and-­the-­nationalist-­paradigm&catid=119:feature&Itemid=132 (accessed on 31 December 2017). Roy, Arundhati. 2013. The Hanging of Afzal Guru and the Strange Case of the Attack on the Indian Parliament. New Delhi: Penguin Books. Satyanarayana, K. 2012. ‘Ambedkar Cartoons, Dalit Objections, and Left Liberals’, Interview by Ravi Chandran, ‘Dalit Camera: Through /­ Untouchable Eyes’, Published in Roundtable India. Available at http:/­ roundtableindia.co.in/­i ndex.php?option=com_content&view=article& id=5203:ambedkar-­cartoon-­dalit-­objections-­and-­indian-­left-­liberals-­i& catid=119:feature&Itemid=132 (accessed on 31 December 2017). Sethi, Aman. 2016. ‘Caste, Sedition, Oppression: How a Student’s Suicide Sparked an Uprising in India’. Available at www.huffingtonpost.com/­aman-­ sethi/­student-­suicide-­india_b_9289504.html (accessed on 31 December 2017). Teltumbde, Anand. 2008. Khairlanji: A Strange and Bitter Crop. New Delhi: Navyana. Thorat, Shukhadeo. 2006. ‘Paying the Social Debt’, Economic and Political Weekly (June 17): 2432–­2435. Thorat, Sukhadeo, K. M. Shyamprasad and R. K. Srivastava. N.d. Report of the Committee to Enquire into the Allegation of Differential Treatment of SC/­ST Students in All India Institute of Medical Science, Delhi. Manuscript. /­ www.nlhmb.in/­ Reports%20AIIMS.pdf (accessed on 7 Available at http:/­ July 2018). Zaidi, Hussain S. 2014. Black Friday: True Story of the Bombay Blasts. New Delhi: Penguin Books.

Part IV

Reflections and memoirs

11 Bearing witness to the university-­‘idea’ Some personal reflections Lakshmi Subramanian

This essay is a set of personal reflections on the idea of the university as it unfolded and assumed new meanings in my professional life. It is derived not from a complex theoretical engagement with the promise and potential of liberal education and of its institutions or their applicability and mutations in the Indian context, but from personal experiences of working in diverse universities and their transformation over three decades from the 1980s. These decades have constituted a period of enormous change in both the structure and functioning of universities as well as of the social-­demographic context of students inhabiting university spaces. This essay  –­ based on an experiential approach rather than a theoretical one  –­ will attempt to explore how these changes slowly but incrementally affected the very idea of the university. Admittedly, there is a retrospective twist to the tale, as it involves looking back on how one participated in the life of the university, worked with a set of assumptions about its rationale and how one’s frustrations simply served to reinforce the value of holding on to the ‘idea’ itself. These frustrations were not simply personal in terms of thwarted promotions or of resistance to new teaching methods or even curriculum change. Rather these reflected the growing mismatch between what the idealized notion of a university was and the actual practice that the structure and workings exposed, the gap largely to do with the way the state demonstrated an ad hocism in managing university affairs. The concern was not only because higher education and its benefits were politicized to become fodder for the electoral mill, but because the politics of higher education governance was thoroughly discredited by utterly incompetent management. In more recent years, the state has become even more sinister with its outright assault on the fundamental premise of the university as a space of debate and open discussion, the bans on prescribed texts and on inviting speakers whose views are not consistent with the state’s position,

234  Lakshmi Subramanian and the wilful destruction of some institutions that ironically have been especially proactive about affirmative action, together combining to create an atmosphere of fear and distrust. These developments have been further complicated by the increasing trend of privatization of higher education and of its internationalization, the consequences of which we have yet to track and consider. My reflections do not claim to address these issues directly, but attempt to provide a context for the growing erosion of the idea of the university as I understood it when I began my career in the early 1980s. Between the 1980s and the 2010s, India witnessed an unprecedented expansion of higher education in terms of the sheer number of universities (public and private, central and state), and of expansion in the recruitment of students as part of a massive democratization of higher education and attempts to render it accessible to socially marginal groups. What did this expansion signify in terms of the state’s project and of the recipients’ expectations, and to what extent did it interact with the idea of the university as it all began in the colonial era? Universities in India, as we know, were part of the colonial project when the colonial state set up universities in the major presidency towns of Calcutta, Bombay and Madras after the Mutiny of 1857. Their agenda was to introduce the tenets of Western education to the enlightened natives and thereby to train them as partners, albeit unequal ones, in the project of the empire converting subjects into citizens over time. These universities did produce an enlightened middle class with liberal values whose increasing control and ambition made such spaces important sites of political action and an integral part of the emerging civil society. To that extent, universities in India were always crucial sites of critical debate and action, particularly those universities set up either in the wake of the Non-­Cooperation Movement, such as Jamia Millia Islamia, or as community articulations like Banaras Hindu University, Aligarh Muslim University and Annamalai University. While the intentions behind these universities differed, there were underlying similarities, namely in the investment placed on education and opinion-­building, in critical reflection and debate and in standing out as a crucial agent in building up social and political identities grounded in progressive liberal ideas. Equally, many of these universities reflected specific interests of caste groups and communities; some of them, like Jamia Millia Islamia University, assumed the minority institution tag which as it happened was entirely consistent with the vision of the early founders of the nation, to preserve and safeguard distinctive identities as a way of making the nation cohesive.

Bearing witness to the university-­‘idea’ 235 How did these spaces and ideals fare in the decades after independence, and how have these ideals gained traction as far as their ‘stakeholders’ are concerned? This is a large question and cannot be easily answered without a thorough examination of the university system after independence. Therefore, the reflections that follow are only to be taken as a subjective perspective, informed by the actual experience of working in very diverse institutions. My initial teaching and research career was in the history department of Viswa Bharati, a central university noted for its association with the poet laureate Rabindranath Tagore. It boasted in addition to a galaxy of scholars in the disciplines of Bangla and philosophy, a fine library with impressive collections  –­ not to speak of the repository in Rabindra Bhavan, a vibrant and robust fine arts department, the Kala Bhavan with K.G. Subramanyan, the activist artist par excellence at its head, and an active history department with a diverse faculty that was inspired by Ashin Dasgupta who gave the department a very distinct shape and personally initiated an important subfield of Indian maritime history. I recall how the space enjoyed a quiet and ambient cosmopolitanism, with scholars teaching Chinese and Marathi, with the Kala Bhavan staging exhibitions like the Nandan Mela that were part of an alternative imagination. Kala Bhavan, largely because of its faculty, was different and broke away from the mould. This was of course not always the case with other departments that had to operate amidst disciplinary constraints and the disproportionate influence the high school constituency in Santiniketan enjoyed. However already by the early 1980s, recruitment of students from a wider catchment area ensured that Viswa Bharati was not simply a university in the district of Birbhum or a finishing school for middle class children of Calcutta but that as a central institution, it was able to attract students from Orissa, Bihar, Andhra Pradesh. Even the faculty was more all-­India in character. This demographic diversity gave the university a distinctive character and ensured a degree of dynamism in social interactions. Such dynamism did not necessarily inflect student politics or persuade the administration to improve hostel facilities or even residential quarters for the faculty  –­ in fact, what stood out was the chronic failure of the administration to enable and guarantee the residential character of the campus and the university. Many of the faculty tended to be daily passengers, an option that robbed the University of the potential of being a really dynamic residential university. However, the University did have an appreciable impact on the local community, as it did on faculty who came from outside, especially thanks to its status as a central university. Some of its departments, especially the Kala

236  Lakshmi Subramanian Bhavan and some departments in Vidya Bhavan and the arts section, stood out as spaces for experimentation, the effects of which were not entirely lost on the students. The freedom that many enjoyed in structuring tutorial sessions, in joint teaching programmes, gave the university a very distinct edge. I recall, for instance, the set of lectures that Professor Tapan Ray Chaudhuri delivered on colonialism and the Indian economy, thus making accessible the new scholarship that was cohering around the New Cambridge Economic History writing project. There was something quite organic about engaging with history at a time when significant debates were being articulated and when textbooks were being rewritten and presented. The university was not simply a space where syllabi were completed and examinations held, but one which had a very definite connect with a larger academia outside it. The enthusiasm many of us carried to the classroom in sharing the excitement of revisionist historiography on Mughal decline and the eighteenth century transition to the British Empire as well as the counter-­attacks by the Aligarh school found resonance in a culture of debate and not of censure. Ashin Dasgupta organized a major international conference on maritime history which was not lost on younger faculty and researchers, and it is not entirely a coincidence that some of the most important interventions in Indian maritime history have come from ex-­scholars and ex-­faculty there. Moving to a state university, the University of Calcutta, in the late 1980s turned out to be a different experience in a number of respects. For one, there were greater numbers both in terms of students in the classroom and of faculty, but much less regional diversity in terms of students. It was, however, much more political as evinced by demonstrations, graffiti and the vigour of university politics in the senate and syndicate. The university was part of the left bastion in West Bengal, and it would be impossible to deny political influence on university affairs or even appointments. It was also the time when bureaucratization became more intrusive  –­ the application for funds and status (for example, the University Grants Commission’s Special Assistance programmes and Centre for Excellence) involved a disproportionate investment of time and energy in chasing files, making visits to Delhi and spending funds that inevitably came late but had to be utilized before the dreaded date of 30 March. Thus, while these special sanctions and funds did facilitate research, and even helped departments like the department of history to successfully develop thrust areas, academic processes tended to become formulaic and mechanistic. This was especially so when refresher courses were organized and subsequently tied up with the promotion and upgradation of college

Bearing witness to the university-­‘idea’ 237 teachers whose enthusiasm for academic interactions waned. This is not to deny that occasionally these worked, or that through the university’s functioning, new fields and subfields of history were communicated with greater regularity. The history department of which I was a member developed a strong subfield in the social and economic history of modern India. The addition of maritime history and the development of labour history and gender history were major contributions to the intellectual profile of the department. To what extent the expansion of university education made possible the realization of other social aims that went with the ideals of liberal education and governmentality is more difficult to answer. That the democratization of higher education fed rising social aspirations connected with education, that it did provide an interface between higher education and school teaching or archival services or even public service commission exams, are important facts that we must record and register. These surely have played a key role in providing the bare bones for our society and a range of services it falls back upon. Through the 1990s, the university space remained a safe one, not so much in terms of hefty salaries or perks as in terms of freedom in what one wanted to write, read and debate according to one’s own predilections, training and orientation. Not for once did I feel the pressure of having to conform to the Marxist debates or to fall in line with what was set out by the Aligarh school. The city’s academic fraternity was equally agog with excitement when a new research centre, the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences (CSSSC), an Indian Council of Social Science Research (ICSSR) institution, was set up to pioneer innovative social science research, to act as an interface between academic and public policy. It rapidly developed into a premier research centre, where debates and discussions held the promise of charting new fields within an interdisciplinary frame. This came as a breath of fresh air at a time when the disenchantment with conventional leftist politics, and with the nation-­state persuaded several influential scholars to interrogate conventional Marxist ways of doing history and to come up with their own insights on history from below. While the project was subsequently accused of being led by elite scholars in global locations, there is no doubt that it leased new life into the discipline of history and enjoyed a level of circulation that was unusual. Thus, notwithstanding academic spats and frictions, there was a genuine excitement about academic work that universities and research centres were part of. Nor was this entirely confined to the few top institutions, there was an attempt by college teachers to carry ideas into their classrooms.

238  Lakshmi Subramanian However, none of this was able to stem the rot that had crept into the system  –­ rampant private tuitions and the inability of the universities and colleges to sustain a viable student-­teacher ratio meant that standards fell and the pursuit of higher education was nothing but a paper chase. Perhaps the most serious constraint that thwarted the vitality of higher education was language competency and the failure to produce knowledge in regional languages and to help students write with confidence in them. Thus, a gap developed between those institutions that had historic advantages and those that did not, with the result that the university became a site of differentiation as it did of greater social interactions. There were those who came from the city’s leading colleges and there were those who did not, and the differences became more palpable as there was a clamour for instruction in Bangla and for the note-­giving method over the lecture-­cum-­tutorial mode. Interestingly, the demands never really translated into a sustained pressure for making more translations available; there were some translated texts, but nothing that even remotely came close to what was required. I don’t think as stakeholders, we can excuse our apathy and failure to reach out to large numbers. If today universities are seen as bad investments, and the clamour is to make them managerially more effective with the right rhetoric that resonates with our aspiring middle class, for whom the aim of education is to turn into a good docile and employable student, then we are as much to blame as the state  –­ which then as now, merely saw the university as one more site to garner votes and keep unemployed youth in a poorly equipped transit lounge. The structural reorganization of universities became even more evident when the state stepped in to ensure protective discrimination and enable greater access to higher education. At the level of actual research and academic reflection, there were new goal posts and new paradigms that reflected the changing milieu in which higher education operated. That new directions in social science research were possible in the 1980s and 1990s, in research centres established under the Ministry of Human Resource Development, testified to the vitality of the academic community in charting and reflecting on new methods and new subjects of historical enquiry. Here, the idea of academic institutions as a space for critical thought and reflection was strengthened. As a research institution, the CSSSC was invested in adopting new methodologies and conducting innovative workshops  –­ the Cultural Studies workshop being a case in point  –­ and in that role was actively involved in creating constant conversations about the method and mandate of interdisciplinary research. Some of these issues were taken

Bearing witness to the university-­‘idea’ 239 up by central universities like Jawaharlal Nehru University and Jamia Millia Islamia, especially in the new centres that were introduced to look more closely at new areas of research and new themes and to work out a trans-­disciplinary methodology to pursue the same. These were undoubtedly in response to the changing context brought in by ‘Mandal’ and ‘Mandir’,1 forcing a greater scrutiny of issues of caste, social inclusion and nation-­building. Looking back, one is struck by the radical experiments in student recruitment followed by institutions such as JNU and the academic freedom that universities and intellectual spaces retained. Even as we struggled to cope with the pressures of the classroom where underprivileged students faced extreme challenges, there was never any question of academic censorship. We were not told to look away from multiple Ramayanas or shrug off the salience of popular as well as professional histories. My own decision to experiment with new cultural history by looking at the story of music and cultural practice in southern India in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and having to develop an altogether new methodology to do so was never derided. It is this quality of academic choice and the freedom to defend it that stood out for me as the most important attribute of a university as an ‘idea’ and as a functioning organism. Thus, even as I was frustrated at my inability to forge effective ways of dealing with students of varying backgrounds in a classroom, I never felt that my methods and my freedom to read and refer to historical works was under constant surveillance and supervision. It was this sense of freedom  –­ freedom to be excited about a new work, freedom to debate its value, the freedom to retain the agonistic orientation of the historical discipline  –­ that made my employment in a university so special, indeed so much so that one was prepared to overlook all the doomsayers of liberal education to carry on with research and teaching. Teaching in Jamia, where I had a brief stint with Professor Mushirul Hasan at its helm, was another inspiring experience  –­ for here I had an actual encounter with a scholar who had a very clear idea about what the university space was intended to be. As a scholar who claimed fidelity to the Indian constitution to be his only religion, Professor Hasan had the reputation of standing tall against goons and violence perpetrated on him for his views on the Rushdie controversy and resisting the pressures of the state to turn in his students over the Batla House controversy. For him, the university was a space for freedom of expression and the freedom to be able to work unimpeded. His enthusiasm communicated to those students who now found a new pride in being part of Jamia’s fraternity and in availing of a decent liberal education that went far beyond the classroom. My stint in Jamia was

240  Lakshmi Subramanian deeply enriching, as it gave me some access to what students experienced. Cynics and detractors scoffed at the architectural ambitions of Professor Hasan, but what was really important was the self-­conscious investment and pride in ensuring a physical space that was conducive to intellectual activity. The setting up of the Premchand archive, the building of impressive lecture theatres, the freedom to organize unusual workshops, and the revival of the Talimi Mela to reconnect the university with the larger community in the area made Jamia a very distinct space, bringing home the significance of the university as an agent of change, aspiration, identification and potential. For me, teaching students across departments, interacting with centres (the media resource centre in particular) and sharing my own enthusiasm for the humanities reiterated the centrality and power of the idea of the university as a crucial space for social imagination, and as a stepping stone for thinking about the public in a meaningful and democratic manner. I believe that it is only at a university where, at least theoretically, students can feel like they can question their superiors not as an exercise in brazen disregard of authority but as an exercise in experimenting with and learning to use the established protocols of debate and discussion. The university is no gurukul  –­ it is not about hierarchy and while the gurukul has been invaluable and indeed indispensable in the dissemination of practices such as music, the university is not structured to fulfil that set of functions. It is a space that brings diverse constituencies together and is a laboratory in experimenting with modes of sociality and academic interchange that go toward building a thinking subject. How far has this idea worked? Where has it become subverted? Why is it that anything remotely critical and non-­conformist is immediately dismissed as recalcitrance? Is this entirely a case of perception made worse by the run-­in that the ruling government has had with radical university spaces like JNU? Or is this a manifestation of a deeper crisis of long standing, of mindless systems of evaluation and instruction that destroy the questioning instinct? Is it a manifestation of a collective unwillingness to redress social injustice and redefine the ‘idea of a university’ to take care of the structural problems that bedevil our society? Why is it that everyone, media included, sees institutions such as JNU as inherently unreliable and voices the opinions of those who say quite unabashedly that students are sent to universities to study and be good and not to protest and critique? Why is it that we do not have public discussions about what it has meant to enjoy access to higher education, especially among marginal groups? The silences on these questions alternating with the shrill noises about

Bearing witness to the university-­‘idea’ 241 university ‘indiscipline’ and failings conceal the reality of poor management of universities, the consequences of unimaginative bureaucratization and also of the latent feudal culture that characterizes our own social attitudes. How often do we hear of professors working off their students to publish papers in their names, and how often do we hear of instances of teachers treating students as errand boys and girls, all in the name of loyalty and fidelity? Surely this is not an issue that can be ignored, for it raises the question of our own failings to act democratically. Under the circumstances, can the idea of the university, as we see it, actually work? Do we, in our private and public lives, actually realize the ideals of rational and professional behaviour and of the rights of freedom and the responsibilities of public life? Do we even value them, or do we simply treat universities as teaching shops where degrees are meant to be secured and students fitted out to take their place in a world with little employment opportunities in any case? Evidently over time  –­ in fact, over the last three decades that I have had the privilege of working in many institutions of modern India  –­ the situation has gone through a sea change and universities have become in every way hollowed out spaces where there is neither the interest in critical thought nor the wherewithal to foster it. There are no easy ­prescriptions  –­ it took a generation of nation builders to build and develop institutions, albeit with flaws and loopholes, and it has taken less than a decade to dismantle them. Given our present situation and given the mandate that the saffron brigade enjoys over adjudicating myth and history and over the form and ideals of higher education, the idea of the university itself may well dissolve in a mist of confusion.

Note 1 I mean, the Mandal Commission recommendations (1980) and the Ram Mandir controversy raging since the 1980s.

12 Don’t study, be happy Vijay Prashad

There was a time in the slowly receding past when higher education was substantially free in most parts of the world. Students who passed difficult examinations would come to universities and study whatever caught their fancy. They had few worries about the cost of their education. What lay before them were years of learning. During these years of learning, habits of democracy filtered into the lives of the students. Education might have been mostly paid from the corpus of social wealth, but other problems did interrupt their studies. Students came from many backgrounds, differentiated by class, ethnicity and region. Inequalities of the world made their way into student lives, and it was to redress these that students became political. Politics was the confrontation between groups over the distribution of power and other resources. It was democratic to be political. Silence is the opposite of democracy. Then, suddenly, the world changed. * A new order emerged. Higher education should no longer be free. If social goods are free, they are abused. Everything must be paid for  –­ including education. How does one ensure that educational institutions are not merely for the rich? By giving opportunities to those who have no spare money  –­ opportunities of scholarship and of debt. The model for this pay-­as-­you-­go education is the United States, where free education at the college level has always been anathema. That is why 7 million Americans are currently in default over their college debt, while the total college debt in the United States is over US$1 trillion. What is good for the United States  –­ namely debt  –­ must be good for the world! Therefore, this debt-­driven educational strategy finds itself promoted by international development institutions, international financial institutions and, of course, capitalists who see

Don’t study, be happy 243 in for-­profit education an immense opportunity. Few countries have been able to hide behind the culture of social goods in these neo-­liberal times. Most have had to succumb to fee hikes of one kind or another as a lever to break down the idea of education as a social good. From South Africa to the United Kingdom, students have revolted against the rise in fees. They have occupied public spaces, chanted till their throats hurt and motivated others to join them in disgust at the profit gouging of this essential aspect of a democratic society. South Africa’s students in 2015 put up immense resistance to the push for an increase of fees by over 10%. This was the largest student and indeed youth demonstration since the end of Apartheid in 1994. ‘Our parents were made promises in 1994’, a student slogan went, ‘We’re just here for the refund’. Disillusionment with the direction of intensified inequality in South Africa and dashed hopes for a socialist future met the sudden rise in fees. The values of the anti-­Apartheid struggle informed the students. They would not back down. The government  –­ under immense pressure  –­ had to rescind the policy. Five years before that, British students called for a ‘demolition’  –­ a demonstration against the fee hike for their university education. The National Union of Students found an ally in the Trades Union Congress  –­ they both saw the fee hike as an attack on the working-­class. Debt-­induced national collapse in Southern Europe was in the air in 2010. ‘Greece, France, now here too’, went the chant. Crackdown by the police against the demonstrators was met in Parliament with a ratification of the fee hike. There were not even the shared values between students and the ruling class as there is in South Africa, even if only fleetingly in the latter. It helped that the anti-­Apartheid struggle was so recent. No such memory unites the classes in Great Britain. In 2011 in Chile, massive student protests opened up against a proposal to replace the public education system with a for-­profit model. These protests continued for two years. They followed major protests against a dam and against rise of gas prices  –­ all part of the slate of neo-­liberal policy. Close to 200,000 students took to the streets on 30 June 2011  –­ brought together by the Confederation of Chilean Student Federations, led by the charismatic Camila Vallejo (University of Chile), Camilo Ballesteros Briones (University of Santiago) and Giorgio Jackson (Pontifical Catholic University of Chile). Under the sign of ‘Con Pasion por la Educación’ (‘Passion for Education’), the students held a massive ‘kiss-­in’ in Santiago on 6 July. The militancy and the creativity brought the students popular support, although the government would not bend. A general strike a year later  –­ on 28 June 2012  –­ did not move the government, which was voted out of power the next

244  Vijay Prashad year. The socialist government of Michelle Bachelet promised to take the students seriously, drawing in left wing leaders Camila Vallejo (of the Communist Party) and Gabriel Boric (of the Autonomous Left) into her government. Bachelet’s government did not deliver on her promise. The protests continue and are likely to escalate. Very recently, in 2016, the Spanish government attempted to put forward a fee hike for universities. School students  –­ who can see their futures melt away  –­ answered the call of the Students’ Union. They took to the streets for a two-­day strike in April. This followed a three-­ day strike in October 2014 against a drift in fees that raised them by 50% over the previous three years. Student enrolments in Spanish universities fell by forty-five thousand. The hashtag for this protest was simple: #QueHablenLos45000 (‘The 45,000 Speak’). In 2016, as the cuts deepened, the anger was much greater. ‘Hijos de Puta’, read a sign  –­ ‘Sons of Bitches’. No more needed to be said. Frustration was too high. Fierce clashes with the police came alongside social democratic demands  –­ ‘Tuition, books and free transport for children of workers’ and ‘We want our scholarships’. These changes  –­ this debt-­funded education  –­ are anathema to students in many parts of the world. Their demands are at the level of affordability: they want to be able to enter college. It is beyond comprehension that college  –­ higher education  –­ would be priced out in democratic societies that have a commitment to equality of opportunity. This is not socialism. This is merely an erosion of the low standard of ­equality  –­ not equality of outcomes, but of opportunity. This is the essence of neo-­ liberalism  –­ the end to the basic promise of liberal equality.

Education of a wide variety would allow students to open their minds to different kinds of knowledge, to test their own developed skills to see what would be best for them to study. Resource constraints push students early into tracks  –­ so that early in their secondary school careers students have to pick sciences or arts, applied work or intellectual activity. But this is far too early in their lives for students to know what is available, given the immense developments in these fields of study. By the time students make their intellectual choices, they do not yet know how these intellectual arenas have developed. A student bored with introductory chemistry might walk away from it but not realize until much later that bio-­chemistry is fascinating for that student. Tracked education denies students the full exposure to what is available. It is merely one of the structural features of the denial of freedom to students.

Don’t study, be happy 245 What determines the choice of study for our students today? Neither their talents, in many cases, nor their interests drive them, but the financial rewards that might come from those trajectories of study. Immense fears of debt and social pressure for upward mobility define the terrain ahead for most of our students, from India to Mexico. Students rush to study economics, for instance, because they believe that mastery of the subject will put them in a good position to enter the financial sector. Their own interest in economics is not the point; what is the point is the desire for a job with high compensation that would erase their student debt and provide their aspirations in a society where possession of commodities has come to define happiness. Slowly, surely, interest in pure science and in philosophy will seem esoteric. These are research trajectories that do not necessarily lead to wealth. What they might lead to is personal fulfilment and, as importantly, social findings that improve human knowledge about itself and our planet. Some of this might have an impact upon commerce, but it is not commerce that drives the agenda in these fields of study. Entire arenas of investigation will become sidelined, tolerated for a time but then defunded as money chases after those areas of study that are themselves slated to produce money. Thought will dry up. Universities will become intellectual deserts.

When students at Jawaharlal Nehru University came under attack from the BJP and its tentacles, one of the complaints against the students was the following: they are students, so they should study and not indulge in politics. Red-­hot outrage was directed at students regardless of what had raised them to moral protest  –­ whether it was Kashmir or Dalits, conditions on campus or scholarship reductions. The issues mattered, surely, but the indignation targeted the student protest itself. Higher education  –­ which should be universal in a democratic ­society  –­ is not merely to be designed to prepare young people towards careers. That is the narrowest definition of education. Higher education’s purpose in a democratic society is to create the stage upon which young people learn to ask questions about their society, about their values, about the discrepancy between their values and their social institutions, and about what one can do about that discrepancy. In other words, higher education provides the space for young people to become citizens  –­ to understand the role of political power towards the betterment and transformation of their social institutions. Student protests from Chile to India have become commonplace not only because of fee hikes  –­ the surface manifestation of neo-­liberal

246  Vijay Prashad policy  –­ but also because of what lurks underneath, namely the evisceration of student politics. If one looks closely at the sites of major student unrest, these are also places with major social dislocation because of long-­term austerity regimes and because of recent attacks on the public sector and the commons. Broad social claims are being fought over in these societies. Students are merely part of this larger struggle. In 1966, German students mistakenly chanted ‘Today the students, tomorrow the workers’. In fact, even in the mid-­1960s, the workers played a social role alongside the students in Paris, Berlin and London. The range of social protests in our time is even more startling  –­ and positive. Students have already begun to root themselves in these protests. In none of the protests  –­ from Chile to India again!  –­ have the students not chanted slogans about other struggles: dispossession in Chile, caste violence in India. Capacious visions emerge in these times. One cannot see these merely as student struggles. These are political struggles by students, who struggle to imagine a world that does not have the constraints of the world they are trying to grow up in.

13 The Presidential transition Paramita Banerjee

The domain of meaning University: the term phonetically seems to have something to do with the universe and by derivation with the universal, and there is, indeed, a connection. Both the words  –­ universe and university  –­ have been derived from the same Latin word ‘universitas’ which originally meant a whole, but developed another meaning in medieval legal Latin  –­ a community, a collective, a company, a corporation. The word ‘university’ emerged out of the second sense. The Encyclopaedia Britannica tells us that the term was derived from the Latin ‘universitas magistrorum et scholarium’  –­ which would roughly translate to ‘a community of teachers and scholars’. The Latin word ‘collegium’, from which the English word ‘college’ has been derived, means almost the same, going by its dictionary import: ‘corporation’ or ‘brotherhood’ or ‘guild’ or ‘society’ or ‘school’. However, there is one interesting difference: the first meaning mentioned in the Latin-­English lexicon is ‘college/­board (priests)’. Etymologically, then, a university refers to a community of teachers and scholars while a college may refer to a collective of priests. It is, of course, a matter of discussion whether any of the two collectives is higher than the other. In fact, there is enough historical evidence to argue that the relationship between scholars and priests has been a complex one. There have been times in different cultures when priests (or whatever other terminology was in use to refer to religious/­spiritual leaders) doubled as scholars and teachers. We usually refer to such times as ‘ancient’ in common parlance. But over time, the two roles got separated to signify different sets of people with varying vocations and their relationship became hierarchical  –­ a hierarchy that would undergo a reversal at a certain historical juncture, the temporality of that juncture being different in different geographical locations. While the Middle Ages (in Europe especially) saw a dominance of priests,

248  Paramita Banerjee they lost out to scholars as the Modern Age (as we normatively know it, also known as the era of early expansionist capitalism in certain ideologies that are increasingly becoming unfashionable to even allude to) dawned. In India also, especially in Bengal  –­ where the subject of this paper pits itself  –­ the age of reason gradually took over, privileging scholars over priests, as Western-­style liberal, rational education was introduced by the colonial masters, the British  –­ of course with full invitation from the Hindu elite of Bengal, the seat of the East India Company that then ruled India. Though there is a definite hierarchy between the terms ‘college’ and ‘university’ in their current usage, insofar as a college is part of a ­university  –­ the hierarchy is not simple!  –­ much like the complexity of the relationship between priests and scholars. Especially with reference to the University of Calcutta, which was among the first multi-­ disciplinary and secular Western-­style universities established in India in 1857. Modelled on the University of London established in 1836, the complex collegiate system has been an integral part of the University of Calcutta since its inception  –­ more because the university was not a site of direct teaching activities till 1904. The undergraduate colleges affiliated to this university (substantially reduced through distribution to other newly founded public universities only in recent times) have relative autonomy in terms of admissions and everyday operations; are rated individually by the centralized University Grants Commission for performance (a system in place in current times); but the syllabi, the examinations and the bachelor’s degrees are centrally controlled by the university. My story lies in that precise hierarchy and relates to the erstwhile Presidency College, transformed into an autonomous university on 7 July 2010. This transition of the ‘prestigious’ institution from a college affiliated to the University of Calcutta to the autonomous Presidency University of today contains complexities that provide enough food for thought, I think, in today’s world of shrinking public-­funded premier institutions that do not cater to doctors and engineers and management graduates, happy to remain committed to the study of the pure sciences and humanities; highbrowed enough to even exclude commerce  –­ the next best thing to engineering, medicine and management in today’s so-­called practical globalized world.

The first among equals It is important at this juncture to justify the inclusion of this essay in this volume: why a disquisition on one college metamorphosed

The Presidential transition 249 recently into an autonomous university in an anthology comprising articles on the idea of the university that dare public-­funded universities to reinvent themselves. This is precisely where the notion of the first among equals becomes indispensible, regardless of whether we look at it from the Marxist perspective of the role of the individual in history that provides a dialectical unity of subjective and objective factors, or from the all-­too-­familiar cult of the hero as humanist transcendentalism, riding high over material contingencies of context. This juxtaposition of two apparently contrary ideas can, actually, be understood without reference to any political theory as well, by invoking the logical concept of ‘necessary’ and ‘sufficient’ conditions, both of which need to combine to produce a desired result. The classical example that students of logic across generations and cultures study is that of there being no smoke without fire: fire is a necessary condition for smoke, but is not sufficient by itself. A trigger that renders complete combustion impossible, such as wet fuel or inadequate oxygen supply, is needed for smoke to be produced. In exactly the same manner, the subjectivity of specific individuals brings that element of sufficiency to the socio-­economic conditions necessary for revolution to happen, the Marxists would say. Little needs to be said about the glorification of the individual in non-­Marxist theories: from the notion of the Benevolent Patriarch to the promotion of Individualism as a social theory, there are far too many examples to need citing. The same indispensability of the unity of (apparent) opposites has been part of traditional wisdom, I would argue, since much before Hegel articulated his thesis/­ antithesis/­synthesis proposition in dialectics. Family and community elders in many cultures (India included) have been stressing that just as no amount of hatching would lead to life emerging from a pebble or anything else that does not already contain the potential of life within  –­ an egg cannot evolve into a full-­fledged living being without hatching, either. The singular significance of the Presidency College (turned University) lies in this imperative need for certain factors to combine for any remarkable change to happen. Any serious discussion on the role of public-­funded universities historically and at the present moment in the Indian context might provoke reference to this ‘premier’ i­nstitution  –­ the first centre of Western-­style higher learning in India. The role of this (once?) stellar academy simply cannot be wished away  –­ whichever angle we look at it from. Having ushered in the charge of Anglicist education, and in thus using the English language as its medium of instruction, this centre of learning has had far-­reaching impact on subsequent events in colonial and also in post-­1947 India.

250  Paramita Banerjee An expansive universe of discourse is already available on the impact of Western education on India to need much elaboration here, but it seems worthwhile to remember how Justice Syed Mahmood begins his A History of English Education in India: “The origin, rise and progress of English education in India . . . constitute one of the most significant episodes, not only in the annals of India, but in the history of the civilised world” (Mahmood 1895: 1). Just in case this assertion seems hyperbolic, it would suffice, I believe, to draw attention to the entire body of academic writings variously labelled postcolonial, postmodern, poststructuralist et. al  –­ all of them discussing and challenging (in different ways) the supposed supremacy of post-­enlightenment ‘rational Western thought’ as the only form of knowledge. A mode of knowledge that has ruled the world as the only form of knowledge  –­ either in acceptance or in defiance  –­ cannot really be written off. Similarly, the academy that first introduced this form of knowledge to the Indian subjects of the erstwhile British Empire cannot be passed by in oblivion. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that many of the eminent public figures of both pre-­and post-­1947 India were educated at the erstever Indian while Presidency College. From churning out the first-­ graduates to being the alma mater of a huge list of eminent achievers in varied fields ranging from academics to politics and governance, from literature to journalism and film-­making  –­ the list of even the most distinguished of the institution’s alumni is far too long, and the same with its faculty list. It has had a major role in shaping the influence of liberal Western education in a myriad of spheres of thinking  –­ from being the seat of pioneering experiments in the material and life sciences to being a hot bed of ‘revolutionaries’ in the first phase of the Naxalite movement, this academy has witnessed and impacted far too much to be left alone. The college pioneered the introduction of a whole new education system in India: a system that “posited and served to create  –­ and sometimes failed to fully create  –­ certain sorts of subjects” (Seth 2007: 5). This is why it is of considerable significance to understand the why and how of the transition of this college to an autonomous university, as also to critically review the role it is expected to play in its altered avatar, and the role that it is actually playing at the moment.

A historical detour The foundation of this premier educational institution is rooted in the Hindu elite’s rapport with the British who then ruled the country

The Presidential transition 251 under the East India Company with Calcutta (rechristened Kolkata since January 2001) as their capital. Hindu aristocrats like Raja Radhakanta Deb, Babu Buddinath Mukhejee, Rasamay Dutt, and even Raja Rammohan Roy  –­ though he did not manifest his support initially so as not to provoke antagonistic reactions from orthodox Hindus  –­ strongly felt the need for Western-­style higher education in English to be available to young Hindus. The establishment of the Supreme Court in Calcutta was a special trigger in this regard, and with support from David Hare, who had already taken steps to introduce English education in Bengal, and Sir Edward Hyde East, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Fort William, the Hindu College was formally established on 20 January 1817, with 20 ‘scholars’. Originally established as a non-­governmental college for young Hindu men only, it became a secular government college in 1855, open to young men from all religions. That is also when it was renamed as ‘Presidency College’. However, it took another 90 years for the college to be co-­educational: girl students were first admitted only in 1944. There are some interesting points to note in the historical evolution of the college, other than its ‘glorious history and venerable tradition’.1 It was in 1813 that the British government in England had directed the East India Company administration to spend an annual sum of Rs.100,000 for the spread of education in India, but the Company hardly took any steps to do that. One reason behind the Company’s indifference was the much-­talked-­about Anglicist-­Orientalist debate on the type of education to be introduced. The Anglicists favoured the promotion of Western scientific learning, while the Orientalists preferred the spread of traditional oriental knowledge. This debate was still raging when the Hindu College was founded unequivocally from an Anglicist perspective: the intention was to impart modern scientific knowledge from the West, rather than traditional knowledge from the Orient. Perhaps this is why the Presidency College Centenary Volume 1955 mentions: “The most striking feature of the Hindu College was its determined effort to impart secular education” (1956: 2)  –­ though it was originally meant for male Hindu students only. Now, there are interesting twists in this tale. The so-­called commitment to secularism did not prevent non-­Hindus from being denied the right to continue education in the Hindu College, as the case of Michael Madhusudan Dutt testifies to. Despite being an exceptionally gifted student, this doyen of Bengali drama, as also of blank verse and sonnet in Bengali poetry, had to leave the college in 1844 since he had converted to Christianity in 1843. The illustrious but tragically short-­ lived Henry Louis Vivian Derozio was appointed an instructor at the

252  Paramita Banerjee Hindu College in 1826 despite being a Christian  –­ signifying that there was no bar to being taught by a non-­Hindu, but he was forced to resign by the directors of the college in 1831. Objections raised by the orthodox parents of the Hindu students necessitated this as Derozio, committed to English rationalism, raised questions about the social practices and religious beliefs of orthodox Hinduism. There were obvious limits to the so-­called Anglicist preference, therefore. It is not so surprising, perhaps, that the Eden Hindu Hostel, a residential facility for outstation students of this institution, would remain restricted only to Hindu boarders for many years after the college had been opened to students from all religions, the University of Calcutta established and the Presidency College affiliated to that first Indian university. In fact, this practice continued until several years past India’s evolution into a secular democratic republic, as well. These realities are critical insofar as they clearly reflect how exclusivity has been a feature of this college right since its early years  –­ keeping liberal Western-­style education limited strictly to the sons of the pro-­ British Bengali Hindu aristocratic families only. They also bring to light an ambivalence between privileging the voice of reason on the one hand, and kowtowing to the pressures of Hindu orthodoxy on the other. It would be partial of me, however, not to mention the other side of the story. Even when the college management was busy safeguarding traditional Hindu values despite its expressed preference for western education, the students of this college have led radical thinking in different ways since the Hindu College days. Derozio had to resign, but his brilliant teaching influenced his students enough to organize a debating society called the Academic Association “that drew both Britons and Indians to discussions of religion and philosophy”.2 Known as the Derozians, his students continued to lead the Young Bengal movement set up by their firebrand teacher, upholding the spirit of free thought against socio-­religious orthodoxy. They managed to keep alive Derozio’s Academic Association until 1838, when it was transformed into the Society for Acquisition of General Knowledge, presided over by David Hare. This Society had more than 200 members in 1843, and Derozian ideas are believed to have had a significant influence on what came to be known as the Bengal Renaissance of the early nineteenth century. The Young Bengal movement itself was short-­lived, but many of the Derozians went on to play a significant role as social reformers. It is important to mention here that the term Hindu in this context does not, in any way, relate to ‘Hindutva’ as it is politically propagated and understood today. The notion of Hindutva would enter Indian thought more than a century after the Hindu College was established:

The Presidential transition 253 Vinayak Damodar Savarkar introduced this term only in 1923, and with that  –­ the notion of Hindu nationalism, as clearly different from a multi-­religious/­secular Indian nationalism. The establishment of the Hindu College corresponds with the beginning of what would later be known as the Bengal Renaissance. Just as the Derozians sought to popularize rationalism and atheism, the Brahmo Samaj movement developed within the elite Hindus of the time  –­ strongly questioning much of the orthodoxy of the religion as it was then practised. Hindu College was already making news in the early 1920s, with James Mill arguing in the British Parliament that this private enterprise demonstrated that the Empire’s Indian subjects were eager for English education, rather than the kind of traditional knowledge that the East India Company was supporting  –­ a view taken up with force by Lord Macaulay, who was Legal Member of the Council of India and refused to become the President unless the Company’s education policy was changed. One particular sentence from Lord Thomas Babington Macaulay’s note circulated as “Minute by the Hon’ble T B Macaulay, dated the 2nd February 1835” in the House of Commons has been quoted and discussed ad nauseam: We must at present do our best to form a class, who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern; a class of persons, Indians in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals and in intellect. (Sharp 1920: 116) What is less known is his original speech in the House of Commons in 1833, where he had unequivocally argued in favour of promoting Western education in India: It may be that the public mind of India may expand under our system till it has outgrown that system; . . . The sceptre may pass away from us. Unforeseen accidents may derange our most profound schemes of policy. Victory may be inconstant in our arms. But there are triumphs which are followed by no reverses. There is an empire exempt from all natural causes of decay. Those triumphs are the pacific triumphs of reason over barbarism; that empire is the imperishable empire of our arts and our morals, our literature and our laws. (Young 1935: 152–­55) This impassioned appeal did prove a turning point, for Lord William Bentinck  –­ the then Governor General of India  –­ supported Macaulay’s

254  Paramita Banerjee views and an Act to that effect was passed. His successor, Lord Auckland, raised more funds to support western education in India, as a result of which the Hindu College would become a secular government college in 1855. Many years later, on 16 February 1916, Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose was expelled from Presidency College along with Ananda Mohan Dam for assaulting E. F. Oaten, a teacher, in reaction to his racist anti-­ India comments. This was an incident that brought young Bose to the notice of Bengal’s nationalist leaders, which would eventually play a far more important role in his life than his expulsion. This just goes to prove the sphere of influence that students of this college exerted on the freedom struggle of India  –­ influencing notions of nationalism and debating about possible modes of winning political sovereignty  –­ which deserve a separate essay altogether. But a glimpse is currently available through an online exhibition put up during the bicentenary celebrations in 2017.3 Perhaps it is no surprise, therefore, that the Presidency College grounds would host regular meetings of students inspired by radical leftism and the Presidency Coalition would come to be a precursor of many brilliant students of this college joining the first phase of the Naxalite movement in 1969–­1970 under the banner of the Communist Party of India (Marxist-­Leninist), led by Charu Mazumder. The moot point here is to note that despite the academic brilliance of its students and faculty  –­ or maybe because of it  –­ Presidency also has had a history of taking a lead in questioning dominant norms and regulations; of challenging accepted behaviour patterns through rebellious actions  –­ of radical thinking, in a nutshell. Elitism and exclusivity do not seem to have deterred this institute from being a centre where the voice of dissent has been variously nurtured and articulated over and over again. As Abheek Barman (incidentally, a college junior), wrote in his piece entitled “From Glory to Ignominy: 200 Years of Presidency College, Kolkata” in the online journal The Quint: “Radicalism made us question all dogma. We never allowed unions of the mainstream parties  –­ Congress or the mainstream Left  –­ to strike roots in the college. And we learnt, I’d like to believe, to think independently” (Barman 2016). My sentiments echo these same convictions.

The personal narrative I joined Presidency College within three months of the national emergency being declared by the then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. One of the first debates I was exposed to was about the autonomy of the

The Presidential transition 255 college  –­ desired by the activists and supporters of Chhatra Parishad, the students’ wing of what had by then become the Indian National Congress (Indira) and fiercely opposed by the radical left. I’m not sure about the position taken by the Communist Party of India (Marxist) on this issue back then  –­ for in the college that I had attended, they hardly had any presence. Opposition to the ‘stooges of the ruling party’ consisted largely of students adhering to left of Left ideologies, with minor differences in their positions. The few supporters of the CPI(M) worked together with the radicals in an atmosphere of stifling Indira-­Congress dominance. The demand to transform the college into an autonomous university was first voiced in an unsigned article released by certain faculty members in 1972, and it was an open secret by the time I had joined that Dipak Banerjee, an illustrious professor in the Department of Economics, was the author of that piece. The reasons behind the Siddhartha Shankar Ray-­led state government not taking up this demand with seriousness are not chronicled anywhere to the best of my ­knowledge  –­ which is rather surprising, since the student wing of the Chief Minister’s party was so committed to this agenda. Chhatra Parishad was consistent, indeed, in its demand that Presidency College deserved to be an autonomous university while the leftist students argued that such a transition would make this institution even more exclusivist and elitist than it already was. The Chhatra Parishad’s arguments were that the college suffered from the forced privations of the University of Calcutta, its syllabi unrevised for many years, and its often erratic system of marking. Elevated to the status of a university, this institution would be free to decide its own syllabi, set its examination systems in order and generally benefit students by freeing them from the behemoth that Calcutta University had become with an uncontrollable mass of colleges of varying standards affiliated to it and therefore a gigantic body of students to tackle. These protagonists were so sold to the idea of an autonomous Presidency University that one of them did not refrain from slapping a fellow girl student  –­ an incident that went viral even in those days of no social media  –­ when she tried to defend a classmate from being beaten up. This classmate had the ‘audacity’ of speaking on Doordarshan  –­ the only television channel then available in a city where only a handful of houses had a television set installed  –­ against the college being granted autonomy. It is of little surprise that the speaker, who went on to become a professor in the Department of Political Science, University of Calcutta, was a committed radical left activist and the classmate who got slapped was the elder daughter of the barrister Somnath Chatterjee, a veteran

256  Paramita Banerjee Marxist. This 10-­time Member of Parliament would later be expelled from the CPI(M) in 2008, when he refused to quit as the Speaker of Lok Sabha after his party withdrew support from the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government. This was a real-­life example of the political comradeship  –­ mutual support, even  –­ that existed between the supporters of the Students’ Federation of India, the students’ wing of the CPI(M), and the radical leftists back then. The subtext behind the leftist position of opposing the proposed autonomous status remains more difficult to decipher even today. Presidency College was an elite institution anyway. It had the stiffest cut-­offs among all the colleges affiliated to the University of Calcutta  –­ other government colleges of repute and other universities in the state of West Bengal included  –­ even for collecting an admission form. It was one of the few colleges where one needed to qualify in an admission test. Only the crème de la crème of students could secure berths there; the set standards of this college did not permit just any average student to get enrolled. Students from the college almost inevitably topped the graduation results from the University of Calcutta  –­ a trend that continued right up to the post-­graduation level. How would the transition of this college to an autonomous university make it any less ‘democratic’ than it already was? Many of us nurturing radical left beliefs in those days of transitioning from adolescence to youth had no qualms about sneering at fellow students from Jadavpur University  –­ an integrated university with both undergraduate and postgraduate courses, complete with engineering and technological faculties, as well. To us, a first class first from Calcutta University in the humanities or science streams  –­ almost always a student of Presidency College!  –­ was unquestionably superior to her/­his counterpart from Jadavpur. Much more stringent competition (in terms of the number of examinees), tougher examination norms (unknown question setters and examiners to Jadavpur’s ‘all at home’ advantage) and stricter marking (admitted and acknowledged in the larger academic world) were at the root of our argument. In our minds, there was no contradiction between opposing the autonomy issue and basking in the self-­indulgent aura of superiority that we inevitably inherited as students of this ‘premier’ institution. In retrospect, it certainly seems far more rational for both parties to have joined hands to demand setting up more universities so that colleges affiliated to the University of Calcutta could be redistributed, as would happen later  –­ rather than fighting over the autonomy of Presidency College. But back then, rhetorically fighting the ghosts of each other’s beliefs was perhaps more important than working out an

The Presidential transition 257 actual solution. Indeed, the struggle between the centrist and leftist students seems to be far more easily explainable as typical of pro-­ and anti-­establishment positions. Chhatra Parishad  –­ representing the party in power  –­ advocated for the hierarchically ‘superior’ status of a university. The leftists, on the other hand, were in no mood for this rise in status  –­ the actual exclusivity of the institution notwithstanding. Autonomy was read as a departure from democracy, which the obvious inheritance of meritocratic prejudice was apparently not. I really wonder how much of this non-­concern with meritocracy owes to Lenin’s concept of ‘democratic centralism’  –­ both ideologically and in concrete practice. The way Lenin had conceived it, this form of political organization consists of “freedom of discussion, unity of action” (1906)  –­ thereby combining two principles apparently opposed to each other: democracy, which promotes free and open discussions within a collective, and the central control which underlines the unity and discipline necessary for any collective to function as a unit. What happened to this attempt at instilling another dialectical unity of opposites in the functioning of the Communist Party of Soviet Union (Bolshevik) under the leadership of Joseph Stalin is a matter of much debate and discussion that remains beyond the scope of this article, but I do want to point out where I see a connection with meritocracy. The term ‘meritocracy’ was originally used by Michael Young in a derogatory sense in his 1958 satirical novel.4 In a later article in The Guardian, Young rues how the term he coined has acquired a different meaning and acceptance without any of his original apprehensions being heeded: “A social revolution has been accomplished by harnessing schools and universities to the task of sieving people according to education’s narrow band of values” (Young 2001). This is where I see the connection between meritocracy and democratic centralism: the problem lies in how ‘merit’ or ability and efficiency are defined. If education’s ‘seal of approval’, as Young puts it, or the lack of it, determines who has merit and who doesn’t, it is the top leadership’s seal of approval that decides who gets to climb the Communist Party ladder and therefore enforce ‘unity and discipline’. Democracy, insofar as it enshrines the notion of substantive equality of opportunities for all, is the casualty in either case. However, all these years down the line, I strongly feel that this similarity between the two concepts is what lured the Left forces (official or radical) to oppose the status of an autonomous university without questioning the structural meritocracy built into the admission systems of the then Presidency College. That seal of exclusivity and elitism was not just acceptable, but necessary, for students

258  Paramita Banerjee from this ‘premier’ institution to influence public opinion and shape the political future of intellectual practice  –­ as was believed to be the ‘consecrated’ purpose of a vanguardist ‘excellence’. This had already been proven through the role of the Presidency Coalition in influencing a huge body of students in West Bengal to join the first phase of the Naxalite movement. But to become an autonomous university might have effectively alienated its communities from intersubjective networks of public outreach and insulated its spaces beyond a currency of public circulation. Also, to not remain part of the University of Calcutta meant a veritable loss in terms of mobilizational potential. The impact of any student movement in Presidency immediately on a massive constituency of undergraduate students affiliated to this university was also because there was a tacit consensus about its being the ‘first among equals’  –­ an advantage that would not be available readily if the college became a university in itself; that would curtail its aleatory spheres of political thraldom. Not any less insignificant was the fact that the opposition was directed from the top of whichever radical left outfit each one of us belonged to. I can vouchsafe for myself that I had never received an acceptable rational explanation behind this diktat, which was to be followed as per the principles of ‘democratic’ centralism. It will be contextual here to take a look at what Professor Amartya Sen said in his Dipak Banerjee Memorial Lecture on 20 January 2016, since it allows a chance to look at the processes by which structures of intellectual exceptionalism are normalized: I don’t think there is anything to be apologetic about being an elitist college. Education must require a cultivation of excellence, uncompromising excellence and in a way that to make room for any value other than any educational excellence, ultimately is defeat. . . . Elitism in the best sense is a cultivation of excellence, recognition of a social role understanding that scepticism is not disrespect, scepticism in a way is a commitment to argument and reasoning.5 Understood from this angle, Presidency College/­University  –­ as the seat of a ‘naturally’ elitist education  –­ is expected to nurture and articulate the voice of dissent as emanating from and enabled by a protected space of privilege. This space of ‘privilege’ was to be guarded even in the worst of times  –­ since academic excellence equips one (or is expected to, as Sen points out) with the ‘courage of truth’. The quintessential ‘argumentative Indian’, who refuses to accept handed-­down prescriptions and diktats, is theoretically a fiction nurtured by meritocratic advantage.

The Presidential transition 259

The transitional riddles It is perhaps ironic that the autonomous status of a ‘university’ was granted to Presidency by Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharya, just about a year before his party and its allies were to lose power in the state after 34 long years of Left Front rule. Was it being in power that allowed this shift of position, or was the CPI(M) always in tacit support? It might even be that Bhattacharya was a supporter of the autonomous university demand, at variance with his party line  –­ as on other issues, he indeed was. These are riddles with no answers readily available either in the public domain, or to this writer. But it does seem difficult to gauge exactly what the institution has gained from its transition to a university. It has been in the news in recent times for all the wrong reasons, both academically and politically. Reputed academic and Presidency alumnus Sukanta Chaudhuri resigned from the Mentor Group, in protest against special favours being shown to the fledgling university even before it could prove its mettle through performance. Such favours did nothing to allow the current ruling party of West Bengal to secure a stronghold on the noted institution, though  –­ the frustration of which would lead Trinamool Congress activists to forcefully enter the college, beat up students, rough up faculty members and vandalize the Baker Laboratory established by Acharya Jagadish Chandra Bose in 1913. Nor have those favours earned the autonomous university any brownie points in academic performance. Rated A+ (A++ being the best) as a college by the National Assessment and Accreditation Council (NAAC) in its previous ranking in 2007, the university came to be graded a bare A in 2016.6 Vice Chancellor Lohia tried to shrug it off as a result of not producing any Ph.D. students yet, though other faculty members have differed, as reported in several dailies of Kolkata. There are reasons to wonder about Lohia’s assertion, indeed. Noted physicist Sabyasachi Bhattacharya, an alumnus of Presidency College, resigned from his teaching assignment because of a stifled atmosphere, reflecting the newly formed university’s inability to retain the best. “The kind of pluralism I looked for on the campus was missing”  –­ quoted the ‘Metro’ section of The Telegraph, Kolkata edition, dated 18 July 2015.7 Vice Chancellor Anuradha Lohia recently denied permission to the Alumni Association to hold a seminar in the institution’s auditorium (named after Derozio), citing ‘unavoidable reasons’. Due to be held on 5 March 2016, the seminar was on “Freedom of Expression and Students’ Politics: Influence on Film Making”. Aparna Sen and Srijit Mukherji, both filmmakers of repute and alumni of the

260  Paramita Banerjee erstwhile college, were to speak. Readers will probably remember that the JNU controversy was raging at this point; the ideas of nationalism and the right of students and academics to dissent were at the centre stage of debates and discussions. Historian Sugata Bose  –­ Presidency alumnus and Chairperson of the Presidency Mentor Group, Harvard professor and a Member of the Parliament from the ruling party in the state  –­ was openly surprised at this denial of permission. “The auditorium named after Derozio was the best place to have such seminars”  –­ the ‘Metro’ section of The Telegraph, Kolkata edition, dated 2 March 2016, quoted him. A direct response to Lohia’s comment to the ABP News channel: “Why only at Derozio? There are other places where they can have such seminars”. Lohia and the unknowns to whom she answers do seem singularly committed to ensure that Presidency breaks away from its past, indeed. On 14 December 2016, the 144-­year-­old heritage gate of the institution was demolished for a new entrance to be erected prior to the bicentennial of the college on 20 January 2017. Gone was the more-­than-­100-­year-­old banyan tree along with that, and a couple of bookstalls attached to the gate on both sides were bulldozed, as well. No one, including the Mayor of Kolkata, had any explanation for what necessitated this demolition. An official at Nabanna, the current administrative headquarters of the state, was quoted anonymously in several city dailies as justifying the demolition to allow better access to fire engines if needed. It is difficult to believe that, though, for fire engines had no problems entering the campus when a small fire in the institute’s famed central library was easily doused in September 2016! Collusion with the ruling party of the state cannot be completely ruled out since a dispute has been brewing between the booksellers lining Presidency’s walls on both sides and the government since October 2016, with the latter wanting these permanent (or so generations of veterans of College Street have always felt!) contours of this area to disappear. We will never know for sure, but this much is certain: no heritage experts were consulted before demolishing a gate through which innumerable students had passed and a banyan tree that had witnessed many a struggle for free thought and the right to dissent.

In lieu of a conclusion I went to Presidency College with the sole aim of becoming a Naxalite, convinced that this elite institution was the place to be accessed for that dream to come true. A clear reflection that the college had managed to hold on to traditions of strong dissent even during the staunch

The Presidential transition 261 repression of the emergency. There have been many incidents since, including the Independents’ Consolidation (IC)  –­ a changed avatar of the Students’ Steering Committee of our times, I’d like to believe  –­ ­winning the College Union elections a number of times, disallowing both the official Left Front and later the students’ wing of the current ruling party (Trinamool Congress Chhatra Parishad) to make this space a stronghold of theirs. The SFI did manage to win the college union elections in 2002 and 2003, and then again in 2009 and 2010  –­ but the union has never ever gone to centrist or right wing forces till date. As Maitreesh Ghatak, a Presidency alumnus and a noted Professor in the London School of Economics writes in his blog Loose Leaves: The college was fascinating as a social and cultural melting pot. . . . It was a matter of forming a core cultural identity that was genuinely bilingual and cosmopolitan, being rooted but branching out wherever there was light, refusing to be boxed in set social or cultural categories. This process was nurtured in the cigarette-­smoke scented air of the canteen of Presidency College, much before the word ‘globalization’ entered our everyday language, or ‘cosmopolitan’ became synonymous with ‘rootless’ in certain circles, or the internet and cable-­TV brought the whole world to our fingertips. (Ghatak 2017) Recent happenings in Presidency University force me to keep wondering about the extent to which this form of cosmopolitanism and the spirit of free thinking are being sacrificed at the altar of its autonomous status. As Professor Amartya Sen mentioned in his Dipak Banerjee Memorial Lecture, referred to earlier: “Presidency has to ask constantly ‘are we relevant in India or in the world? What can we do?’ ” (Chowdhury 2016a) I know for sure that generations of students of the Presidency College have asked these questions. How long the students of Presidency University will continue to do that  –­ if they still are  –­ is what I feel unsure about.

Notes 1 Refer to the section titled ‘Brief History of Presidency’, www.presiuniv. ac.in/­web/­presidency_history.php (accessed on 8 January 2018). 2 www.britannica.com/­biography/­Henry-­Louis-­Vivian-­Derozio (accessed on 8 January 2018). 3 See the exhibition ‘Towards Swaraj: Presidency During the Independ ence Movement of India’, www.google.com/­culturalinstitute/­beta/­exhibit/­ MAIijGlF-­w6sJA (accessed on 8 January 2018).

262  Paramita Banerjee 4 Michael Dunlop Young, The Rise of the Meritocracy, 1877–­2033: An Essay on Education and Inequality (London: Thames and Hudson, 1958). The author of this article has the privilege of having the 1967 Pelican edition. 5 Excerpts from this lecture were published in Subhankar Chowdhury, ‘Nothing Wrong with Elitist College If It Means Cultivation of Excellence: Sen’, The Telegraph, Kolkata edition (January 21, 2016), https:/­/­www.tele graphindia.com/­1160121/­jsp/­frontpage/­story_65034.jsp (accessed on 7 July 2018). 6 Refer to Subhankar Chowdhury, ‘Presidency “High” with a Catch’, The Tele­ graph, Kolkata edition (December 17, 2016), https:/­/­www.telegraphindia. com/­1161217/­jsp/­frontpage/­story_125271.jsp (accessed on 7 July 2018). 7 Refer to ‘Stifled Professor Quits Presi’, The Telegraph, Kolkata edition (July 18, 2015), https:/­/­www.telegraphindia.com/­1150718/­jsp/­calcutta/­story_32271.jsp (accessed on 7 July 2018).

References Barman, Abheek. 2016. ‘From Glory to Ignominy: 200 Years of Presidency College, Kolkata’, The Quint (January 19). Available at www.thequint. com/­news/­india/­from-­glory-­to-­ignominy-­200-­years-­of-­presidency-­college-­ kolkata (accessed on 8 January 2018). Chowdhury, Subhankar. 2016a. ‘Nothing Wrong with Elitist College If It Means Cultivation of Excellence: Sen’, The Telegraph, Kolkata edition (January  21). Available at https:/­/­www.telegraphindia.com/­1160121/­jsp/­ frontpage/­story_65034.jsp (accessed on 7 July 2018). ———. 2016b. ‘Presidency “high” with a catch’, The Telegraph, Kolkata edition (December 17). Available at https:/­/­www.telegraphindia.com/­1161217/­ jsp/­frontpage/­story_125271.jsp (accessed on 7 July 2018). Ghatak, Maitreesh. 2017. ‘Circles in Time: Memories of Presidency College’, Loose Leaves (January 23). Available at http:/­/­maitreesh-­ghatak.blogspot. in/­search?q=presidency+college (accessed on 8 January 2018). Lenin, Vladimir I. 1906. Report on the Unity Congress of the R.S.D.L.P.: A Letter to the St. Petersburg Workers. (Section VIII). Available at www. marxists.org/­archive/­lenin/­works/­1906/­rucong/­viii.htm (accessed on 8 January 2018). Mahmood, Syed. 1895. A History of English Education in India. Aligarh: M. A. O. College. Presidency College Centenary Volume 1955. 1956. Alipore: West Bengal Government Press. Seth, Sanjay. 2007. Subject Lessons: The Western Education of Colonial India. Durham, NC, London: Duke University Press. Sharp, Henry. (ed.). 1920. Selections from Educational Records, Part I (1781–­ 1839). Calcutta: Superintendent Government Printing. ‘Stifled Professor Quits Presi’. 2015. The Telegraph, Kolkata edition (July 18). Available at https:/­/­www.telegraphindia.com/­1150718/­jsp/­calcutta/­story_ 32271.jsp (accessed on 7 July 2018).

The Presidential transition 263 Young, George M. (ed.). 1935. Speeches by Lord Macaulay with His Minute on Indian Education. London: Oxford University Press. Young, Michael Dunlop. 1958. The Rise of the Meritocracy, 1877–­2033: An Essay on Education and Inequality. London: Thames and Hudson. ———. 2001. ‘Down with Meritocracy’, The Guardian (June 29). Available at www.theguardian.com/­politics/­2001/­jun/­29/­comment (accessed on 8 January 2018).

14 University The state’s kitchen? Akanksha Ahluwalia, Ishan Mohan and Sagar Sachdeva

As students, our first encounter with a centre of education is through its prospectus and related publicity media that inform aspiring applicants about infrastructures, faculty, opportunities and admission procedures. Sri Venkateswara College was visually represented through the ‘sacred’ gates of the Tirupathi temple, and its foyer space: an atrium at the front of the building, where students, professors and others could convene, converse and revel in the spirit of modern Indian education. A foyer generally refers to the hallway at the entrance of a structure, like the reception of an institutionally organized space, where the spirit of the corporative body is displayed for public consumption as a glimpse into this world. The college foyer (in this case) was winged by entrances to two academic buildings: the science departments on the west side and the liberal arts/­commerce departments on the north side. In the east wing were housed the administrative and accounts sections (including a small branch of the associated bank), and right next to the entrance stood the temple, the grand organizer of all events. The foyer itself was a simple hall, lined with marble seats, and bulletin boards filled with all sorts of information from coursework, student events, team-­trials and so forth. It was a space with the perceived spirit of Delhi University (DU): a culture of extracurricular fervour and artistic enthusiasm where students learn within and without the classroom. This was also supposedly the space of a carnivalesque performance of one’s subjectivity as distinct from the faceless and regimented ‘student community’. It was an escape from the tight schedule of classes and sports, to reclaim ‘free’ time in a ‘free’ space with no direct productive intent, an assertion of the many selves of ‘Venkyites’.1 This paper seeks to address the university through everyday technologies of student subjectification, to unpack the contestable claims of ‘freedom’ it makes, and the disciplinary methods it employs in order to interpellate individuals within the state machinery. The recent flood of

University 265 regulatory shifts in university policies has called for urgent academic intervention to describe, analyse and critique the ideological regimes responsible for it. However, this paper aims to seize this opportunity to also reflect back on university spaces and the assumptions that are associated with them. As a liberal project, such an institution needs to be thought of not merely in opposition to the socially conservative forces at work, attacking its autonomy. Institutional freedom and autonomy are not isolated fundamentals, but rooted in historical processes that shall be discussed in some detail ahead.

Subjection and subjectivity: the individual in/­and the institution Herbert Marcuse (2008) wrote on the individual subject of freedom and authority within bourgeois social structures, introducing it as consisting of two basic elements: “a certain measure of freedom . . . and conversely, submission” (Marcuse 2008: 9). The subject, whose individual will is central to liberal thought, is to be located somewhere in its relation to a kind of heteronomy which is manifested in the form of a “general will” (Rousseau 1999: 63), Kant’s “collective-­general will” (Marcuse 2008: 40) and so on. The negotiation between “internal autonomy and external heteronomy” is a contradiction that bourgeois culture has had to deal with. Marcuse begins his discussion from the “Christian-­bourgeois doctrine of freedom” (ibid.: 9). This freedom is a sixteenth century Protestant project of “liberating” the individual from “traditionalist feudalism” (ibid.) and establishing a “territorial sovereign” over a “centralized Church” (ibid.: 10). The conscience of the individual is to be rooted in this method of thinking freedom, a method liberated from “religious and ethical norms in order to clear the way for the rise of the bourgeoisie” (ibid.). However, the seemingly anti-­authoritarian doctrine of the Christian-­bourgeoisie also recognized “certain metaphysical authorities . . . [which] permit external unfreedom to be perpetuated within the human soul” (ibid.). Marcuse’s discussion of Luther’s and Calvin’s notions of Christian freedom concludes that the individual subject, anchored in a transcendental ‘inner’ freedom, is left to obey worldly authority with no option to rebel;2 the only freedom left then, is the “freedom to obey”3 (ibid.: 27). “Unfreedom” here is transferred to human nature, instead of explaining it through one’s ‘social praxis’ (ibid.: 29). The concept of enslavement or necessity signifies one of the most important steps forward in the effort to perpetuate unfreedom in the essence of human freedom: it remains operative right until German

266  Akanksha Ahluwalia, Ishan Mohan et al. Idealism (ibid.: 29). “Unfreedom” characterizes the spirit of the foyer, under the aforementioned thin veil of institutional harmony: a heavily regulated space, ideologically and structurally. The administrative and accounts block already being a looming presence, the bulletin boards could only be used with prior permission (each notice being screened individually). The temple reinforced specific Vedic ideals that founded the college, and was the initiator of all events academic or cultural. Alan W. Norrie (1991: 62) notes that Kant’s rational individual corresponds to “Hobbes’ free, consenting individual”. Both of them created an abstract idealized individual that was at the same time “autonomous and responsible” (ibid.). Within this idealized individuality, what emerges is a “society of individuals, for each of whom it is a ‘postulate of practical reason’ ” (Marcuse 2008: 39) to claim as his own an external object of will. And this society must thereon exist under laws of “coercion and subordination” (39) in order to secure individual rights. Kant’s theory of rights, in other words, rationalizes the need for subordination of individuals due to the association of a rational will to the individual. But this coercion cannot contradict the freedom that the individual is supposed to enjoy. Coercion then must be embedded within the individual to not become a consequence of practical reason in the exteriority of the individual. This problematic is resolved through the “collective-­general” will (as cited in Marcuse 2008: 40), wherein individuals enter an agreement of “self-­limitation under laws backed by power” (ibid.). The ‘sovereign’ of Hobbes is described as follows: The social contract does not merely create the sovereign de facto, it creates a moral-­juridical relationship between sovereign and people in which the people acknowledge the sovereign’s acts as their own and are obligated to obey his commands because he commands as of right. (Norrie 1991: 18) This ability to consent to a contract with the sovereign stems from an idea of individual autonomy that is essential to every person. In fact, ‘man’ is an individual by virtue of this autonomy. Taking the context of individualization further, Beck and Beck-­ Gernsheim (2002) study what they call “institutionalized individualism” against the backdrop of globalized neo-­liberal economics. They argue that an “image of the autarkic human self” (2002: xxi) has been constructed within this context. An over-­emphasis on the individual obliterates the dependence on each other through “worldwide

University 267 networks and institutions” (ibid.). This individual is not an independent category that stands confronted by society, but a product level socialization” (ibid.: xxi). of “complex, contingent and high-­ Comprehending it as a social process, individualization offers “rights and entitlements . . . designed for individuals” wherein they “are not so much compelled as peremptorily invited to constitute themselves as individuals: to plan, understand, design themselves and act as ­individuals  –­ or, should they ‘fail’, to lie as individuals on the bed they have made for themselves” (ibid.: 3–­4). Foucault offers “power-­knowledge relations” (ibid.: 27) as a methodological tool to analyse this subject formation, instead of viewing individuals as free or unfree from power. The three key components of the power-­knowledge analysis are “the subject who knows, the object to be known and the modalities of knowledge” (ibid.). A liberal framework would place these categories unto individuals in the manner of an ‘individual who knows’, or an ‘individual to be known’. This individual is always imagined as a ‘whole’ entity, upon which rationality is founded. It is within the category of the ‘subject’ that possibilities of moving beyond the liberal bourgeois framework open up. There are two meanings of the word ‘subject’: subject to someone else by control and dependence; and tied to his own identity by a conscience or self-­knowledge. Both meanings suggest a form of power that subjugates and makes subject to (Foucault 1982: 781). It is evident that the subject, in its affiliation with knowledge, is tied up with the question of power. This is to say that the constitution of a subject is contingent upon dominant systems of knowledge, rather than an abstract finality. The subject then also presumes discipline. There are three key elements to discipline: “the scale of control” (Foucault 1995: 136), “the object of control” (ibid.: 137) and “the modality” (ibid.). The scale was to individually “treat” the body with forms of coercion directed at the “level of mechanism” (ibid.). The object to be controlled was not the representation of the body and its signifiers, but the material body in its movements. The body is an economy, and its internal organization was the target of control. Modalities ensure constant coercion and supervision by separation of time, space and movements (ibid.). The product of these processes is to throw the individual body into a “docility-­utility” relation. Foucault offers the metaphor of a “machinery of power” (ibid.: 138) which indicates that the body is itself a consequence of a production process. By making the body describable and manipulable, disciplinary power individualizes bodies to not only make them ‘efficient’ but also docile. “A disciplined body

268  Akanksha Ahluwalia, Ishan Mohan et al. is the prerequisite of an efficient gesture” (ibid.: 152). And because this coercion is always subtle, the individualized subject appears to be just an already individual subject. The individual is coerced into being productive and produced within its coercion. It would be fallacious to argue that disciplinary power reduces individuals and collects them into a common singularity. On the contrary, it differentiates individuals into smaller units, decomposing them till efficient subjects are produced. Power has its own economy of production and it is within forms of power that knowledges are produced. Subversion therefore lies within power-­knowledge. Foucault goes on to add another feature to the individualizing process: totalization. For him, “state’s power . . . is both an individualizing and a totalizing form of power” (Foucault 1982: 782). The ‘modern state’ was not formed in mere abstraction, but sophisticatedly meant to shape individuality in specific disciplinary patterns.

Occupying space, becoming data Coming back to the foyer, the activities herein could be loosely divided into two categories: non-­curricular and extracurricular. Non-­ curricular activities consist of all the things students would partake of apart from classroom studies or any of the fine arts. This includes anything ranging from conversations on the breakfast toast and jam to engaging in socio-­political discussions. Crowds from different courses crisscross each other, and hence social formations of various sorts become possible in this space. This is not to say that there is an absolutely free-­flowing social interaction, because these confrontations are informed by social factors such as class, gender, sexuality, caste and so on. However, these potential formations are suspended within a subversive and complicit opposition, marking a distinct social public sphere of the university/­college. There is an apparent potential for debate and dissent, unless of course regulated. During our time at the college, a decree was passed which forbade students from ‘occupying space’ in the foyer, as we were to be forever engaged in classrooms, at the library or in the sports field. Finally, when the order to vacate the foyer (unless for official work) was openly flouted, the college removed the seats in the foyer altogether, such that there was now no place to sit, unless one were to sit on the floor. The structure of the space was changed so as to reinforce the presence of the sovereign as a controller of the student-­subject. Bars and cage-­ doors were installed at specific points in the corridors and staircases beyond, to control the movement of populations

University 269 between classes. The foyer was now a space without the threat of collectivization. Any form of collective activity that was not authorized, recorded and supervised by the college administration seemed to present possibilities of relations that could be potentially subversive to the seemingly singular authority of the sovereign. Extracurricular activities are supposed to provide a respite from the routine academic process, helping students to nurture talents that would enable ‘soft skill’ and personality development (among other highly marketable sales pitches), and providing them the possibility to pursue careers in the fine arts. The college recognized these activities to such an extent that beyond the formal institution of specific ‘societies’ such as Western Music Society, Dramatics Society, Debating Society, Dance Society, etc., it also formed an umbrella Fine Arts Association (FAA). Its role was to assist every other society in procuring funding for organizing events, and hold a collective felicitation ceremony for all societies. There are a few important observations to be made on this system. Firstly, the vocabulary of ‘societies’ signifies little formations with their rules, procedures and hierarchies formally instituted. Presidents, General Secretaries and Treasurers were registered with the college administration, all organized events were conducted only with the approval of the Principal. In other words, the administration left no stone unturned to maintain surveillance over its societies. Secondly, FAA’s ceremony of ‘recognizing’ students for participating in these activities was a formal method of producing incentive structures to will them into sanctioned procedures. These two points present a stark contrast to the assumptions of subjective freedom and autonomy with which the student enters a university. This ultimate control garbed in the rhetoric of assistance and gratification makes the ‘society’ formations visible infrastructures of student subjectification at the behest of an ever-­invisible sovereign, via an elaborate technology of ‘procedures’. Additionally, FAA’s prerogative of financial assistance is actually a symptom of a greater issue. Since extracurricular activities were beyond the standard classroom-­based academic purview of the college, funding for the events was sourced from private corporations itching to tap the already individualized student population, normalizing individual consumerist subjectivities. At Delhi University, hosting departmental guest lectures and seminars often required funding from sources outside the college. Institutional funding was either scarce, or  –­ mostly reserved as it were for the Science and Commerce streams  –­ declined to the ‘irrelevant’ humanities departments. As a result, the university became the space of public endorsements and private advertisements.

270  Akanksha Ahluwalia, Ishan Mohan et al. The installation of the latest Pepsi vending machine in certain colleges of DU exhibits the penetration of corporate capital into the university. A peculiar element of disciplinary punishment is a double system of “gratification-­punishment” (Foucault 2009: 180). A system of reward and punishment based on a sense of ‘good’ and ‘bad’, ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ is implemented within such institutions. A disciplinary account of individuals can be maintained then, based on what kind of ‘points’ an individual receives. This normalization of structures of continuous assessment-­as-­judgment is the end that the corrective function of disciplinary punishment seeks to achieve. The knowledge of the individual is therefore crucial to this disciplinary mechanism. Totalized as a student community, and individualized as a roll number, first division holder with high attendance, singer and so on, the moment students are enrolled into a university, identification cards are immediately prescribed to them. This ID card provides them access to the campus, legitimizes students’ presence in the university space, and regulates their engagement with this space. In addition to this, in March 2017, the University Grants Commission (UGC) directed all universities to include student photos and Aadhaar numbers in their degrees and certificates. Essentially, Aadhaar is a 12-­digit unique identification number issued against the registering and verification of every Indian resident’s biometric and demographic data. UGC’s demand to make this single identification document mandatory unabashedly attempts to introduce uniformity and transparency within historically ‘diverse’ student constituencies enrolled in higher education. Significantly, this directive highlights the university as internally mapped onto the State and makes visible the latter’s manifestation as the transcendental signifier of activities performed therein. Some remarks must now be made on this kind of power and the ‘state’. In contract theories, we see the emergence of a State that presides over individuals, as a site of governance where individual wills get negotiated. This is a sovereign power, a singular authority that acts as a common referent for all its citizens. However, this conception of the state can be challenged through the disciplinary framework, wherein power is exercised in subtle, invisible forms, through examination of activities that make its subjects visible. It hides in the dark, and coerces individuals into visibility. An example of this form of examination is embodied within Bentham’s Panopticon (ibid.: 200) structure, where a central tower watches over individualized cells all around it, enabling the omniscient examiner to document and police every individual’s activities and behaviour. This examination renders individuals “describable, analyzable” objects to maintain their

University 271 particular individualities under the gaze of “a permanent corpus of knowledge” (ibid.: 190). Disciplinary power observes and describes in a way that, in other words, constitutes individuals into their own subordination. It is certain that in contemporary societies the state is not simply one of the forms or specific situations of the exercise of power  –­ even if it is the most important  –­ but that in a certain way all other forms of power relation must refer to it. But this is not because they are derived from it; it is rather because power relations have come more and more under state control. (Foucault 1982: 793) The recent unveiling of the architecture of Apple University, Steve Jobs’ ‘gift’ to the future of institutionalized training facilities, is particularly interesting. A space reportedly inspired by Stanford architecture, the institution is hemmed in by a giant glass circle with a forested space in the centre. The structure is futurist and is designed to ‘inspire’ designers and engineers to uphold ‘Apple’s commitment to quality’. The space is also one of subjection to manipulative visual aesthetics, or marketable art: design. The panopticon is no more the monolith of the prison or the traditional campus, but instead, a dispersed, transparent and excessively landscaped space to control the very spatial responses of subjects; and, much like the design of the spaces themselves, the design of the responses is also patented. As shockwaves from the United States result in more education around the world getting privatized, newer response generation mechanisms are consistently under development for maximized productivity down to temperature control to pique attention spans. The Foucauldian model of subjectivity within the institution makes way for a simulatory model where the subject becomes ‘data’ culled from clusters of aptitude test results, medical reports and in certain cases community-­family profiles. Foucault (2009) identifies the subject within a discourse in terms of its status, institutional sites and with respect to various domains of objects.4 The university supervises, grades, records and thus individualizes student-­researchers to define them within these networks of relations. It also legitimates an ethic of intellectual proprietorship  –­ one that testifies to the effect of individualization. The state’s prerogative is also to individualize through a totalization process, where the unique identification (UID) code becomes a reduction of identity into a serial number on a list. Big data transforms the realm of education and pedagogy, as numbers efface and inform personal capacity

272  Akanksha Ahluwalia, Ishan Mohan et al. in biological, mental and emotional ways (while the workings of the endocrine still remain an uncertain territory between the physical and the cognitive-affective).

Pedagogy and neural-­hegemony We have seen how the university works like a bureaucracy where compliance is expected and rewarded; while any form of argument, dissent or indiscipline is reprimanded. In the specific case of DU, this routine was made easier through the attempted imposition of the Four Year Undergraduate Programme (FYUP) in 2013  –­ which was declaredly introduced to ‘reform’ college learning by providing greater flexibility to students, but through its insistence on imparting required ‘skill-­ sets’, turned the university into a centre for vocational training. The ‘autonomous and responsible’ (Norrie 1991: 62; 2014) subject is subjected to a deep state and deeper economic structures, of self-­worth through commercially ‘productive’ employment. The logic of periodical report cards, SUPW (Socially ‘Useful’ and ‘Productive’ Work) and a mobility tier-­structure promoting students from one grade to the next echo the corporate ethos that educated individuals are expected to internalize. In the past few years, the tradition of assessing academic learning in terms of its utilitarian value has led to a systematic attack against the humanities through a constant decline in state funding, or a political devaluing of liberal arts and social science subjects. In 2011, funding in the United States for humanities research was less than half of 1% of the amount that the sciences and engineering studies had access to.5 This was followed by Florida Governor’s recommendation to increase the tuition fees of humanities subjects because they were “nonstrategic disciplines”.6 This trend echoed in Britain when government funding for humanities was withdrawn and replaced by higher tuition fees. Following suit, the Australian Prime Minister, Tony Abbott, declared the reprioritization of AUS$103 million, from humanities research into medical studies.7 The corporate-­political intrusion within the university space culminated in Japan when, in 2015, the education minister sent out a notice demanding closure of all humanities and social science undergraduate departments and graduate schools, while simultaneously mandating the implementation of a new curriculum in allied fields with greater utility.8 The humanities and social sciences then appear to be departments trapped in an ivory tower of eclectic interests and esoteric vocabulary. More often than not, these departments have to

University 273 compromise on ideal functioning (deep reading of texts, open seminars for essential dialogue and so forth). For instance, it is not uncommon to hear of compromises in evaluative strategies. Administrative bodies require evaluative data (test scores, etc.) to regiment the student body, and these departments must hold reductive examinations where theory is butchered and commodified into archaic marking schemes and answer-­script practices like drawing lines and margins for ‘neatness’ (one of the authors even having been advised to carry a ‘kerchief’ by an external examiner). Apart from affecting departments, the aforementioned systems also impact learning on the whole, while directly alienating and ostracizing ‘non-­normal’ bodies with learning disabilities. In direct opposition to these structures stand relatively recent research developments on the role of kinaesthesia within learning, which has increasingly proved to be a more wholesome variant of the Western assembly line method. Educators are now employing art, movement, material and craft to supplement critical pedagogy, as these modes do not ghettoize the neural other and do not assign a ‘competition-­marketability’ logic to education (it is true that these efforts, as of now, are more commonly applied to primary and secondary education). In this vein, Brian Massumi and Erin Manning call for neuro-­diversity at the university in their work on ‘Immediation’, through their SenseLab project (Massumi 2016: 147). SenseLab is a pedagogical experiment that exists (at the moment) beyond the firm lines of any university. It is a space for free and open learning, en groupe, without strict hierarchies of educator and educated. Moreover, the medium of learning is also unlike more traditional western methods. Massumi and Manning argue for an ecological environment or the ‘event’, which contains the human among other sites of ‘sentience’ and the elements of the physical world  –­ a relational field driven by past, present (affect) and future. The concept of affect, as taken up in a philosophy of immediation, is a way of focusing on the germinal modes of activity that factor into events as they are just beginning, and not yet fully determined as to where they might lead. It is a directly relational concept, because you have to think the ‘to affect’ and ‘to be affected’ as two sides of the same coin of the event. Affect is a point of entry into an eventful, relational field of complexity that is already active, and still open-­ended. The point of thinking with affect is to think through our implication in relational fields, and the potential we might find there. There is no general theory of affect, and it is completely singular to the situation, so the theory of affect has to be custom tailored to every field of event formation, and even to every event, and has to be continually reinvented. While

274  Akanksha Ahluwalia, Ishan Mohan et al. discussing Whitehead’s ideas around speculative philosophy, Massumi remarks that it is through creativity that these novel modes of existence are generated, and ecologies become more complex. This is not a ‘doing-­something’ in the mode of capitalist business, and activity is never reduced to what the human does. Instead, it has to do with the generative potential of ecologies, the generation of new forms of value that give rise to new forms of life. In her work with autistic children, Erin Manning once posed a question to her subjects about the catatonic way in which they moved their arms, to which they replied that it was their method to access where they end and the world begins (2016). Manning uses this incident to question the agency of those who carry volition. She believes that the hazard of over-­coding or after-­coding in these subjects is too high; and it is first the hegemony of the human subject in the event, and secondly as the wielder of complete sensory and physical volition which make current pedagogy at the university fraught with loopholes on a more fundamental platform. Benode Behari Mukherjee, the blind art professor from Santiniketan and subject of Satyajit Ray’s The Inner Eye (1972), is a prime example of the something-­doing, the agencement of the event in its speculatively pragmatic unfolding. With the loss of his eyesight, Mukherjee’s form changed as an artist, and his process of installation was now tactile. Although this is perhaps too literal an example for too profound a formulation, it is in spaces like Santiniketan that the hegemony of the neurally diverse is not awarded with normality. At the SenseLab, Manning and Massumi seek to investigate how to work, act, think, write and move in the immediacy of an event, and how to create something from there that comes into its own, singularizing and resonating-­with, so as to renew the event. The SenseLab works without process and allows for an affective-­creative force to organize the elements of its ecology. The population that engages with this ecology is also floating, and has no definitive form or structure. Of course, the first issue faced here is a financial one, as by discarding an institutional identity, a space like this cannot respond to the neo-­liberal economy it is physically surrounded by (bills, rent etc.). Alternative pedagogy becomes an elite privilege as institutions that do offer such spaces are usually fashionably priced. If not that, it is at the mercy of political funding, like the RSS shakhas spread throughout the country, and which ironically do engage in a praxis-­oriented epistemology, warned against by Hill’s (2010) work on Gramsci (in which Gramsci says that the philosophy of praxis must not be considered in subordination to another philosophy, like the Vedas in this case, for the grasping of a new dialectic). The Gramscian educative-­formative

University 275 problem was in fact capitalism’s inherent counter-­ontological force; an understanding of its fetishism of human-­productive capacity. Gramsci’s relentless advocacy for self-­education was simultaneously an urging to free minds from the existing capitalist mode of thought and inevitably from their own fetishization.

Conclusion A curiously injunctive document titled ‘UGC Guidelines on Safety of Students On and Off Campuses of HEIs’ (2015) was only one of the interventions that attempted to promote the University as an ‘apolitical’ space of knowledge-­ consumption, within a monitored and predetermined amplitude of physical movement. The fortification of housing complexes, methods of identification using biometric technology, emphasis on women’s safety through safety shuttles and Community Service Officers, and so on create a parent-­warden-­counsellor nexus of surveillance. This technology is invested with pre-­judgments regarding campus issues like sexual violence against women, adulthood, health and what-­not, therefore determining the direction of public discourse around these issues. The university, as an object-­out-­ there for the student just out of school, transforms into a lived space of relations, as time progresses. And it is in this living that the abstraction the university is gets felt in concrete relations with fellow students, professors, administrations and so on, within the campus-­space and beyond. The state is then present, dispersed in these very relations, wherein it institutionally disciplines them. Education then becomes fraught as no space remains ideal. The university, as an entirety, perhaps needs to be reconsidered.

Notes 1 An informal term of address among students studying at Sri Venkateswara College. 2 Marcuse (2008) starts tracing this from Luther’s thesis on Christian freedom, to note a distinction made between a transcendental “inner” freedom of a person and the “outer” subjection to worldly authority (12). This antagonism is resolved by Luther by treating the internal freedom as a “thing-­in-­itself”, an “a priori” (ibid.: 19) category that is tied to the soul. This leads him to surmise that any external coercion cannot act upon the freedom of an individual, for the “inner” precedes the “outer”. This is not to say that “there would not be any poverty, or misery in the world”. The “inner” realm of freedom is based upon the “soul”, which is rooted in a transcendental Christian worldview. It follows then, that “worldly powers” cannot attack this freedom due to its implied non-­transcendental nature.

276  Akanksha Ahluwalia, Ishan Mohan et al. The subject who “is not done” but “who is” makes “the autonomously acting person” (ibid.: 14). This freedom does not require action to assert itself, as it precedes action: it is “always already realized when man begins to act” (ibid.: 13). The external realm is defined by “authority and offices” (ibid.: 16). This strict divorce between these two realms necessitates a justification for action or work when the individual is already free in his inner Christian self. The obedience to external authority gets explained within “the ordinances of God”, as “it is set up to punish the bad, protect the faithful and to preserve the peace” (ibid.: 16). In other words, absence of authority would lead to collapse of the worldly order. The detachment of freedom from action also separates the person from the worldly “office” (ibid.: 18). 3 Marcuse then compares this notion of freedom with Calvin’s rejection of the separation of office and person. Instead of looking at a transcendental freedom, his basis of man’s relation to authority is that of disobedience, traced back to the original sin of Christianity. The worldly authorities are seen rooted in this moment, and therefore, all the misery caused by it would be seen “under the superintendence of God” (Marcuse 2008: 24). And this standard for systems of authority and law also offers an opportunity to question their material forms. However, this limitation of worldly authorities is only meant to prevent them from dividing the absolute sovereignty of God, who alone can legitimate any such material form of authority in the first place (ibid.: 24–­26). The Christian Fall signifies a depraved “human will [that] is necessarily corrupt and necessarily chooses evil” (ibid.: 29). Calvin’s reference to the Fall is significant, Marcuse notes, because he establishes freedom of will in the act of the original disobedience to God, and then, based on this, man can be held responsible for all his misdeeds thereon. 4 To elaborate, the subject who makes statements from a position of power (in his example, nineteenth century doctors) has access to a status sanctioned by some institutional body of legitimation that renders the statement with a degree of ‘truth’. Moreover, the subject acquires various positions within research, like the questioning, listening, seeing, observing subject. One can also extend this to the domain of research production and derive a writing, producing subject. We can look at the university as a legitimating institution, which sanctions the role a researcher assumes. Now, all these subject positions can also turn the researcher into an ‘object’ position as one gets questioned, is listened to, is seen and observed. And these institutional setups can be used to identify state-­power. 5 Refer to National Science Foundation, ‘Expenditures and Funding for Academic R&D’ (2016), https:/­/­www.nsf.gov/­statistics/­2016/­nsb20161/­/­report/­ chapter-­5/­expenditures-­and-­funding-­for-­academic-­r-­d (accessed on 7 July 2018). 6 Refer to Jordan Weissmann, ‘Should Science Majors Pay Less for College Than Art Majors’, The Atlantic (November 5, 2012), https:/­/­www.theat lantic.com/­business/­archive/­2012/­11/­should-­science-­majors-­pay-­less-­for-­ college-­than-­art-­majors/­264417/­ (accessed on 7 July  2018). 7 See Ella Delany, ‘Humanities Studies Under Strain Around the Globe’, The New York Times (December  1, 2013), https:/­/­www.nytimes.com/­2013/­12/­ 02/­us/­humanities-­studies-­under-­strain-­around-­the-­globe.html (accessed on 7 July 2018). 8 Jack Grove writes in ‘Social Sciences and Humanities Faculties ‘to Close’ in Japan After Ministerial Intervention’, Times Higher Education

University 277 (September 14, 2015): “Many social sciences and humanities faculties in Japan are to close after universities were ordered to ‘serve areas that better meet society’s needs’, it has been reported. Of the 60 national universities that offer courses in these disciplines, 26 have confirmed that they will either close or scale back their relevant faculties at the behest of Japan’s government, according to a survey of university presidents by the Yomiuri Shimbun. It follows a letter from education minister Hakubun Shimomura sent to all of Japan’s 86 national universities, which called on them to take ‘active steps to abolish [social science and humanities] organisations or to convert them to serve areas that better meet society’s needs’”, https:/­/­www.timeshighereducation.com/­news/­ social-­s ciences-­a nd-­h umanities-­f aculties-­c lose-­j apan-­a fter-­m inisterial-­ intervention (accessed on 7 July 2018).

References and further reading Beck, Ulrich and Elisabeth Beck-­Gernsheim. 2002. Individualization: Institutionalized Individualism and Its Social and Political Consequences. New Delhi: Sage. Print. Delany, Ella. 2013. ‘Humanities Studies Under Strain Around the Globe’, The New York Times (December 1). Available at https:/­ /­ www.nytimes. com/­2013/­12/­02/­us/­humanities-­studies-­under-­strain-­around-­the-­globe.html (accessed on 7 July 2018). Foucault, Michel. 1982. ‘The Subject and Power’, Critical Inquiry, 8(4): 777–­ 795. JSTOR. Available at www.jstor.org/­stable/­1343197 (accessed on 31 December 2017). ———. 1995. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York: Random House. Print. ———. 2009. The Archaeology of Knowledge. London, New York: Routledge Classics. Print. Grove, Jack. 2015. ‘Social Sciences and Humanities Faculties “to Close” in Japan after Ministerial Intervention’, Times Higher Education (September  14). Available at https:/­/­www.timeshighereducation.com/­news/­social-­ sciences-­and-­humanities-­faculties-­close-­japan-­after-­ministerial-­intervention (accessed on 7 July 2018). Hill, Deb J. 2010. ‘A Brief Commentary on the Hegelian-­Marxist Origins of Gramsci’s “Philosophy of Praxis” ’, in Peter Mayo (ed.) Gramsci and Educational Thought. Malden: Wiley-­Blackwell. Print. Manning, Erin. 2016. The Minor Gesture. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Print. Marcuse, Herbert. 2008. A Study on Authority. London: Verso. Print. Massumi, Brian. 2016. ‘Immediation’, in Politics of Affect. Cambridge: Polity Press. Print. National Science Foundation. 2016. ‘Expenditures and Funding for Academic R&D’. Available at https:/­/­www.nsf.gov/­statistics/­2016/­nsb20161/­#/­ report/­chapter-­5/­expenditures-­and-­funding-­for-­academic-­r-­d (accessed on 7 July 2018)

278  Akanksha Ahluwalia, Ishan Mohan et al. Norrie, Alan W. 1991. Law, Ideology and Punishment: Retrieval and Critique of the Liberal Ideal of Criminal Justice. The Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers. Print. ———. 2014. Crime, Reason and History: A Critical Introduction to Criminal Law. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Print. Rousseau, Jean-­Jacques. 1999. Discourse on Political Economy and the Social Contract. (trans.) Christopher Betts. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ‘UGC Guidelines on Safety of Students On and Off Campuses of Higher Educational Institutions’. 2015. New Delhi: University Grants Commission (April). Available at www.ugc.ac.in/­pdfnews/­3895361_Safety-­of-­Students-­ Guidelines.pdf (accessed on 31 December 2017). Weissmann, Jordan. 2012. ‘Should Science Majors Pay Less for College Than Art Majors’, The Atlantic (November 5). Available at https:/­/­www.theat lantic.com/­business/­archive/­2012/­11/­should-­science-­majors-­pay-­less-­for-­ college-­than-­art-­majors/­264417/­ (accessed on 7 July  2018).

Index

Abbott, Tony 272 Academic Association 252 academic freedom 2 – 3; idealization of 7 – 8 Academic Performance Index (API) 144 – 145, 151 Academics for Creative Reforms (ACR) 135 activism 30; see also political activism Adam, William 163 – 166, 168 Africa Watch 95, 100 Ahluwalia, Akanksha 31, 264 Airbnb 51 Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP) 159, 200, 204, 212, 223 Akhlaq, Mohammad 212 Alidou, Ousseina 96 Aligarh Muslim University 234 All India Convention of Students’ Struggles 214 All India Coordination of Science and Technology Students Association 214 All India Institute of Medical Sciences 141n2 All India Kayastha Sabha 167 All India Student Federation (AISF) 203 All India Survey on Higher Education (AISHE) 169 – 170 Amazon 50 Ambani, Mukesh 24 Ambedkar, B. R. 223 Ambedkar Periyar Study Circle (APSC) 206, 210, 222 – 223

Ambedkar Students Association (ASA) 211, 223, 224, 225 Anganwadi Scheme 120 Annamalai University 234 Anti-Education (Nietzsche) 6 Apna Morcha (Singh) 182, 189 – 193, 196 Apple University 61n12, 271 Aristotle 55 Asian Development Bank 109 Astonishing the Gods (Okri) 130 Babu, Hany 30, 217 Bachelet, Michelle 244 Bagal, Jogesh Chandra 161 Banaras Hindu University (BHU) 29, 182 – 184, 186 – 189, 194, 234 Banaras Hindu University Act (Act XVI of 1915) 182 Banerjee, Dipak 255 Banerjee, Paramita 31, 247 Bangladesh: case of higher education in 102 – 105; multi-party politics 114 – 115n6; public universities and 105 – 106; student politics in 106; violent attacks in 111, 114 – 115n6 Bangladesh Environmental Lawyers Association (BELA) 114n4 Barchiesi, Franco 96 Barman, Abheek 254 Barnhardt, Cassie 209 Basant Panchami 188 Basole, Amit 71 Basu, Deepankar 71 beneficiary communities 173

280 Index Bengal 103 Bengal Renaissance 252 – 253 Bentinck, Lord William 163, 253 Berlin Wall 106 Beruf, vocation 43 – 44, 45 Berufung calling 43 Besant, Annie 183, 187 Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) 159, 199, 211, 212, 245 bhasha andolan 191 bhasha andolankaris 193 Bhatia, Gautam 226 Bhattacharya, Buddhadeb 259 Bhattacharya, Debaditya 1, 155 bhikshus 20 Bihar Hindu Sabha 167 bills of exchange 16 Boric, Gabriel 244 Bose, Acharya Jagadish Chandra 259 Bose, Netaji Subhas Chandra 254 Bose, Sugata 260 Brahmo Samaj movement 253 brain drain 110 Briones, Camilo Ballesteros 243 British Council 135, 138 – 139, 141n3 British Empire 5 Brown, Wendy 26, 43, 92, 93, 105, 113, 151 Buddhist viharas 20 Butler, Harcourt 183 Calcutta University 255 calling 181 – 182; Apna Morcha and bhasha andolan 189 – 193; birth of religious university 182 – 184; moral, of the right 184 – 186; moral economy of the left 193 – 196; sacred geography, karmayoga and political space 186 – 189; see also vocation(s) Calvin, John 265, 276n3 Cambridge 131 Capital (Marx) 15, 50, 63, 70 – 71 capitalism: higher education 66, 87n1; neo-liberal 105 Carnoy, Martin 97 Césaire, Aimé 95 Central Universities Act (2009) 29, 155, 157, 159, 174

Central University of Bihar (CUB) 155 Central University of Haryana 159 Central University of Jharkhand 159 Central University of South Bihar (CUSB) 25, 155, 158 – 159, 163, 176n2 Centre for Studies in Social Sciences (CSSSC) 237, 238 Chakravarty, Prasanta 29, 181 Chandra, Nandini 27, 63 Charter Act of 1813, 161 Chatterjee, Somnath 255 Chaudhuri, Sukanta 27 – 28, 119, 259 Chaudhuri, Tapan Ray 236 Chauhan, Gajendra 210 – 211 Chhatra Parishad 255, 257 Chile, student protests in 243 – 244, 245 – 246 Choice Based Credit System (CBCS) 144 Christian freedom 265, 275 – 276n2 Christian liberalism 6 civil society 102 college, term 247, 248 college debt, in United States 242 – 243 Collini, Stefan 131, 132 colonial mimesis, history of 160 – 163 Committee for Academic Freedom in Africa (CAFA) 94 – 95, 96, 100 commodity, labour power as 80, 88n7 common progress 3 Commonwealth Games 82 Communist Party of India 255 competition, principle of 13 Constitution of India 218 – 220 Cooper, Frederick 96 – 97 Dalit Bahujan student groups 218, 222, 225, 227 Dalit Panthers movement 204 Dalit Sangharsh Samiti 204 Dam, Ananda Mohan 254 Darwin Charles 55 Das, Bhagwan 183, 187 Dasgupta, Ashin 235, 236 Dattatreya, Bandaru 211, 223 Deb, Radhakanta 161 Deb, Raja Radhakanta 251 Delhi University 24, 82, 134, 136, 205 – 206, 211, 221, 264, 269

Index  281 democracy 54, 57, 171, 257 democratic centralism 257 democratization: of higher education 158; new central universities and fable of 157 – 160 Department of Industrial Policy and Promotion (DIPP) 88n6 Derozio, Henry Louis Vivian 160 – 161, 251 – 253, 260 developmentalism 77, 93, 113, 157 Devi, Mahasweta 159 Dharma Sabha 161 Dia, Mamadou 97 dirty politics 106 disaster capitalism 85 Disraeli, Benjamin 199, 202 Djite, Pauline 97 Doctor Faustus (Marlowe) 131 D’Souza, Owen 205 Dutt, Michael Madhusudan 251 East, Sir Edward Hyde 251 East India Company 251 Ecole Normale Superieure 5 Ecole Polytechnique 5 Economic and Political Weekly (magazine) 148 economic growth 13 economic rationality 105; neo-liberal 105 education: areas of study 244 – 245; contradictions in factory form 81 – 83; greater centralization of 136; strategic inclusion 132 egalitarianism 56 e-learning 68, 79, 83 embodied cultural capital, loss of 67 – 70 enslavement, concept of 265 Essential Services Maintenance Act 1968 (ESMA) 195 ethics, vocations 46 – 47 European Union 52 excellence: definition of 17; ranking for universities 146 – 149 extracurricular activities 269 Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FICCI) 64 Federici, Silvia 93, 96, 105 Feher, Michel 59n4

Ferdinand Franz (Prince) 201 fertilizers, university research 138 Film and Television Institute of India (FTII) 134, 201, 210 – 211, 214 financialization, of public university 49 – 51, 53, 55 – 57, 60n8 first among equals, notion of 248 – 250 First World War 201 Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) 65, 79, 202 Foreign Education Providers (FEP) 27, 65, 78 – 79, 81 Fortune (magazine) 84 Foucault, Michel 267 – 268, 270 – 271 Francophone education 97 free labour principle of 80 Freire, Paulo 196 French Revolution 5 Gandhi, Indira 254 – 255 Gaudiya Sabha 161 Gender Sensitization Committee Against Sexual Harassment (GSCASH) 139 – 140 General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) 11, 78; higher education in India 65 – 67, 213; World Trade Organization 63 Ghatak, Maitreesh 261 Goel, Vijay 208 Gorz, Andre 82 Gross Enrolment Ratio (GER) 169 – 170, 207 Guardian, The (newspaper) 257 Guevara, Che 201 Guru, Afzal 211, 224 guru dakshina 141n1 guru shishya parampara 130 Habermas, Jurgen 1, 9, 10 Hare, David 251, 252 Harvard 131 Hasan, Mushirul 239 – 240 Heidegger, Martin 8, 184 – 186 Hibou, Beatrice 145 higher education: in Bangladesh 102 – 105; capitalism and 66, 87n1; democratization of 237; politicizing benefits of 233 – 234; secular feudal pact as policy

282 Index 170 – 174; social mobility and 86 – 87; standards for 137 Higher Education Commission of India 24 Higher Education Financing Agency 122 Higher Education Funding Agency (HEFA) 23 Higher Education in India: Vision 2030 64 Hindu College 161, 251, 252 Hinduism 252 Hindu nationalism 253 Hindutva, notion of 252 History of English Education in India, A (Mahmood) 250 Holocaust 8 Honest Engineers (web series) 64, 76, 80 Houphouët-Boigny, Félix 97 human freedom 265 – 266 humanities: controlling dissent 138 – 139; marginalization of 138; study and teaching of 152 Human Rights Watch (HRW) 226 Humboldt, Wilhelm von 1, 2, 3, 4, 9, 184 – 185 Hussain, Ghulam 188 Hussain, Mushahid 27, 92 Hussain, Zakir 171 Hyderabad Central University (HCU) 199, 201, 205 – 206, 211 ideal of university 140; defence against dictates of state 134; humanities and social sciences 138 – 139; in India 134 – 137; strategic inclusion 132; vision of 130 – 132 idea of the university 1 – 2 imagined communities 104 imperial unconscious 96, 114n1 India: arguments for and against activism 207 – 209; expansion of number of universities 234; feudalism and 167 – 169; GATSification of higher education in 65 – 67; Midday Meal Scheme (MMS) 120, 121; outside the world-class university in 18 – 21;

power and perpetuation of inequality in 125 – 127; primary education 119 – 121; public and affordable higher education 132 – 133; public and private universities of 123 – 125; Right to Education Act 120; robust system of higher education 133; sending children abroad for study 137; student politics in 203 – 204; universities of 121 – 123 Indian Council of Social Science Research (ICSSR) 237 Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) 120, 125, 201, 205, 210, 214, 220, 222 – 223, 225 Indian Institutes of Information Technology (IIIT) 205 Indian Institutes of Management (IIM) 122, 125, 205, 210 Indian Institutes of Science Education and Research (IISER) 205 Indian National Congress 203 Indian Universities Act of 1904, 167 Indian university: analoguing the crises 149 – 151; anxieties of excellence 146 – 149; caste privilege and roots of 163 – 167; economies of knowledge production 144 – 146; history of colonial mimesis 160 – 163; legacy of colonial 167 – 169; popular culture 75; postcolonial future of reform 169 – 170; reforms of 144 – 146; secular feudal complex 166; secular feudal pact as policy 170 – 174; without alibis 151 – 153 India Today (magazine) 141n2, 146 individual, institution and 265 – 268 Inner Eye, The (Ray) 274 Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS) 120 – 121 International Monetary Fund (IMF) 11, 100 Islamic religious extremists 111 Jackson, Giorgio 243 Jadavpur University 119, 123, 128n7, 214, 256

Index  283 Jaitley, Arun 208 Jamia Millia Islamic University 234, 239, 240 Jaspers, Karl 1, 9, 92, 93, 101 Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) 24, 122, 128n7, 134, 136, 139, 140, 141n6, 199, 201, 239; costs at 175 – 176n2; hashtag#we are JNU 155 – 157; student politics 205 – 206; students under attack at 245 Jega, Attahiru 96 Jha, Ajit Kumar 141n2 Jha, Ganganatha 164 Jha, Hetukar 167, 168, 170 Jio Institute 24 Jobs, Steve 271 Kala Bhavan 235 Kamraj, K. 204 Kant, Immanuel 265, 266 karmayoga 188 Kenya 96 King Edward Medical College Lahore 203 King Saud University, Riyadh 122 Kishore Raj 189 knowledge: areas of study 244 – 245; enclosure by modern university 112 – 114; knowledge-service 8; research and education 54 – 57 Kothari, D. S. 172 Kothari Commission 172 Krishnajanmashtami 188 Kumar, Nandanam Susheel 211 Kwiek, Marek 11 – 12 labour market, surplus population and 70 – 73 labour power, commodity 80, 88n7 La Decomposition du Marxisme (Sorel) 193 Lamba, Alka 208 law schools 61n12 Lenin, Vladimir 257 literary education 138 – 139 logic of pre-emption 108 Lohia, Anuradha 259, 260 Lohia, Ram Manohar 192 Loomba, Ania 28, 130

Loose Leaves (blog) 261 Luther, Martin 265, 275n2 Macaulay, Lord Thomas Babington 161 – 163, 253 MacIntosh, S. 165 MacIntyre, Alasdair 185 – 186 Mahabharata 130 – 131, 141n1 Mahmood, Syed 250 Majumdar, Debabrata 189, 193 Malaviya, Pandit Madan Mohan 183, 185 – 186, 187, 189 Mandal Commission 78, 239, 241n1 mandarins 4 Manning, Erin 273, 274 Marcuse, Herbert 265 market’s assessment 50 Marlowe, Christopher 131 Martin Randy 108, 113 Marx, Karl 15, 17, 24, 50, 63, 70 – 71, 86, 107 Marxism 193 Massumi, Brian 273, 274 Mazumder, Charu 254 medical schools 61n12 Memon, Yakub 211 Midnight Notes Collective 101 Mill, James 253 Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) 122 Ministry of Human Resource Development (MHRD) 85, 122, 143, 170, 210, 223, 238 Minute (Macaulay) 162 modern university: African compromise 95 – 101; case of higher education in Bangladesh 102 – 105; as contested space 92 – 95; enclosure of knowledge 112 – 114; neoliberal moment 105 – 112; private and privatizing universities 111 – 112; see also Indian university; university Modi, Narendra 210 Mohan, Ishan 31, 264 Monsanto 138 Moore, Jason 67 Morrill Act of 1862, 45, 59n2 Mukhejee, Babu Buddinath 251 Mukherjee, Benode Behari 274

284 Index Mukherjee, Pranab 18 Mukherji, Srijit 259 multiculturalism 69 Munro, Thomas 166 mutatis mutandis 65 Naidu, M. Venkaiah 199, 208, 212 Nalanda University 18 – 21, 122, 127n5, 128n7 Naoroji, Dadabhai 203 Napoleon 5 National Assessment and Accreditation Council (NAAC) 123, 143, 147 – 151, 259 National Council for Teacher Education (NCTE) 158 National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) 119, 127n1, 225 national cultural agenda 3 National Education Policy (HEC) 22 National Institutional Ranking Framework (NIRF) 122 – 123, 125, 143, 149, 151 National Institution for Transforming India (NITI) 21 National Knowledge Commission 146, 173 National Policy on Education 29, 157, 172 – 173 National Students’ Union of India (NSUI) 205 National Union of Students 243 Naxalite movement 258, 260 Nazism 92 – 93 neoliberalism 48, 59n4, 67 – 68, 101; assaults of 153; enclosure of knowledge 112 – 114; middle-class subjects 110; political activism 204 – 207; private and public universities 107; privatization of public university 48 – 49, 51, 53, 54; public universities and 106; risk-taking 108 – 109, 110 – 111 neo-liberal university: life or death antagonism 87; rankings 83 network advantage 51 New Education Policy (NEP) 146, 199 Newman, Cardinal 183, 185

Newman, John Henry 1 nexus of contracts model 51 Nietzsche, Friedrich 6 – 8, 46 Nigavekar Report, Academic Performance Index 81, 88n11 Nigeria 98; Anglophone 98 Non-Cooperation Movement 234 non-curricular activities 268 – 269 non-governmental organizations (NGOs) 109 Norrie, Alan W. 266 nostalgia 2 Oaten, E. F. 254 OBC (other backward classes) 78, 82, 89n13, 217, 220 – 221, 225 occupy: definition 217; Occupy UGC 217 – 218; Occupy Wall Street programme 217 Okri, Ben 130, 133 OP Jindal Global University 143 Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) 11 Outlook (magazine) 146 Pakistan 103 Pandey, Sandip 194 Pandey, Sarjoo 189 Pandit Sundarlal Sharma Central Institute of Vocational Education 127n1 Panjab University 24 passivism 30; students 201 – 203 Patel, Chimanbhai 204 Patna University 18, 29, 157, 167, 168 Payment of Salaries Act 26 Pedagogy of Commitment (Freire) 196 Pelikan, Jaroslav 1 philosophical ideal 114 plebianization of politics 106 Podile, Apparao 211 political activism: arguments for and against 207 – 209; hypocrisy of 212 – 213; nature of student 209 – 212; neo-liberal reforms 204 – 207; students 200, 201 – 203; students in India 203 – 204

Index  285 politicalness of education 196 politics, as calling 43 ‘Politics as a Vocation’ lecture, [Weber] 43, 45, 58 poverty reduction 13 Pradhan Bhumihar Brahmin Sabha 167 Prashad, Vijay 31, 242 Presidency College 248, 254, 258, 260 – 261; autonomous demands 255; elitist education 258; personal narrative 254 – 258; public figures at 250; renaming 251; significance of 249; University of Calcutta and 252 primitive accumulation 70 – 71, 77, 87 – 88n5 Princip, Gavrilo 201 Prinsep, H. T. 161, 163 private universities 111 – 112, 115n7; Dhaka 112; religious extremism and 114n3; terrorist attack on bakery in Dhaka 115n7 privatization, of public university 48 – 49, 51, 53, 54, 56 production: fields of 88 – 89n12; sphere of restricted 81 psycho-somatic disorder 174 public university: administrators of 58; curriculums 52 – 53; disciplines 52; financialization of 49 – 51, 53, 55 – 57, 60n8; neo-liberal privatization 48 – 49, 51, 53, 54, 56; private money and 49, 59 – 60n6; ratings and rating agencies 52, 60n10, 60n7; research and education 54 – 57; shareholder value 50 – 51; tuition rates of 48; vocation of 45 – 47, 55 – 58; see also modern university; university Quacquarelli Symonds (QS) 123, 125 Radhakrishnan, S. 171 Radhakrishnan Commission Report 29, 157 Rajput Sabha 167 Ramdev, Rina 28, 143

rankings, excellence in university 146 – 149 Rao, Ramchandra 211 Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) party 159, 200, 223, 274 Rashtriya Uchchatar Shiksha Abhiyan (RUSA) 122 Ray, Satyajit 274 Razzak, Abdur 94, 103 Readings, Bill 148, 153 Reliance Foundation 24 religious university, birth of 182 – 184 research in public university 54 – 57 Revani Kahar Sabha 167 Reyes, Kimberly 209 Rhodesia 96 Right to Education Act 120 risk-taking opportunities 108 – 109 Roy, M. N. 188 Roy, Rammohun 161, 162 Sachdeva, Sagar 31, 264 Saha, Meghnad 171 Said, Edward 96, 114n1 Salmi, Jamil 13, 14 Sandip University 83 sangharama 20 Sanyal, Kalyan 77 – 79 Sara Aakash (Yadav) 64, 75, 78 Sarjupari Brahmin Sabha 167 Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (SSA) 120 Satin, Rustam 189 Satyanarayana, K. 225 Savarkar, Vinayak Damodar 253 Schelsky, Helmut 1, 9 scholarships 131 – 132 ‘Science as a Vocation’ lecture, [Weber] 43, 45 Scindia, Maharaja 187 Secondary and Higher Education Cess (SHEC) 22 secular feudal roots, public Indian university 156 Security of Services Act 26 Sen, Amartya 258, 261 Sen, Aparna 259 Sen, Ram Comul 160, 161 Senghor, Léopold 97 SenseLab 273

286 Index sensorium 1 service industry: economy in US 87n4; lure of 73 – 74 Seth, Sanjay 102 sexual harassment, debate in universities 139 – 140 shadow form 83, 89n14 Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar 125 shareholder value 50 Sharma, Alka 89n13 Sharma, Nupur 208 Shastri, Letin 187 Shimomura, Hakubun 277n8 Singh, Kashinath 29, 181, 182, 190 Singh, Maharaja Prabhu Narayan 187 Singh, Manmohan 18 Singh, Satya Narayan 189 Skill India programme 159 social justice 10, 171 social mobility: higher education and 86 – 87; universities and 131 – 132 social sciences: controlling dissent 138 – 139; marginalization of 138 societies, vocabulary of 269 – 270 Sorel, Georges 193 South Africa 96, 243 South Asian University 122 Soviet Union 106 Special Economic Zone (SEZ) 65 Sri Venkateswara College 264 Stalin, Joseph 257 State Higher Education Council 25 STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) 61n12, 147 strategic inclusion, logic of 132 student activism: nature of 209 – 212; and passivism 201 – 203; politics in India 203 – 204; protests in Chile 243 – 244, 245 – 246 student politics: arguments for and against 207 – 209; protests in Chile 243 – 244, 245 – 246 Subramanian, Lakshmi 30 – 31, 233 Subramanian, T. S. R. 199 Subramanyan, K. G. 235 sub-Saharan Africa, universities in 93 – 94

surplus population: history within the university 77 – 79; labour market and 70 – 73 Tagore, Rabindranath 235 Takshashila, university in 19 – 21 Technocracy 45, 55, 57 Teltumbde, Anand 29 – 30, 199 Thorat, Sukhdeo 217, 220 Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry (MacIntyre) 186 Times Higher Education (THE) 123, 125, 143, 149 Trades Union Congress 243 Trenkle, Norbert 17 Tripathi, Girish Chandra 195 uberization model 73, 87n3 unique selling proposition (USP) 138 United Kingdom 243 United Nations 109 United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) 219 United Progressive Alliance (UPA) 256 United States: college debt in 242 – 243; pay-as-you-go education 242 universalism 6 Universities Act of 1974, 205 university : academic freedom 2 – 3; ambivalence toward productive work 74 – 77; chronicling the idea 26 – 32; as contested space 92 – 95; contradictions in logic of factory 81 – 83; from culture to service 6 – 9; as factory for proletarianization 79 – 81; ferment of precedence 5 – 6; history of surplus population within 77 – 79; idea of excellence 146 – 149; individual and 265 – 268; internal condition of justice 174 – 175; internal organization 3; learning as dead labour 12 – 18; liberal fantasies of consensus 9 – 12; loss of embodied cultural capital 67 – 70; pedagogy and

Index  287 neural-hegemony 272 – 275; personal reflections on idea of 233 – 241; promise of new 86 – 87; public and private in India 123 – 125; rankings 146 – 149; responses to impasse of 83 – 86; site of research and development 64, 73; state of birth 2 – 4; structural delinking from jobs 83 – 86; structural reorganization of 238 – 239; surplus population and labour market 70 – 73; term 247, 248; see also Indian university; modern university; public university University Education Commission 171 University Grants Commission (UGC) 22, 121, 127n3, 143, 158, 205, 236, 270 University in Ruins, The (Readings) 148 University of Berlin 2, 5 University of Calcutta 167, 236, 248, 252, 255 – 256, 258 University of Delhi 136, 220 University of Freiburg 8 University of Granada 131 University of Hyderabad 30, 134, 225 University of Illinois 131 University of Iowa 209 University of London 166, 248 University of Michigan 209 University Unthought, The (essays) 33 unthought 2; towards university 32 – 33 Usmani, Shaukat 188 Vallejo, Camila 243 – 244 value-for-money education 11 Vemula, Rohith 134, 141n2, 159, 174, 211, 214, 223 – 224, 227n12

Vikramshila, university in 18, 19 Viswa Bharati university 235 Vivekananda Study Circle 210 vocation(s): calling in public university 43 – 45; counter-intuitive meaning of 45; ethics in 46 – 47; knowledge in public university 55 – 57; of twenty-first century university 47 – 53; see also calling; public university Washington, Booker T. 95 Washington Consensus 106, 202 Weber, Max 9, 43 – 44, 54, 181 welfare reforms 10 Wells Fargo 51 West Bengal Universities and Colleges Act 2017 25 – 26 Wilhelm, Frederick, III 3 Wissenschaft, science in German sense 43, 46 World Bank 2, 11, 13, 17, 23, 77, 94, 100, 101, 109 world-class university: case of India 18 – 21; first vs third 21 – 26; paradigm 15; policydefinition of 12; term 14; terminological glossary for 14 – 15 World Trade Organization (WTO) 11, 16, 202; WTO’s General Agreement on Trade in Services (WTO–GATS) 63 Yadav, Deena Nath Singh 189 Yadav, Rajendra 64, 75 Yash Pal Committee 157, 173 Yomiuri Shimbun 277n8 Young, Michael 257 zamindars 167