Flirting with a range of visual and material belongings happens to be the bench-mark of class-identity and mobility. It is closely tied to class-aspirations as well. The cultural milieu of the class that can afford to consume gets constructed through purchase and display of several things. In the post-liberalisation era, such conscious assertion of class-character has disseminated further down the ranks.
The competition for distinction is not only limited to property, automobiles, apparel, accessories, but it has increasingly spilled-over to the contested turf for acquiring social-capital.
Acquisition and demonstration of social-capital is essential for playing and winning the status-game. And in that game of participation and privilege, the most prized possession is one’s educational qualification. Quality, place and type of education determines class-positioning. No wonder, there has been an unprecedented boom in the rampant privatisation of higher-education in the last one decade, which is no longer limited to engineering, medicine and technical fields alone.
Private capital has entered and made steady inroads into the social-sciences – a bastion that was so far under the monopoly of public universities. It was unimaginable even 15 years ago to send your children to complete an undergraduate degree in humanities and social sciences in a private university in India that costs anywhere between Rs 15 – 50 lakhs. What was unthinkable has become quite a norm for a certain section of the urban elite and the middle classes, in a short span of time.
Branding and business modelling of these new universities offers a life-style-package for the young. Loaded with faculty with foreign PhDs, these institutions promise credibility that the rapidly declining public universities have lost. Academic credibility is complimented by acreage-obsession and lawn-maintenance – both of which are a result of the colonial hangover and costs gallons of water. Useless aesthetic concerns with grass-growth undermines productive possibilities of using the land more productively for organic fruit and crop cultivation for students. Unimaginative glass-concrete-steel trio colonises sustainable architectural options.
These manicured lawns and aesthetically appealing walled campuses curated by the corporate capital are tailor-made for the privileged. Parental aspirations are reproduced in a space that guarantees exclusivity and isolation. It is a fancy campus-life that can be accessed by a limited clientele. It is devoid of any pretension of social justice and egalitarian values of education-for-all.
Also read: Ashoka University’s Descent into Academic (un)Freedom
Class and caste homogeneity of private universities defies heterogeneity, inclusivity and the ideal that a university is a levelling-field. With a non-existent representation of the unprivileged, and students from the state-boards – the message is loud and clear: rights to education are abjectly reserved, and unapologetically so.
With varied pedagogic choice-basket and curriculum-flexibility, these universities act as functional preparatory-schools for a foreign post-graduate endeavour. Barely any students coming out of these institutions yearn to enter public universities in India for research or further studies. While Rs 50 lakhs may appear shockingly absurd for many to buy a degree in social sciences and humanities, but a similar sort of an under-grad degree from the US or Europe, may cost twice as much. So those who are choosing to spend that much are possibly saving more by deferring and delaying their flights abroad.
Consciously quarantined from its immediate surroundings, these are utopian and apolitical spaces. Located on recently commercialised pastoral-lands located at the far-end of metropolitan-limits, these are islands that are heavily guarded from the controversies of caste, marginality, malnutrition, poverty and a host of other pertinent issues that exist outside its gate.
In fact, in the name of safety and security, its high boundaries immunise students inside from the everyday-realities of the life outside the campus. Much hyped-up emphasis on ‘critical-thinking’ and ‘interdisciplinarity’ are successfully sold catch-words that tends to overlook socio-political concerns of its proximity. The question remains as to what extent can a true social science training be fostered within such social isolation.
The inherent mandate of social science education is to challenge the existing power-structures and status-quo. Therefore, the expression of dissent is an integral part of social-science training. With assured protection of class-interest, one doubts how much ‘critical-thinking’ in classrooms can possibly translate into critical-action outside the campus.
Protest and resistance are non-existent in private universities, not because of an institutional apathy for dissent, but because protests are made to appear irrelevant. These fully residential-campus-lives operate like regiments with a host of curfews, restrictions and repression-mechanisms.
Also read: The Significance of Ashoka University’s Teachers Calling for a Strike Over Academic Freedom
Repressive administrative bureaucracy is often staffed by ex-army-men, who may consider peaceful mobilisation as an act of indiscipline. Young adults are often infantilised. At times, worse than parental injunctions, these injunctions are normalised, as students get socialised to remain under severe surveillance. The prized freedom to choose and change courses often comes at the cost of personal freedom that once characterised our college lives. Surrounded by perceived dangers of the dehat (rural areas), these sanitised spaces have serious exit-issues – barring the promise of preparing students to go abroad. When ‘foreign’ is the destination, why waste time engaging with the local? Quite logical!
When students are customers with consumerist entitlements, a degree logically turns into a commodity. The period for choosing and dropping courses is called ‘shopping week’. Campus-lifestyle becomes a register of exclusionary tendencies and strategic-distinction. Education gets subsumed under the all-pervasive claim of being world-class. And the society – at large– aims to out-class and exclude the ‘other’ that cannot afford.
Sreedeep is a Sociologist with Shiv Nadar University and is the author of Consumerist Encounters (2020).