higher education institutes

With the NEP’s Focus on ‘Autonomy’, Are We Ushering in a Spirit of Academic Capitalism?

Commentators see the National Education Policy 2020’s emphasis on choice, modularity and autonomy as disquieting because they see it as pushing the education system into a neoliberal governance mode.

In a perspicacious commentary on the National Education Policy 2020 (NEP), social scientist Satish Deshpande noted that multiple exit options “will certainly help in renaming drop-outs as certificate or diploma-holders. But they cannot ensure that these credentials will bring significant benefits for holders.”

He further noted that in the current system, “The indivisibility of the degree provided an incentive for students and families to try hard to complete their degrees.” Deshpande’s criticism is spot on. To push his arguments to the next stage, we can examine how the flexibility offered to the student is in fact illusory and mired in a whole set of troubling issues.

The rise of creativity

‘Creativity’ and ‘innovation’ in terms of study, personality development and institutional mechanisms are the operative words in the NEP, occurring on practically all pages of the document. A few samples:

“quality higher education must aim to develop good, thoughtful, well-rounded, and creative individuals…”

“It must enable an individual to study one or more specialized areas of interest at a deep level, and also develop character, ethical and Constitutional values, intellectual curiosity, scientific temper, creativity, spirit of service, and 21st century capabilities across a range of disciplines”

“…well-rounded across disciplines including artistic, creative, and analytic subjects”

“Imaginative and flexible curricular structures will enable creative combinations of disciplines for study… “

Then there is the emphasis on ‘mobility’:

“provide greater mobility to students in India who may wish to visit, study at, transfer credits to, or carry out research at institutions abroad, and vice versa…”

“[Currently, there is] a complete lack of vertical mobility for students from the vocational education stream …”

“The credit-based Framework will also facilitate mobility across ‘general’ and vocational education.”

Thus, mobility, choice, autonomy and creativity are to become the keywords for the next generation of students and for educational administrators. In and of themselves, of course, no one disputes their idealism. However, these concepts are also loaded with other value-systems in our contemporary era.

Also read: The NEP Goes Against the Existing Constitutional Mandate of the RTE

Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiapello in their The New Spirit of Capitalism (2018) note that autonomy, self-realisation, mobility and individual responsibility have been substituted for stability, the consistency of socio-economic and welfare structures and organised planning. Everything finally devolves on to the individual, in terms of planning, growth, choices, skill-sets and development, since there are to be no more supportive structures (including, one adds, fellowships, whose delayed payments have been in the news recently).

In order to fulfil one’s aspirations, one works even harder, since the responsibility is solely one’s own. It is in this context that one worries away at the emphasis on student choices, autonomy, creativity and responsibility.

Boltanski and Chiapello, studying management discourses of the 1990s, note that the workers are treated as being ‘more skilled, more flexible, more inventive and more autonomous’.

More worryingly, they note that in stressing versatility, job flexibility and the ability to learn and adapt to new duties rather than possession of occupation and established qualifications, while also stressing the capacity for engagement, communication and relational qualities, neo-management looks to what are increasingly called ‘life skills’, as opposed to knowledge.

Neoliberal flexibility

The IIT Bombay Liberal Arts program under its Centre for Liberal Education invites you, on its opening page, to ‘choose your own path to arts, sciences, or engineering’. The IIT Madras MA program speaks of itself as serving ‘the goal of providing people with the freedom to make their lives better’. IIT Guwahati makes a slight shift when it says of its Master of Liberal Arts: ‘this programme will enable students to make informed judgments and choices, but always with awareness and a sense of the ethical implications of those choices’.

About its MA programmes, the English and Foreign Languages University, Hyderabad, writes:

“We follow a modular approach – what is popularly known as ‘the cafeteria system’ – students can choose from a variety of courses offered in different areas, such as literature, linguistics, and language education and opt for a programme that best suits their goals and interests.”

For commentators, this emphasis on choice, modularity and autonomy is disquieting because they see this as pushing the education system into a neoliberal governance mode.

As Jakob Claus, Thomas Meckel and Farina Pätz put it in their essay on ‘Academic Capitalism’: “This responsibility is part of forming one’s adaptive and active personality. Creating and managing one’s curriculum in this respect is an exercise in interacting with as well as shaping and being shaped by changing environments and projects.”

For Claus et al, this so-called flexibility is in fact disguised social control. Reading the Liberal Arts programs in Europe via Gilles Deleuze, they note that, “The personalised freedom given to Liberal Arts students is accompanied by constant self-reflection and supervision structures.”

It is this strange mix of heightened control, expanded monitoring and presumed freedom that they draw attention to: “The potential student for the above mentioned Liberal Arts programs recognises flexibility, creativity, responsibility, freedom and self-reflection as a matrix of contemporary values within the new spirit of capitalism.”

Claus et al see the projection of creativity and freedom as actually enabling and amplifying supervision and monitoring by the institutions (since neoliberal societies shift the mode of social control away from the state to organisations).

Also read: The Liberal Arts in the Age of Illiberalism

One turns here to the NEP document which, as noted elsewhere, speaks of autonomy and greater regulation of institutions, often in the same breath. About assessment, the NEP is categorical: “HEIs shall also move away from high-stakes examinations towards more continuous and comprehensive evaluation.”

This seems to indicate greater and not lesser monitoring and supervision. Later, in an interesting passage about student activities that would ostensibly produce all-round development, the document says:

“all HEIs will have mechanisms and opportunities for funding of topic-centred clubs and activities organised by students with the help of faculty and other experts as needed, such as clubs and events dedicated to science, mathematics, poetry, language, literature, debate, music, sports, etc. Over time, such activities could be incorporated into the curriculum once appropriate faculty expertise and campus student demand is developed. Faculty will have the capacity and training to be able to approach students not just as teachers, but also as mentors and guides. “

One notes that the those deemed extra-curricular hobbies and ‘fun-and-games’ are to be incorporated into the curriculum with accompanying faculty expertise. Would this be freedom or supervision of even sports and cultural activities?

The two samples seem to imply the validity of the Claus et al’s argument about greater monitoring that lies underneath illusions of student choices and presumed freedoms.

Toward a pedagogy of the anxious?

The NEP does offer much to think about. As it moves into the implementation phase, we need also to think through the implications of some of the proposed changes.

As the policy makes choice and autonomy the centrepiece of student subjectivity, it overlaps with the neoliberal emphasis on responsibilisation. Individual decisions – course, instructor, program, institution – will determine the kind of success and subjectivity that emerges at the end of the process. As a supposed response to our over-regulated institutions, the policy treats the institution as a space of possibility and potential: you must choose your possibility to fulfil your potential.

In such a context of responsibilization and autonomy, we can think of a series of questions:

Are the students’ states of vulnerability being prised wide open when neoliberal restructuring offers freedom of exit options and freedom to choose any combination of courses without core disciplinary training in the guise of multi- and interdisciplinarity?

What forms of market-ready skills and abilities accrue to a student who chooses any and every mix of courses simply because she can, and exits with a diploma?

Will the versatility and creativity be at the cost of stable pedagogic systems, supportive nets (financial and other) and disciplinary strengths?

Are our institutions and their apparatuses structured to enable self-realisation, efficiency, rational choices and self-management, or would they induce, when student vulnerabilities are exposed to slowed-down job markets, lost disciplinary cohesion and so-called flexibility, greater anxieties?

Do such multiple choices lead to fulfilment or fragmentation of disciplines and of the self – as critics have noted about neoliberal subjectivity (see Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism) – in the guise of choice and autonomy?

These questions index what Noah de Lissavoy in Capitalism, Pedagogy and the Politics of Being has called ‘the pedagogy of the anxious’ – it is this pedagogy that we have to account for now.

Pramod K. Nayar teaches at the University of Hyderabad.

Reservation in Faculty Recruitment: A Necessity for Merit, not a ‘Premium for Mediocrity’

Invoking ‘merit’ to deny affirmative action has a long history in India. But it is not supported by any empirical evidence.

It is widely believed that the implementation of affirmative action in faculty hiring within government educational institutions will generate a decline in the quality of teaching and research. One would imagine that a belief so widespread among the ‘intelligentsia’ would have some basis in the empirical realities of life.

But such empirical evidence is nowhere to be found.

In fact, some studies have found that the implementation of affirmative action within government organisations generates a mild increase in productivity. The belief that affirmative action hurts excellence is based on the presumption that, in the absence of affirmative action, hiring and promotion of faculty is based solely on merit. Economic theory suggests that this presumption is false.

Invoking ‘merit’ to deny affirmative action has a long history in India; a history which spans the ideological spectrum of Indian politics. There are two variants of the merit argument: the strong and the weak.

The strong variant says that affirmative action hurts efficiency and therefore ought to be avoided altogether. One of the early advocates of this position was Jawaharlal Nehru’s home minister, Govind B. Pant, who put it bluntly: “If we go in for reservations… we swamp the bright and able people and remain second-rate or third-rate.”

The strong-variant of the merit argument proved particularly potent in stalling affirmative action in faculty recruitment. The reasons for this are succinctly explained by sociologist Arvind Shah in an article published in the Economic & Political Weekly. In the article, Shah says, “…to compromise with merit in appointment of a teacher at any level is to subject his students, including those of backward classes, to mediocrity for the entire length of the teacher’s service”. This was circa 1991.

The weak-variant of the merit argument differs from the strong in that it allows for ‘unmeritorious’ recruitment at the ‘lower levels’. The idea behind this is that the higher-level positions are far too important to be left to factors other than ‘pure merit’.

One proponent of this position was Kakasaheb Kalelkar, chairman of India’s first Backward Classes Commission. Kalelkar accepted reservations in government jobs of grades III and IV but objected to any affirmative action in Grades I and II.

The weak-variant of the merit argument can be found within the judiciary too. In Thomas vs The State of Kerala, for instance, Justice Iyer supported affirmative action among clerks on the grounds that here is a “pen-pushing clerk” not a “space scientist or top administrator… on whose initiative the wheels of a department speed up or slow down”.

The weak-variant of the merit argument has not just survived the times, but appears to have grown stronger with them. In 2020, the Ramgopal Rao Committee recommended that the Indian Institutes of Technology be excluded from affirmative action in faculty hiring so that they can compete at the international stage “in terms of excellence, output, research and teaching”. It is as if the mere spectra of caste-based reservations is enough to erode excellence, for the IITs never did implement reservations in earnest.

Also read: How Meritorious and Inclusive Are Our Institutions of Higher Education?

What studies say

Though there are no empirical studies on the relation between productivity and caste-based affirmative action in faculty hiring within universities in India, there are two studies pertaining to other government institutions. Neither study offers any support to either the weak or the strong variant of the merit argument.

The first of these is a 2014 study by Deshpande and Weisskopf on the Indian Railways published in World Development. They examine the implementation of reservation in Grade A and B level positions for Scheduled Castes (SC) and Scheduled Tribes (ST) from 1980 to 2002.

Grade A and B employees make managerial decisions that can have sizeable effects on the productivity of the organisation. Deshpande and Weisskopf found that the implementation of affirmative action did not decrease the productivity of the Indian Railways; if anything it generated a mild increase in productivity.

The second of the two studies is by Bhavnani and Lee, who analyse the effect of reservations in the Indian Administrative Service. Their study, published in the American Journal of Political Science in 2020, uses a detailed data set on the recruitment, caste and careers of India’s elite bureaucrats to examine the implementation of schemes used to build roads, schools and wells. They find that the bureaucrats recruited through affirmative action perform no differently from everyone else in the delivery of public services. Moreover, the result holds irrespective of whether the public services are targeted at the poor or meant for the larger community as a whole.

Why then is the empirical evidence on affirmative action so much at odds with the conventional belief that affirmative action hurts efficiency? The answer lies in the incentives faced by government bureaucrats in making hiring and promotion decisions.

The conventional belief is based on the notion that, in the absence of affirmative action, government organisations hire solely on the basis of merit. In reality, however, the bureaucrats who run government organisations have little to no incentive to hire or promote workers on the basis of merit.

Government organisations are writ with what economists call ‘incentive-compatibility problems’ and higher educational institutions are no exception. Incentive-compatibility problems arise when the incentives faced by the bureaucrats who run an organisation do not align with the goals of the organisation.

In government organisations, the tenures and salaries of bureaucrats tend to be fixed. Bureaucrats are neither punished nor rewarded for the effects their decisions have on the productivity of the organisation. In fact, it is more sensible to think of bureaucrats as serving superior bureaucrats rather than final consumers, irrespective of whether the final consumer is a traveller on Indian Railways or a student at an IIT. This is because the resources controlled by a bureaucrat depend on the decisions made by his superiors within the bureaucracy. The final consumers’ sole influence is through her attendance at the poll booth once every five years.

This influence is terribly weak for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is that citizens cast their votes considering bundles of goods offered by competing politicians. The behaviour of a particular bureaucrat – or even the functioning of a whole government organisation for that matter – is but a grain of sand within the large and diverse bundles of goods voted upon every five years.

All this means that the final consumer, as a voter, is in no position to align the incentives of a bureaucrat with the goals of the organisation. Bureaucrats, in serving their superiors, can engage in behaviours that, though beneficial to themselves, are detrimental to the organisation.

Also read: When Will India’s Educational Institutes Have Their ‘Dalit Lives Matter’ Moment?

The expression of caste preferences in hiring, promotion and access to resources is one such detrimental behaviour. Such caste-oriented behaviour is most likely to be found in government organisations where the higher-level bureaucrats are predominantly of one caste. The IITs, IIMs, and the Indian Statistical Institutes are all examples of such organisations.

Consider IIT Madras for instance. All but one director of IIT Madras, since its inception in 1959, have been Brahmins. The vast majority of the deans and heads of departments, too, have been Brahmins. In such a setting, there is an incentive for junior bureaucrats to woo higher bureaucrats for promotions by expressing – or at the very least tolerating the expression of – caste preferences in the allocation of resources.

Inside IIT Madras, Chennai. Credit: IIT Madras

Inside IIT Madras, Chennai. Photo: IIT Madras

There is little incentive to make the quality of teaching or research matters of primary importance, particularly if these come in the way of caste sentiments. In such a setting, caste discrimination in the form of differential treatment, exclusion from research centres and even humiliation, are not bugs; they are features of a system in which the incentives faced by the bureaucrats do not align with the goals of the organisation.

Caste not only influences the flow of resources among those within an organisation, but it also poisons the very recruitment process by which individuals become faculty members at national ‘Institutes of Eminence’.

Incentive-compatibility problems intrude into the hiring process in three ways. The first of these is in advertisements for faculty positions. Bureaucrats have an incentive to tailor advertisements to call for specific qualifications, which are met by their kin waiting in the wings. Note that the hiring of faculty members is not based on the demand for courses since government institutes are not funded by students.

The second way in which these intrusions take place is in the shortlisting of candidates for interviews. Faculty applicants come with doctoral degrees from various universities and publication in a variety of journals. Neither universities nor journals can be unequivocally compared across disciplines, or even within the same discipline for that matter. Here again, there is a need for judgement and there is little incentive within the system for the judgement not to be directed by one’s caste sentiments.

The third place in which incentive-compatibility problems intrude into the hiring process is at the interview stage. The composition of the interview panel is as much a determinant of an examination’s outcome as the quality of the interviewee. Bureaucrats, therefore, can influence the outcome of an interview by selecting panels that are likely to favour certain candidates over others. The favoured candidates are more likely than not to belong to the castes of the bureaucrats who commission the selection panel.

Overall, there are numerous avenues in faculty hiring and promotions where caste preferences eclipse merit.

In some senses, India has come a long way since the days when Jyoti Basu told the Mandal Commission that caste is of little relevance in his state and Rajiv Gandhi criticised V.P. Singh for implementing the Mandal recommendations. However, the belief among the ruling elite that affirmative action hampers excellence remains unchanged; a belief most potently expressed by the Organiser, RSS’s mouthpiece magazine, circa 1990.

The magazine called affirmative action “a premium for mediocrity”; economic theory suggests that such belief is mere blind faith. In the absence of affirmative action, there is little incentive within government educational institutions to hire or promote faculty members solely on the basis of merit. Affirmative action, therefore, opens the doors to individuals who may have been rejected because of their caste and despite their merit. Naturally, the recruitment of more meritorious faculty members will increase, not decrease, the quality of research and teaching.

Affirmative action and merit are therefore friends, not foes, at least within reasonable bounds.

Vipin P. Veetil is an assistant professor at IIT Madras.