JNU fees today

The VC of JNU is Turning a Premier Institution Into ‘WhatsApp University’

After first pretending that exams are taking place as per schedule, the VC wants them held through alternative modes in the next 3-4 days. What he wants will making JNU the laughingstock of academia the world over.

This article is a modified version of an open letter to President Ram Kovind by D.K. Lobiyal, President, JNU Teachers Association (JNUTA) and Surajit Mazumdar, Secretary, JNUTA.

We had written to the president of India nine days ago regarding the crisis in Jawaharlal Nehru University and the urgent need to end its root cause – namely, the reign of mis-governance by its vice-chancellor, M. Jagadesh Kumar. Since then, the crisis has become graver as we are now almost at the end of the scheduled period of the monsoon semester and the schedule of academic activities prescribed are far from being completed.

True to form, the VC has continued to reject every effort at finding a solution to the prolonged impasse and to the restoration of the conditions in which these activities can be undertaken by teachers and students. He has even spurned the opportunity offered by a second initiative of the Ministry of Human Resources Development to facilitate a resolution. The clear evidence of this lies in the complete mismatch between the subsequent actions of the JNU administration and what was put out by the MHRD in a December 12, 2019 press release as a “Record of the discussion held in MHRD on resolving the JNU Issue on 10th and 11th December 2019”.

One of the misdirected efforts of the JNU VC has been a concerted attempt to somehow complete the university’s end-semester examinations as per the academic calendar by reducing this process to a mere formality. This is also in sharp contradiction with the approach reflected in the MHRD’s report – that of first redressing the concerns of students and then consider an extension of the semester by a couple of weeks to allow academic activities to be completed.

Why JNU Protests

While JNU believes that the fundamental objective of knowledge is to break hierarchies that society imposes, the ruling regime believes not only in protecting these hierarchies but also creating new ones.

Until 2014, students and teachers of JNU were found occupying place in prime time shows of news channels as experts on various socio-economic and political issues. But post-2014, JNU has occupied prime time spots, almost every alternate week, for very different reasons.

The current JNU protests are against changes in the hostel manual and the steep increase in hostel charges that will force nearly 50% of its students to leave their education and stop scores of others from underprivileged backgrounds who dream of taking admission in this university. Both students and teachers of the university – through their representative bodies, JNUSU and JNUTA respectively – have unequivocally said that these changes are unacceptable, but the JNU administration has chosen to ignore them completely and is hell-bent on imposing these changes.

The students and teachers are arguing that it is the university’s responsibility to provide residential and mess facilities to those pursuing higher education at reasonable costs and hostels cannot be run on a self-financing principle as the new hostel manual proposes. A large number of students from marginalised backgrounds, particularly female students, have so far been able to both enter and successfully study in JNU only because the fee structure has remained very low. The students and teachers of the university see it as a part of a larger assault on inclusive public higher education, and a concerted agenda to destroy JNU.

A few months earlier students and teachers had protested because the JNU vice chancellor had selectively issued charge-sheets against 48 teachers, including a retired faculty, invoking CCS conduct rules for raising their voices against the destructive policies of the JNU administration.

The teachers got a stay since there were absolutely no grounds for the university to claim the applicability of CCS conduct rules for teachers. The Delhi high court pointed out that applying CCS rules to control faculty members was untenable since it would go against their basic role as teachers responsible for research and encouraging debate.

Also read: The JNU Fee Hike Affects Students with Disabilities More Than We Realise

While we in JNU have a very clear understanding, the public at large is always perplexed about the nature of constant protests in JNU. In what follows, I make an attempt to explain the core concerns of students and faculty at the university.

JNU students lathi-charged by the police during their march to Rashtrapati Bhavan, in New Delhi, Monday, Dec. 9, 2019. Photo: PTI/Kamal Singh

One of the foremost objectives of the JNU Act is to disseminate and advance knowledge, wisdom and understanding via the teaching and research of social needs. If this is so, why is JNU the target of the current regime? While we at JNU believe that the fundamental objective of knowledge is to break all kinds of hierarchies that society imposes on us and question existing wisdom in order to push the boundaries of knowledge; those in the ruling regime believe not only in protecting these hierarchies but also creating new ones. Over the years, JNU has been able to successfully break three types of hierarchies – that of identity (gender, caste, and religion); of disciplines; and the hierarchy between teachers and students.

Taking seriously upon itself the responsibility of fulfilling the objective stated in the JNU Act, the JNU community takes pride in claiming that this is not a university for children of the rich but for those deserving boys and girls, however marginalised and poor they may be.

Until this VC took over, JNU, without shying away from critiquing its own efforts, whenever necessary, became a microcosm representing the diversity of India through its unique model of deprivation points allotted for regional, economic and gender backwardness, over and above the constitutionally mandated reservation policy for Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes and Other Backward Classes. The university implemented this objective even in its faculty composition. This was the first hierarchy that it demolished.

Subsequently, with the help of its diverse background of students and teachers, the second hierarchy that JNU dismantled was among disciplines. As a result, knowledge creation here instead of remaining within the boundaries of specific disciplines, transcended to create a unity of knowledge.

Also read: JNU’s Four Subversions: A Primer For the Anxious Right-Wing Citizen

And none of this could have been achieved, if the JNU community had not broken the third hierarchy, i.e. between teachers and student within the classrooms. It became a university that practised inter-disciplinarity in the true sense. The pedagogy that the JNU community evolved was not based on the idea that teachers alone were custodians or owners of knowledge. Rather both teachers and students in JNU always remained seekers of knowledge. This resulted in form of interactive teaching and research with a collaborative connection between students and teachers.

It is for the first time in the history of JNU that we have seen a vice chancellor who is completely controlled and governed by the ideologies of a parivar that fundamentally believes in maintaining all the above-mentioned hierarchies. This is being pushed through by the current vice chancellor through repeated violations of the statutory provisions and obligations to alter the basic character of the university.

Ever since professor M. Jagadesh Kumar took over, he has undermined the integrity of the faculty selection process, He has restricted students from joining the university for higher studies and research, violated the Central Educational Institution Act 2006 and the constitutionally mandated policy of affirmative action, harassed and intimidated teachers who disagree or oppose these moves; assaulted all democratically elected bodies; destroyed JNU’s anti-sexual harassment policy which was achieved after a long struggle of the JNU community and created an atmosphere of fear among students and teachers.

JNU students during their march from the university campus to Rashtrapati Bhavan, in New Delhi, Monday, Dec. 9, 2019. Photo: PTI/Kamal Singh

The JNU community has opposed every single move of the vice chancellor. Ever since Narendra Modi’s election in May 2014, there have been few occasions to feel hopeful about anything in general but particularly about politics in the country. Yet even in these difficult times, it is JNU that has spoken and voiced concerns about various issues.

This endeavour of the JNU community disturbs the current regime the most. It is the responsibility of governments in a democracy to create an environment where teaching and learning can be free and without inhibition and fear. What is happening today is exactly the opposite.

Also read: Why the University and Its Questions Worry the State

The government is forcing public universities to submit to the mercy of the market so that it can never create and nurture an egalitarian ethos. Whatever it may cost, the JNU community is united and determined in its resolve to fight against such an onslaught, save an inclusive public higher education system and protect the idea of India that is enshrined in the constitution.

Avinash Kumar teaches at the Centre for Informal Sector and Labour Studies, SSS, JNU and is the former secretary of JNUTA.

The Hindutva Project to ‘Purify’ Campuses Is Underway

The ‘asuras’ who organise beef festivals on various campuses and the much-maligned JNU ‘tukde-tukde’ gang celebrating Mahisasur Jayanti need to be taught a lesson, according to some.

Now that the Hindutva state is upon us in all but name, the powers that be are complacent and believe that they can put up their feet up and relax. After all, they have the required numbers in Parliament to enforce any legal measure in a ‘democratic’ manner.

However, much to their chagrin, scores of students descended onto the streets of the capital. JNU students hold Delhi to ransom – screamed a news bulletin. Another channel enquired of a JNU student as to why they were all activists to which the student responded that he only focused on his studies but now felt that unless he raised his voice, he would have to leave the campus as the fee hike would become unaffordable. The scorn and derision against the term ‘activist’ was clearly evident.

Ever since India embraced economic liberalisation, the process of rolling back measures for public welfare has been in full swing. The first to bear the brunt was education policy. As it is, state spending on education was meagre in comparison to defence and other services but the progression of privatisation accelerated the pace. In the process, only techno-managerial education was valued and both the humanities and social sciences were considered worthless and only the ‘undeserving’ students opt for such courses.

Gradually, the emergence of private universities queered the pitch for the marginalised Dalits, minorities and women to access such resources as they were priced beyond the reach of the common person. The only option for these sections was and remains publicly funded universities. For the caste-ridden Indian society, access to education was the only way to ensure upward social mobility and a chance to lead a meaningful life.

Aristotle measured the richness of human life by the freedom to engage in meaningful activity. He believed that the lack of liberty to act in self-chosen ways impoverished life. Similarly, Amartya Sen argued that being excluded from social relations limits our life opportunities, thus producing not only capability deprivation, but also diverse capability failures.

Also read: JNU’s Four Subversions: A Primer For the Anxious Right-Wing Citizen

One important aspect of such exclusion is that it seems to unite the perpetrators at the same time that it isolates the victims. While the “excluders” produce exclusion by collectively expropriating public spaces and refusing to share social opportunities, the excluded experience exclusion as individuals and personal failures – as the inability to participate freely and fully in the social life of the community. For many first-generation Dalit Bahujan students, university campuses thus present a window of opportunity to demolish the monocultures of the mind, as such spaces provide them with voice, agency and self-awareness to fight for justice.

The mutating figure of a student

For ages, the ‘ideal’ student was imagined as male, sober, obedient, sitting docilely at the guru’s feet. The contemporary model student is a high-tech guy lugging a laptop, (a few females have joined the fraternity) well dressed in modern attire, exemplifying a futuristic country. He inhabits the perfect universe akin to Bollywood’s version of an idyllic Indian family under the benevolent paterfamilias. There were people who questioned such skewed utopias, a few ‘jholawalas’ who were coerced into silence by a state keen on pursuing a neo-liberal development agenda.

However, a silent revolution was simmering underneath the calm of the surface. The first generation of the Dalit Bahujans who gatecrashed into the gurukuls, gradually, with the benefit of affirmative action, began to critically engage with the structures of oppression.

After the Mandal Commission was implemented, the profile of public educational institutions reflected the changing social dynamics. Classrooms echoed with more diversity and their engagements with pedagogical praxis have threatened savarna privileges. Campuses have become more restive and the state has to frequently resort to force to maintain the status quo.

Also read: Why the University and Its Questions Worry the State

The well-knit and smoothly functioning archetype of the ‘parivar’ has been rudely jolted. Rohith Vemula penning a note about his astronomical dreams and philosophising about equality, girl students in BHU protesting against arbitrary hostel rules, Delhi University girls demonstrating to literally break the pinjra or cage, JNU, TISS, FTII in ferment – all these are reflections of Kaliyuga. The ‘asuras’ who organise beef festivals on various campuses, the much-maligned JNU ‘tukde-tukde’ gang celebrating Mahisasur Jayanti – all need to be taught a lesson.

JNU students clash with police during a protest march towards Parliament in New Delhi, November 11, 2019. Photo: PTI/Ravi Choudhary

Purifying the campuses

In the Brahmanical ethos, space polluted by the mlecchas needs to be ceremoniously purified. This needs to be accomplished with minimum violence and with maximum effect. Any gesture of protest is viewed within the prism of nationalism which justifies brutal suppression. When student groups in HCU organised a protest against the verdict in Yakub Memon’s case, it was dubbed as anti-national and whatever happened to Rohith Vemula and his friends was well deserved.

Similarly, even though the investigation has not unearthed anything anti-national against Kanhaiya and Khalid, they have been eternally vilified in the court of public opinion. This strategy has polarised the general public and gradually persuaded them into acquiescing to the actions of the state. The crackdown on students by the police and paramilitary, the imposition of section 144 around JNU is acceptable and legitimate in the public eye.

The vice chancellor of Vishwabharti demanded paramilitary security for the university. Delhi Police treated the lawyers’ protest with kid gloves and turned the full face of its coercive power against students. The protests against the fee hike are seen as ludicrous and a pliant media portrays the students as freeloaders, who are wasting public funds for ‘anti-national’ activities. Such students do not wish to create a ‘world-class university’ and instead spend time in ‘activism’.

Ironically, an internal campus matter regarding fee hikes was ‘allowed’ to snowball into a controversy undermining ‘the nation’ and a rattled state shuts down metro stations in the name of security. It is ironic that the state and its minions in the administration of JNU are unaware of the social and economic profiles of the students.

The handpicked vice chancellors of JNU, HCU, FTII etc are willfully promoting the agenda of their political masters. The university is a microcosm of the larger society and measures like deprivation points have enabled students from poorer backgrounds regardless of caste, class and gender to access education in the nation’s capital and enrich the campus.

Watch | JNU Fee Hike Row: Why Shouldn’t Education Be Subsidised For All?

For many of us, it was the first brush with the ideologies of feminism, anti-caste radical politics, debates and the gradual acceptance of myriad voices. Such intermingling helped sensitise generations of students to wider questions of inequality, justice, discrimination which are now an anathema for the ruling elite.

The deprivation points were the first to go, then the slandering of students who are politically active and now the fee hike. All this to create a utopian meritocracy. Such measures will effectively finish off reservations.

The template is well laid out to gain legitimacy and widespread public acceptance. Sundry godmen join the debate. Sri Sri Ravi Shankar pointed out that government schools are breeding grounds for Naxals. Baba Ramdev in an interview with Republic TV condemned intellectual terrorism and singled out followers of Periyar and Ambedkar as working against the nation’s interests.

Such public discourses disseminated by the ‘godi media’ has succeeded in demonising students, ideologies and institutions. This fits well into the marketising of the New Education Policy with its promise of Skill India and Make in India. Gradually, the idea of social justice will disappear with the erosion of public universities.

Instead, institutions like Jio University which have attained the status of eminence despite only existing on paper will manufacture docile ‘deshbhakts’ who will uphold the agenda of cultural nationalism. None of this is a secret. That is why the Ambedkarite slogan of ‘educate, organise and agitate’ is resonating across campuses as students fight back.

N. Sukumar teaches Political Science in Delhi University.

JNU’s Four Subversions: A Primer For the Anxious Right-Wing Citizen

JNU’s liberal thought, social commitment, environment of equality and sustained excellence discomfits its critics. Here’s why.

Dear right-winger, neo-liberal, anxiety-ridden denizen of India, this is for you.

This is basically a primer on the four major subversions that JNU has wrought on this Bharat Mata of yours.

It is also meant to answer two of your perennial queries: why is JNU forever in the news, and why is there trouble in JNU all the time?

Your enlightened comparison to the peace and quiet of the IITs and the IIMs is well taken. After all, maintaining the status quo is, in your view, a profoundly nationalist act.

These are also conundrums to which there are no easy or convincing answers. Also, given that your ideology is somewhat inchoate but incandescent with a burning hatred, I bet you are pretty sure that JNU’s ideology is ‘leftist’, or ‘commie’ or, as the Union home minister revealed to the CRPF, that of an ‘urban Naxal’s’.

At your most charitable, you are willing to climb down to ‘liberal,’ but as only a pejorative: a person who wears Fab India kurtas and thinks like the ‘Khan Market caucus’.

You pillory this university in your wine parties, kitty parties, card parties and political parties. But at the end of the day, a fact remains: JNU does tend to get under your skin and makes you violently itchy, just like the poison ivy which you may have accidentally brushed against.

Also read: The World’s Largest Democracy: Beyond Question

The irritating itch that JNU gives you is that fear of subversion it creates in your petty, secure lives. JNU is subversive of all the little non-liberal, right-wing, conservative and reactionary codes which constitute your mental DNA. You would like to wish it away, but your wishes are not your horses, not at least where JNU is concerned.

The first subversion is liberal thought.

Bloody hell, imagine a university where students are encouraged to think for themselves! The load of lectures is kept at a level where they can go to the library and read more. Less lecture loads don’t mean less work. The counterbalance are the tutorials which an average M.A. student in the School of Social Sciences has to write once every 10 to 12 days.

Posters at a JNU canteen. Photo: Jai Pandya/Flickr (CC BY-SA 2.0)

These are presented to their peer group in the presence of the teacher for that course. Arguments must be defended, ideas have to become argumentative before a submission can move to its next stage, grading. A teacher just can’t grade and be done with it.

She must justify the grade she has given to each student in the presence of those who have credited her course. So, there you have it, there is a permanently interactive subversion of minds which goes on in JNU.

These students take their subversive minds into the public arena and grind any hostile interlocutor down to the ground. You should see online videos of some of them ripping apart ‘journalists’ from some chronically anti-JNU media channels.

Such maturity needs to be carefully nurtured. Why do you think JNU students want better library facilities and longer library hours? And why do you think this administration wants to cut down on both?

The second subversion is that of social commitment.

In India’s damagingly skewed social environment, JNU has dared to dream. It has dreamt of an equal opportunity admissions policy to the greatest extent possible. It has dreamt to empower the downtrodden, the marginalised and the oppressed by enabling them to enter its portals and study with peers who have come from privileged backgrounds, but without any barriers of access to space, food, library and social interaction.

A poster at a JNU canteen. Photo: Jai Pandya/Flickr (CC BY-SA 2.0)

JNU’s dream is for you a very dangerous nightmare, a nightmare of equality in a society riven with myriad oppressions of caste, community, religion and gender.

Prior to 2017, admissions were made keeping in mind the constitutionally mandated reservations for the marginalised and deprived social groups and to facilitate them more, they were given extra deprivation points keeping other parameters of deprivation, like region, gender and community in mind.

Deprivation points based on gender worked like a charm. JNU became one place where women students tended to outnumber males in classrooms, libraries, seminars and in its many dhabas. Since this was working well – though there were still miles to go – it had to be dismantled by the administrative regime that was installed in 2016.

And just look at what immediate devastation it caused. Admissions of students from families earning Rs 6,000 rupees per month (oh yes, such people still exist, shocking as it may be for your genteel sensibilities) dropped from 25.7% of the total in 2016-17 to 9.8% in 2017-18.

Students from rural backgrounds shrank from 48.4% in 2016-17 to 28.2% in 2017-18.

The third subversion is the sensitive and humane environment that JNU strives to provide to its students and other residents.

JNU’s humanism lies first in its spatial openness, then in its social openness and accessibility. All public spaces have unrestricted access, or used to till, dear right-winger, your conservatism kicked in.

The most iconic representations of this openness are the dhabas, the chai shops and that venerable spot for the star gazers – the Parthasarathi rocks.

Dhabas provide food and beverages to people who wish to supplement the often-drab food in the hostel messes. But these dhabas are also subversive. They provide convivial spaces for ideas to be exchanged and debated, for arguments to be made and for political agendas to be put to the test.

Students chat at JNU’s Ganga Dhaba. Photo: Jai Pandya/Flickr (CC BY-SA 2.0)

Now, this will surely churn your neo-liberal stomach. Students have come to study, why must they do politics, you will ask indignantly.

JNU’s subversive answer to your anxiety would be ‘study and struggle’. Shocking, no?

More shocking to your morality are the emotional offshoots of this openness: people finding love, sex and general companionship in keeping with their sexual orientations. Parthasarathi rocks is an enabling place for love as well as star gazing or watching the planes flying past.

Whatever your orientation, JNU enables it. No, you say, this can’t be allowed. It offends your high morals, I know.

Did you know, a person belonging to the ruling political dispensation you so wholeheartedly cheer spent many a night prowling around JNU counting used condoms and empty beer bottles, most of them in his mind? But there is moral to his efforts: even used condoms in JNU are deemed subversive.

The fourth subversion, my dear right-winger, that JNU has brought about, is the idea of a public university as a source of excellence.

You applaud privatisation and in all probability have a child or two studying in a private institution because it caters to ‘merit,’ whereas in your exalted view of the world, public universities are sullied with reservations.

You are also deeply disturbed that your hard-earned tax rupees are being wasted on people who are spending years on doing what appears to you as some incomprehensible research, plus demanding that they need more subsidies and facilities.

Please know that a public university is a constitutionally mandated responsibility of the state and citizens must enjoy that right. If your tax rupees are working in that direction, you should grin and bear it no matter how painful it may be for you.

One of the buildings at JNU. Photo: Jai Pandya/Flickr (CC BY-SA 2.0)

I would like to draw your Ray Ban-ned attention to the fact that about 40% of JNU students come from families whose monthly income is less than Rs 12,000 and these students often send funds from their already meagre merit-cum-means scholarships and non-NET fellowships to supplement their family incomes.

Also, do you know, JNU students actually pay more to live in their hostels than students of other central universities? And with the recent hikes in charges, they will be paying much more. If anyone needs subsidies, they do.

By the way, have you given up your LPG subsidy? Do you think of the subsidy you enjoy when you fill your car’s fuel tank with diesel or feel happy at your low electricity bills in Delhi these days?

So, what does this all add up to? People like you who desire quick-fix solutions and immediate gratifications see education as a utilitarian object. In JNU, we see it as a public good, and public good is something which works for the good of the public.

JNU also believes that unless education enhances the fund of knowledge (no, not information which you source from Google probably every minute of your day) it serves no purpose, and that’s why research is encouraged in this university. Research is a slow process, like good wine it takes time to mature (ah! you got that, the wine bit, yet not the research bit).

Consider this: if one finishes an MA at the age of 21 years, and gets into an M.Phil/PhD course at 22, one will exit at 29 or 30 with one’s years spent in researching on issues like caste, tribe, environment, gender and much more.

Also watch | JNU Fee Hike Row: Why Shouldn’t Education Be Subsidised For All?

Do you realise a researcher in JNU is investing the most happening years of her life in creating a fund of socially relevant knowledge, and for what? Rs 5,000 rupees a month, upgraded to Rs 8,000 at the end of three years.

Finally, do pause for a moment to compare a similar researcher, say, in the USA. While the average age of a person acquiring a PhD in the social sciences in a USA university is 33 years, Google tells me that ‘the cost of PhDs in the USA can vary between $28,000 to $40,000 per year, and students find that they can get funding for much, or all, of their studies’.

Your ideal is the IIT and the IIM of course. Did you know that these institutions enrol 3% of total students in this country but use 50% of government funding on higher education?

What do many of their students do after enjoying this massive subsidy? Pack their bags and go to the USA to write programs for software companies or play bulls and bears at the NYSE, of course.

Now compare this with Rs 5,000 that a researcher in JNU gets and feel some shame. But then you have none, for you are a neo-liberal, JNU-bashing, right-wing majoritarian.

I am waiting for the day when one IIT-ian or an IIM-ian gets a Nobel prize in the sciences or in economics. Your very subversive, ‘anti-national’ JNU can boast of one recipient already.

Rajat Datta is professor at the Centre for Historical Studies, JNU.

Why the University and Its Questions Worry the State

Citizenship, defined by the state, is conforming and passive.

Rising tuition fees, erosion of subsidies, over-regulation, systematic vigilante violence against curricula, moral policing – often endorsed by those in power and their fringe elements – and now, in an extraordinary event unsurpassed in our cultural memory, paramilitary forces on campuses, signal an overt, or not-so-overt, war against universities and higher education institutions (HEI).

Add to this already incendiary mix, the race for global stature and internationalisation – in itself, not at all bad for any HEI – and it is no small wonder that there is hardly any breathing space to learn.

But why is there this fear around the university? What is it about universities and its multi-hued ethos that worries the state? Why, alongside protecting the nation’s borders from invasion, does a state feel compelled to police universities, regulate its inhabitants, straitjacket them, pressurise them into conformism, or produce a particular kind of labour for nations with a high index of “ease of doing business”?

Those are questions, and the Question is the subject here.

A state’s war on universities is, as noted in these columns before, a war on the language within a university (short-hand for discourses, forms of critical thinking) and a war on freedom. A curriculum and pedagogy, especially in liberal arts, that focuses on ideas of freedom, dissent, equality and social justice and which thereby interrogates inherited cultural practices promotes entirely different ideas of teleology, human society and values.

When, for instance, one reads Fanon undermining the very idea of humanism’s “universality” (“universal” man is white, male) and linkage to imperialism or Ambedkar noting the discrepancy in the freedom movement’s emphasis on political reform without social reform, it gives us a history of questioning. When Stephen Greenblatt shows how Shakespeare’s texts gesture at the tyranny of a monarch, he effectively gets us to understand that Shakespeare is asking: how does tyranny operate? And why do we tolerate it?

Also read: JNU Students: You Are Our Only Hope

When the liberal arts and social sciences education and pedagogy define society in terms of power struggles that are “naturalised” as god-given or “always this way”, they essentially question how several people have been excluded from the category of the human: how was “humanity” constructed to exclude, at various points in its history, women, Catholics, gypsies, Muslims, brown-/black-yellow skinned races, Jews, mentally disadvantaged?

What were the systems of thought and supporting social practices, such as colonialism or patriarchy, that enabled social orders to exclude some? To unpack a literary or cultural text’s subtextual, unvoiced questions in this fashion is the task of the university.

The attention to structures of power in pedagogy and research within a university (and within that, the humanities) means the university is the place of the Question:

[The university] demands and ought to be granted in principle, besides what is called academic freedom, an unconditional freedom to question and to assert, or even, going still further, the right to say publicly all that is required by research, knowledge, and thought concerning the truth.

It is a place where and in which it is possible that

everything that concerns the question and the history of truth, in its relation to the question of man, of what is proper to man, of human rights, of crimes against humanity, and so forth… to pose all the deconstructive questions that are called for on the subject of man, of sovereignty, of the right to say everything, therefore of literature and democracy, of the worldwideization under way, of its techno-economic and confessional aspects, and so forth…

So writes a philosopher in The University Without Condition. But why is this function, of questioning, foundational to a university?

The Question, in form and content, tenor and resonance, in the university is what drives its profession. To “profess”, notes this same philosopher,

Of Latin origin … to “profess” means, in French as in English, to declare openly, to declare publicly … To profess is to make a pledge [gage] while committing one’s responsibility.

This is the key argument: the Question in and from the university is a profession, a public act of professing. It addresses the public (demos) that makes up a democracy. All questions, in short, from and of the university, whether on dress codes or moral policing, are questions for and to the public of a nation.

Also read: The War on Language in Universities is a War on Freedom

A university may not have all the answers, but that does not stop it from asking questions. This is what worries the state: the incessant questioning, the state of constant vigilance by the future citizens. Students who ask these questions of the state and the status quo are not the citizens the state wants.

Citizenship, defined by the state as conforming and passive – “disciplined”, to use an old word – is, therefore, unquestioning. To ask questions is to diversify thought, to abandon one line of thinking for another, sometimes just for the heck of it, to see where it leads.

JNU students clash with police during a protest march towards Parliament in New Delhi, November 11, 2019. Photo: PTI/Ravi Choudhary

But, of course, even as we plead for the sovereignty of the university when freedoms are at stake does not mean the university itself is beyond question: “The university should thus also be the place in which nothing is beyond the question … not even the traditional idea of critique” or even the idea of a university, says this much-quoted philosopher.

And here we see the tables being turned in the form of the state asking questions of the university: What is being done in the university? What do the liberal arts actually do?

A history of this (questioning backlash) on the role of the university may be found in the US. We saw this in the work of Allan Bloom’s attack on counter-culture in The Closing of the American Mind and the anti-intellectualism – mostly translated as anti-liberal arts! – in the wake of Bloom.

There is, as a commentator noted in 2017 about American neo-conservative criticism of American campus political culture, a “hostile” way of talking about universities. Just as moral relativism and a liberal questioning outlook on life-issues as diverse as sexuality or religious identity worried Bloom, it does every present-day government that believes in monolithic cultures and unitary origin myths.

This pluralism, that drives discovery (of the self, of identity, of viewpoints) is what worries the state. Indeed, Heather Mac Donald’s controversial book, The Diversity Delusion: How Race and Gender Pandering Corrupt the University and Undermine Our Culture (2018) made the preposterous argument against diversity within the American system. It would be good to revisit, in the light of curbs on hostel-visits and imposition of curfew-hours, Mac Donald’s diatribe:

Students in the 1960s demanded that college administrators stop setting rules for fraternization. “We’re adults,” the students shouted. “We can manage our own lives. If we want to have members of the opposite sex in our rooms at any hour of the day or night, that’s our right.” The colleges meekly complied and opened a Pandora’s box of boorish behavior that gets cruder each year. Do the boys, riding the testosterone wave, act thuggishly toward the girls? Yes! Do the girls try to match their insensitivity? Indisputably.

One does not dispute nor condone the pernicious impact of drugs and alcohol or related violence, on the minds and behaviour of student populations. Yet Mac Donald’s assumption that the resultant ‘less-than-romantic… encounters’ are ‘transformed into rape’ is surely hyperbolic. Is this quasi-securitising mode of asking questions of the university a prelude to policing and strangling diversity? The answer, as responses to Mac Donald indicate, is “yes”.

But there are also other questions which universities must ask of themselves. We may look at just three sets for now.

Also read: JNU: The Story of the Fall of a Great University

With the announcement of “Eminence” as a goal for the Indian HEIs, the competition among them hots up further. Does this competition mean HEIs will up their game in terms of better pedagogic practices, better courses, programs and testing mechanisms – Avijit Pathak’s prescient commentaries on dated pedagogics are worth revisiting – updated knowledge being disseminated by teachers (a scandalous truism: once hired into secure jobs, a vast majority of Indian faculty do not upgrade their knowledge), and commitment to teaching? That is one set of questions.

Scholars in education studies such as Philip Altbach have pointed out that Indian academics publish a lot, but what they publish has little global visibility because of their poor quality. As Pushkar, citing Altbach and others, put it, ‘much of the “quantity” comes from “forced” research and publishing [also known as Academic Performance Indicators, or API]’. How does a university internally abandon quantity in favour of quality when it comes to evaluating publications?

In this API-driven scenarios, students represent only career-points and therefore are an ‘API-Human Resource’. If I may be pardoned for lapsing into the autobiographical, when at a faculty meeting deliberating ending the M.Phil program, a faculty member with nil publications piped up, “but then, how will I accumulate API?”, thus indicating that the student is seen only in terms of “quick APIs” if they are MPhil students, “slow APIs” if they are PhDs, to use the unpardonable nomenclature I heard recently.

Are students stepping stones to greater career heights for faculty, exercises in constituency-building for leverage within the university system, grist to the identity-politics mill or are they more than that? That is another set of questions.

Rather than the state asking what we do in the university, let us ask this of ourselves, even as we ask similar, disquieting questions of the state. Shall we?

Pramod K. Nayar teaches at the University of Hyderabad.

JNU Students’ March: Several Injured in Police ‘Lathicharge’, At Least 50 Detained

Among those taken into custody is reportedly JNUSU president Aishe Ghosh.

New Delhi: Several students have reportedly been severely injured following lathicharge by police during their march to the parliament in protest against the hostel fee hike. A particular video doing the rounds on social media shows a male student being forcibly led into a police vehicle while profusely bleeding from the head.

Amit Shah’s Delhi police brutally assaulted JNU students for demanding the rollback of increased fee. Is it the way to treat students?#EmergencyinJNU
pic.twitter.com/INfnwW0spV

— Ravi Nair (@t_d_h_nair) November 18, 2019

Reports have said that as many as 50 students have been taken into custody, including JNU students’ union president Aishe Ghosh.

ANI has quoted Mandeep S Randhawa, the Delhi Police public relations officer as having promised an “inquiry” into the allegations of lathicharge.

Entry and exit points of three metro stations were closed off in the wake of the protests.

Yellow Line Update

As advised by Delhi Police, trains are not halting at Udyog Bhawan and Patel Chowk. Exit/Entry Gates for Udyog Bhawan, Patel Chowk and Central Secretariat have been closed temporarily.

— Delhi Metro Rail Corporation (@OfficialDMRC) November 18, 2019

Meanwhile, several university student bodies and opposition political parties have lent voices of support to the protesting JNU students.

Heavy police presence was deployed outside the university campus on Monday. The police also barricaded all main roads around the campus and said that Section 144 had been imposed.

Reporters at the seen said students were breaking past the barricades, and the police responded with water cannons.

pic.twitter.com/vmLYSBUfVQ

— Anya Shankar (@AnyaShankar) November 18, 2019

The agitation comes on the first day of the parliament’s winter session, which will end on December 13.

Students have been protesting against the increase in hostel fee for the past three weeks, even as the university’s administration on Wednesday announced a partial rollback of the hike. The union had termed the decision an “eyewash”.

43% of students of JNU have an annual parental income of less than ₹ 1,44,000 and the proposed fee hike will make the annual hostel fee ₹ 66,100 for Single Seater and ₹ 62, 500 for Double Seater#EmergencyinJNU @DrRPNishank @mamidala90 @JNUSUofficial

— JNUSU (@JNUSUofficial) November 18, 2019

Ten companies have been deployed outside JNU, police said. One company comprises 70 to 80 personnel.

The JNU Teachers’ Association (JNUTA) expressed concerns over the deployment of police outside the varsity.

“The massive police deployment and barricading the gates of the JNU campus, on the face of it appears to be only for the purpose of preventing the students from taking out their planned march to the Parliament,” it said.

“Such measures or use of force to thwart the exercise of constitutionally guaranteed democratic rights and to impede the students from peacefully taking their voice beyond the campus would be extremely unfortunate and the JNUTA hopes that no such situation will eventually arise,” the association said.

Police officials said adequate security arrangements have also been made along the route of the march. Police personnel have been deployed at all entry points leading to the Parliament, a senior police official said.

(With PTI inputs)