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Honourable Shri Arjun Singhji,
Vice-Chancellor Shri Ved Prakashji,
Members of the Faculty,
Staff and the Student Community,
Ladies and Gentlemen,
It is a matter of
great privilege for me that I have been asked to deliver the First
Foundation day lecture of the National University of Educational
Planning and Administration, an institution of great eminence with
which I have had the good fortune to be associated in a number of
different capacities, almost since its very inception. As the topic
of my today’s lecture suggests, I shall be concerned with the
context of globalization. But before I come to globalization, let me
first distinguish between two very different perspectives on higher
education. These perspectives exist quite independently of
globalization, but the context of globalization accentuates the
divergence between the implications that follow from these
perspectives, and hence underscores the need to distinguish between
them. The first perspective sees higher education as a transaction
between teachers and students, which occurs at specific locations
called colleges and universities, and in the course of which
teachers impart and students receive a certain training, which
enables them to improve their skills and get better placements in
the job market. Two conclusions follow from this conception which is
very widely held. First, the success of a university can be measured
by the success of the trainees coming out of it in getting good
placements in the job market.
Second, since
placements in the job market can be hierarchically ordered as being
better or worse, an ordering that transcends national boundaries,
the universities too can be hierarchically ordered across the world
as being better or worse. Therefore, when people lament that so few
Indian universities figure among the top 200 in the world,
underlying this lament is this first conception of higher education,
the conception that believes in the possibility of ordering
universities as one orders natural numbers. When students demand and
institutions open placement cells to facilitate campus recruitment,
underlying it again is this first conception of higher education:
the institution, by opening such cells, is establishing its bona
fides. As against this, there is an alternative conception of
higher education. This sees higher education as an activity in which
students and teachers are jointly engaged on behalf of the people
of a society. It is not a bilateral transaction between teachers
and students; in fact it is not a transaction at all. Both teachers
and students are jointly working on behalf of the people. The
purpose of higher education according to this conception is, to
borrow a term from Antonio Gramsci, to produce “organic
intellectuals” of the people. But what, it may be asked, has the
activity of teachers and students got to do with the people? The
answer lies in the fact that higher education is essential not just
for the development of a country, but for the very survival of the
freedom of its people. The realm of higher education is the cradle
of ideas; the shrinking or extinction of this realm necessarily
makes a society parasitic on others for its ideas, and such a
parasitic society cannot remain free. In fact our freedom
struggle began in earnest when we broke out of our parasitic status
in the realm of modern ideas, through the writings of pioneering
thinkers like Dadabhai Naoroji and Romesh Chandra Dutt who laid the
intellectual groundwork for the political mobilization of the
masses. They dared to think independently of the prevailing
theoretical constructs of their time in the institutions of higher
learning in the metropolitan countries and in their local
off-shoots. Indeed the prevailing theoretical constructs in
educational institutions of their time were meant to show
colonialism as a benefactor of the Indian people, and to produce
intellectuals who would be willing to serve, directly or indirectly,
the interests of the colonial regime.
Macaulay’s policy
in other words had been designed to produce “organic intellectuals”
for the colonial regime. When Gandhiji gave a call to students to
come out of educational institutions, a call that even Rabindranath
Tagore was critical of, his object was precisely to break the
“colonization of the mind” that institutions of higher learning of
the time were designed to produce and did produce. Gandhiji followed
up his call by starting some preliminary institutions where an
alternative education could be provided, and independent
non-parasitic thinking promoted. This tradition of independent
thinking that was necessary for the launch of the freedom struggle,
is also necessary for defending the gains of that struggle. And
since we are now in a position to have our own institutions where
the conditions for independent thinking can prevail as a matter of
course, we must develop and nurture such institutions. This second
perspective on higher education may appear somewhat bemusing at
first sight: are we not supposed to impart skills through higher
education? Are we not supposed to make our higher education system
cater to the changing needs of the time, as reflected above all
through the demand and supply situation in the market? Since
high-sounding words like the “freedom of the people” and “organic
intellectuals” fall essentially within the domain of the social
sciences and the humanities, are we supposed to give a primacy to
these disciplines over what is accorded to science, technology
and management studies? And going beyond such “practical” questions,
are there no scientific truths that lie at the core of any
discipline, so that the “profession” that professes this discipline
has an integrity transcending the nationality of its practitioners?
The second perspective is totally different from these suppositions
about it. Indeed the Gramscian notion of “organic intellectuals”
does not refer exclusively to literary or “highbrow” activities. It
encompasses all: writers, technicians, academics, scientists,
professionals, officials of the State, engineers and doctors. The
distinction between the two perspectives outlined above lies not in
the fact that one emphasizes one set of disciplines and the other
emphasizes another; it lies in the fact that one looks upon the
higher education system exclusively as a means of imparting
skills, while the other sees all activities of skill-imparting as
being informed by a concern for, and an awareness of, the social
ambience within which the skill-imparting is taking place. This does
not mean a lacing of skillimparting with occasional homilies on
society and the people; nor does it mean thrusting down the throats
of the students some particular theoretical or ideological outlook
on society. It means a break from exclusive preoccupation with
marketability; it means a rounded education going beyond the
narrowness of technical disciplines; it means inculcating in
students a sense of the society to which they belong; and it means
focusing within particular disciplines on research themes that have
relevance for society instead of being merely copied from abroad.
This last point may
be disputed in the case of the natural sciences in particular,
whose truths, not being nation-specific or society-specific, have a
universality that makes for a unified profession in the case of
these disciplines. The same incidentally may be said of social
sciences too whose truths are not simply nation- or
society-specific. The point here refers however not to the truths
but to the problems for research. While some problems, both in
social and natural sciences, like why an apple falls to the ground
or why an economy faces recessions, may be common to both the first
and the third worlds, problems like how to combat a resurgent
malaria concern third world societies more than they concern first
world societies. These latter problems should find greater
reflection in research in our country than in the advanced
countries, from which it follows that science curricula too can not
be identical across countries, a view strongly held by no less a
person than J.D. Bernal.
Since this second
conception, which underlies our birth as a modern nation, is not
much discussed, let me spend a bit more time on it. Implicit in it
is a whole series of rejections. First, there is a rejection of the
view that different institutions of higher learning belonging to
different societies can be ordered as being “better” or “worse”
along one particular axis. If these institutions are to be “organic”
to their specific societies, then, since the interests of these
societies are quite obviously not congruent, each set of
institutions must be different from the others in order to fulfil
its legitimate role. Comments, which one commonly hears, such as
“Jadavpur University or Jawaharlal Nehru University should imitate
Harvard”, “our institutions should enrich themselves by borrowing
ideas and faculty from advanced country institutions”, "we have to
judge ourselves by how well we are recognized by top institutions in
the world", have no place within this second perspective. Such
comments are based on a perception of higher education as a
homogeneous commodity of which some institutions are better
producers than others, and not as a means of producing “organic
intellectuals” for a particular society. I referred above to
Dadabhai Naoroji and R C. Dutt whose contribution to the struggle
for the freedom of our society was enormous. But scarcely any one in
Harvard or Cambridge doing economics would have heard of them
(though those doing “India Studies” might have). Modelling our
institutions after Harvard or Cambridge, It is a tragic symptom of
our times that the Prime Minister of the country, despite himself
being an academic who should know better, has announced that
henceforth our civil servants will get promotion only on the basis
of satisfactorily completing a training programme at Harvard. This
is a move reminiscent of the colonial times and completely at
variance with the ethos a free India, which would entail copying
their curricula and syllabi, would therefore necessarily mean
sacrificing, to our great cost, the conceptual framework, the
perspective and the insights of a thinker like Naoroji.
Secondly, this
second perspective rejects the view that the professionalization of
subjects like “economics”, and “political science” is a desirable
process. The “profession” in these disciplines as well as in others,
is dominated by the advanced countries; therefore recognition in the
“profession” would necessarily mean sacrificing any independent
thinking and parroting borrowed concepts. This would not matter if
these borrowed concepts were genuinely “scientific” and not imbued
with the ideological objective of defending the hegemony of the
advanced countries. In the social sciences at least, such is not the
case. Not that everyone engaged in social science research in the
universities in the advanced countries is a conscious ideological
defender of imperialist hegemony, but everyone is entrapped by the
need to belong to and to be recognized by the “profession” and
therefore undertakes research within strictly circumscribed limits
which preclude any critical awareness of the role of the handed-down
conceptual apparatus in the ideological defence of imperialist
hegemony. Stepping out of these limits invites reactions of unease,
astonishment, silence, derision and even hostility, resulting in a
loss of academic and financial status2. Hence even the best
intentioned dare not step beyond the limits. In societies like ours
where the domination of the Western theoretical orthodoxy in social
sciences is far from complete, thanks precisely to our rather recent
birth as a nation after a prolonged anti-imperialist struggle,
any emphasis on “professionalization” would mean voluntarily
surrendering ourselves to this domination, closing the space which
has been made available to us for independent thought.
Thirdly, this
conception entails a rejection of the attitude which places a
special value on “recognition” in the advanced countries, and hence
on awards and distinctions bestowed from there. In the social
sciences at any rate, all such awards and distinctions are
conditional on conformity, on keeping within the “limits” and
abjuring the use of concepts that critique imperialist hegemony.
Unfortunately this attitude of prioritizing “recognition” in the
West is all too pervasive in our country. Almost all of us, when we
sit on Selection Committees, prefer a candidate who has published in
a western journal over one who has published within the country,
even without looking the manner in which, in the discipline of
economics, ideas emanating from within the metropolis itself, but
different from or hostile to the dominant conservative orthodoxy of
the metropolis, are suppressed by the “profession”, is discussed in
a recent article under the title “Hip Heterodoxy” by Christopher
Hayes in The Nation. The article can be accessed at
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20070611/hayes closely at the
quality of the two publications. By doing so however we contribute
to a stultification of the tradition of independent thinking.
Fourthly, this
perspective denies any role other than a purely secondary one, to
private institutions in the sphere of education. Privatization of
education turns it into a commodity where the buyer’s preference
must necessarily enter to determine the nature of the commodity
produced. There is a basic difference between education that
satisfies the preference of the buyer and education that is
undertaken in the interests of the people. And if education is to be
undertaken in the interests of the people, to defend their
interests, then it must be publicly financed. If it ceases to
be publicly financed, then the education that increasingly gets to
be produced is one that is intrinsically incapable of serving the
interests of the people. To say this is not to ask for a ban on
private institutions of higher education, but to emphasize the need
for a predominantly public educational system, into which the
private institutions must fit, in clearly specified ways. In
contrast to this perspective, the first perspective which sees
education as a transaction between teachers and students to augment
the latter’s employment prospects has an inherent tendency towards
privatization. If placement on the job market is the object of
higher education, then a publicly funded education system
necessarily entails an indefensible private appropriation of public
means, compared to which charging fees appears preferable; but if
significant fees are charged, even on the criterion of ability to
pay, then it becomes difficult to insulate the course contents and
curriculum from the demands of the fee-paying students. And in any
case, with such an objective for higher education, there is no
argument left against the privatization of higher education.
The fact that in
India public funding was supposed to sustain the core of the higher
education system after independence is clear evidence that it is the
second and not the first perspective that underlay our higher
education policy, though not always explicitly. The relative
magnitude of public funding of higher education did arouse the
criticism, even by many progressive and sensitive thinkers, that
resources which should have been devoted to elementary and school
education were being used instead to sustain higher education which
was a “white elephant”, that instead of a pyramidal structure with a
broad base of elementary education underlying a small apex of higher
education, we had opted for a top-heavy structure. This argument
however is fundamentally flawed. There can of course be no two views
on the urgent need for eradicating illiteracy and enlarging the
spread of elementary education. In fact it is a national shame that
even after six decades of Independence nearly one-third of the
population in the country remains illiterate, and around two fifths
of children of school-going age remain outside the ambit of formal
schooling at any given time. But the mistake consists in believing
that an absolute curtailment (or even a curtailment relative to GDP)
of expenditure on higher education is necessary for overcoming these
failures. The overall shortage of resources that is usually cited
in this context as a constraint is a mere alibi: at no stage during
the entire post-Independence period has India spent an adequate
amount on education, by any reasonable definition of the term
“adequate”. In fact the proportion of GDP that the
white-supremacist South African State spent on the education of the
black majority even during the apartheid period, notwithstanding the
massive drain on its exchequer that the maintenance of the highly
oppressive police, military, and intelligence apparatus entailed at
the time, was higher than what the Indian State has ever done on
education as a whole throughout its entire post- Independence
history. The matter in short is one of priorities. Any
government that has the political will to eradicate illiteracy and
provide universal primary education would always find the resources
for doing so without curtailing higher education. And any government
that complains of lack of resources and considers it necessary to
starve higher education in order to provide for the spread of
literacy and primary education, simply lacks ipso facto the
political will for effecting universal literacy and primary
education. This argument about higher education being a “white
elephant” may appear passé, now that there is an appreciation
of the importance of higher education in the new “knowledge
economy”. Hasn’t the National Knowledge Commission itself suggested
that there should be 1500 universities by 2015, and that we should
set up 50 National Universities providing “education of the highest
standard”, of which at least 10 should come up within 3 years? But
any joy that the NKC’s emphasis on higher education may bring,
disappears the moment one realizes that the NKC sees higher
education exclusively within the first perspective. Its
suggestion that the Vice-Chancellors of the Universities should
function like Chief Executive Officers, its implicit distrust of
campus politics, its proposal that University Courts should be
dispensed with and that in lieu of Academic Council meetings we
should have Standing Committees taking decisions, all in the name of
expeditiousness of decision-making, would effectively convert
Universities into highly authoritarian institutions, run rather like
factories sans trade union rights. And these authoritarian
institutions will not even necessarily be in the Government sector.
The bulk of them will be run by the private sector or as
publicprivate partnerships, to expedite whose birth the UGC is to be
dispensed with and a Regulatory Authority put in place. The NKC’s
proposals in short clearly envisage a substantial privatization of
higher education in the country. There are three basic problems with
this NKC vision. The first, as we have seen, is it negates the role
of higher education as defender of the freedom of the people,
through the production of “organic intellectuals” of the people. The
1500 universities visualized by the NKC, not all of them new of
course, will successfully turn out cheap skilled labour for
employment by Indian and foreign corporate groups, but not much
expertise for critically comprehending the way the global system
functions and impinges on the people. It would in short produce
“organic intellectuals” of globalized capital but not “organic
intellectuals” of the people. Only someone who believes that the
interests of globalized capital and those of the people are
altogether identical can rejoice over this prospect.
The second problem
with the NKC vision is that it would create sharp dualities within
the education system. Consider its attitude to the whole issue of
drawing fresh talent into the academic profession. There can be
little doubt that a major reason for the academic profession being
drained of fresh talent is the abysmal incomes of the academics
compared to other professions, which in turn is an outcome of the
fact that income relativities have become totally irrational under
the neoliberal regime.
India now has one of the most unequal salary structures in the world. The
salaries of executives in the private sector are now so
astronomical, and so utterly lacking in justification for being so
astronomical, that hardly any person of talent feels drawn any more
to the sphere of higher education, which pays a pittance in
comparison. The Prime Minister lamented the other day that the
salaries of corporate executives in
India had crossed
all limits, but the fact that they have done so is a direct result
of the neo-liberal reforms which have removed the ceiling on
corporate salaries that had existed until then. Neo-liberal India
has not only thrown incomes policy to the winds, but also judges
individuals according to their relative incomes. This has now become
the biggest problem before the higher education sector, which is
threatened with atrophy through being starved of talent. Some
totally dedicated and committed people may still come to the
academic profession, but they constitute the exception rather than
the rule.
The NKC does not
address the issue of income relativities at all. Instead what it
suggests is “incentives and rewards for performance” which basically
means a differential salary structure within and across
universities. This still would not draw fresh talent into the
profession, since at the start of an academic career very few new
entrants can show “performance” (unless the idea is to get fresh
Ph.D.s from Harvard, Oxford and Cambridge at astronomical salaries,
far exceeding those paid to home-grown Professors, on the grounds
that Ph.D.s from those universities, unlike from our local ones,
ipso facto constitute “performance”). On the other hand it would
introduce a new “caste-system” on the campuses and destroy whatever
democratic atmosphere remains within them. Since such a democratic
atmosphere is a pre-requisite for free academic exchange, any
destruction of it will be counterproductive, and hence act as a
further deterrent to the entry of fresh talent.
Thirdly, and most
importantly, such “dualism” (if I may use it as a short-hand
expression) will be singularly unsuccessful in achieving the
“excellence” that the NKC wants. There will be a whole lot of
universities, faculty members and students who will be considered
second rate and lacking in “performance”. They will be low in
morale, lacking in self-confidence, full of cynicism, and drained of
whatever enthusiasm they originally had, and whatever creativity
they were originally capable of. On the other hand there will be a
limited number of universities, faculty members and students,
supposedly the “excellent” ones, who, precisely because they would
be considered “excellent” only as clones of Harvard or Oxford or
Cambridge, would forever be hankering to get to those hallowed
precincts of supreme “excellence”. They too would be frustrated and
low in morale, but for an altogether different reason, namely their
unfulfilled desire to move from the imitation to the original, i.e.
from their current locations to the places whose clones they are
supposed to be. This would be the surest recipe for the destruction
of quality in our higher education system. Quality does not come
from aping others. Some of our finest institutions, which indeed
have acquired global attention, have done so because of their
systematic refusal to ape others, their systematic academic
“arrogance” vis-a-vis similar metropolitan institutions, and their
strong connections with the Indian reality. This is as true of
Professor Mahalanobis’ Indian Statistical Institute whose major,
original, and pioneering work related to the study of the impact of
the Bengal famine of 1943 on the people of that state, as of the
more recently created
Jawaharlal Nehru
University which has kept its feet firmly on the Indian social
reality. And yet aping is what all the current signals emanating
from the government are pointing to. I may of course be confronted
with the counterexamples of IITs and IIMs, which, despite apparently
having very little connection with the Indian reality, have
nonetheless acquired “world class” status. While I do not wish to
talk about them per se I certainly feel that an entire higher
education system modeled on them will be undesirable, apart from
the fact that any large-scale cloning of such institutions will
yield sharply diminishing returns even in terms of their current
criteria of “success”.
I have so far
discussed only one of the ways that the objective of producing
“organic intellectuals” of the people can be undermined by the
context of globalization, via the overwhelming need for, and the
apparently tempting prospects of, producing what can almost
exclusively be called the skilled foot soldiers for global
capitalism. There is another perennial threat that exists under
globalization, and that is from the communal-fascist outfits, who
thrive in the soil prepared by the unemployment and deprivation
unleashed by globalization. The sway of communal and obscurantist
forces over the sphere of education has been loosened for the time
being, but there is little room for complacency here. I shall
however be brief in discussing them. These forces, at any rate
segments of them, often claim to be fighting “Western” influence on
our education system. Paradoxically, however, they end up
strengthening the very "Western influence" which they claim to be
fighting. Their attempt at the introduction of courses in
State-funded universities to turn out Purohits and astrologers, on
the explicit argument that there is a market demand for them, is as
much a “commoditization” of education as the demand for capitation
fees and the substitution of basic disciplines by more “marketable”
subjects. Likewise their attempt to change text books to make them
conform to the prejudices of a handful of bigots on the grounds that
nothing offensive to the “religious sentiments” of the “majority
community” should be carried in such books is antithetical to the
spirit of scientific inquiry without which there can be no
“intellectuals”, let alone "organic intellectuals" of the people.
The retreat to prejudice, the promotion of obscurantism, the
substitution of extraneous criteria for scientific investigation in
evaluating the worth of academic propositions: all of these entail a
devaluation of the content of higher education which actually
disarms the country intellectually against the onslaught of
imperialist ideology. If at a political level communalism and
fundamentalism divide the people and contribute to a weakening of
the nation vis-a-vis imperialism, then at an intellectual level too
they make a parallel contribution by obliterating the intellectual
capacity to see through its machinations. The opposition to the
ideology of imperialism, one must remember, was provided by an
inclusive Indian nationalism that was secular, democratic and
self-confessed socialist. Communalism, whether of the Hindu or the
Muslim variety, never had an anti-imperialist thrust. Should it come
as any surprise then that the emergence of communal politics and
ideology also paves the way for the re-assertion of the hegemony of
imperialist ideology?
All that I have
said so far should not be construed to mean that our higher
education system is not in a crisis, that it is not lacking in
quality, or that we should not strive for excellence. What I mean is
that the notion of quality and the means of achieving it should be
our own, that the concept of “excellence” should be defined by us,
and that the means of overcoming the crisis of higher education must
include increased not reduced involvement by the State, social
regulation of the socalled “self-financing sector”, better
emoluments and conditions of work for teachers, accompanied by
greater inducement for research, and other similar steps based on a
painstaking analysis of the crisis. Simply implanting some
“prestigious” institutions on a crisis-hit situation amounts to a
quick-fix that does not address or overcome the crisis.
There is, however,
a deeper issue here. One may disagree with the NKC recommendations
but they are addressing a certain reality, namely the increase in
demand by global capital for skilled personnel from countries like
India. This opens up large opportunities for the Indian middle class
youth and hence creates in them a constituency that advocates
reforms in the higher education sector which would enable them to
tap these opportunities. If these reforms are not consciously
undertaken then the “pull of the market” will ensure that they will
be surreptitiously affected, through private self financing
institutions. And what is more, is resisting the pull of the market
even desirable? Such resistance after all will only restrict
employment opportunities for Indian youth. In other words, is not
the second perspective on higher education both impractical and
undesirable, in the sense of being inimical to the employment
prospects of many? It may have been the perspective underlying our
freedom struggle, but that alone cannot justify our sticking to it.
This question can be answered at two different levels. As long as we
are constituted as a nation, the task of nation-building, the task
of being sensitive to the interests of the people, the task of
ameliorating their condition and protecting their freedom, retains
paramount importance. The higher education system therefore must be
looked at through the second perspective. To change it under
pressure from the Indian and foreign corporates and the middle class
constituency that stands to benefit from such change is to allow a
small segment of the population to hijack the agenda for higher
education. The nation can permit such hijacking only at its own
peril. But then are we talking about a conflict of interest in the
realm of higher education between the middle class youth hoping to
cash in on the increased global demand for cheap skilled labour, and
the vast number of ordinary people whose freedom and protection
(threatened especially in the era of globalization) should be the
objective of higher education? The fact that there is such a
conflict in reality cannot be denied. The stark contrast between the
burgeoning salaries and visible prosperity of a section of the
middle class youth on the one hand and the spate of farmers’
suicides on the other, both a fall-out of globalization, testifies
to this conflict of interest. And our two perspectives on higher
education epitomize the difference in outlook between these two
social segments. Even so, I do not believe that the middle class
youth coming out of an education system which has as its objective
the production of “organic intellectuals” of the people, will for
that reason cease to be employable by global capital. Global capital
after all is keen to employ Indian skilled labour not out of charity
but out of hard economic calculations. As long as these calculations
justify such employment, it will persist even without our having to
turn our entire higher education system topsy-turvy in a bid to
impress global capital with our “excellence”.
In other words,
there is no need for the tail to wag the dog. There is no need for
us specifically to change our higher education system for
producing skilled foot soldiers for global capital. There is no need
for us to internalize the insecurity of our middle class youth and
change the conception of our higher education system away from
producing “organic intellectuals of the people” to producing
“organic intellectuals of global capital”. There is no need for us
to abandon the project of painstakingly putting the higher education
system back on track by finding solutions to the myriad problems
that go into the making of its crisis, in favour of instituting
quick-fix reforms that will only exacerbate the dualism of the
system. The second perspective on higher education which is the
legacy of our freedom struggle not only remains as relevant today as
ever before, indeed more relevant today than ever before; but it
cannot even be construed by any means as jeopardizing the short-term
interests of the middle class youth in the context of the job
opportunities opening up under globalization.
Thank you for your
attention.
Prabhat Patnaik |
