Diminishing the idea of a university

While speaking of the idea of a university, one actually speaks of an “ideal”, that is, what a university is expected to be doing to justify its own existence as a university. As John Henry Newman, a 19th century British academic, argued, a university is the place where a certain type of valuable activity is supposed to be happening. It is the place where meaningful and productive exploration of ideas is expected to take place, where truth is sought and where critical imagination is deployed to engage with issues that confront society (which can be taken as a valuable activity).

At a fundamental level, the essential duty of a university is to search for the “truth”, however unpalatable it may be. If a university is simply busy trying to follow the dominant narratives prevalent in society uncritically and unreflexively, it will necessarily lose sight of what it is supposed to look for — the truth.

One of the most important things a university is supposed to promote is critical imagination, an ability to raise questions, however, unpalatable they may be, to the powerful and hegemonic sections of society. This will involve resisting the “banking concept of education”, in the language of Paulo Freire, a Brazilian educator and philosopher. What this means is that a university is not like a bank where people go and deposit money and it simply accepts that. He argued that the basic aim of education should be to “conscientise the conscience” of those who are receiving education, not merely fill their minds with information which they are expected to receive uncritically.

A university is the place where every idea or perspective is interrogated and accepted only when it stands the test of reason and criticality. Critical engagement with ideas is the basis of a healthy education. The question which comes to mind is whether or not universities are really encouraging their students and teachers to express themselves freely without any hindrance, and critical thinking is actively promoted. In the absence of an enabling environment, pursuing critical engagement with ideas will be difficult. In this context, there are a couple of things which need closer attention, though there are a few others such as a severe shortage of funds and dilution of autonomy in the name of ill-defined accountability, which are equally important but need to be dealt with separately.

Rising intolerance

First, there is an increasing intolerance of oppositional ideas and positions, which appears to be a global phenomenon now. When university teachers can be arrested on the basis of gross misinterpretation of what they say or write and when universities (Harvard, for example) are being penalised for taking a position in favour of those who are subjected to systematic and methodical elimination (Palestine), it is time to think what we are doing to universities. It must be remembered that any damage to the health of universities will cause irreparable damage to the health of societies in the long run. Any stifling and criminalisation of dissent on the campuses will produce universities which are conformist and afraid of expressing their point of view which will only stunt growth and development of society.

Ideally, universities are spaces where contending viewpoints are advanced and allowed to contest one another. But what one is seeing on the university campuses is the shrinkage of those spaces because of fear of repercussions. Fear is increasingly being weaponised against oppositional positions and ideas. Critical enquiry is being vilified as an act of subversion. A university is supposed to be the home of “public intellectuals”, who pursue not only their academic engagements seriously but also reflect, speak and write on issues which concern all especially the marginalised and weaker sections of society such as minorities, Dalits and women.

Public intellectuals are expected to take an unequivocal and uncompromising position in favour of fundamental values of dignified social existence such as freedom, equality and justice and certainly they need to speak up against injustice and discrimination. It is indeed a matter of serious reflection whether universities as they are today are able to produce such public intellectuals or not. There is a strong need to reimagine universities as spaces of articulation of dissent and critical point of view on public issues which concern all of us. Confining oneself to one’s own disciplinary concerns and not reflecting on issues which concern society at large will reduce university spaces to those of ivory towers, not organically related to the societal issues.

Commodification of education

The increasing commodification of education, which is another factor, is severely impacting the critical quality of higher education. Higher education is seen as a commodity to be bought and sold on the market. What this means is that education is no longer pursued for its own sake, for a playful and meaningful engagement with ideas. What is happening on an increasing scale is that the use value of education, or knowledge for the sake of greater understanding of the reality around us, is being replaced by the exchange value, or how much income one can generate from the qualification. Clearly, the market has become a great determinant of which degree is desirable and which is not. A serious implication of this is that it has made education an unreflective and unreflexive activity.

Critical engagement with ideas is discouraged and in fact is considered irrelevant. One of the offshoots of increasing commodification of education is the growing clamour to figure at the top in any system of ranking of universities. This ignores the fact that any system of ranking only contributes further to the commodification of education (a degree from a certain university or institute is a must for getting a good job) and tends to adopt homogenising (one size fits all) and hegemonising (publications in journals located within the West almost become mandatory) criteria. Of course, it goes without saying that the growing commodification of education is closely aligned with neoliberal reforms. Educational reforms that are being attempted today are such that they correspond to the desired changes in the economic regime thus ably functioning as an effective “ideological state apparatus”, to use an expression from Louis Althusser, who was a French Marxist philosopher.

If universities are not to become irrelevant, it is critically important that they become spaces of reason, debate, free enquiry and a playful engagement with ideas instead of contributing to the growing commodification of education.

(Professor D.V. Kumar teaches Sociology at the Department of Sociology, North-Eastern Hill University, Shillong. Views are personal)