The Goebbelsian Turn At University Of California, Irvine

By Romi Mahajan

11 January, 2016
Countercurrents.org

In the past decade, much has been written about the manner in which academic institutions have compromised themselves and have abandoned their putative mission of creating citizens. The crux of the arguments contained therein is that academia as a whole has turned into just another part of the cash nexus--playing the money game, cozying up to corporations, creating underpaid laborers out of adjunct and junior faculty, and spitting out barely-educated students who are meant to be cogs in the machinery of capitalism.

That’s the view from the progressive Left. From the Right, accusations of “liberal bias” and of cow-towing to the desires of minorities fly like arrows while the public in general is increasingly disenchanted with the costs associated with higher education.

Disenchantment and disappoint therefore abounds, from all sides of the political spectrum.

While opinions differ strongly about where the faults lie, there is one idea that is shared in common- that these institutions should not be held as sacred and inscrutable and that the public has the right to know what indeed is happening in the academy.

And every now and then, this scrutiny reveals a story that reads like fiction of the absurd. The recent hubbub over the involvement of the Dharma Civilization Foundation (DCF) with education at University of California, Irvine is one such example that once again reaffirms the position of the Left that the edifice of higher education is fully tied to the power of money and is willing to forego its mission in order to collect cash.

At the heart of the matter is the fact that an organization like the DCF, with clear RSS and Hindutva roots, can, via the power of money, have a public institution like UCI accede to stipulations that clearly fly in the face of academic objectivity and freedom (including far too much oversight in who will be hired to fill the endowed chairs and to suggest that only practitioners of Hinduism are the only ones who can pass muster in the study of India.) While donations to universities often come with some vanity stipulations like naming rights and so on, they cannot interfere with the academic process and certainly should not intimidate scholars whose work might fly in the face of the goals of private capital. So one might wonder how indeed an organization that has created a “blacklist” of academics who its member deem hold “negative positions in some aspects of Hindu studies” could possibly be a fair and ethical donor.

The controversy has been amply and well-covered in the local paper, The Orange County Register, thanks to some intrepid reporting and has recently been picked up in India as well. What hasn’t been written about in-depth however is that degree to which the Hindutva brigade, flush with dollars and shielded by the veneer of multiculturalism, has been able to further its agenda through the domination of thought and learning. While readers of Countercurrents no doubt see the saffronization of institutions in India, they should also be aware that the process is afoot in the West as well, aided by the money-hungry academic bureaucrats who prostrate themselves at the altar of capital.

Further, few have pointed out the incredible series of ironies that undergird the very existence of organizations like the Dharma Civilization Foundation which is so brazen as to openly discuss its mission to influence US Universities on its website. That some members of the executive committee left India ages ago to pursue money-making in the West, that they presumably manage the affairs of the organization in English (not, as it turns out, in Sanskrit!), and practice Western medicine. Some even boast of connections to the HSS, an organization that is affiliated to the RSS, a paramilitary organization whose members assassinated Mahatma Gandhi. If the UCI bureaucracy couldn’t see these connections, shame on them for bad due diligence. If they could see them and chose to ignore them, then all involved should be shamed for moral indecency. To date, the DCF has donated $6M. They want to raise this number of $100M. If we’ve seen moral cowardice from the academic bureaucracy—who proceeded without consulting the South Asianists on campus-- when the prize is in the single digit millions, imagine what we might see when the number rockets to triple-digit millions.

Hindutva is globalized, rich, fascist and good at PR and thought-control. The DCF’s ability to manipulate UCI is a clear example of this.

Scholarship is about scrutiny and great scholarship comes from independent thinkers. The DCF types don’t want this; for this reason alone institutions like UCI should reject their money outright.

Post script:

There is much more to be written about here. On the list is the curious transposition that has allowed the Hindu right to appear to be the first to expose the racism of the Colonial West when in fact is practitioners did very little to rid India of the colonial yoke and fought tooth and nail against the Left which was the first to fight colonialism.

Also on the list is an exposition of the RSS members open admiration of Hitler and his views of racial purity. These are indeed areas of great historical and sociological interest that real scholars at institutions like UCI should study and pursue.

Romi Mahajan can be reached at [email protected]