Academics In Danger

By Umer Jeelanie Bnaday

09 September, 2015
Countercurrents.org

Prof. Amartya Sen’s excellence and fame outshines those that normally belong to Nobel laureates. He is a public intellectual of international renown and noted for his liberal, secular values and devotions to independence of academia.

A university is a body corporate with a legal personality. That can be conferred only by legislation. Colleges possess no legal personality and are registered under the Societies Registration Act. That is where the problem arises. The acts make the head of state, president or governor, the chancellor of the university. After long debate it was accepted that he acted in his individual discretion and not on the advice of the Council of Ministers. That helped, but not much.

The Nalanda University was set up by the Nalanda University Act and came into being in 2010. It has an international character with a governing board comprising nationals from different Asian countries besides Indian academics. Prof Sen was appointed its first chancellor. The university has the Indian president, Pranab Mukherjee as visitor while the external affairs ministry coordinates with the visitor’s office.

Sometimes, I feel I am just the personification with the system of strange fixities. I question, I contradict, I believe, I confess, I seek not to yield; I constitute it my way, the way which I experience with the emergence of new government which brings the change in the system. Few months back, the board decided, in the absence of Prof Sen who properly recused himself, to ask him to serve as chancellor for a second term when his present term expires.However, the decision of the board becomes operational only after the visitor (the president of India ex-officio) gives his consent. The decision was conveyed to him after the meeting on Jan 14 drawing his attention to the urgency of the matter.

More than a month passed without the visitor according the requisite consent. Not only the president’s office, but also the external affairs ministry did not reply. Prof Sen decided to resign. He made two points. One concerns the government’s functioning, the other the independence and autonomy of academia.

He pointed out “Non-action is a time-wasting way of reserving a board decision, when the government has, in principle, the power to act or not act. This also happened to the revised statutes that the governing board passed unanimously last year. Many of these statutes (including the one pertaining to the chancellor’s term of office) also never received formal acceptance or rejection from the Ministry of External Affairs.” This is a shabby way for the government to deal with any citizen; more so with a university of international character.

He said: “I am also sad, at a more general level, that academic governance in India remains so deeply vulnerable to the opinions of the ruling government, when it chooses to make political use of the special provisions. Even though the Nalanda University Act, passed by parliament, did not, I believe, foresee political interference in academic matters, it is formally the case given the legal provisions that the government can turn an academic issue into a matter of political dispensation if it feels unrestrained about interfering.”

This point is well taken. The acts establishing universities are modelled on those enacted in the colonial era. They had no notion of the place of free institutions in a democracy nor of the role which universities play in moulding the outlook of citizens.

No one summed up these truths better than the sage Walter Lippmann. Democracy had worked in the US because, “outside the government and outside the party system there have existed independent institutions and independent men”. He named “free universities” among them besides the judiciary and press.

Academiais respected for its freedom from partisanship and vested interests. “The role of the universities, apart from their specific task of training men and advancing knowledge, is not unlike that of the courts. They are places to which men can turn for judgments which are unbiased by partisanship and special interest. Obviously, the moment the universities fall under political control, or under the control of private interests, or the moment they themselves take a hand in politics and the leadership of government, their value as independent and disinterested sources of judgment is impaired.”

The whole educational system seems caught up in this long confine of undecidability. Every pattern seems rattling now and everywhere it is conflict, destruction, agony, incertitude and many impending disastrous complication which may once explode and blow up the whole educational system. My intention is not to confound you with any recondite philosophical commentary but, it is just an attempt to bring the relevance of the above assertion into the present educational institutional condition.

State power is not the only threat to academia’s freedom. In accepting endowments universities must insist on “their freedom from the promptings of private interest”. Also, academics must “renounce their ambition to play a part in partisan political controversy”. It is the freedom by which truth can be pursued. The battle of separation in India from the states has yet to begin in earnest.

The author is a research Scholar Central University of Haryana Email:[email protected]