Foreign Faculty, For What?
By Rajesh Kumar Sharma
23 November, 2011
Countercurrents.org
Speaking at the FICCI Higher Education Summit 2011 in New Delhi recently, Deputy Chairman of the Planning Commission Montek Singh Ahluwalia stated that the Indian universities must have an international flavour, adding that "this would not happen unless the government removes the restriction on employment of international faculty".
Interestingly, the man who is known for the sophisticated understatement made a departure from his rhetorical repertory and sounded as if the only thing holding the universities back from the ranks of the world's top 200 was the lack of international faculty. The implications of his statement require unravelling.
First, in one fell stroke he writes off the Indian faculty: in his opinion, there is nothing international about it. In effect, this amounts to equating the 'international' with the 'foreign'. Only the foreign is international. A brighter badge of the colonized conscience would be hard to find in the global shopping mall. Second, he forgets that the quality of the faculty is only one of the many factors taken into account while evaluating the world's best universities. Or does he mean that the Indian faculty is solely to blame for the universities not making it to the top grades, and that the faculty works in some weird empty space? Third, his culinary fantasy of giving an 'international flavour' to the Indian universities, whose desi flavour obviously hurts his refined sensibilities, requires a thorough interpreting by some latter-day Freud. To me, it points to what he unconsciously knows can be gained by the entry of foreign faculty: 'flavour', not substance. And it tells that he wants only the flavour, nothing more.
Fourth, Ahluwalia hopes to make the universities more 'research-based' with induction of the foreign faculty. This claim demands a little closer examination. I am sure Ahluwalia also knows what every Indian researcher worth the name knows – that the research must be grounded in the realities of the Indian situation. How does he plan to bridge the gulf between the specificities of the situation and the faculty transplanted from abroad? Or does he have in mind only the needs and aspirations of the multinational corporate research industry?
One did not expect the Planning Commission to proclaim itself so quickly and brazenly as an arm of the multinational corporate sector.
In fact, the occasion and scene of the Deputy Chairman's pronouncements themselves explain his strange desire. The occasion was, as noted already, the FICCI Higher Education Summit, inaugurated by Ahluwalia, where he also released the FICCI-Ernst & Young knowledge paper on ‘Private Sector Participation in Indian Higher Education’ and the FICCI-Synovate report on 'Perceptions on Higher Education'. The list of other personalities on the scene, mentioned in the FICCI press release, reads like a veritable catalogue of the forces eager to command the policy formulation on higher education in India. The personalities included Daniel C. Levy, Distinguished Professor, University at Albany, State University of New York and Director, Program for Research on Private Higher Education (PROPHE); Prof. David Naylor, President, University of Toronto, Canada; Dr. Lin Tsong-ming, Deputy Minister, Ministry of Education, Taiwan; Mr. Michael Russel, Member of Scottish Parliament, Scottish Cabinet Secretary for Education and Lifelong Learning; Mr. Harsh Mariwala, President, FICCI; Prof. M Anandakrishnan, Chairman, FICCI Higher Education Committee and Chairman, Board of Governors, IIT, Kanpur; and Prof. Rajan Saxena, Co-Chair, FICCI Higher Education Committee and Vice Chancellor, NMIMS University. Is this group representative of the Indian higher education in any way?
So much for the respect in which policy makers hold the parliamentary democracy, to safeguard whose honour they would routinely resort to anything, whether legal or extra-legal.
Ahluwalia's one-point solution is typical of the way a proper recognition of a problem or crisis is systematically and deceptively evaded under the regimes that see a crisis as an opportunity to make more profits and to produce another crisis. It is a calculated fetishism. It is not that an awareness of the crisis is lacking. Rather, the awareness is allowed to keep lurking at the back of the mind and not permitted to become full recognition. Instead of the complete object, a part of it is recognized. This absolves you of guilt, but without bringing you to respond to the crisis in its integrity.
At a more mundane level, the wholesale writing-off of the Indian faculty as un-international is a tactical move to demoralize them, a move that is part of the larger strategy to silence them. The powers that be have surely learnt their lesson from the oppositional, dissenting discourse that has dogged their every suspect move in the democratic public sphere since the time the 'reforms' were launched. The move should be seen in conjunction with the new practice of evaluating the faculty's academic work with the aid of API (Academic Performance Index). API grants only one mark to an article published in a newspaper, and there too the article is not to be counted among academic publications. It is time, clearly, to seal off every little crack and crevice in the so-called ivory tower so that not a murmur of dissent escapes into the public sphere. The API, that master stroke of impish genius, does not give a damn to the book review either. The book review, which at its best is a serious exercise in rigorous dialogue, has somehow come to look redundant, or positively dangerous, perhaps. A smart way to confine every inhabitant of the ivory tower in his or her solitary cell. What a bright example of the policy that will place the Indian universities among the world's best!
According to reports, the Deputy Chairman called for removal of the 'dysfunctional regulation' to allow entry of the foreign faculty in India, indicating to what uses law may be put in these times of manufactured confusion and excessive legislation. Giorgio Agamben, the Italian philosopher and political thinker, remarks that the sovereign is sovereign because he is above law in so far as he determines what is or is not lawful. If the law does not permit the hiring of foreign faculty, it must be changed. One better understands, in the wake of Ahluwalia's pronouncement, the rationale of putting Kapil Sibal, a man of the laws, in charge of education.
But the French also think. And they think differently. They too are working overtime to internationalise their education, but they have chosen to embrace a more reasonable and fruitful course. They will have faculty exchange programmes with the universities in other countries. Their own faculty will have to meet the highest standards elsewhere. They will not be written off without an opportunity to prove their worth.
(This article appeared in Daily Post of November 22, 2011)
The writer is Professor of English, Punjabi University. He also edits the quarterly journal South Asian Ensemble. He may be contacted at [email protected]
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