Lambs To The Slaughter: The Dying Future Of Higher Education
By P K Vijayan
30 March, 2015
Countercurrents.org
“Professional integrity requires that teachers should be as free to speak on controversial issues as any other citizens of a free country. An atmosphere of freedom is essential for developing this 'morality of the mind'.” This statement was made as far back as 1962, by the Report of the University Education Commission (more widely known as the Radhakrishnan Commission Report), one of the first, and probably the most influential document on higher education in its time. We have come a long way indeed, from that understanding: today, the current writer, along with seven other colleagues of Hindu College, Delhi University, have been found guilty of “gross misconduct in acting against the interests of the college and lowering the dignity of the college by bringing it into disrepute”. The reason? That we wrote a letter to the Hon'ble Lt Governor of Delhi, drawing his attention to various improprieties and irregularities in the construction of a new girls' hostel in the college. For this, we have been punished with loss of pay amounting to two salary increments, for the rest of our careers, and debarment from holding any position of responsibility for no less than five years in the college. Meanwhile, we will be subjected to continuous scrutiny during this period, annual reports will be submitted on our conduct, and a review will be held after five years. All this, for writing a letter.
This is an extremely severe punishment, involving a financial loss of several lakhs of rupees individually over the span of our careers, as well as the blanket denial of all professional opportunities for five years, quite apart from being stigmatized as irresponsible and delinquent. This kind of punishment falls just short of dismissal from service, in the scale of extreme penalties, and is usually reserved for correspondingly extreme sins of omission and commission (e.g., dereliction of duty, moral turpitude, etc.). It is not only incredibly out of proportion to the alleged fault on our part, its sheer excess would smack of spite and vindictiveness, if we were not informed by the Chairman, Governing Body, that the punishment was also intended to be exemplary, a lesson to other college teachers.
Ironically, what provoked this was in fact our living up to the “professional integrity” spoken of by the Radhakrishnan Commission Report, and speaking up as citizens of a free country. Additionally, it must be remembered that Article 19.1 (a) of the Indian Constitution also guarantees the right to freedom of speech and expression – a provision made by no less a figure than B R Ambedkar. By writing to the Lt Governor of Delhi, drawing his attention to the fact that the college administration was undertaking illegal construction in the college without acquiring the requisite clearance from statutory bodies like the MCD, the National Green Tribunal, etc., we were merely giving voice to our collective conscience, as guaranteed by the Indian Constitution – but “professional integrity” is now understood as “gross misconduct”! Even more ironically, although it was the college administration that was patently guilty of misconduct, it turns around and accuses us of misconduct because we spoke up about its illegalities! It then proceeds to foist a farce of an inquiry on us, incidentally initiated suo moto by the Chairman, without being discussed in the College Governing Body, and undertaken, not by an independent third party, but by two members of the very administration that is being accused of committing illegalities. Following on this and various other patent procedural violations and improprieties in the disciplinary process, the Governing Body then decided on this massive penalty.
This must be seen not as an isolated instance of the arbitrariness of an individual college administration, but in the larger context of changes that Delhi University in particular, and higher education in the country in general, is undergoing. A revealing sign of this change and its implications for Hindu College in particular, came a couple of years ago, when the current Chairman of the Hindu College Governing Body publicly stated that Hindu College was a private college (in an attempt to avoid responding to an inquiry under the RTI Act, regarding some administrative irregularities). The fact is that, ever since the publication of the Report on a Policy Framework for Reforms in Education in 2000 (also known as the Birla-Ambani Report), there has been a steady, inexorable push towards privatization of higher education, as a policy direction. Significantly, the Birla-Ambani Report was not commissioned by the Department of Education, or the Ministry of Human Resource Development (MHRD), or the University Grants Commission (UGC) – which would have been the expected bodies to undertake such an enquiry – but by the Prime Minister's Council on Trade and Industry. Commissioning this report was one of the first things that the NDA government did when it came to power in 1998.
This report set the agenda for the series of further reports, policy initiatives and eventually, legislative measures that followed, including - among others - the government’s own National Knowledge Commission's Report to the Nation, 2006-2009 (2009), also known as the Knowledge Commission Report (KnCR); the University Grants Commission’s paper on ‘Strategies and Schemes during Eleventh Plan Period (2007-2012) for Universities and Colleges’ (2011); the annual planning-papers on higher education collaboratively produced by the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FICCI), Ernst & Young Pvt. Ltd. (a multination consultancy) and the Planning Commission of the Government of India, from 2011 onwards; the ASHE 2014 (Annual Status of Higher Education of States and UTs in India, 2014) report, brought out by Confederation of Indian Industries (CII), the Ministry of Human Resource Development (MHRD) and the international consultancy firm, Deloitte; and the MHRD’s own Rashtriya Uchchatar Shiksha Abhiyan (RUSA, or National Higher Education Mission) document (2013). It has been matched by a series of similar reports and documents from the private sector, also urging privatization as the panacea for higher education in the country, such as Pricewaterhouse Coopers' document, 'India – Higher Education Sector: Opportunities for Private Participation' (2012); the India Brand Equity Foundation's 'Education Sector in India' (2012); or CRISIL's ‘Skilling India: The Billion People Challenge’ (2010), among others.
Several of these documents note the sheer quantum of the higher education market, as a major selling point (so to speak) for privatization: the estimate is a whopping USD 115 billion, over the next ten years, which boils down (on current conversion rates) to an average of INR 70,000 crores per year. However, this massive market is effectively locked down, inaccessible because still predominantly state controlled and subsidized; its potentially gargantuan profits can be harvested fully only if the state withdraws and permits freer private investment in this sector. As of now, about 52% of higher education is through private institutions; if this is gradually increased as a fallout of the state withdrawing from this sector, the estimated quantum of profits will go up even more.
The real prize for private players of course, is not in raising new institutions from scratch – although, given the magnitude of profits involved, that too is by no means a mean investment option. The real prize lies in taking over existing public-funded institutions, thereby minimizing the investments involved, and then reaping the benefits that accrue from their privatization. The colleges of Delhi University are prime picks in this sense: they not only come with minimal investment requirements, they come pre-loaded, so to speak, with a 'reputation', derived from their affiliation to Delhi University (if not carrying substantial ‘brand-values’ of their own, as in the case of colleges like St Stephen's College, Sri Ram College of Commerce, Lady Sriram College, and of course, Hindu College), and a clientele ready and waiting at the doors.
There are however two major obstacles to the realization of this dream. One is the fact that legislation on higher education has not yet caught up with the pace at which higher education policy has been changing: but this is being addressed by the six new bills on higher education, collectively referred to as the New Education Bills, currently awaiting passage in Parliament. The other is the 'recalcitrant', 'lazy', 'conservative', truculent teaching community that has been fiercely resisting these inexorable impulses towards privatization for almost a decade now. As long as these teachers are around – with their vision of education as a public good, and their understanding of their professional integrity and freedom as sacrosanct – there can be no hope of capitalizing on the hopes and dreams of the explosion of youth who are about to enter higher education – a demographic wave that is referred to, quite shamelessly, in almost all the above-mentioned reports, as India's 'demographic dividend'.
One crucial way in which this resistance has been tackled has been through the simple expedient of increasing contractualization of teaching jobs, de facto if not de jure. By simply refusing to hold interviews for permanent appointments, today, almost half the teaching strength of the university and its colleges – amounting to almost 5000 teachers – is constituted of ad hoc teachers, whose sheer dependence on the system to get permanent posts, render them quiescent. Another has been to not appoint permanent principals in colleges where the need arises, but to administer them through OSDs (Officers on Special Duty), Acting Principals and Officiating Principals. A large number of colleges – including Hindu College – have now had these temporary administrators for several years, all of who are hand-picked for their subservience to authority. A third way has been to unleash a veritable bonanza of awards and grants, but disbursed in a highly selective manner, as incentives to toe the line of the university administration. The teachers' movement has been massively eroded, qualitatively and quantitatively, by these carrot-and-stick measures. But this still does not tackle the existing lot of 'recalcitrant' teachers, many of whom have many years to go before they retire, and continue to challenge these tendencies towards incremental, de facto privatization.
Hindu College is one such college, that is ripe for the picking, but also had – and continues to have – a clutch of such 'recalcitrant' teachers who have been repeatedly questioning the innumerable irregularities, improprieties and violations of rules and procedures on the part of its governing body. This governing body, dominated by a private trust and by a chairman from that trust, appears intent on running the college like its private property, but without having to make the slightest investment in it. Indeed, one of the reasons why it undertook construction post-haste, without waiting for due clearances, is the fact that funds earmarked for infrastructure development, which had sat unused in the college coffers for several years, were set to be recalled by the UGC. If this had happened, the trust would have had to make that infrastructural investment from its own pockets – if not now, then at some later point of privatization, when it would take over the college completely. The idea is to milk the state for all it can give, at this stage, before privatization comes in in full force: the lamb must be fully fattened, at state expense, before it is slaughtered for private profit. Hence the decision to keep this clutch of recalcitrants out of any positions of responsibility, where they can intervene in this shadowy agenda, for five years, during which time we will be “kept under observation” (as if we are prisoners) to ensure we stay quiet. By which time no doubt the entire higher education scenario would have changed, not just in the college but in the entire country.
Hindu College is a test case now, as to how such entrenched 'bad elements' in the teaching community can be dealt with; this is especially clear from the deliberate reference to the punishment as an exemplary one. If the once strong teachers' union now stands weakened and divided, it is substantially because of the carrot-and-stick policies noted above; but it is time to see them for what they are, viz., cynical tactics in a much larger, much more damaging battle for the soul of higher education itself. It is time to come together once again, to resist the last but most brutal measure that is being deployed, in the project to privatize higher education, in the form of such excessive and therefore exemplary punitive measures. These measures are being followed with keen interest by those who would seek to replicate them in other colleges, in this university and outside, so that they too may start paving the way to reaping their crores of profits. For the sake of our professional integrity, then, for the sake of our students, for the sake of the institutions that we have studied and worked in, for the sake of the society to which we belong and to which we are accountable – for everyone's sake, and not just our own, it is time for the teachers' movement to come together once again, and give an exemplary response to the forces that seek to grind us down.
P K Vijayan is Asst Professor, Dept of English, Hindu College, Delhi
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