Administration Archives

The Burning of Lyons

letters-from-a-stoic-original-imaefcp7sbhzqx68 I have stopped relying on serendipity; this has been replaced over the years by a firm belief in the hidden hand that unbeknownst to me puts things in my way, gives subtle signs, and guides me forward.

A case in point was a chance reading of Seneca’s Letters from a Stoic, an unlikely book for me to pick up early on a winter’s morning. Of course it might be said that a cold, foggy, and bleak morning is precisely the time to read about stoicism, but flipping through the pages, I came across his Letter 91, On the Lesson to be Drawn from the Burning of Lyons. The power of his writing aside, I am sorely tempted by the allegorical these days where everything is a metaphor for something else, something more immediate and more relevant.

The burning of Lyons so many centuries ago … the arson attacks on our public institutions … the erosion of trust, the destruction of edifices constructed with so much effort … all as one.

The value of reading Seneca is not just to draw moral lessons from the stoic philosophy, to control anger and passion in the face of so much provocation, but also to draw upon that wisdom and the hopes infused in that letter, written so many years ago.

The calamity, the fire that has wiped out the colony of Lyons, becomes in these days the calamity that has destroyed a great University, a great public institution. As Seneca says of the burning of Lyons, “Such a calamity might upset anyone at all, not to speak of a man who dearly loves his country. But this incident has served to make him inquire about the strength of his own character, which he has trained, I suppose, just to meet situations that he thought might cause him fear. I do not wonder, however, that he was free from apprehension touching an evil so unexpected and practically unheard of as this, since it is without precedent. […] Fortune has usually allowed all men, when she has assailed them collectively, to have a foreboding of that which they were destined to suffer.“

Somehow, we have all been just as unprepared for an evil so unexpected. So many great schools, to rewrite the Senecan text, any one of which would make a single institution famous, were wrecked in one term and with so little foreboding. And the strangeness of it all, the obscurity of purpose, adds immeasurably to the weight of this calamity, the death of a University.

Of course I talk of our public Universitites, JNU in particular, of which I have talked earlier, and am not able to not talk about either. I continue to be surprised by the rapidity with which the spirit of the University has been crushed. Not for this institution, arguably a fine and great creation, “to be granted a period of reprieve before its fall.”

And the effect of this conflagration will last long – those who remember the old Lyons will not forget those who helped burn it down. And they, the ones that burn it now will not be able to forget what they have done. chance

As Seneca says, “nothing ought to be unexpected by us. Our minds should be sent forward in advance to meet all problems, and we should consider, not what is wont to happen, but what can happen. […] Chance chooses some new weapon by which to bring her strength to bear against us, thinking we have forgotten her.”

Stoicism therefore seems a wise strategy to follow. In the past few years, every time one has thought that the worst was over, some new horror has been thrust upon us. We should, as Seneca notes, therefore reflect upon all contingencies, and should fortify our minds against the evils which may possibly come.

Like Machiavelli’s or Kautilya’s, some of Seneca’s writings are lessons in leadership, notably his advice to Nero, On Mercy. And there are bits of this essay that advise leaders, as well as others. Commenting on the rapidity with which disastrous changes can be wrought, his observation that Whatever structure has been reared by a long sequence of years, at the cost of great toil and through the great kindness of the gods, is scattered and dispersed by a single day is a timeless warning against hubris, a warning that the present dispensations might well heed. And others as well.

untitled Seneca’s own life was so filled with contradictions that he was quite attuned to the fickleness of fortune and very sensitive to the whims of successive Roman Emperors, at least two of who – Caligula and Nero – who had ordered him to commit suicide… Therefore let the mind be disciplined to understand and to endure its own lot, and let it have the knowledge that there is nothing which fortune does not dare – that she has the same jurisdiction over empires as over emperors, the same power over cities as over the citizens who dwell therein. We must not cry out at any of these calamities. Into such a world have we entered, and under such laws do we live. If you like it, obey; if not, depart whithersoever you wish. Cry out in anger if any unfair measures are taken with reference to you individually; but if this inevitable law is binding upon the highest and the lowest alike, be reconciled to fate, by which all things are dissolved.

There is also hope in the stoic outlook. Already there are signs that some changes are afoot. Like Lyons, which eventually was rebuilt, “to endure and, under happier auspices, for a longer existence!“, maybe we will bounce back, and the JNU of the future will be an even better University. Inshallah!

O Dunning! O Kruger!

While moaning about the state of affairs we find ourselves in at the present time (and indeed about the present day affairs of state) to an old student who has since fled these shores, I learned that what I felt were original and acute perceptions of why things at JNU were the way they were had a name: the Dunning-Kruger syndrome.

To quote Wikipedia (which calls it the D-K effect, but I prefer syndrome, given that we are experiencing a near melt-down), “the miscalibration of the incompetent stems from an error about the self, whereas the miscalibration of the highly competent stems from an error about others.”

Which succinctly sums up the current situation at JNU, and also sort of explains why it is that the majority of the academic staff at JNU appear to be so much at sea at the present time. There is no point in explaining to the very deaf: those, as the adage puts it, that will not hear. For one thing, our line is really a very simple one, that policing at all levels does not result in academic value, and that there are better ways of achieving intellectual discipline.

Our latin forbears put it simply, verbum sapienti sat est: To the wise, a word suffices. (The phrase and its abbreviation verb. sap. was drummed into our philistine skulls by Mr Cleary, my Class IX schoolteacher.) The inability of the JNU teaching fraternity to get their point across, is really a consequence of the D-K effect. Since it has much relevance to our current situation, and I warmly recommend a slow read (or quick scan) of the Wiki entry which has many points of resonance, as when talking of their paper Why People Fail to Recognize Their Own Incompetence it is noted that “much incorrect self-assessment of competence derives from the person’s ignorance of a given activity’s standards of performance”.

The standards of performance of academic administration are high, and indeed need to be even higher. One of the problems seems to be that they don’t know that they don’t know... the refrain in the Kruger and Dunning song that was performed when the duo earned an IgNobel prize. This was part of the IgNobel ceremony’s Incompetence Opera that year. The irony, of course, is that the refrain can be applied to all sides of the argument, but let that be.

To add more would be both futile and self-defeating, so let me close by quoting (selectively) from Charles Darwin: Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge.

Death by Infantilization

The American poet bell hooks might have been speaking about the situation in JNU today: “Sometimes people try to destroy you, precisely because they recognize your power — not because they don’t see it, but because they see it and they don’t want it to exist.”

In my thirty plus years at JNU, I have rarely spoken in a public m eeting, but when asked to do so on “What JNU has contributed in the Sciences” on 28 February this year, I felt I must. Partly because it is getting increasingly difficult to fight the losing battle of public perception versus ground reality, and also, because I was provoked by a recent public discussion on Lok Sabha TV, where blatant lies were broadcast, and the participants congratulated each other on their moral positions, each ever so smug and self-righteous.

Day after day there is an article in one or the other medium, with JNU faculty trying their best to explain just what the issues are to those who are not at JNU. This is not a case of “us” explaining to “them”, but there is more than a little schadenfreude in the point of view that cannot see what the fuss is all about. Not to mention a number of articles devolving around what-about-when-X-did-Y-to-Z…

jnu None of which can account for the slow and painful killing of an excellent university. And what lies at the heart of this heinous action is the basic incomprehension of what a modern university is, or indeed what a modern Indian university should be.

When I moved to JNU in 1986, one of the main things that attracted me to the university was that it was a graduate school. The School of Physical Sciences was started that year by then Vice Chancellor P N Srivastava with the idea that it would be a school of studies that recognized no disciplinary boundaries within the physical sciences. Having been at places where (in today’s language) the silos were impenetrable, it seemed like more than a breath of fresh air. For mainly professional reasons and some personal ones, I was happy to move to JNU from the institute I was at in Mumbai.

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Some things about JNU seemed wonderful. The size, for one- it seemed to have so many more possibilities with four times the number of teachers and fifty times the number of students, not to mention the acreage, which was about fifty times as large as well. The number of disciplines – there were 8 Schools in JNU then (SIS, SLLCS, SSS, SES, SLS, SCSS, the old ones) and SPS and SAA, the new ones. There were some special Centres as well (some of which are now Schools in their own right), but the academic environment was rich compared to the smaller and more specialist campus I had been a part of in the preceding few years. It was a small matter that many people thought that we were a School of Physical Education, formed along with a School of Arts and Athletics… those were the initial days and we hardly cared.

The atmosphere was even more wonderful. This was a short enough time after 1983, and the memories of the earlier times were strong. The campus was politically alive, and the Ph D students who trickled into the School of Physical Sciences – 4 in 1987, 5 in 1988, maybe 6 or 7 in 1989, and so on – brought in the culture of the rest of the campus into our growing School. Our Ph D students of the early days were mostly all resident in the hostels, so we indirectly got to hear of what was discussed, the issues that were debated, and above all, we got to see first hand what an enabling campus the JNU was. Our students came from a very different demographic than the students at most institutes, and we could see first hand the change that JNU brought about in their lives, as indeed it did in ours.

kk1 There were also some not so pleasant aspects of being at JNU. One was the two culture divide, caused in part by the huge disparity in size between the science Schools and the much larger Schools of International Studies, Language, and Social Sciences. The SPS was very small, even after we started the MSc in Physics, in 1991 or 1992. The students were younger and there were more of them, but still we were a mere ripple in the JNU, and some of the rules and regulations that were needed for a small cohort were not always in consonance with what the larger body had decided. But we went along, for the most part happy to be part of a public university, and adapting to the changes that were needed.

One of the most remarkable aspects of JNU was the position of students vis-a-vis the faculty. From the earliest times, the sense of participation of all students in university matters has been complete, be it at the level of governance or at the level of pedagogy- students have been able to participate in decision making, and indeed their opinions have been sought and respected. Most students (other than in the languages, that is) at JNU entered the university after a Bachelor’s degree elsewhere at the very least- and were therefore also adults for the most part. And they were treated as such, in terms of their responsibilities, in terms of our expectations of them, and in the way in which we dealt with them and their various issues.

Which is why, when in 2017 or 2018, the University administration does not condescend to talk to students let alone treat them as sentient beings capable of making their own choices, it seems an aberration. To be fair to the Administration (with the capital A) they do not talk to teachers either – unless one conforms to an archaic mode of conduct- but in the process, the entire University, teachers and students alike, is given the “Daddy knows best” line, and it is up to us to conform.

This process of infantilization is simply unacceptable.

It is tiresome to repeat the arguments of why the attendance issue is being misrepresented, and why it could and should have been done better, so I shall not. But as one who has taught at JNU for the past thirty or so years, I know that the real issue is of learning. Over time, the nature of pedagogy has changed, not just in JNU but also all across the world. The internet, the availability of online material, YouTube, Wikipedia, more books and better libraries- all of this has democratized the classroom as never before. To be sure, teachers are still needed, but our roles have evolved in a fundamental and significant way, something that the purveyors of attendance sheets cannot realize. The focus has to shift to evaluating outcomes fairly, to know what students have acquired and to ensure that they have learned the skills they need and not to ensure that they have 75% attendance. That is simply not the point, and in short, they.just.don’t.get.it.

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And regrettably, they cannot realize it because, at a deep and fundamental level, the real reason that they just don’t get it is because they simply are not very capable. It can indeed be difficult to have to cope with not being very good… being fairly mediocre and knowing it can be a difficult cross to bear. The knowledge also that come what may, try as one might, one is never going to quite make the cut: When mediocrity is coupled with authority, the combination is toxic.

There are many things that need to change in JNU, and those that have lived with it for the past so many years are best placed to advise on what is needed and how best to make the change. The hostels need better administration, for sure. The fees need to be rationalised to a less embarrassing level: the JNU annual tuition fees have not changed in years, the hostel charges are unrealistic, and this is against a backdrop where salaries and scholarships have been growing, keeping pace with the growth of the economy in fair measure. One can list more, indeed several more things that need change, but this should, in the best spirit of the campus, be done through discussion, through debate. Not via edicts, and certainly not under the pretence of having had decisions passed in the Academic Council when they were not. Or by the fabrication, the fraudulent claim that letters of support were strongly endorsed when the eminent alleged signatories simply deny ever having done so. A shame that it has come down to this.

There is a peculiar stillness in the University today – a disquiet and a lack of enthusiasm that does not bode well. Dialogue is out, and in some sections, so is hope. Many of the things that the old JNU fought for and implemented have been done away with, and the price to be paid is that the campus demographic will change significantly in these few years. And then, there will be no one left to care.

Pushpa Bhargava, Mentor and Friend

When I came to the University of Hyderabad in 2011, one of the first people I called upon was PMB, Pushpa Mittra Bhargava. Someone I had known in one or the other capacity since 1983, my most recent interaction with him then had been at a book release at the IIC, when my colleague at JNU, Prof. Bipan Chandra had asked me to be one of the speakers at the NBT release of PMB’s book Angels, Devils, and Science. I’ve forgotten now precisely what I said, but given my preoccupations at that time, I would have spoken of Kosambi, and Bernal, both rationalists who would have appreciated the argumentative Bhargava.

PMB was nothing if he was not complex. Fiercely loved by some of my friends, he was also as disliked by some others. He was outspoken, unapologetic, opinionated, he could be dismissive of others and very full of himself, but he was also always knowledgeable, erudite, and above all, genuine. By the time I got to know him, when he had more time to spend, it must also be admitted, he was already in his late 70’s. In 1983, though, he had invited me to CCMB to give a seminar, and I remember his interest at that time was on Manfred Eigen’s hypothesis on the origin of life, and whether something like life might have just happened by chance in the chaos of early Earth. From that early interaction, a scientific collaboration grew between Somdatta Sinha, staff member at CCMB and myself, resulting in three journal articles, and more importantly, a lifelong friendship (it helps also that we share a birthdate) that has outlived spouses and geographical dislocations. We wrote an article that has appeared today in The Wire, and I quote from it below, with permission.

Pushpa Mittra Bhargava – a.k.a. PMB – was larger than life. His flamboyance was multidimensional, from the striking printed bush-shirts he was very often seen wearing, to the scientific friends and colleagues he cultivated, to the remarkable institution that he built and causes he espoused. Never one to shy away from controversy, he was one of the most outspoken public scientists in the country, and one who stood his ground on political as well as scientific fronts. There have been few like him in terms of his personal courage, and fewer still who were as unafraid to be vocal on issues that challenged his personal convictions.

PMB, born in Ajmer in 1928, was educated in Lucknow. He obtained his PhD from Lucknow University in 1949 and shortly thereafter moved to Hyderabad, to work at the CSIR’s Regional Research Laboratory (RRL) as an organic chemist. Although he spent a few years in the US and in England, he remained a Hyderabadi for the rest of his life, and Hyderabad is where both of us got to know him more closely, although at different stages of our lives.

Like few other chemists in the country in the 1950s and 1960s, PMB was greatly taken up by the ‘molecular’ approach to biology. He was an evangelist, and as students we recall his efforts in the early 1970s in persuading the faculty and students of leading chemistry departments in the country to look into the then-nascent field of molecular biology. He campaigned with great energy for setting up the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology (CCMB), first within RRL Hyderabad (now called the Indian Institute of Chemical Technology) in 1977.

Although a separate campus was not established for the institute until the mid 1980s, he was able to attract some outstanding talent to CCMB as well as some stellar visitors – James Watson and Francis Crick among them. From its inception, the CCMB had a distinctive character, marked by a fresh and distinctly innovative approach. It was always a very special type of laboratory within the CSIR. PMB’s vision was evident on all scales, from the type of building to the art in the corridors, the groups that were formed and the problems that were studied.

In turn, two very distinctive features of PMB and his approach to institution building are worth noting. The first is the sense of aesthetics, his ability to integrate artistic sensibility into the work environment, something he shared with Homi Bhabha and C.V. Raman. Indeed, he paid close attention to the details of design and he prioritised aesthetics and functionality over all else, be it the CCMB or his own residential quarters.

The second was his belief in the need for scientists to speak up for the cause of science, and the need for public intellectuals to engage on contemporary issues in forums that were appropriate. He ensured that CCMB would have occasions to invite the common people to come see what science was being done there, but he would also make the lectures by leading scientists available to the public at large. He believed that it was the duty of scientists to fellow citizens to explain and encourage them to get excited by science, and think scientifically.

From the early 1980s to this day, thousands of school and college students and their parents, and countless others, would visit CCMB and learn from the faculty and students there as to what work was going on. Another of his passions was MARCH (Medically Aware and Responsible Citizens of Hyderabad), an organisation that he cofounded and which would meet every month to discuss some issue or other pertaining to public health. Given his sensibilities, these would be current and he would also get some of the leading experts to come and talk.

Of course, the cause of public engagement could take extreme forms. In 2015, he returned his Padma Bhushan (awarded to him in 1986) to the Government of India as a protest against the government’s attack on rationalism, reasoning and science. Years earlier, in 1994, he had resigned from the fellowship of the science academies of India for their lack of opposition to governmental plans to introduce astrology into university curricula. He spoke out against many issues, such as homoeopathy, GM crops, irrational beliefs and superstitions, pseudoscience and the lack of scientific temper, and about which there are numerous reports in the media. He responded to national issues with conviction and inevitably made enemies for his strong views and actions.

But what remain are indelible impressions of PMB the man. Both of us were associated with and influenced, in different ways, by him over a long period of time. Oddly enough, it was his intellectual curiosity that stimulated our academic collaboration, starting with an invitation to RRL to speak at the CCMB in 1983. At that time, SS had just joined CCMB as a young faculty member: fresh from JNU and working in an area of biology most people were unfamiliar with, and always ready to question the ‘administration’s decisions’.

PMB would listen patiently. Faculty meetings encouraged long discussions, dissent, arguments over institutional issues – and all this came largely from the sense of belonging that he instilled in the staff. Hugely nationalistic, in a way that was appropriate at that period of time, PMB would ask, “Why can we not do this work here?” of one or the other scientific problem. Keenly aware of trends in world science, he encouraged faculty to think of difficult and completely new problems that could have applications to society. He had the ability to find excellence and innovative ideas in people, independent of their rank or academic pedigree.

Regular group meetings with scientific literature reviews, a steady stream of national and international visitors whom the young faculty and PhD students always met, implementing a full technical group to support biologists with instrumentation issues, setting up a fully participatory and shared work atmosphere, and, most importantly, making young students and faculty feel the aura of basic science and giving the confidence of wanting to do interesting and difficult work, was PMB’s seminal contribution to the next generation of students and faculty.

There were also aspects of PMB that were difficult to deal with. Views that diverged widely from his were unsustainable. Those who could not convince him of their viewpoint either had to concur or leave. He could be arrogant, on many issues he was mistaken or inconsistent, and he could often seem autocratic and dogmatic. He had his blind spots. But for all his strong opinions, he had a commitment to quality, and in the end this is essential to build anything that will last. eminent-scientist-pm-bhargava

And PMB was much more than even this. To people around him – students, young faculty, the lab-boys, gardeners, drivers, people who managed the instruments, air-conditioning, guesthouse and canteen, and others – he was intensely personal. Cutting across hierarchies, he was one of them, their own PMB. He made everybody feel that working together towards excellence in all spheres is the way to excel. CCMB was not only known for its science but also its cleanliness, beauty, reliably excellent facilities and the ability to have the scientific faculty, administration, engineering, stores and purchase, gardening and hospitality services work together smoothly, like a well-oiled machine.

It would not be an exaggeration to say that all this happened largely due to the contagious enthusiasm that PMB radiated. He was always there. This was a new approach to the directorial style, one that was uncommon in those days (and even now). He knew everybody by name and made it his job to know each person’s concerns. He made lab rules such that anybody could work at any time of day and night, but in a way that safety was never compromised. Support to all employees to be dropped back home at night after work, or if they were stuck in any emergency condition anywhere in India, and interactions allowing free discussions – these were all hallmarks of making one feel ‘at home’ in the workplace.

Untitled He was one of the finest institution-builders in India as he could integrate the Indian culture of togetherness with the western culture of hard work. Several people who went on from CCMB to other institutions have tried to replicate such an ethos. So have several others who have seen it work so effectively at the CCMB. Beyond the flamboyance and everything else, PMB was a great inspiration. A friend and guide to many, his direct and indirect influence on Indian science and scientific culture will be lasting.

Sinning by Silence?

Weltenangst. German somehow seems the right language to use in the present context and if this word is not already a part of the general vocabulary its high time it joined weltschmerz in describing the present global collective and perpetual sense of disquiet that does not seem to let up no matter where or when one looks, home or abroad. There is, in a way that has not earlier been quite as sharp, a distinct sense of the binary: us/them, right/left, right/wrong, in/out… One yearns for a world where the distinctions are recognizably blurred, where the blacks and whites give way to more shades of gray, where one can be more definitely unsure… when one is more willing to learn, and to change.

But since that is not to be, this post is about the need to speak out, inspired by a friend in New York from whom I learned of Ella Wheeler Wilcox‘ poem Protest, written over a century ago. In words that are truly timeless, and as pertinent today as when they were written, she says:

To sin by silence, when we should protest,
Makes cowards out of men. The human race
Has climbed on protest. Had no voice been raised
Against injustice, ignorance, and lust,
The inquisition yet would serve the law,
And guillotines decide our least disputes.
The few who dare, must speak and speak again
To right the wrongs of many.

The poem itself is longer, but this post is about the last two lines from the excerpt above, “The few who dare must speak and speak again”. And it is essential that those who do not speak should at the very least, support those who speak for us, for the values that we hold dear.

The heart of one of the crises we are presently facing, the breakdown of communication between the UGC and the rest of the universe on the matter of admissions to the Ph D, is a matter of perceptions. The UGC believes that a system that works in the US or elsewhere should work here. The here knows that the system that would work elsewhere does not work here, and the proof of the pudding is in its eating… To give complete weightage to an interview would tilt the balance in favour of the more articulate. Who also, typically, have had many of the advantages that make them more articulate in the first place… It is simply not true, as Mr Javadekar asserts, that “UGC regulations on MPhil and PhD admissions are as per the best practices of the world. It is being implemented healthily in all universities. The problem is there in one university.” His statements reflect an imperfect understanding of what the best academic practices are, and what that one university has been trying to do all these years.

To start with, the MPhil is a dying degree that should be allowed to become extinct as per the best practices of the world. And as for healthy implementation, the healthiest implementation of admission to the PhD is through the GRE Examination and applications, with no weightage at all for an oral examination… US university admissions committees know full well that their brightest graduate students (typically those from Asia) may not speak English well enough when they enter, so using performance in an oral entrance examination as a yardstick would serve them badly. They do what works well: Administer a good written examination and choose the best from the written scores. Of course they do it intelligently as well, using a combination of measures, but an interview is typically not one of them.

The UGC would best serve the University community by restricting itself to be a regulatory body as far as curricula are concerned (if at all) and stay away from prescribing admission rules and procedures. There are mechanisms aplenty to identify those who do not follow fair practices, and instead of finding routes of exempting them from fair play (such as declaring them to be INI‘s or Institutions of National Importance), it would serve us all better if the UGC would step in and insist on an even playing field for all.

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To make the point further, the real responsibility is to ensure that all have an equal – or equitable – access to higher education. And one of the reasons for this is that the workforce, especially for skilled jobs, should have a balanced representation. Gender imbalance, for example, at the hiring stage reflects to a large extent the gender imbalance at earlier stages, that of admission to the qualifying degree for example. This is what has been termed the leaky pipeline in the context of gender representation in academic careers, but it is clear that the leaky pipeline idea operates just as well for all other groups, particularly those that have been excluded for one or the other reason.

The human race, Ella Wilcox asserts, has climbed on protest, and indeed we have. And protest we must, at these ill-argued, poorly considered fiats decreed by a body that has lost its relevance, the UGC which should also heed that students of all persuasions are now are opposing this move …

And not just this. It appears that the idea of a university is lost on the very group that needs it most, the government. In the abstract, the government of the people, by the people and for the people, should use those very people it has invested in to help it think through and devise a better future for the rest of the people. And arguably, that is one of the jobs our universities should undertake – take our country into its future. At least that is what, again in the abstract, each modern nation does. It is 2017 after all, and one of the blindingly obvious truths is that any government needs to use the best minds that it can muster, not just the best brawn. To disregard uncomfortable thought is more than just another mistake… Minds are terrible things to waste.

In the past three years, especially in higher education administration one has seen a relentless and uncompromising policy of choosing complaisant and available mediocrity for purposes of ideological resonance. This is a big mistake, one that we really cannot afford, not least because there is saner counsel available.

In a journal article that is available on the net, David Roy Smith of the Department of Biology, University of Western Ontario (DOI: 10.15252/embr.201643750) points out (passionately, one might add) that by democratically electing a person who openly mocks science and what one has learned from science (in the USA) puts both the basic sciences and our planet in danger. To quote from Smith’s article, “The situation is looking equally dire in other parts of the world, with nationalist, anti-immigration, and big business interests taking precedence over the preservation of our planet, its natural resources, and its ecosystems and species. To be an environmentalist, an academic, or a scientist of any kind in this polarized and pernicious political landscape risks being labeled an elitist, a liar, an ultra-leftist, and someone who is out of touch with the average person.”

That is something that those of us who teach at this one University are quite familiar with. Being at JNU is equated in the public (post-truth coloured!) eye as being ultra-leftist and all of the other things Smith says. We see this again and again: To be an academic of any kind in a polarized and pernicious landscape is a major risk. To whit, the following:

copy-2-of-southasian-map-by-himal We are taught – those of us who have learned of the physical world – that there is no special place in space from which one should derive all our coordinates. There really is no preferred sense of direction other than by convention and by legacy. For many years now, I have had the Himal South Asia magazine’s unusual map hanging in my office and have had innumerable discussions (of a non-political kind) about how it helps to change one’s point of view about our country, whats up south and down north and so on. I must say that learning to see this map every working day (and learning to refer to it in as normal a fashion as possible) has also been instructive in its own way, and it seems more natural now to draw a line from Kanyakumari down to Kashmir rather than the other way around. To have any sense of nationalism hinge on a completely arbitrary definition of up or down is to have a somewhat unhinged sense of nationalism.

che And speaking of ultra-leftist, another thing that hangs in my office is (what I consider) a superb poster, a telescopic image of Ché Guevara on the South American continent… something I picked up forty years ago when it was fresh and new, and another thing I have had to explain to any number of visitors who eventually all come down to “Ah… JNU, what else can one expect?” But this is just one poster, and it is more about the kind of aesthetic I cared about at some point in time rather than some ideology that is indelibly tattooed onto my soul.

By discrediting academic values, one discredits a rational approach to governance that might see dissent and protests as part of a process that is, in the end, enriching because of its argumentative nature. And we must therefore support the few who speak and speak again.

Self-organized Mediocrity

In the late 1990’s Per Bak, a vastly talented theoretical physicist, wrote a book titled How Nature Works: the science of self-organized criticality. The title of this blogpost is more than a little inspired by him, and could well be How Universities Work: the process of Self-organized Mediocrity.

Sadly, there is really no attempt on my part to be tongue-in-cheek. The process of self-organized mediocrity is all too evident in department after department in institution after institution in the country, especially the less endowed ones.

As for self-organized mediocrity, or SOM, once one has give the phenomenon a name, what more is there to say? But like T S Eliot might have said, giving it a name is a difficult matter, it isn’t just a holiday game… And like the wonderful idea of Gross National Happiness one might equally well say that there is not much more to the concept than the name, but indeed there is… It makes sense to draw attention to the fact that a country benefits more from the happiness of its people than what it produces for others.

Nevertheless, SOM will bear some elaboration even though the “effanineffable” name itself conveys much of the basic concept. There is a long-standing in-joke among academics, that academic politics are so vicious because the stakes are so small. Variously attributed to Henry Kissinger, Woodrow Wilson, Wallace Sayre and others, the basic sentiment apparently goes back to Samuel Johnson, in whose times, the universities had very different structures. But in some sense the joke rings somewhat hollow these days, particularly for the Indian university. The stakes are not really all that small at all, and the internal politics at most academic institutions can be vicious. Regrettably, its also not just the internal politics- the world outside the campus walls has a way of sneaking into academic affairs and in many of our institutions, the (external) political positions inform and guide the internal.

This is a particularly difficult time for higher education in India. There is not enough money, the resources are stretched almost to breaking point, and there is little appreciation of what higher education truly entails. In some sense, the old model has exhausted itself: it is simply not possible to educate the large numbers of students (at present and in the future) with the tools and techniques of the 1970’s and 1980’s, which is what is extant at most institutions at present. And the style of the 1980’s differs too little from that of the 1950’s, while the youth of today are light-years apart from those of the 1980’s or the 1950’s, in mentality, in preparedness, and in motivation. Apart, not ahead.

Universities tend to succumb to inertia, and public universities inevitably succumb to an inertia fueled by public cynicism and low expectations. The demand for high quality higher education at negligible cost is a hangover from colonial times, regardless of how it might be dressed up as a state responsibility to provide good education to its people. This has resulted in our country creating small enclaves of privilege where a few can indulge, at state expense, in scholarship without having to pay for these privileges by having to teach others. Some find asylum in such enclaves (and then proceed to educate others on the need to respect “merit”) while others who gravitate to universities find the environment plagued by excessive political interference and few resources.

And what little is available is bitterly fought over. The crab mentality in academic institutions is well known the world over – one does not mind not having something so long as one’s colleague also does not have it, and one can do a fair amount by way of machination and petty politics to ensure that nobody does better than oneself. Except that in pulling others down, the only denouement that is ensured is that all are at a uniform low level: this is the self-organized mediocrity. And Departments will do the same to other Departments when it comes to space, students, or any other resources, gradually driving institutions into mediocrity…

[I should here acknowledge the inspiration behind this nomenclature. The theory of self-organized criticality or SOC has been around and quite influential for almost three decades now. It deals with systems whose dynamics – without external impetus – drives itself to a critical state and maintains it there. The archetypical example is a sandpile depicted in the charming illustration above: adding more and more sand beyond a point leads to a sandpile that maintains it’s shape by letting off sand in avalanches. The picture is, of course, incomplete without another denizen of the beach, the crab.]

I recently found that one of my heroes, D D Kosambi said something to the same effect in an autobiographical piece he wrote towards the end of his life. In the early 1960’s, K. Satchidananda Murthy and K. Ramakrishna Rao of the Department of Philosophy at Andhra University in Waltair invited a number of thinkers to contribute articles on their personal philosophy as researchers. This collection eventually appeared as Current Trends in Indian Philosophy, a book that was published in 1972 by Andhra University Press. One of the articles therein is by DDK, titled Adventures into the Unknown. This essay runs to some twenty pages and has been excerpted, bowdlerized and re-published as Steps in Science in the DDK commemoration volume, Science and Human Progress.

DDK-pic2 — D D Kosambi in his mid-twenties

Both versions of the essay were published posthumously (Kosambi died in 1966) and they largely overlap, except that the more widely circulated commemoration volume, Science and Human Progress, has been somewhat sanitized. The wit of Kosambi is largely missing in this autobiographical piece, and given that the original is very articulate on some of the more difficult aspects of Kosambi’s life, it is a pity that the editors of the latter felt the need to remove these bits. (I hope to discuss the articles and the changes in a subsequent post on this blog; I have my theories…)

One bit that was not excised in the second essay was on Kosambi’s perceptions of the working conditions for the scientist in India: The greatest obstacles to research in any backward, under-developed country are often those needlessly created by the scientist’s or scholar’s fellow citizens. The passage of time has not done much to change the appositeness of this observation even if it was deeply coloured by the personal tribulations that Kosambi had faced towards the end of his life.

One of the sadder aspects of self-organized mediocrity is that it is both not inevitable and is really quite unnecessary. And at the same time, the academic landscape is littered with universities that were great, departments that had seen better days, all described with more than a tinge of “what might have been”, and regrets for what was not achieved.

I have been mulling over the present post for some time now. In part it is occasioned by responses to an earlier post on the Department of Chemistry at IIT Kanpur. A comment made by more than one of my friends was that successful examples of institutions in India were uncommon enough that one needed to analyze just why they were successful while others were not. But that would require the efforts of a gifted analyst of the sociology of institutions, or maybe an institutional historian and archivist.

When the School of Physical Sciences was just established at JNU, well-wishers told those of us who were there at the time that twenty-five years was the half-life of most departments in the country. Its been nearly 30 years now, but from the inside one cannot easily tell if the half-life has been crossed or not. But one thing that has become obvious in recent years is that the present funding pattern of the UGC makes it very difficult for universities to achieve any kind of excellence. In fact, carrying out the routine tasks of teaching and research (at whatever level) can take all one’s effort-

But to get back to Chemistry at IIT-K, one of the things it seems to have done was to evolve with the times. As an IIT, the institution was also insulated, by and large, from the sickness of poor funding. And regardless of what the internal dynamics might have been, the Department has always stood as one. Regrettably, this does not happen in most other academic departments, and the consequences are out there in plain view for all to see…