politics Archives - And then...

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.

In my previous post, I wrote about SOM or self-organized mediocrity, the unnecessary but seemingly inevitable fate of many academic departments in the country. Some colleagues wrote in, a few in agreement, but a few to express dissatisfaction with what I had written.

I thought I would take the chance to expand the discussion, with a little help from my friends. On the face of it, there is little to disagree with the idea of SOM. Most cases of institutional decay seem to be nobody’s fault but those of the protagonists. But in writing on issues like higher education and other public matters, one challenge is to go beyond stating the obvious. While the problems are quite apparent, as are some solutions, their resolution seems to require near superhuman effort at least within the constraints imposed by the existing system.

As my friend SR said: Yes! Very nice to read. Then what……? What does one do about this? Accept that this is so? Do we see a change? Do we see a change in theory? In practice?

Many questions, SR, but the post was meant to provoke an individual reaction. What should you do? You too have been in a position of responsibility. If only I had a prescription for what we all should do! I personally don’t believe that one has to accept the inevitability of SOM, but avoiding it will only come with some hard work and harder decisions. Some of it is knowing, like the Red Queen, that one has sometimes to keep running as fast as possible to even just manage to stay in the same place. And as for how to make a palpable change, one that one can see, an answer was to some extent posed by another friend, AD. Of which more below.

Our Departments and Universities are to be seen always as works in progress, projects under construction. I think that point of view gets lost, once some success has been reached. But with the smallest slips – like a bad hire – one is saddled with a liability that does not go away easily. In fact, it propagates easily, as mediocrity breeds much faster than excellence.

AD’s diagnosis is that a major cause for SOM is hiring people who are less than top quality in both technical AND social skills. It is pretty easy to evaluate technical skills and thus to hire only A-level people technically. But, social skills are much harder to evaluate. People who lack the desire and ability to work together to build an organization will ultimately kill it. Such people are interested in building their own careers, groups, fiefdoms, etc., but not the organization.

The desire and ability to work together is an absolute essential when it comes to nurturing an academic institution, or perhaps any large enterprise as AD also wrote, This could also have been written about many academic institutions in the USA as well as businesses around the world. It likely true for almost all large government organizations.

Another friend, MP felt that I had deliberately pulled [my] punches which would have made this a telling piece. I don’t agree with your analogy because the sand pile retains its shape, but mediocrity digs bottomless pits! To which I kind of agree and kind of don’t. The only linen I would have to wash is predictably petty, and actually with the passage of time, I find the details less interesting than the broad brush-strokes. Sure, every department has its politics, and some of it’s denizens are cursed with a long memory for trivia, the griots who keep alive a list of past injustices, of academic and non-academic skirmishes and battles. But my concern was more that this story seems to get played out everywhere, with an occasional change of cast, but the same institutional ecosystem. And MP is absolutely correct that the critical sandpile keeps its shape, but the mechanism of SOM ensures a flat and uneven landscape. The pits, in short.

The crab mentality also makes sure that nobody rises above the low mean. And the most recent instance that prompted my somewhat bitter comments had to do with trying to establish a department to study a major new discipline, only to find opposition on the most flimsy grounds. Each campus also has its Kaikeyis, who remember every past promise, and for whom a personal advantage overwhelms that of the group. But let me not say more on that- each of us has tales that are better told in convivial company. I’m not pulling my punches, MP, but there is just so much one can say. Without naming names, we do know that the landscape is littered with departments that had everything going for them have not stayed anywhere near their peaks.

Of course, the worry is always one’s own. The School of Physical Sciences at JNU started off in 1986, and now 30 years later, one keeps worrying about how it is doing… I had tangentially suggested (appealing to a comment of D D Kosambi) that some of our difficulties come from the challenges of trying to build alien structures without the requisite resources- the sad consequences of growing an expensive research enterprise in an under-developed country. But when I said “from the inside one cannot easily tell if the half-life has been crossed or not“, my friend KK pointed out that the job had to be done by oneself.

In a thoughtful note, he went on to say that measures of half-life can be gauged internally by asking some difficult questions. I’ve edited his note to share (here is a recipe, SR),

Rate of change: Lifespan of faculty, and how has the faculty strength changed over time. Is this competitive? Sustainable?
Average age of faculty retained for 5 years, 10 years, 20 years since inception. Many departments don’t have the freedom to hire as they choose, but it is possible to plan on keeping a desirable age profile.
Students: Are they generally getting better or worse in grades/skills/capability/employment? Are teaching laboratories keeping up with the times, given the resources.
Process time: Is the university a faster or slower place to implement a decision compared to what happens in society? (Agility in making a purchase etc.).
Infrastructure: Are the basic facilities outside the university better than that inside? Why?
External connections: Are connections getting built with targets outside the University? University departments should eventually benefit some group, especially in industry or in different sections of society.

There may be more ways, but the basic point is clear: Look within. If you want to know how to avoid self-organized mediocrity, most of the answers are there.

Tag: politics

Death by Infantilization

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