Academic freedom may mean many things to many people but it is always suspect in the eyes of the government. (Express illustration/File)
By Tanvir Aeijaz
Should we obey the state even if it inflicts injustice on its citizens? What strategies must social movements adopt to annihilate caste and patriarchy? Should nation-states, like erstwhile empires, disintegrate if they are not able to sustain themselves? How much can culturally motivated collective violence, like lynch mobs, produce new forms of hatred?
Questions such as these throw open debate in the social science classrooms of our universities. The geography of fear and violence pervading our civil society, and the universities embedded in it, has an impact on these day-to-day debates. Teaching social science, particularly political science and history, is becoming increasingly onerous. Teachers bear the apprehension of being targeted by the burgeoning culture of intimidation in student politics. The question, keeping the Ramjas college incident earlier this year in mind, is: Is it possible to have an academic discourse without the freedom to express one’s mind by the faculty and students?
Modern universities function best when they promote a culture of innovation and dissemination of knowledge for the greater good. A university can fulfil this role if its members are free to critically ideate and debate the externalities, follow their studies and research, wherever they may lead. It is important here to note that university values cannot be beholden to majoritarian preferences, or the desires of its clientèle. Teaching and research needs to be a mix of the principles of reasoned argument, empirical data and judicious inference. Whenever there is an interference in these processes — by the polity, market or cultural groups — there is a major possibility of skewing truth to the needs of power and, consequently, flinging universities into crisis.
Academic freedom may mean many things to many people but it is always suspect in the eyes of the government. For instance, Nandini Sundar’s book The Burning Forest: India’s War in Bastar hasn’t gone down well with a few teachers in Delhi University and they were protesting against its inclusion in the syllabi. The protest is mainly on the title of the book — India’s War in Bastar — and not on the book per se, indicating that the protesters didn’t bother to read it. But the university would actually be enriched by the conversations in and around the book. Study and inquiry by scholars, including students, that is truly free often strays outside political bounds.
Scholars are wont to read, write, say and do things that challenge, provoke, upset, or offend others. They pick up the most contentious, but nevertheless important, topics of the day. A good university must challenge social values, policies and institutions and like Socrates, this will be discomforting. Instead of scorning such research, the government and university administration must ensure that scholars are judged solely on intellectual merit. We know well that the market and eleemosynary institutions tame academic freedom in their own interest. The commercial principle of consumer satisfaction would needlessly sap the faculty’s will to prioritise intellectual merit and vitiate the very basis of academic freedom.
Universities, by their very right to deliver education and scholarship, try hard to assert academic freedom through their own decision-making procedures on the content of curriculum and the mode of its delivery, on the agendas of research and the policy outcomes drawn from them, and on the benchmarking of students, teachers and scholars. In order to defend academic freedom, universities must collectively develop an open statement of principles focusing on the core values of the academic community. These principles will undoubtedly help make respectful disagreement possible.
More often than not, it is the faculty which is not able to use and defend the academic freedom. They find themselves neck-deep in the politics of appointment, posts and privileges. It’s high time the faculty advances its freedom by using it to follow ideas where they lead, without fear, favour or preconception.
It is quite deplorable to witness some of our public universities under severe constraint. University governance has become more subservient in the patron-client fashion, to the state and corporates, which obfuscates the collegial processes of academic decision making. Such an academic milieu has jeopardised the university’s response to changing societal imperatives.
At its core, classroom teaching must impart the kind of education where students grapple with ideas that are stimulating, perplexing, challenging or merely delightful. When students see as to how the powers of free inquiry develops the innate cognitive skills in their own lives, they will value it. Universities in pursuit of academic freedom enhances its members’ “capacity to aspire” and strengthens civil society.