Why are our universities becoming back-offices of corporates?

Have universities across India lost their conscience of the future? One wonders whether universities have lost their grammar, the very language of ethics and morality. These questions are very fundamental at a historical juncture, or at a particular time in history when democracy as a way of life has lost out to democracy as an electoral phenomenon anchored in majoritarian politics.

Is India still democratic? Or is it an assumption that we are unable to deny under today's majoritarian regime of the BJP.

The government's recent demonetisation move has completely taken over the psychological consciousness of the public and the polity. In fact, the creation of the demonetisation myth is the new sacrifice for the national good.

To a certain extent, the myth resonates a rhetoric similar to that of a development project that justifies death and destruction over national good. The demonetisation move is as pathetic a move by the BJP as the recent victory of Donald Trump is in the US presidential elections.

In one sense, both events have a certain sense of commonality. Narendra Modi's demonetisation move, the night before Trump was elected as next president of the US, shows a gradual shift in terms of the nature of democracies that India and the US are turning into.

In fact, it appears as if democracy is now just a wish-list, which can be altered according to one's own need, necessity and politics. It is no more the premise on which we embed our values, our cultures, our science and our actions.

One of the best examples of growing indifference to democracy comes from university spaces. Universities post the liberalisation period have turned into monstrous evils which no longer hold democratic values. University spaces have become redundant sites where one no longer finds active intellectual academia and creative dissent.

In fact, at a certain level, universities have become miniaturised embodiment of the dualisms in a society where the university syllabus has lost its creative power to interact with society and its everyday problems. Universities today have become assimilation centres, where young minds are constantly fed with the genocidal idea of scientific rationality and industrial development.

The idea of a university which combines unity and diversity has lost its moral cognisance and has ironically become the centre where young minds are constantly told about uniformity and national interest.

Today most institutes of industrial technology and advancement have become nothing less than corporate camps where multinational companies decide the nature of syllabus and the kind of skills imparted by forming a sacred academic board which cannot be challenged by the students.

In fact, a friend of mine who considers himself a victim of scientific education put it brilliantly in a recent conference when he said: "Universities today have replaced tutorial colleges, and have become more of a training centre which serves as a back office for corporations in terms of their human resource mobilisation."

A university as a compost heap of diverse knowledge systems fascinates me. The fascination of this idea of a university is not about creating any new disciplinary thought, but goes much beyond in understanding how various epistemologies of disciplines interact with each other.

Today, the politics of disciplinary thoughts as politics of education across universities looks much worse than the cameo performances of routine politics that we encounter in our day-to-day lives. It in fact makes me sad when I look at a university today, because it is no longer a space that takes the idea of knowledge seriously. On the contrary, it has become a complex mechanism of procedures where creative knowledge is substituted by applied science.

Sustenance as an idea enters the university spaces not as a life-form, but as a complimentary function that aims at sustaining the politics of disciplines alone and it is at that level one is beginning to see the rise of epistemic fascism inside university spaces.

In fact, the idea of university needs a meta-physical understanding of what Portuguese legal philosopher Boaventura De Santos as part of his book Epistemologies of South calls justice against  epistemicide.

The purpose of education, as I understand, is a particular process of communication, where different knowledge cultures and epistemologies interact with each other in a dialogic sense and creatively respond to the challenges of the society. Today, there is a serious break down of this process of communication.

This in fact, throws up primarily two challenges. The first, are university systems still capable of responding to the everyday crisis and problems in society democratically? The second is about the nature of education itself. To a certain extent, in times like these, one is consciously forced to think about education and its adversities.

Corporatisation of university education systems over the decade or so has made tremendous progress in reshaping not only the idea of education but also, fundamentally, how we think. To put it bluntly in the words of David Orr, the American environmental educationist, it's time we start rethinking the purpose of education.

Also read: Modi sarkar's policy to saffronise education much too dangerous for India