Why expansion of public universities alone won't save India's higher education

There's a lot wrong with universities the world over. Financial imperatives to run profit-making courses and institutions, and the instrumentalisation of degrees are two aspects of neoliberal accounting procedures that dominate the life of learning today. The downward spiralling of standards, in a self-regulating association of "peers" when mediocrities make it to the top, is not an unrelated problem. The instrumentalisation of higher education and the consequent dumbing down of learning lowers overall standards of learning, thereby allowing mediocrities and apparatchiks to dominate universities, and the trends become mutually reinforcing.  Each country, region or jurisdiction has its own specific variations on this theme, but the general problem is recognisable. And each country, region or jurisdiction has its version of nostalgia for bygone eras where things were allegedly better. We are here concerned with the Indian version of the problem.

In the course of these discussions, a number of issues are often confused or conflated: the independence of education and research from agendas imposed by funding bodies, private or public; the extent of access to higher education among previously underprivileged social groups; the intensity and quality of the intellectual environment provided by universities; education as a public good versus "returns on investment in education" for private individuals.

A recent commentator, a respected longstanding Marxist professor emeritus of economics, Prabhat Patnaik, has proposed that the "commodification of education" in India is an outcome of the increasing privatisation of higher education. The solution proffered is, firstly, "a massive expansion of public institutions of higher education so that the tendency towards privatisation (and hence commodification) is not just halted but reversed"; and secondly, "the removal of the middle-class monopoly over higher education" by bringing in "deprived segments" of society into higher education in large numbers.

This is reductive: there is no indication that public institutions have succeeded in being less neoliberal in their logic, or in creating markedly different student attitudes to instrumentalising their degrees. Nor is it clear that private institutions of higher education are necessarily any worse at providing learning than the public ones. There are significant variations across institutions in this respect. More importantly, the argument that the expansion of public higher education institutions will kill private ones ignores a very crucial set of political contexts.

First, let us look at the question of the alleged independence of public universities. It was long assumed that publicly funded higher education would continue to be independent of government control despite the government being its main source of funding. The constitution of Weimar Germany guaranteed this scholarly independence, as did the "Haldane principle" in the United Kingdom all the way until the current prime minister David Cameron indirectly denounced it by announcing that the government would refuse to fund anything not directly useful. In India, more resource-constrained, we are aware that, more than any First World example we might provide, this scholarly independence was always more imagined than real. And the Narendra Modi government, an explicitly right-wing regime with authoritarian tendencies, insistent on imposing its world view on education of all description, and is already offering to impose uniform syllabi in accordance with its ideological proclivities. In this context, the assertion that an expansion of public universities would automatically lead to progress and independence in learning is nothing short of idiotic. In such universities, larger numbers of students from underprivileged backgrounds would simply have the right of access to more government propaganda. And, of course, with the provision of these ideologically doctored degrees, the most sensible student reaction to such a degree would be not to take it seriously except as a route to earning a better living.

We could leave aside for the time being the fact that "public" universities the world over are expected to garner private funding for some (and increasingly more and more) of their activities, which of course makes the sharp line drawn between private and public completely artificial. We could even leave aside the distinction normally drawn between scientific or technical subjects, allegedly less prone to ideological manipulation, and the humanities and social sciences, also allegedly more "humanist" and less prone to instrumentalisation. These also complicate the somewhat simplistic arguments put forth.

And we could turn instead to how "public" universities in India actually worked. It would be only honest to remind ourselves that appointment committees were usually based on patronage networks; that unconnected scholars could seldom get jobs or scholarships, and sometimes were excluded even from positions on MA or PhD programmes; that a well-known group of pro-CPI(M) scholars ran great swathes of patronage networks that simply made it impossible to function without their protection. Lest this sound like a version of the standard BJP "communist plot" argument, let me clarify that there was very little that was ideological about much of this. In other words, it was not that we had radical Marxist intellectuals searching for committed fellow travellers to join their ranks in order to radicalise the next generation. Indeed, to qualify for the patronage of the Aligarh networks, for instance, loyalty was far more valued than competence in Marxist argument or in the discipline of history. It has been widely noted that to show competence in mathematical economics at one of the famous Jawaharlal Nehru University economics departments was to invite contempt from the majority of the faculty, regardless of the directions to which one put these mathematical skills. Very little education of the educators emerged from these machinations.

One could argue that the pluralism of Congress and Congress-led regimes simply consisted in their ability to work together or coexist with these ideological networks; and that the current government has rationalised existing procedures, simply making them more explicit and formal, and changing ideological direction. Research councils that control access to funding are now ideologically coordinated. As the Hindutva tendency controls more and more academic space, a consequentially larger number of their cadre get jobs and funding. The argument that much of their activity cannot be reconciled with international standards of any prevailing academic discipline could easily have been applied to earlier times, although it would definitelybe accurate to say that there was more space for more competent academics under earlier regimes.

So it may even be true that it is the private sector in higher education that will prove, in current circumstances, to be more independent, more conducive to independent thinking, and even more accessible to underprivileged and underrepresented sections of society. This of course is dependent on the nature of each institution, and in the longer term on the extent to which an authoritarian government wishes to exert control over private educational institutions, or on the ideological propensities, resilience or staying power of individual funders or entrepreneurs. These are all unsatisfactory non-solutions. Still, the argument that state provision is always better depends, as Marxists ought to know, on the nature of the state.