Why decision to scrap entrance test at Jadavpur University is an assault on liberal education

Before jumping into a debate/discussion on the importance (or the lack of it) of admission tests in the Arts and Humanities departments of Jadavpur University — and liberal arts universities in general — let us come straight to the point and voice something that puzzles many people.

How does an understanding of, say, a comparison between Rabindranath Tagore's later poems and John Donne's metaphysical poems, or the realisation that the cat in Puss in Boots has a lot in common with the fox in similar picaresque folk tales of north Bengal, benefit a person who is going to join the IT industry or file customer invoices, among other unrelated things?

In other words, is rattling stuff from Shakespeare going to help you change a light bulb? The charges of elitism and complete alienation from practical reality are the deadliest weapons that the liberal arts are facing in recent times.

How an orientation in the liberal arts holistically shapes an individual, imbues us with the ability to appreciate the broad brushstrokes of history, culture, and civilisation and enriches our existence even within the invariable parameters that life decides for us, is the subject of broad and extensive discussion; allow me keeping in mind the limitations of space, to present a few salient points.

Robert Maynard Hutchins, the great American educator, wrote in a famous essay on education titled "The Great Conversation" that the aim of liberal education is human excellence both private and public - meaning excellence as a person and as a member of society.

Liberal education teaches students to become lifelong learners who in time become their own best teachers. It enables them to take intellectual risks and to think laterally — to understand how the humanities, the arts and the sciences inform, enrich and affect one another. By connecting diverse ideas and themes across the academic disciplines, liberal arts students learn to better reason and analyse, and express their creativity and their ideas.

The human brain is a collection of neurons and synapses. When the brain forms memories or learns a new task, it encodes the new information by tuning connections between neurons. You learn chess, you learn music, you read a book, and new synaptic connections are formed. Beyond the brain's skill at making sense of what we're seeing, the brain actually goes through changes when we engage with literature, art, or cinema that challenges us intellectually. In fact, a gorgeous painting, sculpture, or other artwork increases blood flow to the brain by as much as 10 per cent - the equivalent of looking at someone you love.

At the same time, reading a book or viewing art isn't just about making sense of words or making sense of shapes and colours. We place ourselves in the narrative and that's a very human thing to do. Think about siding with heroes or sympathising with villains with grey shades or actually experiencing the feeling of tranquillity in a beautiful sylvan surrounding depicted in a painting. This "placement" occurs through a process known as embodied cognition in which mirror neurons in the brain turn things like action, movement, and energy we see in art into actual emotions we can feel.

We actually wouldn't need countless corporate trainers paid humongous amounts of money to keep mouthing clichés about thinking "out of the box" to executives if they have had a liberal arts education.

One really doesn't need to ask a roomful of execs. "Why can't we think of the sky as green and the grass as blue?" if they are familiar with Chagall's paintings.

In a country of polarized politics, a liberal education enables critical thinking and the capacity to put challenging issues into a larger context. Such graduates develop skills to help our country implement solutions rather than simply conduct arguments. A liberal arts education lets us explore. It encourages us to consider and question other opinions and viewpoints. For engineering students it not only give them a break from the usual math and science classes, it encourages them to think about sociological or political issues, historical references, or satirical literature, all of which are important to create a well-rounded student upon graduation. Now more than ever in a fluid world of interdisciplinary learning, we face vexing questions on climate change, scarce resources and porous borders (that bring along with them cultural confrontations) these are critical 21st-century skills because they prepare people to be adaptable and flexible in the face of change. One learns to relate the apparently unrelatable, one learns to join the dots. This, let us keep in mind, is a world in which future jobs profiles are yet to be determined.

Why is it important to have admission tests for those applying to the Arts and Humanities? An admission test tests one's attitude and approach towards a particular subject. A good Arts and Humanities program will filter out those who simply want to join in order to get a degree and dovetail into a job, without the desire to inculcate all these things in his/her personality. The ability to address a question logically, the ability to articulate a question cogently, as well as the temperament of the candidate, are some of the basic things that are tested. When you are getting about 3,000 candidates for the Jadavpur University department of English every year, it is important that you are screened on the basis of your aptitude and enthusiasm for the subject and not mere marks.

School and junior college marks have been bumped up over the last few years to such an extent that in the rat race of admissions, even a student who has 98.9 per cent will be dropped in favour of someone who has 99 per cent.

This has happened over the years because the various boards of education have relaxed their standards to abysmal levels hoping to "pass" everybody but at the same time followed screening methods that have simply become reduced to the farce of competing decimals.

Are all these students getting marks in the higher nineties brilliant geniuses? Evidence would prove otherwise on a close scrutiny of their articulation, grammar, exposure, and general enthusiasm. The coaching classes which have mushroomed in every corner of India, boasting about the "achievements" of their students do not exactly teach these things in their swotting or "ratta maroing" factories. The education system is a meat grinder and the marks it awards are for who can mug up the most.

The executive council of Jadavpur University, Calcutta, scrapped the admission tests for the Arts Faculty on July 4, 2018, only a week before the scheduled dates of the admission tests, without citing any acceptable reason. Abhijit Gupta, senior faculty of JUDE describes the chain of events:

"The mode of admissions to all the undergraduate courses of the Faculty of Arts, JU was published on 9 June 2018, following a meeting of Admission Committee of the Faculty of Arts on 6 June 2018.

The decision of the Executive Council of the University changed the norms in significant ways on 27.06.2018 by resolving that all departments taking admission tests would compulsorily take 50% weightage from Board results. This changed the criteria for departments of English, Comparative Literature.

On 4.7.2018 the Executive Council of JU yet again changed the norm. Now they decided that only the results of the board examination would be considered; there would be no written examinations at all.

For an applicant to English or Comparative Literature, this means that the norm was changed from 100 per cent based on admission test to zero per cent. Applicants had applied on the basis of the first notification. They had studied accordingly, they had pinned their hopes on the test."

Much will be written about the nitty gritty's of events preceding and following this, the sordid politics that has reared its ugly head in one of the most prestigious universities of India, as well as the State government's attempt at hijacking JU's autonomy, but some facts need to be established.

A university is an institute of higher studies and is not responsible for primary education, nor is it a rehabilitation centre for students with high marks but no academic value. The admission test has been a time-tested procedure at Jadavpur University, which has enabled the university to maintain its excellence over the years.

If this is considered "elitist" by the education minister of West Bengal, then such elitism is much to be desired, because the alternative is appalling.

Arunava Sinha, well-known translator and alumnus of JUDE, says, "It takes decades to build an institution, and an hour to dismantle it. The English department at Jadavpur University has honed its reputation for being (one of) the finest centres of literature studies in south Asia with many years of hard work that has been both imaginative and meticulous, both creative and rigorous.

The innovative admission test has always sought out young people who love literature and can contribute to absorbing, questioning, critiquing and admiring it, irrespective of their performance in the (not always) bloodless war that is the Class 12 board examination.

I have met many graduates of the English department of Jadavpur University (I go back a very long way) with extraordinary powers of critical analysis, creative engagement, clear-sighted thinking, and gracefully cogent self-expression. I have hired some of them, edited their work (and had my work edited by them), recommended them for projects, argued with them, and constantly learned from them.

In fact, this is true not just of the English Department, but of all the Humanities departments of Jadavpur University."

Responding to charges of those who favour the doing away of admission tests on the grounds that candidates are selected on the basis of their pre existing cultural and social privileges, Rimi Chatterjee, senior faculty, JUDE quips sarcastically, setting an imaginary admission test question, "Admission tests are elitist scams that allow privileged wannabe-white babus and mems to continue their monopoly of postcolonial cultural capital.

Do you agree? Answer with reference to your idea of how a university should be run."

Ahona Panda, an alumnus of JUDE says, "When people speak of how "elite" English department is, I remember of the hours spent with my friends from Bengali medium schools whose depth and reading of Bengali literature was far greater than mine. And they wrote the English department admission tests and qualified."

The excellence of an educational institution should be decided not by how a student fares in the examinations but how well he does in the real world.

Did you turn out a student with excellent academic records who just became a drone of the system sans humanist sensibilities, sensitivities, empathy, sans the willingness to engage with the political and social world, sans intellectual flexibility, and above all a sense of humour that makes the vicissitudes of life bearable?

Then you have failed. Our educational systems have been succeeding on paper and failing in the practical sense all these years.

The Arts and Humanities department of Jadavpur University was an exception to this sorry trend, this unbroken continuum of mediocrity that churned out bots by the thousand every year, to take their places as cubicle Dilberts, swelling an already acquiescent obedient population.

What the WB state government is doing by interfering in JU's admission procedure is what any fascist government believes in doing.

The creation of a captive population without the spirit of inquiry, malleable of spirit, weak of spine, solipsistic to the core.

Also read: A Latur murder reveals the dark side of Maharashtra's education system