Why apolitical campuses are suicidal for the idea of the university
There seems to be a deluge of write-ups following Rohith Vemula's death. And deservedly so, for this is no ordinary death. Rohith's death exposes the hypocrisy and elitism, the twin termites that have eaten in to the very essence of higher education in this country.
Amidst hosts of issues being currently raised, there is one in particular, which is most disturbing in its timing - questioning the very idea of politics in a university campus. Some commentators have argued that the university is a place for education and learning, so why should there be politics and political activism on the campus.
Much that those who understand the larger mandate of education in society may feel outraged at this, there are, sadly, many still that will buy this idea of sanitised campuses; for the logic behind such articulations looks prima facie well-reasoned and innocuous.
This line of argument targets two things simultaneously: One, it casts aspersions on the tragic death of a young man coming from a marginal section of the society and secondly and more deviously, it attempts to use the occasion to consolidate and augment the neo-liberal, industry-centric understanding of the idea of higher education which essentially caters to the affluent strata of the society, caring two hoots to the principles of inclusion and equity.
This set of arguments looks at university campuses as mere cogs in the larger wheels of burgeoning corporate regimes, with their advertised objective of producing the most efficient fits for the respective industries.
Politics for them is hooliganism and a bottleneck to that hallowed process of manufacturing soulless, spineless conformists. Anything which questions the prevalent, pervasive and the dominant becomes anti-social.
In other words, politics in this formulation has only a nuisance value; it is a law-and-order issue. By that logic, Rohith was a deviant, even a criminal.
It is disappointing to come across these views, for not just that they are terribly myopic but more importantly they are dangerous for a society like India.
Politics is at the very heart of higher education and university campuses are sites of training young minds to critique, dissent and pose counter-arguments against the status-quo and the established. If universities are for knowledge creation, then the obvious question would be how we define that knowledge.
Furthermore, knowledge for whom and for what purposes? Whether science or social sciences, creation of knowledge has primarily got to do with being critically engaged with the existing order.
Newton could convert an ordinary act of falling apple in to a scientific law precisely because of his critical mindset. In the realm of social science and humanities, the project is all the more crucial.
For example, the issues related to caste, gender and racism, to name a few, usually get inaugurated as "natural" in our everyday world. It is here that the role of centres of learning including universities becomes crucial. It is in the universities and other centres of learning and education that the learners are exposed to the same world through multiple lenses, via a new perspective or a fresh paradigm.
Reading Ambedkar's Annihilation of caste and exposure to the world of Phule and Om Prakash Valmiki prepares the young minds to look beyond what is given or borrowed.
Reading these texts and getting good grades is just a tiny portion of that vocation or enterprise called education. True knowledge emerges when the learner starts applying the critical and the alternate pedagogy, learnt in the class rooms, for questioning the normal and the taken-for-granted in his or her own everyday world.
If politics is about questioning the banal, routine and the status quoism that is usually tied to regressive and unjust practices, then an ideal university ought to be political. And both the learners and the educators have to have certain element of political activism in their system.
Clearly, those who are rooting for sanitised campuses have a different sense of education and its objectives. Broadly speaking in their scheme of things, a learner is a self-serving entity- he/she learns, earns and accumulates for self aggrandizement.
Contrast this with Ambedkar's "Educate, Agitate and Organise" and you get to see the real motive, the larger design of the exclusionary agenda behind the idea of sanitised campuses.
In Ambedkar's vision, the real objective of higher education is to create learners who are society-serving, rather society altering, to be precise; rather than self-serving and hence his emphasis on agitation and organisation and not just on education.
Annihilating the spirit of debate and dissent in a university campus would be detrimental to the democratic fabric of our society. Let the varied, even contrary and opposed, ideas get debated, discussed and vehemently argued over in our campuses.
A silent campus is a bad idea. Universities and colleges are not cremation grounds; they are birth places of newer ideas and the people there are harbingers of change. Do not silence them unless we want robots. Politically noisy campuses are exciting.
Conformists are the darlings of industries, not of universities. Great universities need more "deviants", such as Rohith Vemula.
Applying the logic of industry to the idea of education and university will be suicidal to our civilisational aspirations. To arrest the decline of universities we will have to make our campuses sensitive and politically alive to the causes, for which Rohith Vemula lived and died.