By Om Prakash Dwivedi
“We know, we know,” as Saul Bellow’s character Mr. Sammler says about human behaviour, “we also forget, forget.” This act of knowing and forgetting is central to understanding the abysmal condition of many public universities worldwide. As George Orwell wrote,
“The further a society drifts from the truth, the more it will hate those who speak it.”
In the same way, the pursuit of knowledge seems to be condemned from all corners of power because we have echo chambers dictating the virtue signals. So, while most of us are aware of the wrongdoings in universities, the majority prefer to remain silent, lest it involves risk not only to one’s job but also to certain predefined privileges. The language of greed and fear is always inadequate to express the importance of public reason, which is ingrained in the DNA of our universities. No wonder both the public and public reason are pushed to the peripheries of policymaking.
We live in times of great paradox, where universities are being asked to toe the culture of the market rather than lead in creating cultures of autonomy and meritocracy. To turn our institutions into endorsements of capital and xenophobic culture is a sign of our failure to feel and to think for a sense of collectiveness. We cannot think collectively for various reasons. Most obvious are the facts that we have wired ourselves to the particularities of selective ideologies, and then there exists a large army of pseudo-intellectuals in academia who only think in terms of profit and loss to remain ensconced in their personal extravagance, feeding off both citizens’ taxes and state privileges while letting students’ rights and entitlements fade into oblivion. If communities struggle to access quality education in these public institutions, it is largely because education no longer figures in the list of priorities for governments and many of our so-called visionary academic leaders. Perhaps it is also due to our willed consent to let these universities die.
Universities, whose purposive action is to produce thinkers, activists, and professionals—thus blurring the palpable societal distinctions of caste, class, and other forms of hierarchy—have apparently been asked to divorce themselves from communities and public reason. What was supposed to be the pinnacle of our imagination is slowly being pushed into shambles. The inherent signature style of universities—merit, thinking minds, and professionalism—is now, unfortunately, found only on their websites and brochures. One can even say that normative moorings and commitment to society are available only for window marketing at our educational institutions. Indeed, a strange turn of events! Public reason and activism are not only discouraged but seen as theatrics of anti-isms. Public reason, sanctified as the flesh and bone of our universities, is being privatised strategically through the eulogising and sloganeering of ‘bright future’ and ‘industry meritocracy.’ No wonder we are witnessing the fall—indeed, the death—of public institutions across the world, and the subsequent rise of private ones.
But this is not a coincidence. We are all culpable for this disastrous turn of events, as it is happening across ideologies. We are at that critical juncture where the public sharpens its imagination—or at least pretends to do so—on the lynchpin of social media websites, so that demagoguery can be easily served as truth. It is no surprise, therefore, that the decline in public reasoning within our institutions is linked to the devaluation and condemnation of thought itself, and the death of universities could be the last nail in the coffin. Gandhi, Socrates, Hannah Arendt, or for that matter any leading thinker or activist, is no longer needed because most of our universities are interested neither in the pursuit of reason nor in its defence. These were places where the pursuit of knowledge was once promoted and advanced, but nowadays learners are categorically injected with the indoctrination of knowing the needs of industries and performing national jingoism—which, of course, is linked not only to a structural deficit but also to intellectual impoverishment. Such performances have been institutionalised, legitimised, and celebrated at many public institutions. Merit is no longer required if one can convincingly demonstrate the parroted language of an ideology that aligns with power. This transformation is demanded even of our academic community, no matter which ideologies they are inflated with. Once coded with the ‘ism’ of the power at the centre, one can be assured of selection through a ‘two-minute’ interview panel or a good leadership position. The monotony of ideological performance is becoming the sole parameter for selection at many institutions. Universities are turning into performance-based management systems, and as they do so, the vision becomes intellectually constricted and constricting, thereby losing the intellectual claims and societal commitments for which these institutions once stood since time immemorial.
So, while the institutions are gasping for breath, depriving communities of quality education, we tend to ignore this because many of our institutional leaders have become stochastic parrots, who have neither any vision of the public good nor any understanding of the role of education. How, then, can one dream of becoming a leader in the twenty-first century when the focus is pinned down on producing robot-like employees, programmed to demonstrate productivity and far removed from thinking? But this was bound to happen, as leadership positions in universities are largely becoming political. Once appointed, one must shed any grain of intellectualism to elevate political ideologies to the status of doctrinal truths within universities. Some of these leaders go to the extent of becoming PR agents, playing the deafening tune of ideological supremacy because, before their loyalty to institutions and the public, what matters is their strict loyalty to ideological performance. Such embedded beliefs are legitimised as givens and, therefore, cannot be questioned. In the wake of the daily supply of a surplus of misinformation coded as historical anecdotes, public universities are turning into gateways to a colosseum culture, where public reason is forced to fight against cannibalistic state-capital resources. The worst part is that most of us seem to be enjoying this culture, reminiscent of what W.B. Yeats once said:
“The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity.”
The only hope we can derive is from the fact that we do have (in)visible academic leaders who possess the audacity to defy the templates of ideological performances—what mostly gets qualified as a national template as well. These leaders may have ideological moorings, but what makes them exceptional is their undiluted commitment to meritocracy, thereby promoting a community of shared meaning and purpose.
Contributing Author: Prof. Om Prakash Dwivedi is a literary critic and columnist.
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