When public universities in India make it to ‘happy’ headlines, it is mostly about the stratospheric pay packets that graduates from IITs and IIMs get from campus interviews. Otherwise, news concerning universities is more often than not about funding drought, excessive politicisation, pernicious mismanagement, creaking infrastructure, brain drain etc.
It is widely known, for example, how institutions like Delhi University, Jawaharlal Nehru University and Jamia Millia Islamia among several others, were hounded and raided ad nauseum by right-wing lumpens in the last decade or so. What also hogs headlines, across the spectrum, are the inconsolable acts of suicide of young pupils for causes too well known to repeat here.
However, the infamy that B.R. Ambedkar University, Delhi (AUD) has lately garnered is because of all the above, except that in its case, it is not an individual but an entire university that is hellbent on progressing on the path of harakiri.
What has happened at AUD? Why is it in the news? Should AUD be singled out, when the decline of the public university is now systemic?
The answer is in AUDs exceptionalism and also because it is such a new university.
In 2008, when AUD was founded through legislation by the Delhi government, it was a rare case of a public investment in humanities, social sciences and allied disciplines that are increasingly perceived to be too ‘academic’ to thrive in an environment that increasingly valued a ‘get your degree for a job’ approach to higher education. More by design and less by chance, AUD, named after India’s most revered social justice crusader, shaped up to be unique. Under its founding leadership, AUD did not fancy becoming a large and populous institution, indulging in conventional and phlegmatic pedagogy, which coupled with the weight of a halcyon legacy has decelerated the country’s colonial institutions.
From its days of inception, AUD brought into practice what can be called the New Humanities. It mended conventions, subverted disciplinary boundaries and engineered a curriculum that was rigorous, while also being aware of the world around that was changing at a feverish pace. It was somewhat of a unique entity where design could have a conversation with politics, psychology could have dinner with history, and mathematics (the only STEM subject at AUD) could be part of a discussion on performance. The founding schools – of Liberal Studies, Undergraduate Studies, Human Studies, Design, Ecology, Development, Culture and even Business, as well as the new additions (Letters, Global Studies, Law, Urban Studies) — were founded on the principle of inter-disciplinary studies.
Inter-disciplinary studies is mostly a fashionable phrase, but at AUD we tried to make it an everyday practice. One could study an English (or any) major and yet had enough institutional space (and incentive) to take courses in any other school, or programme. The structure allowed it, without compromising on the fundamental requirements of a specialisation. It also pioneered an extremely useful English language ‘acquisition’ method, meticulously combing the entire corpus of incoming students and placing them in different classes in relation to the language, so that each could be empowered depending on their state of readiness to enter a liberal programme.
A similar approach was also taken for the postgraduate programmes, most of which happily accepted students from outside the fold of domain knowledge, as long as they showed a temperament of learning and a degree of promise. There were groundbreaking M.Phil programmes in Psychoanalysis and Development Practice and intensive field work that was built into disciplines that needed them. Along with that there was compulsory mentoring and tutoring of students, just to name a few of its attractions.
The classes were small, the attention personal, and teacher-student rapport was devoid of the shallowness of showy protocols. The university’s fee structure and stringent entry requirements were also designed in such a way that the deserving were never to be discriminated against. AUD was a pleasurable place to teach, and an equally pleasurable space, we had gathered, to learn.
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Frankly, AUD pioneered the template which has become de rigueur of liberal studies programmes in private universities that have flourished in the last decade. The private universities just happened to advertise them better.
There are four fundamental requirements for such a free-spirited liberal system to make a mark: a willing government, an enabling administration, an imaginative faculty and a restless, eager-to-learn, eager-to-experiment student fraternity. And for its first decade, AUD had it all. Not the whole of all, but all in good measure. At no point was this easy, or taken for granted.
There were hard days, sad days, and tired days at AUD. For each progressive decision, for each abandonment of a convention, for each step against tried and tested methods, there were prolonged discussions, consultations and, naturally, disagreements. There were also problems congenital to new public institutions – funds, space and most importantly, infrastructure. But there was never a dearth of spirit, and no compromise on a modicum of equity and democratic decision making, plus a willingness to work together, to fire-fight, to make do with things that were available.
At no point is this to insist that AUD was a utopia. But that was also never the aim. The aim was to be different, unconstrained by tradition and unchained from a certain hegemony of functioning. AUD managed to seed, cultivate and even institutionalise much of this in the first decade.
That first decade has now become, literally, AUD’s prelapsarian period.
But over the last five years, things have changed radically at AUD, and always for the worse. Newspaper reports suggest that a rather disinterested government, coupled with a very distrustful administration, are primarily responsible for AUD’s state. There are accusations of witch hunts, nepotism and favouritism triggering a deep crisis of trust between the administration and the faculty. AUD’s rank has fallen, seats are going abegging, faculty have been leaving for more enabling pastures, the campuses look unkempt and there is barely any atmosphere of teaching and research at AUD. The only good thing remaining about it is that, undeterred by the lack of government will, or by administrative deafness, the faculty and at least a part of the students are still fighting tooth and nail to keep the university ‘alive’.
But as a former faculty of AUD who taught there for 12 long years, and as a stakeholder in the country’s liberal higher education, I do not want to blame the current administration ad hominem for having caused grievous hurt to an institution of genuine spirit and promise. Universities often manage to function with even the most incompetent of administrations; they do not implode the way AUD has imploded just in the last two years.
This leads me to think whether AUD is also an allegory for public-funded liberal education. AUD’s uniqueness needed nurturing, its promise needed a benign awareness of what is liberal education, its faculty and students needed to be assured of a certain safekeeping of their free spirit. None of that has happened, largely because no one in the portals of power in Delhi or elsewhere either understands, or is willing to lend a ear to the idea of liberal education.
No government and I repeat, no government – left, right or centre – is willing to be seen as a defender of liberal humanities. They want to throw rulebooks at the slightest show of insurgent pedagogy and want to chain methods that do not follow the dictates of the University Grants Commission and other stultifying policy makers.
But most importantly, no government now wants to create a space – like former Prime Minister Indira Gandhi did at one time with JNU – which can become a springboard of ideas, robust and humane research, and most importantly, fair rebellion. They want to browbeat a place like AUD to submit to conformism, in learning, thought and practice. And that is exactly what has happened.
It would be premature to write an elegy for AUD. Maybe things can still be turned around. But it is perhaps not premature to say that with its decline, a theme for a dream has become the all too familiar case of how Things Fall Apart.
Sayandeb Chowdhury teaches at Krea University, Andhra Pradesh. The views expressed here are his own not of any institution
