Comment

At the heart of the storm

AT the heart of the storm that currently afflicts the University of Hyderabad is a conflict whose terms need careful delineation. I have always maintained that this is our fight – both the moment and the larger cause that it represents, and continue to hold steadfast to that position, notwithstanding the wider public attention that the issue has gathered ever since the Rohith Vemula ‘suicide’ hit the headlines and stirred both conscience and consciousness that one thought of as impossible. It is imperative to put our university back on the rails, without compromising either the intensity of the fight for justice and fraternity on our university campus or the practical expediency of our academics (the teaching and the learning that is integral to any university).

Weeks into the storm, although the issue has been alive for a much longer duration, I am happy and somewhat relieved that a delicate balance has been struck, and we can now possibly think more meaningfully and systematically about the imperative and the challenge of reclaiming our university. At the heart of this process – at least for me, as a serving teacher in this institution – is a recognition of the inherent ‘organicity’ of our university, an ‘organicity’, incidentally, that has to do with the emergent history of its engagement with caste and region and the materiality of subaltern lives. My association with the university goes even further back from the year (1998) when I formally joined it as faculty; and notwithstanding the changing morphology of the university – the ‘yuppiedom’ that it has come to display in patches – it by and large still remains a grounded institution. While it is customary to highlight its ‘elitist’ status within the pantheon of Indian universities, I think of it – and indeed, believe it to be so – as largely a subaltern space meant to empower and enhance student capacities across a social spectrum. The University of Hyderabad is an interesting place to be, and remains so – ever so challenging, ever so numbing.

I had said: At the heart of the storm that currently afflicts our university – the University of Hyderabad – is a conflict whose terms need careful delineation. What do I mean by this? I need to be careful here, lest I be misunderstood or even shift the axis of our critical gaze. I am certainly not trying to mediate and reconcile between the sheer multiplicity of voices that have been raised, both within the campus and outside. They have been pitched at various levels, and incorporate a variety of claims directed at particular actors, regime changes, societal dispositions and social structural tendencies. Perhaps, later analysts and chroniclers will help in disaggregating these levels and claims. For the moment though: what is the conflict whose terms I am urging require careful delineation? And, what is the fight about?

Tersely put, it is about finding ‘institutional solutions’ to structural problems that have their source both within the institution and the society or history at large. In the given immediacy of our moment – their tangled histories notwithstanding – the ‘structural problems’ are twofold: one, caste discrimination on campus and, two, the issue of academic freedom and institutional autonomy. Undoubtedly, the latter is key – and could even have served as the basis for combating the former – but has been severely compromised both in this instance and more generically.

The ‘facts’ of the case – whether it be the chain of events that preceded Rohith Vemula’s taking of his life, the growing stridency of student politics, the complete lack of judgement on the part of various institutional authorities including that of the Vice Chancellor, the interference of political bosses in university functioning, the slurring of the university as ‘a den of casteist, extremist and anti-national politics’, as indeed the outpouring of public sentiment both on our campus and elsewhere about ‘acts’ of caste discrimination, and so on – perhaps need no recounting; and yet where do we go from here?

The recent past of our university has overseen two fairly comprehensive reports on student ‘suicides’ on campus; and, having served as an active member on both the panels, one was privy to establishing certain conditions for institutional reform and regulation. Sadly, yet, the university has faltered and the diligence necessary for letting the institution live on its own has not been forthcoming. Doubtless, the current storm has other contingencies that define it; and, if recent events are anything to go by (and I refer here to the happenings on JNU campus particularly), then perhaps the engulfing storm afflicting all our university spaces is going to incarnate itself in diverse and perplexing ways. But let me limit myself to our university, the University of Hyderabad.

At the heart of the storm that currently afflicts our university – and perhaps generically other universities – is delineating an ‘institutional’ way of thinking; in what follows, I hope to give some indications of what this can be about. Hopefully, the ‘institutional solutions’, some of which have already been proclaimed – by Sukhadeo Thorat, for instance, in The Hindu of 26 January 2016, as indeed the UGC guidelines as specified in the UGC (Promotion of Equity in Higher Educational Institutions) Regulation 2012 and UGC (Grievance Redressal) Regulations 2102 (and again the UGC guidelines for Students’ Entitlement, circular dated 23 April 2013), as also the directives of the committee appointed by the Andhra Pradesh High Court and chaired by the Vice-Chancellor of the NALSAR University of Law in 2013 – can take new shape in this light. Quite certainly, there is something more than a platitudinous sensibility or even a nihilistic urge that is operative here. Precisely because university education is so important, it is imperative that we focus on making genuine improvements in our ways of thinking about university structure and governance.

The ‘institutional’ way of thinking that I am trying to express for all of us here is perhaps all too easy to formulate and/or to admit, being signified by one word, namely, autonomy; both the autonomy of educational institutions and the autonomy of their students (as induced by the former). But that’s not the tack I want to pursue here, howsoever compromised ‘autonomy’ has been in our specific instance and at a more general level. The ‘institutional’ way of thinking that I have in mind is again perhaps better expressed in the formula, ‘Don’t think; look’ (with due apologies to Wittgenstein) – an injunction as much for university administrators as for those whom they administer (students and teachers alike, although it does not always translate uniformly across these categories). But the absoluteness of this formula terrifies me, and I shall desist from formulating the ‘institutional’ way of thinking accordingly. I will begin by calling attention to some specificities, before moving on to a more capacious set of institutional claims and/or warrants.

At the heart of the storm that engulfed the university was a heterogeneous group of students called the Joint Action Committee (JAC) for Social Justice, University of Hyderabad (UoH) forged across 14 disparate organizations on the campus (the leadership totalling almost 30 members, with two representatives from each of the organizations, and spanning the ideological spectrum of caste, class, gender and region) along with a strong force of ‘volunteers’ (whose numbers I am unaware, but with a sizeable presence of students unattached to any organization or ideology). The convergence thus forged is an institutional ‘dividend’ that one would want retained in all the rebuilding and reconciliation efforts that can – and must – gather apace in the university space. Of course, this is easier said than accomplished, and one is not so naive as to believe that this ‘convergence’ can easily obtain. One is already witness to fissiparous tendencies within; but the imperative of convergence remains crucial.

So is the JAC listening and heeding to the ‘institutional’ call? Needless to say, besides, the university administration, the teaching fraternity, in particular would have to actively strive to cultivate the conditions under which events such as the ones witnessed in the past months and the recent weeks – as indeed the larger institutional malaise they help underscore (namely, caste discrimination and threats to academic freedom and institutional autonomy) – are rendered impossible. Again, perhaps this is easier said than done; and, particularly, insofar as the teaching fraternity at our university is concerned, the pointers have been mixed. It is striking, yet, that the university as a whole hasn’t quite had the time (or the space) to show genuine remorse for the prevailing state of affairs. I believe this nebulous condition goes against the heart of our university, which hitherto has often shown the will to do things right both for itself and for its students. I think I could go on in this vein, but let me revert to a more capacious form of the ‘institutional’ way of thinking, one inscribing as much ethos as disposition for thinking and thoughtfulness.

I must revert to my overture. I spoke of the University of Hyderabad as largely a subaltern space meant to empower and enhance student capacities across a social spectrum, and as such a place at once challenging and numbing. The point of that allusion is twofold: on the one hand, it is experiential, in that it is a reminder that the university had its ‘origins’ in questions of region and caste – the organicity that I alluded to earlier – and thus is bound to remain highly critical and contentious as an institutional space. On the other hand, at every point in the history of the University of Hyderabad, it has come down to how the university personnel (specifically, its teachers and researchers) have tried to absorb this ethos and create new ideas in this ethos. To be sure, this ethos is a fragile and fraught one, and not all my teacher colleagues will agree with me about this rendering of our university’s ethos.

What it places in perspective, yet, is the importance of teaching, even as it is taken for granted that faculty members are doing research. Crucially, what counts in the ethos is the quality of one’s teaching, one’s engagement with students, as indeed one’s presence within the university institution. Sadly though, this is not something that ranks as a quality parameter within academic institutions, including ours. Speaking for myself, teaching is something that I have always cherished, although in recent times I have grown to be exhausted by it all (only to be enervated by a university ethos that has waxed and waned in excruciating ways). The level of autonomy over curriculum, pedagogy and assessment is very clear and protected (although again this is not something on which I have personally experimented much, leaving it to students to take the initiative).

Oddly enough, this grafting of teaching as central to the ‘institutional’ way of thinking can mean re-inscribing a teacherly authorial presence, which could yet confound students thinking for themselves and/or designing their own curricula and assessment procedures. I remain unsure of what our students want, and refrain from thinking this through. But, of course, the question of pedagogy, or what the antique philosophies of both the East and the West called paideia obtains as crucial to the ‘institutional’ way of thinking.

Can the heart of the storm that afflicts our university engage, as well, the institutional form of such a paideia? What might its contours be? I leave that for another occasion. Hopefully, there will be other contexts and circumstances to converse.

Sasheej Hegde