Monobina Gupta, who writes on Kafila had a piece in Times of India recently on the ravages of restructuring at Delhi University. While researching this piece Gupta sent me and several others a list of questions about the reforms. I reproduce below her questions and my answers in full. If you’re convinced by what follows, please sign this petition.
- How has the academic culture/ environment changed over the last five years? Has it been a slow process of attrition or sudden negativity with Kapil Sibal getting more and more aggressive?
Interestingly, strictly speaking, we’ve seen not so much attrition as an acceleration of initiatives in the purely quantitative sense accompanied by academic chaos and a disturbing decline in intellectual input. It’s possible that we now have a greater variety of courses on paper, more research projects and more published papers by faculty, but the quality of each of these has to be questioned in the light of the pressure under which they are being produced. Intellectual activity, whether anybody likes it or not, cannot be compared to most other types of output or production. It requires a very different administration, temporality (like any creative activity) and support. It needs to be largely self-directed and self-motivated, with a few broad parameters set by authority. There can consensus on standards, but these need to be set by the academic community in a public and transparent way. They cannot be set by bureaucrats and administrators and enforced by the gun. What Sibal’s regime did, consciously or unwittingly, was to define the entire teaching class as enemies, at the administrative level. The effect was that Delhi University’s VC found it in himself to bypass established democratic and consultative procedures and ram through the proposed changes. Every time teachers asked that established norms be respected and we be consulted through due process or if we suggested that intellectual and scholarly processes take time, the administration stonewalled us and threw us out of the reform process. Under Sibal, decades of collegiate functioning was torn apart, and every fight got ugly. Suddenly, ‘debate’ and ‘democratic consultation’ became dirty words. It is to be expected that a change in the higher education policy of a country as massive as India would generate passionate debate. Since this debate was not taking place in the national media, we teachers should have been considered the most valuable interlocutors, but we were stunned by the speed and ferocity of the reform process, and the criminalisation of our right to dissent and ask questions. Who has decided what the time frame for reforms is, and why aren’t we involved in this decision? Ultimately, the administration might wish that we didn’t exist as the troublesome, questioning human element in the teaching learning process, but unfortunately this is not going to happen unless they invent androids!
- Can you outline the main points of difference in the way the education is perceived by the ministry/ policymakers and those who actually do the teaching?
KAFILA - COLLECTIVE EXPLORATIONS SINCE 2006 