[Reader-list] The notion of an academic public domain

[Saumya Gupta]

The idea of creating a web-based academic resource has been in the air 
for a while at sarai. We invite you to start a discussion towards 
realising  the concept...
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It seems there is a crisis staring the academic community in India in 
its face. The government resources for higher education especially for 
the humanities and social sciences streams - are progressively drying 
up, and no alternative sources of funds have been created or even 
creatively thought about. The response of the best academic 
institutions to the paucity of governmental allocations has been 
unalloyed lament, along with slashing of research grants, cutting of 
faculty positions, and grossly limiting library and archival resources 
by limiting book grants and closing subscriptions to academic journals 
and periodicals. Privatise or perish is the mantra. And since the 
former is not really a choice for 'unproductive' disciplines like 
humanities, the prospects look quite grim.

The results of this resource and creativity crunch are equally 
obvious: less students register for the humanities and social sciences 
courses, and those that do grapple with their research in deficient 
and inefficient university libraries, highly restrictive and expensive 
specialized libraries and government resources centers.  The teaching 
faculty with scholarly initiative has to simultaneously struggle with 
a heavy teaching workload as college managements increasingly cut down 
on study leave for academic research. 

That there is no dearth of academic talent - teachers, researchers, 
students committed to take the academic world out of this malaise -is 
equally evident. However, long dependence on governmental funds and 
planning and disciplinary/institutional restrictions form huge 
barriers in the formation of  independent, interdisciplinary 
reflection and action about the condition of academia in social 
sciences. To give an easy example, most of the colleges have got 
additional funds from their management boards for computerization, 
which in most places has meant buying computers, without any thought 
about the use of information technology for greater awareness about, 
and access to academic resources, digitization of resources, greater 
integration of information technology in research and teaching etc.

The need is to get this community of scholars, researchers, teachers, 
students to interact with each other and also with other crucial nodes 
of academia - the archivists, the librarians and the publishing 
houses, and to create and activate a public engaged in social science 
and humanities knowledge production that will be the creator, 
collector, curator and consumer of digitized academic resources. A 
dialogue between everyday pedagogy and specialized research should be 
set in motion, to develop synergies between those working in the 
field, and in classrooms, to discuss the application of detailed 
historical work to undergraduate syllabi. An online Bulletin board can 
be conceived, which will serve as a one-stop info gateway providing 
information about events, seminars, workshops, new books and research. 
Simple things such as sharing academic calendars/ plans/problems can 
be easily sorted out using the this bulletin board, or through an 
email list dedicated to the academic community.

Sarai would like to facilitate an attempt of this kind. But such an 
endeavour can only work through the cooperation of those working in 
and/or interested in academia. Your responses on this list will be a 
great way to start thinking more concretely about this. 

Please post your responses to the project idea on the Reader list or 
to write to Saumya Gupta (saumya at sarai.net)


best
saumya


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