[Reader-list] Scholars and Stooges

[Shivam Vij]

  Scholars and Stooges
  Indian academic life is unsure of what excellence means

  By Pratap Bhanu Mehta
  The Telegraph / 12 August 2004
  http://www.telegraphindia.com/1040812/asp/opinion/story_3544238.asp#


A change of regime in Delhi has occasioned numerous academic
appointments and committees. Many academically heavyweight positions
are likely to be filled in the coming months. But these appointments,
and the discourse that surrounds them, are revealing at least as much
about the crisis of Indian academic life as they are about the
ideological preferences of the government.

When the government constituted a committee comprising of Professors
De, Grewal and Settar, to examine the content of the history
textbooks, the first reaction of most academic colleagues, regardless
of party lines, was some lament to the effect that the government
should have found someone below retirement age to carry out this task.
But if you followed up this comment with a question, "Whom would you
recommend?" there was a long silence. In the gossip circles of Delhi,
there is much talk about appointing a new director for Nehru Memorial
Museum and Library, a significant institution for historians. But it
is noticeable that most participants in this gossip are very hesitant
to recommend names.

It is astonishing that even in as well-established an academic
discipline as history, there seems to be a dearth of names that
command general intellectual respect. Imagine the story in other
disciplines. The Delhi School of Economics, once a giant in both
economics and sociology, is a pale shadow of its own past. While it
still has very good talent, in both these disciplines it no longer has
the commanding presence it used to. And in fact it has a difficult
time finding talent whose reputation is commensurate with its own
history. The story is even worse in disciplines like political science
and philosophy, where the veneer of serious academic talent seems
thinner still.

The sense that there is a crisis of academic leadership is very
palpable across a range of disciplines. This judgment is not based on
some romanticized version of our academic past. After all, in
academics, as in history, time often consecrates eminence. Those whom
we designate as academic giants in retrospect, suffered from a similar
crisis of credibility when they first appeared on the intellectual
horizon. Many of the so-called giants of the field, especially in
disciplines like history and economics, ran intellectually closed
shops. It could be argued that there is no real diminution in the
level of average professional competence in these fields. Yet there is
a sense that we are experiencing an unprecedented vacuum in higher
education. Why?

There are many reasons for this. The political economy of higher
education has altered drastically. The deteriorating state of our
universities and incentives abroad make retaining talent very
difficult. In disciplines like economics and history, the brain drain
is quite staggering. A list of all those names who command general
academic admiration, but who have left India, would take more column
space than would be prudent to use up. The reasons for this attrition
from Indian academic life are quite complex. It is true that many of
our institutions do not reward talent. But in disciplines like history
and economics, many of those who left were at the top of the
profession in India, widely acknowledged and celebrated: Kaushik Basu,
Veena Das, Gyan Pandey, to take some random recent examples. We ought
not to rush to judgment about the choices Indian academics have made.
But we should recognize that there is an institutional cost to these
choices.

The character of academic life has become ideologically more partisan.
Academic life has always been characterized by partisanship, sometimes
ideological, sometimes venial. But we have reached a point where it
has become almost impossible to detach the idea of excellence from a
scholar's theoretical or political positions. Judgments of excellence
have become internal to sub-communities of academics. While we can
name many professionally outstanding individuals, we are less sure
that they will command some general credibility across theoretical or
party affiliations. Sometimes, paradoxically, greater professionalism
also diminishes general credibility. Academics lose the ability to
reach even a wider audience of academics, let alone the general
public.

Then there is what we might call the phenomenon of institutional
secession. Given the difficulties of institutional life in Indian
universities, good scholars adopted one of the following strategies.
Many of them chose to set up or affiliate themselves with small
research institutions that became little islands of autonomy and
occasionally excellence. But the cost was that these academics became
less involved in teaching and the mainstream of university life.

Two consequences followed. First, some of our best scholars have not
been able to produce a critical mass of students. They have not been
able to institutionalize first-rate research programmes that are
necessary to sustain standards in the long run. Second, the power to
command general credibility often comes from teaching, especially at
critical institutions like Calcutta or Delhi University. Teaching can
put a stamp of authority on a figure larger than even their
scholarship. And students, more than the scholarly community, are both
more tolerant of diversity and a real source of reputation. Other
scholars still, who chose to remain in the university system, de facto
seceded by withdrawing from institutional life altogether. The result
was that even the excellence that remains is fragmented and
under-institutionalized.

There was perhaps a time when association with power did not diminish
intellectual credibility. This was because the political climate did
not force those in positions of power to make so many compromises. And
those who were in power saw themselves as upholding a professional
trust. In contemporary times, association with power almost
automatically diminishes credibility, whether you are a
vice-chancellor or simply the chair of a department. As a result,
almost any academic who takes part in active institutional life, runs
the risk of appearing tainted in one form or the other: they have
either had to annoy enough people that their reputations suffer, or
they have had to placate enough people that they come across as mere
stooges. But institutional responsibility these days invariably seems
to diminish academics. The result is a general crisis of credibility.

In a curious way, we have also come to associate a certain kind of
eminence with age more than we used to. So there might be a number of
people in the age-group of forty-something, who are considered too
young to provide academic leadership merely on account of their age,
thus exacerbating a sense of vacuum. This is a shame. If the history
of our own academic institutions is any guide, plenty of young
academics have provided sterling leadership in the past. I suspect we
resort to age as an argument more because we are unsure of our own
judgments.

So the hesitation of my interlocutors on the subject of academic
appointments was entirely justified. This is not because they could
not name individuals whose scholarship or good sense they could trust.
But what they had less confidence in was the ability of these names to
evoke widespread enthusiasm. Whether the current round of committees
and appointments will lead to a better academic culture — in the best
sense of that impoverished term — remains to be seen. If early
evidence coming from the ministry of human resource development is any
guide, the "detoxification" drive against the Rashtriya Swayamsevak
Sangh that is currently underway is also premised on a short-sighted
view of what academic life should be about.

But the difficulty we are having in making appointments that command
general assent is more evidence that our academic life is fragmented,
partisan and unsure of what excellence means. It shows that we have
difficulty thinking of what a genuinely liberal academic life would
look like.

(The author is president designate, Centre for Policy Research, Delhi.)