Linguistic apartheid at the heart of crisis in higher education

“There is a clear resentment against researchers. There is a sense that universities are a danger to society. We can see this in India, as this government often likes to present public universities as a threat. But this is happening not just here, but in the United States, Hungary and Poland too. What is it about this moment that they are creating this politics of resentment,” asked Pratap Bhanu Mehta, vice-chancellor, Ashoka University and commentator.

He was responding to how to build universities that matter, the poser at a panel discussion that followed the release of the book Building Universities that Matter by Pankaj Chandra, Vice Chancellor of Ahmedabad University. Mehta was part of the panel that included Ambedkar University VC Shyam B Menon, Secretary General of the Association of Indian Universities Furqan Qamar, Apoorvanand of Delhi University and Niraja Gopal Jayal from Jawaharlal Nehru University.

“We haven’t solved the problem of what higher education means in a multi-lingual society. We know nationalism rises out of tissues of resentment, but if you scratch it, the underlying source of that resentment is that how can you have a higher education system, whose standards, norms, aspirations and defining values are all couched in English even as a large mass of students are not comfortable in that language.”

“This problem was less insistent in the regions, because linguistic nationalism compensated for the fact that our higher education system was reducing people in the vernaculars to a second-class status. Unless we find a creative solution to this sense of linguistic apartheid, you are not going to address the underlying sense that is producing this resentment,” elaborated Mehta.

Hindi is not the vibrant source of knowledge production in its own right, not just a medium of translation, and, according to Mehta, “that congealed resentment is at the heart of the crisis in higher education”. “It is then overlaid with the politics of caste. Currently, JNU is under two forms of threat – the threat from government, but there is also the politics of caste on JNU campus now,” reveals Mehta.

“You cannot think of a single profession, which now has credibility and legitimate standing in the eyes of the public. One of the things about India that worries you is that you cannot think of a single institution that can perform a credible mediating function, which is what academic institutions do. Academic institutions mediate forms of knowledge, media mediates forms of information,” notes Mehta.

Till the beginning of the nineties, only about 15 per cent of the total enrolment in higher education used to go to private universities, about 85 per cent would be enrolled in public universities.

Private universities and IITs

“Today it has been reversed. Around 70 per cent of the total enrolment in higher education is to private universities. So, the expansion of higher education since 1991, until now also coincides with the diminishing per capita allocation of public funds for higher education,” notes Menon, going on to add that, “the higher education system resembles the Indian society. It is caste-ridden, full of hierarchies and inequities.”

“Today everyone goes on about how good the IITs are. But naturally, if you have several children, but you feed only one, then that child is going to do well. What is the miracle in that? The expansion strategies have also been unplanned. There is ignorance of how institutions grow and develop. Institutions are organic entities; the assumption is that once you create central universities in places, you can induce development in these places. One doesn’t realise that higher education is the consequence of development,” quipped Menon.

A government mindset has pervaded our institutions. It is not service oriented, but control oriented; it governs by rules, rather than by culture and norms, but “those of us who are a part of the public university system are wont to accept this as a fact of life. It is worth remembering that what we accept as the fact of life, is in other places with a more robust public university system than our own, very unusual,” pointed out Niraja Gopal Jayal.

“We are responsible for a lot of the problems within universities; the sooner we accept it, the better. Other than education secretaries, most regulatory bodies have academicians as the chairpersons and they are in majority on these boards. There is certainly a problem

in our education system; our country has not reached the potential that it should have,” says Qamar.