Mediocrity creeps into JNU

Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), perhaps, comes closest to Ivan Illich’s dream of “de-schooling” and creating decentralised webs of learning, since universal education is not possible through an institutionalised education system. The university is a rare combination of institutionalised learning and de-institutionalised living of a life of the mind. You learn by living a philosophy. This “authenticity” is what is troubling the current Right-wing dispensation, because for them life of the mind goes against an established order of things. An additional problem that afflicts the current administration in JNU is the double-edged problem of seemingly improving academic standards but essentially undermining the university.

On the one hand, current vice-chancellor Prof. M Jagadesh Kumar received the award for best university for JNU from the President of India, and on the other, there are claims the varsity is a space for “anti-national” activities and that faculty appointments have been made in violation of procedures and are way below the available talent pool in the country. One “advantage” that Right-wing politics seems to enjoy is that they are “liberated” from both commitments and convictions.

Sushma Swaraj, minister for external affairs, gloated about India’s IITs, AIIMS and other premier institutions at the UN to take down Pakistan, but in reality the Right-wingers undermine the same institutions. They wear hypocrisy as a badge and mediocrity as a medal. In fact, the current dispensation at JNU is using mediocrity as a weapon against the system. All those who were at the margins of the current liberal/English educational system are being talked into dislodging the best practices and introducing a “tradition” of discipline, fear, and control. Making attendance compulsory for students is yet another step in furthering this not-so-hidden agenda. This will be followed up, we are told, by introducing biometric attendance for the faculty and CCTVs in classrooms to monitor what is being taught.

Refresher courses that are meant for lecturers are being organised in JNU and other universities with a circular asking not to invite or organise lectures that are “anti-national”. This attempt to completely control the system is borne out of both a sense of academic inferiority and construing freedom to think and live a life of the mind as at best anarchic, and at worst perversion.

It is not simply sufficient to offer a critique or dismiss the current move to make attendance compulsory; even as we do that, the progressives on and outside the campus need to think about how to reach out and include those at the margins of the educational system, who have remained mediocre, inferior and therefore anxious to control the system and make it an assemblage of disciplinarian methods.

Further, it is an open secret that there is a lurking anxiety among the faculty of JNU that class attendance has been steadily declining. At the Centre where I teach a compulsory course, while the student strength is around 80, not more than 50 students have been attending classes. It’s been a long-standing issue that students as they progress in the course do not attend classes but what is new is that even fresh students in their first semester itself have been lackadaisical in attending classes. However, this is not merely an issue of discipline but new challenges that pedagogy is facing in the light of the many changes the educational system is undergoing globally.

To begin with, liberal arts courses are not the first preference of many who join these courses but they are mostly the last resort to stay afloat. New exposure to technology and internet has given easy access to information that the teacher was the sole source of earlier. Attention spans of the students have taken a beating (reminds one of what Arun Shourie said about the current regime lacking the attention span to deal with the intricacies of the economy and instead adopting, what I feel, is a soap opera-kind of governance).

Further, JNU has other sites of learning including student politics and informal interactions. Even the post-dinner talks that were at one point of time the high point of student life on campus have witnessed a steady disinterest. Easy access to faculty, growing democratisation of student-faculty relations and rising aspirations among students have set in a culture of pretentiousness and a false sense of confidence that is not backed by hard work and professional ethics.

Earlier, students inquired about the chapters they needed to read in a book, now they inquire about the paragraphs they need to focus on in a chapter. It’s also a fact that in institutions such as JNU, because of the overwhelming reputation it enjoys and the little competition it has from other central or state universities, students have got an easy claim to superior academic status over their compatriots in other places (this problem continues to plague JNU students when they join mofussil universities as academics; they struggle to strike a rapport with others and often end up forming ‘JNU Clubs’ that exclude others. In most cases, students refuse to move outside Delhi and some even outside JNU).

There has been a clear decline in the quality of dissertations, where most MPhil and PhD work is written in the last leg before submission. Since evaluation methods are lenient, for various reasons, quality of research has not been something that JNU can really boast about. Not many of the theses that are submitted are eventually published. In fact, most students find it difficult to even publish the mandatory paper that is now required for submission of PhD. A culture of self-arrogation not backed by matching competence has inaugurated a non-dialogic posturing and aversion to criticism. In fact, more often than not students in JNU begin their research proposals with their conclusions.

In this intriguingly deductive logic of research, open-ended spaces and sites of interaction have been supplanted by political activism and experiential fundamentalism. Research proposals take their inspiration more from the daily dose of prime-time news than from interactions in class. The JNU faculty is fast losing hands down in competition with the Arnab Goswamis of the world. (Arnabs of the world unite; you have nothing to lose but your noise!). JNU continues to suffer the confusion of drawing a clear line between activism and scholarly interventions. While they are undoubtedly related, it’s also a fact that they cannot be collapsed into each other.

The inter-personal relations among the faculty are marred by extra-curricular concerns and a scarcity syndrome. Students that are taken under the fold for guidance are seen more as social and cultural capital rather than co-equals in the sojourn to discover newer aspects of research agenda. As a consequence, evaluation standards of MPhil and PhD work have suffered, and students are keenly aware of this fact and prefer to appear as surrogate progeny of their respective supervisors and demand that their supervisors treat them like their adopted children.

While students do opt for courses from other disciplines, inter-disciplinary research has been a non-starter in JNU. The interactions between the various schools and centres belong to an “imagined community” of hierarchy of the Vedic period.  Amid all the talk of egalitarianism, a class system prevails between the various centres, with particular centres and schools representing the “high culture” and the rest relegated to “low culture” and subalternised. For instance, economics assumes to be the king, and history the queen, and disciplines such as political studies and sociology occupy the position of intermediaries or provincial fiefdoms.

Schools outside of the School of Social Sciences are imagined as backwaters meant for recreational purposes. Academic life on the campus is not in the pink of health but the diagnosis and medication that the current administration has administered makes wayside quacks look more authentic and reliable.

Part of the problem is the current political dispensation, and in this I must add not just the Right-wing parties but all and sundry have developed a contempt for higher education in India. There have been budget cuts and attempts to further privatise higher education in India.

In order to circumvent this grave problem, the current dispensation is doing what it is best at – changing the goal post. Earlier in the year, it was a seat cut in the name of teacher-student ratio, now it is mandatory attendance to usher in more accountability.

It is important to resist these rather devious methods, but equal care should be taken not to sidestep the declining academic standards. While the university administration is ostensibly resisting a “classless” society, it should not be an occasion to undermine the need for revolutionary changes in pedagogy that a premier institution like JNU urgently requires.