Thought, policies and politics: how may we imagine the public university in India?

Abstract

The university is often imagined by many in the teaching profession as a crucible for critical thought, autonomy and democratic practices, even as the reality of our intellectual and professional existence in such spaces may belie such ideas. This is because the university is a paradoxical space – at once intimate and embattled – and because teaching is hierarchical, conducted in classrooms that are often deeply stratified and sometimes fraught spaces, where the mismatch between desire and actualisation is always present as an undercurrent. As Indian sociologist Shiv Visvanathan said rather provocatively in an early iteration of how one might envisage the university, ‘One must begin by stating that the university is an outrageous hypothesis, and its survival a miracle. Yet one also feels that if it did not exist, it would have to be invented.’1 In this paper, which has two different, though mutually constitutive parts, I wish to think about the sites from where we ask the question: ‘What is the university for?’ This mutual constitutiveness – that of the intersection of state policies on higher education with student politics – may seem somewhat counterintuitive yet is, I would argue, integral to understanding one of the most significant contemporary sites of crisis today: the steady erosion of the public university. This crisis is a matter of concern not merely for the global South, but is one that has generated heated academic and political debates all over the world.2 The first part of the paper, then, is an attempt to read an older imagination of the university against India’s draft National Policy on Education (NPE) 2016,3 announced by the Bharatiya Janata Party government last year, which threatens to undo the last vestiges of a state-supported, liberal education system and replace it with privatised skills building. This move is not unfamiliar, and aspects of this are visible in different parts of the world where a managerial imagination is helping to create educational systems that are geared towards generating ‘economic value’. While this is usually