Since February 9, 2009, I have often faced these questions:
Did I really move
to JNU from PU in order to reach MJPRU? Is Bareilly a place,
in many ways different from Delhi and Chandigarh but perhaps similar to
Jalandhar (the place of my school and college education), to "reach"
for a "re-turn"? What can this "re-turn" stir up for
me, and the Mahatma Jyotiba Phule Rohilkhand University, given the
zeniths and peaks, super-structures and sub-structures, resemblances and
parallels, incongruence and discrepancies, variations and disparities that I
notice in the familiar and yet astonishing academic realm within which our life
and work are located? What does it mean for us, students and teachers, to take
part in an almost (or may be seemingly) thoughtless and pompous carnival of
rapidly expanding 'information' and 'skills', to endure lectures and
conversations, texts and readings, experiments and field studies, lessons and
examinations, in an enormously uneven world of intransigent hierarchies of race,
gender, caste, class, nations and professions both at the local and global
levels? How shall it be possible for us to pursue and make real the calling so
vibrantly articulated by Jawaharlal Nehru: "A university stands for humanism,
for tolerance, for reason, for the adventure of ideas and for the search for
truth. It stands for the onward march of human race towards even higher
objectives. If the universities discharge their duties adequately, then it is
well with the nation and the people."
Role of Universities in India
How can our universities in India, say Mahatma Jyotiba
Phule Rohilkhand University, Bareilly, accelerate the pace to
accomplish the "mission of educating, training and conducting research", as
articulated in the UNESCO Document "Higher Education in the 21st Century:
World Declaration of Prospect and Action, 1998", that "promote
the implementation of life long education for the whole population, and
transform themselves to motivate the process"?
Teachers and students can do well if they care to ask the
question: "Why are we reading/doing what we are reading/doing"? Asking
this question about relevance and significance of our studies not only brings us
to proximity with the text/work but also simultaneously makes us stand at a
distance from the same. Such an instantaneous dawning of a thoughtful awareness
of proximity (closeness) and distance (remoteness) from our study/work enthuses
us to reflect upon the possible relations between the known and the unknown,
familiar and strange, 'here' and 'there', 'now' and 'then'. It can also help us
see, comprehend and acknowledge the inherently exploratory but incomplete, and
thus forever, insufficient and on-going character of all our received knowledge
about self, society and nature. In doing so, we learn to discover and appreciate
that our ancestors and contemporaries, in answering their questions, leave for
us and future generations many more questions to be answered. In order to
advance the frontiers of knowledge and skills, we must be both equipped and keen
to grow and develop, willing to take part in a sincere and unrestricted search
for original and significant ideas/skills, to make a difference to what has been
going on previously. It is this perpetual curiosity or sense of wonder that
defines our humanity.
The Role of Teachers
For humanising our education, we have to make a determined
effort to change our teaching for the better. We can not afford to remain smugly
satisfied with our consistently vending the familiar again and again, year after
year. The responsibility of teaching deserves to be taken more seriously than
barely transmitting the available knowledge or skills to the students. It has
been my experience, over the years, that when students are educated and
motivated to think about their thinking, their learning skills improve
significantly. We must inspire our students to further explore what they learn
and discover through their studies, to talk about new ideas both inside and
outside the lecture theatres and seminar halls. We need to redesign our syllabi
and courses to create spaces for innovations in teaching and methods of
evaluation of students' learning skills. We need to provide the students
opportunities to design and pursue their own self-study projects -- projects
which are focused, simple and practical for addressing the societal and
individual needs related to the subject of study chosen by the student. We are living in a world desperately in need of strong and
effective remedies for unrelenting and pervasive evils of oppression and
injustice that humanity has suffered for centuries. Severely distressing
poverty, rampant economic inequality, unsustainable valorisation of capital,
irrational and conspicuous consumption, insurmountable recession, growing
unemployment, ethnic and communal tensions, swelling intolerance of differences,
conflicts, wars, acts of terrorism, pollution, extinction of wild life,
depletion of natural resources, climate change, and ecological crisis are
problems which demand solutions for sustaining our hope in human survival, and
making it possible for us to live our lives with a sense of dignity and
compassion. As members of the global academic community, it is our
responsibility to find ways of making our world a better place to live and work.
This we can do by contributing towards the strengthening of a deliberative,
dialogical and democratic culture for dealing with problems faced by all of us
locally and globally.
Market forces and Academics
Day by day our living is becoming increasingly grim,
complicated and uneasy with startling and far-reaching global changes that
jeopardize our very survival as moral beings. The forces of economic
globalisation tempt us to view the world through the prism of the market and
market alone. An eye for short-term gains and quick profits is a compulsive
limitation of the market forces. Some self-financing institutions in higher
education tend to follow the ill conceived logic of the market in offering and
conducting their courses and related activities. Such an approach results only
in the proliferation of unethical practices among the students and teachers.
Students find that managing to get the degree by some how arranging to pass the
examinations is more important than seriously learning and understanding the
subject they are expected to study. There is a wide spread tendency to pass the
examination by cheating, and to plagiarise the term-papers and research
dissertations for quick results. Rightly or wrongly, there is a deep suspicion
that our system of higher education is inherently corrupt and exploitative. Many
students, teachers and other stakeholders in the university system have shared
their apprehensions and concerns with me in private conversations but have shown
a strong reluctance to speak in the open about the same. Sadly this cultivated
unwillingness to speak in the open is a silence of vulnerable and feeble
individuals living in a precarious world of possible harm, often imaginary and
yet so real. It is not surprising that many graduates completing their studies,
particularly in the professional courses, are becoming increasingly insular in
their thinking and activities. It is high time that the University takes all the
necessary steps to reaffirm and reassert its commitment to the values of
rigorous, disciplined and objective scholarship and research which is released
from the pressures and demands of private profit. Many of us may like to believe
that markets need efficient, productive, submissive and compliant workers. But
more importantly, our society needs moral and happy individuals capable of
asking intelligent questions and seeking good answers for preserving rule of law
and protecting human dignity in a civil society. The university must not give up
its academic mission just because it has to exist and survive in a milieu driven
by market forces.
The aim -Samvada, Sahamati, Sahayoga
Our research must begin by questioning well established
perspectives and frameworks, assumptions, norms, models and paradigms in order
to become a real adventure of ideas. An understanding and acknowledgement of the
tentativeness and incompleteness of received opinions and ideas, our conjectures
and hypotheses, can help us in learning to be humble about our claims to truth,
and becoming open and tolerant towards differences in views and opinions. Only
by imbibing the spirit of humility, tolerance, personal integrity and academic
excellence, we shall be able to sustain an environment in which students and
faculty can continue to work together for learning, teaching and researching. As
students and teachers of the university, it is our sacred duty to constantly
engage ourselves in the collective endeavour to further enhance the quality of
academic work that we do in our university. I wish and hope that by
participating in cognitive praxis through dialogue, consensus and cooperation (Samvaada,
Sahamati, and Sahayoga), the level of involvement of all engaged in
university life will become much higher and more visible. An opportunity to
study in the university must become for each and every student a definitive and
decisive step in the personal and intellectual journey into diverse cognitive
spaces and cultural terrains. An initiation of interdisciplinary
discussion groups on the university and college campuses, supported by
inter-university collaborations and academic programmes, will be undertaken to
encourage the students to respect the significance of dialogue and communication
in the creation, accumulation, transmission and enhancement of knowledge and
skills. We must not forget that a loss of confidence in the intrinsic value of
education, knowledge and skills will only create, to use the words of Oscar
Wilde, individuals who know the price of everything and value of nothing.
The Way Forward
Let me conclude by making a plea to pledge ourselves to
pursue the goals for which Mahatma Jyotiba Phule dedicated his life: to
identify, understand and engage with the social ills and human suffering which
our society had stopped questioning. We must ask whether our society has now
become adequately prepared to find answers to the questions which Mahatma
Jyotiba Phule had placed before us more than a century ago. Keeping these
concerns in view, let us work together to make our university a place where we
can learn to think seriously and act efficiently against the exclusionary logic
of communal, casteist, ethnic, regionalist, linguistic and gender divisions that
are often invoked to tear apart the social fabric of India. We must pursue the
goals of academic excellence in whatever courses/ disciplines that we study,
teach and research in the university. While doing so, we must find and keep some
moments, on a daily basis, to consider and engage with the complexity of
multifarious relations between technology, economy, values, science, culture and
history in order to address and confront the challenges thrown up by forces of
economic globalisation for us, particularly for the socially backward sections
of our society and minorities. I must caution that though recourse to rhetoric
of moral indignation often comes easy to us but it can never be a substitute for
clear thinking and hard work. It is only through clear thinking and hard work
that we can learn to appreciate and acknowledge the indispensability of
practicing and preserving ethical values in our everyday life.
(Satya P. Gautam)