While Delhi University is facing the wreckers' ball, the Ambedkar University, Delhi has become a viable, vibrant space of thinking and learning. The new political masters must simultaneously perfect the art of judicious intervention to save the former and the craft of withholding the temptation to interfere with the latter. Recently, we had sobering news that as many as 98% of teachers who took the Central Teacher Eligibility Test failed in the attempt.
This, after the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) had already dumbed down the syllabus following the previous year’s dismal experience. Educationist Krishna Kumar pointed out that an agenda on education will hardly be visible (or audible) as long as the high decibel campaigns of political parties and news channels alike dominate our public life. But there is hope yet. The announcement in the Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) Delhi specific manifesto (endorsing an earlier commitment of the Aam Aadmi Party – AAP) that it will save the students of Delhi University’s (DU) four year undergraduate programme (FYUP) from the “waste of a precious year” is timely and must be made more than an election promise for all parties. Regardless, that is, of who wins the polls.
The FYUP has now become a four letter word among many vocal students and anxious parents, who see no academic merit in the dubious “foundation courses” even as they are forced to pay for the extra year. (As I write this, an unsavoury skirmish between the members of the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP) and a faculty member has ended with the administration closing down the student union!) DU has given the term “gap year” a whole new meaning. It is not a year that a student voluntarily takes out from institutional life to reflect on possible roles she will play in our complex and challenging environment. It is a year that the institution compulsorily takes out of all enrolled undergraduates (and their parents), to produce a calculated, dangerous boredom. Now, with an eye no doubt on the votes from a publicly discontented student body, the BJP/AAP manifestos turn attention to the rapid changes that were introduced last year. This should give the mandarins of higher education a few sleepless nights. It also gives us an opportunity to ask a few questions about the goals and achievements of higher education in contemporary India.
Sea of Mediocrity
DU’s FYUP was thrust on a largely unsuspecting and unprepared student and faculty body in the name of a new “reality” that needed grasping, in contrast to the “classical mode of overburdening theory-based dissemination of knowledge” (from the DU website). Stock phrases such as “out of the box” apart, there was no clear assessment of the problems of the earlier system. Neither were the virtues of the new one spelt out while making these momentous changes. “Out of the box”, so far, has only meant jumping into the sea of mediocrity, so that before long, college teachers too will “qualify” for the same level of incompetence as our schoolteachers.
Unseemly haste, rather than serious collaborative thought, has produced change all right, though in the direction of precipitate and premature decline. It is vital to rethink, if not reverse these changes. For some time now, “critical thinking” has been replaced by skill building from the high school syllabus upwards. Multiple choice questions and short answers have taken an appalling toll on Indian intellection, on the ability of students to sustain arguments, think deeply and evaluate information in a complex manner. Language learning, at one time a staple of our undergraduate programmes, has been let go without even a whimper. All we now have throughout the secondary education system is language stripped down to its bare minimum: communicative abilities.
This has been extended to the higher education programmes as well. Now, by emphasising “simple concept based learning” “hands on training” and substituting “practical” orientation and skills for “critical” thinking, the DU system may be producing mechanical operatives, talk show hosts and event managers. It will soon be turned into a vast system of accreditation rather than an institution of higher learning.
Ambedkar University
It is our good fortune that while one institution, whose achievements have been completely ignored in the name of 21st century demands, is facing the wreckers’ ball, another institution is quietly being built up in this National Capital Region (NCR). I am not referring to the multitude of private universities which are harvesting the windfall, both in terms of students and faculty, provided by the rapid changes at DU. I refer to the Ambedkar University, Delhi (AUD) a state university which has, over the last six years of its existence, become a viable, vibrant space of thinking and learning. It has declared its mission “to create sustainable and effective linkages between access to and success in higher education”. It has jettisoned the clichés, and not critical thinking. It is striving to provide affordable and yet sustainable fee structures. Thus far, judging from its programmes and its students, it has encouraged creativity and non-hierarchical structures of learning.
Will AUD succumb to the “iron law of Indian institutions” and quickly go down the DU path? What will the fate of this young institution be in the hands of possibly new political masters? Will the two institutions, one a central university, the other a state university, be treated as spaces to “capture” through systems which have been perfected by both right wing and left wing regimes in this country? Will the fledgling be given the support and encouragement it needs, and will the hoary institution be given the corrective surgery it requires to save it from oblivion?
Yea Sayers
Karl Marx, a discredited thinker in these times, perceptively remarked in his Theses on Feuerbach, that “it is essential to educate the educator himself”. In these parlous times, higher education experts, senior academics, and thinkers have largely been bypassed in favour of cronies and yea sayers, opportunists and political appointees. It is a sad day indeed, when we can only desperately hope that the new crop of politicians will educate the educators, bring them back on track, renew and revitalise the system for goals that extend beyond their five year terms. Yet, an opportunity for rethinking higher educational institutions has once more opened up in our NCR.
Increasingly, in the DU case, faculty accountability is being seen as an externally mandated, administratively driven, procedure which now, in a move that seriously defies all known intellectual norms, involves the students themselves in “spying” and reporting. The AUD on the other hand, is attempting a process of evaluation which is driven by the scholarship of teaching and learning, strongly focused on academic concerns, rather than “evaluative” ones, and therefore, one hopes, on knowledge building outcomes. The teachers and students are seen less as “adversaries” and more as collaborators in the business of learning. It is early days yet for the younger university, so it would be premature to sing its praises too loudly. But DU is dangerously close to throwing away a good, nationally respected system of higher education, including a complex and challenging tutorial system, for an ill tested, morally questionable alternative.
Both, the attacks on the older university system and the building of a new one occur against the background of a shrill, high decibel clamour for private investment in higher education (preferably foreign investment). Private investment is seen as the panacea for a wide range of real and imagined ills. What has largely been achieved in the health sector, a marked and irreversible shift away from state public health systems to networks of private, profit-maximising healthcare, and to some extent in the privatisation of secondary education, will now be speedily achieved in higher education.
Unlike the disastrous fate that has been pressed on DU by its highly “motivated” administrators and their disturbingly novel innovations, the AUD experiment teaches us that ambitious educational programmes can thrive only through consultative processes, hard thinking about consequences, by encouraging creative syllabus design and by keeping, in this grotesquely unequal society, the twin goals of quality and equality firmly in sight.
If these two routes to higher education, one a rapid descent and other a well-deserved rise, are to serve as lessons themselves, the new political masters must simultaneously perfect the art of judicious intervention (to save DU) and the craft of withholding the temptation to interfere (to support AUD). These are tall orders to place before a political class which, judging from our recent past, will be inclined to pack its bags for a study tour of institutions in the antipodes.
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