EDUCATIONAL INSTITUTIONS DON’T STAND BY THEIR FACULTY

Two cases widely reported in the media this week prove what we as academics already know. That when it comes to contentious matters involving the government, politics, ideology and religion, educational institutions rarely stand by their faculty. Instead, they side with the powers that seek to silence their faculty and take punitive action against them for expressing views unpalatable to the establishment. This is unfortunate, as it goes against the very principles of what an educational institution represents. It represents intellectual freedom. A university is not the army. People who opt for the teaching profession have minds of their own, on the basis of which they are selected. Everyone in the university cannot be expected to fall in line.

In the first case, an assistant professor at Ashoka University found himself in the firing line on account of a research paper he wrote that claimed that the BJP won the 2019 parliamentary elections not because a majority of Indians voted for them, but because of manipulation. Now, it isn’t surprising that the government has lashed out at the professor, questioning the validity of his data and analysis, calling his research half-baked, and accusing him, predictably, of anti-nationalism. This is only to be expected. But what is disturbing is that Ashoka University, which among private universities in India is known for its liberal values and is, perhaps, the JNU of private universities, has itself released a statement on Twitter to “distance” itself from the professor’s research and specify that it does not support the point of view expressed in the paper.

Why did Ashoka University release such a statement? Was it on account of fear of falling foul with the ruling dispensation and being blacklisted by them?  Was it that they feared that the corporate houses that funded them would withdraw their patronage? But then, doesn’t that imply that Ashoka University has sold out to the government and the corporate sector? Is it really likely that they would have to shut shop if only they issued a general statement to say that institutions of higher education, by their very definition, were spaces where different points of view, some pro, others anti, had to be expressed? That pluralism was the hallmark of a university?

Admirably, it is the students who came out in support of their professor’s research. They issued a counter-statement that said: “Leher [Ashoka University’s student body] stands in support of Pofessor Das’ academic freedom, condemns the outpouring of hate and attacks toward him and demands that the university withdraw its statement and guarantee protection of Professor Das’ and other faculty’s right to freedom of research.”

Actually, in issuing such a statement, the students are at greater risk than the institution itself. After all, their degrees, their placements, and their careers in general are in the hands of the university. A vengeful university can easily jeopardize students’ futures.

Not just the university, but even the faculty at Ashoka have been, to the best of my knowledge, silent about the research paper. But if it is Professor Das today, can’t it be any of them tomorrow?

The second incident happened at Symbiosis College in Pune, where I happen to be guest faculty. During the course of his lecture, a Junior College Hindi teacher extolled the virtues of monotheistic religions like Islam and Christianity while critiquing polytheistic religions like Hinduism. A student video-graphed the man’s statements with his mobile phone, posted it on all social media platforms, and that was enough to bring the aggrieved right-wing Hindutva brigade to the college to call for the man’s arrest. The cops arrived on the scene and so did television channels. The man was booked “for hurting the sentiments of Hindu students,” even as the college promptly suspended him.

At the outset, I must state that there is no comparison between the Ashoka and the Symbiosis incidents.

The Ashoka incident is based on solid, well-conducted research.

In the Symbiosis incident, conversely, the teacher comes across as rather foolhardy, if not downright foolish. I mean, to speak in such an un-nuanced manner on a subject as sensitive and touchy as religion, and that too in a mass language, Hindi, and in a Junior College class with a strength of over a hundred seventeen or eighteen-year-old students, puts the intelligence of the teacher in question in grave doubt. Who did he think he was? Salman Rushdie?  But even Salman Rushdie couldn’t save himself from being assaulted in a city as liberal as New York City exactly a year ago.

As for our Hindi teacher, it’s likely that he wanted his two-minute bit of fame, that he believed, as the poet Gieve Patel once wrote in a poem, that “To be no part of this hate/Is deprivation.” This is corroborated by the suspicion that the man wanted his lecture to be video-recorded, for if he did not, why didn’t he stop the student who pulled out his phone to record the statement from doing so? Or, are we saying that he did not know that the statement was being recorded? This is unconvincing. Moreover, the context in which the man spoke is unclear. Was he speaking in relation to a text he was teaching?  Or were his statements autonomous out-of-context statements?  The former scenario makes his offence less serious, because the onus of whatever he said can be placed on the text itself, which he obviously had no hand in prescribing.

But for all the man’s brashness, couldn’t the college itself have tried to protect him, instead of condoning his arrest? Couldn’t they have pointed out to the cops that, as news reports inform us, he has been in their employment since the year 2005, and has never before been known to have made controversial remarks in class? Couldn’t they have begged the activists who arrived on campus and shouted slogans to forgive him this one time?

That, of course, is too much to expect, regardless of whether it’s Ashoka University or Symbiosis College or any other institution of higher education. The teaching fraternity has always been, and will continue to be, vulnerable.