The debate surrounding the relevance of the presently holding paradigm of the university, its functions and its fairly conventional and predictable curriculum of studies (almost all of it imported, together with its exotic assumptions, from Europe and the US) would have gone on without end — and for several decades more — were it not for the fact that the students have decided that “enough was enough.” Student disaffection against institutions of higher learning is manifest in two ways nowadays: one, they either refuse to attend class since the subjects have absolutely no interest for them or their lives or their possible employment — this is a problem faced by university administrators from MIT to Delhi university; or, two, they carry on mechanically, like parrots, mindlessly regurgitating what they have been compelled to chew, banking on the degree for what it is worth, if it comes, since all feel some parcha or certificate is an essential condition for employment wherever one goes.

Either way, learning or what we call “higher education” is out of the window. Consequently, from Prime Ministers to bankers, there is a demand to know why they are unable to source competent human beings for work in their institutions after holding thousands of interviews and after the mushrooming of hundreds of colleges and universities.

Across the world, the disjunct between what universities teach and certify and the needs of the societies in which they are located has become more and more of an embarrassment. Paradoxically, as university certification becomes more and more inefficient and valueless, the push towards commercialised, private, foreign, educational institutions gets enhanced. These latter institutions are interested in money which comes from exploiting their educational pedigree, not education. The results will be increasingly obvious to all, except the most dumb. What is worse, they will come with their own imported curricula of studies and paradigms, just when we are recognising the need to develop our own.

It is safe to say that the educational enterprise today supports itself from the contributions, fees and doles handed up by large masses of unemployed people who are convinced, despite ample evidence, that spending time in these institutions will equip them with a definitive edge over others and provide for a comfortable life in a society where dog eats dog. How far removed this aspiration is from reality can be gauged from the statistic that the bulk of students attending MBA courses in prestigious management institutes come from IITs. Apparently, even a 5 year degree from an IIT is not considered adequate qualification for a job in the creamy section of society. Might as well forget about the dreams and capabilities of the hoi-polloi.

The demand for mass education has correspondingly transformed the university into a mindless degree-stamping factory. Tan Sri Dzulkifli Razak, one of Malaysia’s most eminent educationists, and former vice chancellor of several universities, made that connection explicit. He wrote:

“I can draw a good parallel between the two [factory and university]. The university is almost like an assembly line, where the student moves from classroom to classroom, lecturers are like operators in charge, examinations are another label for quality control. You pass the examination and move to the next conveyor belt. At the end of the day, you are ready for the market. You are successful if you can be absorbed or not successful if employers cannot find a use for you.”¹

The relationship between student and teacher has not changed in 1,000 years. (slide)

What has made the factory model easy to implement is the homogeneous nature of academic courses and textbooks. Increasingly, what one finds taught under the garb of “academic studies” in Ghana is also the same in Kolkata or Hamburg. The university has become the primary agent of homogenising thinking in the world. This can only mean one thing: a downward pressure into extinction for people’s knowledge, vernacular language, and indigenous cosmologies. All these, we must not forget, are the primary sources of biodiversity among the populations of the world.

If you combine the factory model with this idea of universally similar feed rations, we then have the battery chicken model of how we run our universities today. (slides)

The issue is not whether European sociology or American psychology or political science is suited to problems facing societies as richly diverse, evolved and complex as India’s or China’s – already recognised as a major ailment affecting these studies – but whether these disciplines make any sense (like cigarette-smoking) or whether their use has improved human welfare, in the least, in any part of the world. The proof is yet to come in. The social sciences have failed to predict all the major social and economic crises that have crippled life in the so-called advanced countries from time to time.

Recently, two major assaults on the university and its perceived-to-be-worthless curriculum of “academic studies” have come from unexpected sources and both reveal startling new perceptions.

Twenty-six out of 60 national universities in Japan intend to shut down their social science and humanities departments altogether from the year 2016. The action follows a specific request from the Japanese government to these universities to take “active steps to abolish [social science and humanities departments] or to convert them to serve areas that better meet society’s needs.” Obviously, this would not have happened if these disciplines had some relevance or were seen as meaningful activities, and if they had excited both students and faculty. The government insisted that further funding for these institutions would depend upon the action taken by them on the government’s directions.²

Ernst and Young, one of the world’s largest accountancy and consultancy firms, and one of the UK’s biggest graduate recruiters, announced its intention this year (2015) “to remove degree classification from the entry criteria for its hiring programmes, having found ‘no evidence’ that success at university was correlated with achievement in professional qualifications.” It acknowledged: “Our own internal research of over 400 graduates found that screening students based on academic performance alone was too blunt an approach to recruitment….The study found no evidence to conclude that previous success in higher education correlated with future success in subsequent professional qualifications undertaken.”³

If one looks at the US educational scenario, one can see that a distinct shift has already taken place there as well from the so-called humanities and social sciences to subjects that are linked to current jobs in the economy. Let me provide a listing of this shift taken from a recent (2008) volume on higher education in that exalted country.⁴ Table 1 shows how old priorities have been replaced by others considered not important earlier. Table 2 shows the large scale desertion of conventional humanities and social sciences for knowledge related more to daily lives and livelihoods:

Table 1

THE TOP TEN MAJORS

Per 1,000 Bachelor’s Degrees Awarded

1968 2008

Education 213 Business 215

Social Science 191 Social Science 108

Business 128 Humanities 86

Humanities 115 Education 69

Physical Sciences 68 Health 67

Engineering 59 Psychology 59

Biology 50 Fine Arts 56

Fine Arts 40 Engineering 54

Psychology 38 Communications 51

Health 28 Biology 49

Vocational 70 Other Vocational 186

1,000 1,000

All Vocational 498 All Vocational 642

NOTE: Social Sciences include History, Physical Sciences include Mathematics; Fine Arts include Performing Arts.

Table 2

SOME BACHELOR’S DEGREES AWARDED IN 2008

Equine science and management Ornamental horticulture

Poultry science Turf and grass management

Landscape architecture Exercise physiology

E-Commerce Tourism and travel management

Resort management Knowledge management

Apparel and accessories marketing Baking and pastry arts

Photojournalism Animation technology

Computer systems security Ceramic engineering

Robotics technology Hazardous materials management

Diesel mechanics technology Adult development and aging

Sign language interpretation Medical office assisting

Cytotechnology Music therapy

Medical illustration Asian herbology

Systems science and theory Historic preservation

Sport management Welding technology

Furniture design Commercial and advertising art

Fiber, textile and weaving arts

Where then does this leave the Indian university, still largely stuck with an unmoving academic curriculum and admittedly, with very little conscious relationship with the real world or community? Do we follow any of the above moves from Japan and the US, for instance? Or are the above responses largely related to perceptions (among students, admins and politicians) that universities must cater to jobs. If not, why has the university continued to adopt the factory model of instruction described so effectively by Dzulkifli Razak?

I was shocked to hear recently from colleagues who have children that have reached the age of going to college that their wards were not interested in pursuing any longer the 2+3 graduation model and were opting instead for learning opportunities outside college walls. This is certainly a new trend. If the idea goes viral, as they say today for any mass infection, the closure of the university would be imminent.

Conventionally, those who felt they did not have a brain for science, engineering or medicine went in for the arts, which meant tackling a basket of subjects that were inherited with colonial education. I have yet to come across a student who did any of these subjects (history, English literature, political science, sociology, psychology, etc.) with any degree of passion. These subjects were there for no great reason; some were less attractive and more anxiety-creating than others. The choice invariably was which one demanded the least amount of work and generated the least amount of anxiety. There was little inherent meaning in most of these disciplines. Except for the fact that the university and its departments remained a hand-me-down concern, it could have carried on forever.

In fact, these disciplines were kept alive because someone had done them earlier and passed them on, without thinking, accepting them as legitimate bodies of knowledge. Naturally, their potential to fill a meaningful universe was extremely low and limited. In fact, all those teaching them lost interest in them after retirement. They were taught because they provided a job. Each new set of students faithfully imbibed the vocabulary and the meanings and the set slogans and the pet phrases and become competent to the extent they felt (or others felt) they were using and reproducing them properly, as per the understanding of the time or the fashion of the time. Clothes fashions change every year. But in the academic world, the same logic worked, with fashions changing every five years.

Forget about governments asking questions, one should also see the response of the students themselves to this quaint, bewildering world of academic studies they face for the first time in their lives, after a decade of mugging concepts and content in school, with little choice of what they can learn or must learn. (I call this school education “brainwashing”. However, an educationist corrected me recently to term it “structured learning”.) To those dedicated to their jobs in this academic circus, students who did not take these studies or subjects seriously or displayed no great wish to even understand them, or even disliked them, were abnormal or deficient in some manner. If you did not appreciate the meal cooked by the teachers, the educators, the administration for your own benefit, there was something wrong or deficient with you and that needed remedy..

Hopefully, that situation has reversed today. Now students consider themselves perfectly normal if they find the academic diets marginal to their concerns in life. In fact, no person who loves sociology or political science should, by the same yardstick, consider himself or herself normal. These are archaic disciplines, born out of the strange wedlock between the the European university and colonial administrators who assumed they were intellectuals. They are out of sync with the situation in our times, where every sacred canon has been busted and where secular disciplines are transforming in so many ways it is difficult to find any commonality.

This affords universities two options. Progressively close down their operations, as they become a hazard to the natural business of learning. Or they can use the emerging methodological and ideological chaos and confusion to seriously bring in fresh perspectives that will give higher education a far better chance of survival. Surviving by cheating unemployed people, promising them a better life through paper degrees obtained after chewing reams of text books does not have much of a future in today’s world. Politicians may do it as a matter of habit. Institutions lack that flexibility (or shamelessness). But the writing as emerged on the wall. Professors and lecturers who consider themselves middlemen between text books and students are rapidly finding themselves replaced by the Internet.

This is therefore, hopefully, the time in which the university can re-invent itself.

Some universities have seen the light and are moving out of the walls of their hallowed stone or heritage buildings into communities surrounding them. Others are locating both curricula and research within the needs of communities or taking their research agenda from them, like PRATEC has done in South America.

Newer university initiatives include the successful running of Baduku College (Bangalore) and Swaraj University (Udaipur), together with the Universidade de la Tierra (in Mexico).

The almost exclusive focus and orientation of the Baduku community college is young people from marginalised communities and neglected regions of Karnataka. This focus has determined the choice of courses and the approach to education. The courses are designed to create professionals who can address complex issues including: learning how to produce safe food and do organic agriculture; become counsellors to assist women facing problems; become educators sensitive to the needs and aspirations of youth; join journalism committed to a peace agenda; and so on. Their Youth Resource Centre is not only a place for youth to be comfortable, relaxed, but discuss dilemmas, find out their own paths. The Centre is stocked with books and film. (For more information, http://www.samvadabaduku.org).

Swaraj univesity located in Udaipur is attracting youngsters who walk out of formal college education because they find it mostly rudderless and without meaning. They join Swaraj to plot and chart their own research agenda as Khojis. The programmes offered are as many as students with aspirations. Most Khojis find meaning and excitement at last after years of attending formal institutions that simply dumbed them down or forced them into avenues for which they were ill-suited or uncomfortable with. (For more information, see http://www.swarajuniversity.org).

Even colleges that once adhered to formal curricula are now rapidly moving beyond such formal boundaries and offering course work that hardly falls within recognisable conventional Eurocentric disciplines. Here one may mention Azim Premji University (Bengaluru). It is these institutions that are attracting students who feel they are out of the ordinary, who are conscious of the need to remain creative, and, at the same time, keen to remain relevant and focussed on their own interests and concerns (in contrast to institutional demands and requirements).

A People’s University (PU) has been proposed for some time now by the People’s Council of Education. The idea would obviously benefit from looking at many of these innovations in universities off the beaten track, since they grout higher education in people’s lives and society’s concerns. They seek to create environments in which human intelligence can directly engage with human and community needs, rather than with an elaborate theoretical edifice that has shallow imported or non-existent roots and whose only claim to legitimacy is that this is the way the university has functioned for some hundreds of years. It would be useful at this stage to enumerate the inherent requirements of a PU. It is necessary first to admit the necessity of a paradigm shift. Once that is done, the consequences will follow.

Almost the very first requirement would certainly be not to imitate or follow current universities, either in the need to have buildings or huge grants or admins, with their attendant bureaucracies. Once these archaic needs are seen to be required, the process of centralisation, control and homogenizing is inevitable. The institution exhausts itself on maintaining its construction and other activity and thereby centralises itself: This becomes the first hazard for creative learning, which cannot emerge in centralised environments. Bureaucrats know rules. They can administer institutions where learning also follows rules. But creative thinking has never followed rules. Popular thinking also does not follow too many rules.

The second major component of a PU would involve creating an environment for self-directed and self-designed learning. This is explicitly prohibited, in fact impossible, within current academic institutions which rigorously enforce curricula that has become more and more homogenous and therefore a complete disaster considering the cultural diversity of a countries like India. A PU must not just respect the culture and knowledge traditions of its people, it should attempt to build on these. It may do this critically or otherwise. This is the only mechanism in fact by which cultures can be kept alive today: by use. Any other route will lead eventually and inevitably to encapsulation of the culture in museums. Today, with the possibilities offered by the Internet (though who knows how long these will last), self-directed, self-propelled learning is now the most important learning process used in the world. Only those who are stuck in formal educational institutions appear like chickens on a factory farm, with “knowledge” fed to them, like water and feed pellets.

What this implies for a PU is therefore a more flexible and relaxed opportunity provided for adults to learn and intensity their learning in those areas that are necessary, in their own perceptions and desires, for their soul. Today, all the learning that is on offer is learning that is conducive to absorption in corporate or bureacratic cultures. It does not satisfy the soul. Present day higher education institutions are a cage. They impose narrow limits and boundaries, or tunnel-visions. The PU should ensure that all adults can be liberated from set learning which has little to do with learning for the soul. In fact, all adults should revolt against the idea that higher education is to be reserved, largely, for those who have just completed school. Even for the latter, higher education has been completely at variance with its objectives, and degenerated mostly into an opportunity to become serfs of corporations and bureaucracies. It must be rescued from the narrow age spectrum to which it is presently reserved (post-school, at college/university only), and restored to all adults who desire it. It should never be made an adjunct to employment and should never be mixed up or identified with it as well. The moment that happens, learning will self-restrict to the demands of industrial culture which has mostly had a gory past, and which also has no future.

Therefore, in this different paradigm govering the PU, there is no need for all the conventional trappings of a modern university. There are no teachers, only co-learners; there are no textbooks, since the text comes after the learning is completed; there are no classrooms, since learning takes place in a million places across the social or natural environment and can be accessed without payment. The resources used up for adult education in conventional, formal institutions, are no longer required.

Thus, every adult who wants to pursue the study of any element of life or nature that resonates with the yearnings of her soul will get that opportunity and support to do so in the PU. The PU will never degenerate to reduce or circumscribe learning within the bounds of what is today offered as formal education, since that is a horrible and terrible perversion and travesty of what learning truly stands for. The idea that people should pay out huge amounts to educate themelsves to fit some slot in some economic machine is itself wholly abhorrent to humanity’s best versions of itself. It has never been part of the enterprise of learning even upto the most recent past. This is therefore a right that must be re-gained and guaranteed for all human beings because they are human beings. The problem is no modern university is founded on such foundations or recognises such rights. Therefore, even if they close down, learning will continue. The PU should ensure the environment is always available for that purpose

References

1. Claude Alvares, “When will the Slavery end?” Paper presented at international conference on at NUMC, Malaysia, January 22-26, 2014.

2. For more details, see: http://monitor.icef.com/2015/09/japanese-government-asks-universities-to-close-social-sciences-and-humanities-faculties/

3. See: https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/ernst-and-young-drops-degree-classification-threshold-graduate-recruitment.

4. Andrew Hacker and Claudia Dreifus, “Higher Education? How Colleges Are Wasting Our Money and Failing Our Kids and What We Can Do About It,” (2010)

Paper presented at the National symposium on “University Education System: Shifting Paradigms and Deepening Crisis” (Pune 16-18 January, 2016,IIE)