Time for introspection

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Time for introspection

Monday, 17 February 2020 | JS Rajput

Time for introspection

An institution can play a leadership role only if it comprehends the dynamic nature of its mission and goals in professional terms and understands the importance of looking within

One of the most prestigious national institutions of India, the Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), is in ferment. Not for the first time. There is a general refrain among academics that it is the most pampered universities in the country. With over 70 per cent entrants getting scholarships, its professors are free to enroll any number of scholars who continue their research work, avail hostel facilities without any time limit or restriction — all for their political pursuits.

While the amount of scholarships must be enhanced regularly, hostel rent must not be touched. Currently, even when over 80 per cent of the students have already deposited the revised fee and registered for the new semester, courts are being approached to deliver justice with one demand: No rise in fee. In fact, in JNU’s terminology, it is business as usual.

However, the level of investment that the nation has made in this one university makes it obligatory on its part to prove its worth on account of the confidence put in it by the people. They know where JNU stands. But the latter is not interested in incisively securitising its role and contribution.

Central Universities and other national-level institutions of higher learning and research must regularly pose a very serious query to themselves — both individually and collectively: Are we really equipped enough to take a fresh look?  An institution can play a leadership role only if it collectively comprehends the dynamic nature of its mission, objectives and goals in professional terms and consistently strives to understand the importance of “looking within.” National-level institutions must remain ever-alert on “growing up” professionally. Reputations are made only through persistence of single-minded commitment to the cause over a long period of time. When academics within an institution get divided on ideological constraints, there is a drastic reduction in the time available for high quality collaborative research and genuine innovations. In the post-Independence period, India has witnessed a sharp decline in some of its prestigious learning centres of earlier years.  It would have been in the fitness of things if JNU had studied such cases and came forward with a model of re-engineering and quality enhancement strategies.

The growth of unbiased and pure professional tradition of knowledge quest suffers in conditions of severe apathy towards the indigenous tradition of knowledge-creation and dissemination, the essence of which may still be relevant.

It is now globally acknowledged that education in every country must be rooted in its culture and must be committed to the progress of the country. The pre-Independence model of Gandhi and Zakir Husain was based upon this premise. It is now being realised that had India given the importance education deserved, things would have been far more encouraging on the employment front. There would also have been no exodus from rural areas.

Education has suffered because of a lack of courage to link it to the national tradition of growth of knowledge and scholarship. Instead, we have been overdependent on inherited legacy. It should never be tough for a professional, unbiased educationist to conclude that education in every country must be a product of indigenous thought process and appropriate new scientific knowledge.

Consequently, the first requirement at the policy-planning level is full familiarity with the indigenous traditions of knowledge quest, its creation, generation, transfer and utilisation. This is necessary but should not be a closed exercise. It would be equally necessary to acquire a deep comprehension of new knowledge that could be available from all possible sources and places. 

Mahatma Gandhi had something to say about it and it appeared in the Young India of June 1, 1921: “I do not want my house to be walled in all sides and my windows to be stuffed. I want the cultures of all the lands to be blown about my house as freely as possible. But I refuse to be blown off my feet by any. I refuse to live in other people’s houses as an interloper, a beggar or a slave.”

One of the outstanding features of the freedom struggle was its persistent focus on indigenous universal education in a free India. Our founding fathers knew that the transplanted system forced by the alien rulers on the country would not work in free India. It was meant for a few to attain a specific objective and would crash even otherwise if extended on a universal scale. Sadly enough, India continued with it. Can one say that we preferred continuity and status quo instead of creating “our schools, our campuses, our programmes, our curricula, our libraries and laboratories?”

Though Mahatma Gandhi had warned about all this in Hind Swaraj, he wrote in 1909: India remained too enamoured of all that is Western; we are too overwhelmed; just too eager to borrow everything from “there and them?”

With its overwhelming emphasis on liberal education, JNU could have researched what was the best model for school education that India must implement. It is certainly not too much to expect that it could have presented to the nation how social cohesion and religious amity could be cemented in the country and why it is a core element of economic growth, progress and development.

It is really depressing that there are two distinct ideological groups of students and teachers who have just fully ignored the dialogical tradition that was the hallmark of knowledge growth in the past and has become more relevant and necessary in present times.

Swami Vivekananda could put it in futuristic perspective as early as in 1896 in one of his lectures delivered in London: “What we want is progress, development and realisation. No theories ever made men higher. No amount of books can help us to become purer. The only power is in realisation, and that lies in ourselves and comes from thinking. Let men think. A clod of earth never thinks but it remains only a lump of earth. The glory of man is that he is a thinking being. It is the nature of man to think and therein he differs from animals.”

Let JNU lead other universities to a major rethink that would let them focus purely on knowledge quest for fulfilling the aspirations of the youth and the nation.

For those who are interested in finding solutions, one would like to submit the following from a letter Albert Einstein wrote to Mahatma Gandhi and which was quoted by APJ Abdul Kalam in one his books: “You have shown through your works, that it is possible to succeed without violence even with those who have not discarded the method of violence.”

Are our universities and students of today not expected to strengthen this philosophy?

It is indeed depressing that today we have a culture where even premium universities, with all of their much-publicised achievements, never seriously try to listen to those who do not think alike. It is sad that a culture of intolerance pervades many famed institutions of higher learning. However, they must not forget that they have an obligation to the nation to encourage, nourish and nurture the great dialogical tradition of India. They must become a place of intellectual interactions and welcome every idea with open arms. India needs leadership institutions that would promote social cohesion and religious amity.

(The writer works in education and social cohesion)

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