While the contribution of the Left has led to the decline of the university, the role of Congress has affected education in general.
Even as leaders of the regime currently ruling Kerala have spoken repeatedly about their intention to turn the state into a “knowledge society”, a public spat broke out between the governor and the chief minister. It deals with the governance of the higher education sector of the state. This should not be seen as a source of embarrassment, it should be welcomed as an opportunity to fulfill the ambition of the government. Notably this comes soon after the Kerala government constituted three commissions to recommend ways to improve higher education.
no mirror to society
When discussing the state of higher education in India, it is the practice that we refer to under-educated youth, devoid of analytical ability and communication skills, lack of understanding of India’s past, oblivious to their role in the success of democracy and evidenced by companies . as “unemployed”. While all this applies to Kerala, arguably, producing employable youth is not the main function of the university. A society maintains universities so that they can hold a mirror to it, in which it is able to recognize itself, warts and all. It is in this role that the universities of Kerala fail the most.
The state is facing challenges on many fronts. Its economic future is bleak as remittances from West Asia are beginning to slow down. Its ecological security is threatened by an attack on the earth to extract stone for the construction of luxury homes indicating social status. Its record of gender equality is questioned when we look at the extremely poor representation of women in decision-making bodies, which itself is related to the malevolent culture of its political parties. Its commitment to democracy is futile when religious interests and a small minority of the working class are treated with little respect for those outside its purview.
Now, most societies have their own vested interests, but they also have independent intellectuals, often based in the university, who call them out. Where is Noam Chomsky or Medha Patkar of Kerala? We do not need to agree with them to see how important a role they play in securing a democratic space free from commercial and religious interests and the dictates of political parties. The last time Kerala had a critique of its own was when Arundhati Roy wrote her first novel nearly a quarter century ago. Obviously, there was a response that it has hurt ‘religious sentiments’.
A knowledge society can exist only when religion is kept away, because historically organized religion has come in the way of the disclosure of secular truth. When it comes to drawing attention to the vulnerabilities of Kerala’s economic prospects, its high consumption inequality, its dire ecological future and its religion-and-patriarchy-ridden civil society, we may ask, where are our universities?
Left’s fault
No political front in Kerala has any answer for the pathetic condition of its universities. A fatal error of the Left political parties in Kerala is that they have worked to undermine excellence and encourage the illusion of the possibility of unlimited material consumption, regardless of productivity. It is instructive that Russia was a site of high creativity in both the arts and agriculture immediately after the revolution, and its people were encouraged to think of the country as their cherished homeland. Even the ruthless suppression of independence by Stalin could not seal it. In 1945, the Red Army first reached Berlin, and Khrushchev scared the Americans by sending a human into outer space. None of this could have been achieved without the concerted application of higher intelligence and the expectation that everyone in society would gain weight.
This is something definitely missing in the approach of the Kerala Left, who aspire to pension very little in the population and distribute spice kits through the public distribution system, even as the state is facing its own problems of polluting. screams for a solution. Rivers, unstable hills and accumulation of domestic and industrial waste.
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Congress Empowered Group
While the Left’s contribution to the fall of the university was the collateral damage of its passion to reduce the population, the Congress, which forms the bulk of the alternative left-wing political parties, has had a more direct role in the decline. Not only of higher education but of self-education. This is what Congress has done by empowering caste and religious groups, which are virtually the “owners” of educational institutions.
Original Sin, so to speak, was committed in the late 1950s when the Congress Party encouraged these groups to oppose the educational reforms initiated by the government of EMS Namboodiripad. It is not clear whether his minister of education, Joseph Mundassery, was particularly concerned with academic excellence, but he could see the harmful effects of these communal groups. The movement that followed was used by Jawaharlal Nehru to dismiss a democratically elected government in a hopelessly partisan act. After tasting victory, caste and religious groups never looked back.
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After Nehru’s death, the Congress had to interpret secularism as the abundance of religions in public places and private educational institutions in Kerala took advantage of this. It is widely said that they indulge in the practice of selling teaching appointments to the highest bidder. The latter may be unproven, but rumor has an estimate of how much the final zoology lectureship served to keep doubts alive.
The indifference of the Congress party’s approach to education in Kerala is its history of being appointed as education minister from communal parties confined to specific areas of the state. This can be done so shamelessly, it should be a shame in a democracy. At least, Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan has refused to do so, rejecting the practice of dividing VCs according to caste and religion. But the weakness of the Left is their cadre, and as long as it rules the state, one can expect nothing but loyalists to make the cut.
Between the strategy of communal mobilization and adherence to the political ideology, practiced by Kerala’s two main political structures, the higher education sector is swept away without a rudder.
No desire
As I have said, the real aim of the University is to show the mirror to the society. But the claim of achieving this goal does not mean that our youth should not get the education they deserve. What protocols exist to see that instruction is of the highest international class, that new institutions or even programs are started only when there is a potential to deliver excellence and that the heads of institutions have demonstrated intellectual leadership and democratic practice. Have you demonstrated commitment? We have become far more prosperous over the past 50 years, and both disciplinary knowledge and an awareness of global best practices are readily available in the administration of education. It is just that Kerala does not have the will to take advantage of this knowledge.
While structural barriers to improving the state of higher education in Kerala, which I mentioned, exist, practical solutions that can be implemented with immediate effect also exist. Principal among them would be the student assessment institutes of the courses. These should be comprehensive without being overly broad, revealing a distance from the global range of instructional material, the quality of the instruction itself, and a focus on learning outcomes. This information must be made public, as is the case with public institutions in the United States. In an IT-enabled environment, this shouldn’t be difficult to achieve. It will turn students into stakeholders, encourage teachers to do their best and hold administrators, public and private, accountable.
Pulapre Balakrishnan teaches at Ashoka University, Sonepat, Haryana
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