Campus has the right to speak, discuss, debate

There is an urgent need to confront the political forces unconcerned both with education and the youth which has to be educated and not be cowed by them.

Last week, Shamsul Islam, an academic, was heckled as he arrived at University College, Mangalore, to deliver a lecture on the 1857 War of Independence. The lecture was delivered under heavy police protection as students affiliated with the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP) raised slogans outside and threatened to barge into the lecture hall. A few days earlier to this, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) MLA from Mangalore South constituency allegedly ordered the acting Vice-Chancellor of Mangalore University to celebrate Ganeshotsava in accordance with his directions. This festival has been celebrated in the university for many years now on a modest scale involving students of different communities.

Increasingly, universities are being forced, through intimidation and threat, to become handmaids of political agendas and political parties. (HT file)

“Knowledge is Light”, reads the motto of my university. I would like to revisit this motto in light of the events taking place in my university today. I became a part of the university campus when I joined the postgraduate department of English as a student in 1985. Since then, I have been a part of the university campus as a student and teacher. As a young student, I remember the university as a vibrant place of discussion, reading, learning and exploring. Scholars from across the country and the world were invited for conferences and we students felt both awed and ignited by their lectures and the discussions that followed. We were fortunate to have a fine set of teachers, some of whom went on to become well-known as scholars and academicians. What I distinctly remember of those years is the academic environment of the university, where questions could be asked and issues could be raised without fear of persecution or intimidation either by the administrators of the institution or the teachers or by political parties or the ruling regime.

Knowledge is never neutral and universities are not sterilised laboratories producing knowledge sanitised of socio-political contaminations. Knowledge is always embedded within and shaped by the socio-historical world. Hence, there is never a non-partisan knowledge. Knowledge emerges from different social and political locations and it is contested and debated from within. A university provides a space for such contestations. The text becomes the site of such contestations and a truly democratic classroom allows complete freedom for debates and dialogues conducted with civility, without privileging or intimidating any participant in this debate. The teacher brings to this debate her readings and scholarship from across the years. However, she should be open and willing to be interrogated by her students in a way that fundamentally questions the orthodoxies on which her learning and teaching are based. It is only then that knowledge truly becomes enlightening and radically egalitarian.

For many years, Mangalore University provided us with such an academic space for learning, unlearning and relearning. Even today it is possible to discuss, question and debate in my classroom even though students are much more clear about their political and ideological affiliations and defend them in the classroom. But as a teacher of many years, I have found that young people are curious and excited about new ideas. They are also flexible enough to be open to new ways of thinking and are capable of maintaining the protocols of civil discussion in the classroom.

It is, therefore, disturbing to see how, in recent years, political ideologues and elected representatives are trespassing into this space of the university and trying to restructure it through aggressive, coercive and insidious ways. Increasingly, universities are being forced, through intimidation and threat, to become handmaids of political agendas and political parties. The delicate and wonderful networks of interaction, dialogue and friendship built and sustained through and within the classrooms of public educational institutions are being replaced by a monolithic, uniform, socio-cultural stamp of identity. Classrooms are being violently forced to bear the uniformity of appearance and uniformity of speech and opinion.

Fundamentally, learning is a process of making sense of ourselves and the socio-historical worlds in which we are embedded and embodied. Learning is also a seeking for social and political structures that are egalitarian and accommodative of a plurality of religious beliefs and ways of living. Learning is a shared enterprise of trying to envisage and introduce practices that will enable the full exercise of our capacity for a humane existence, and the efflorescence of our creative and intellectual potential. Hence, the learning that takes place in a university is always in a process of conversation with the society and the world that surrounds it. The classroom is a space where this conversation can be given full freedom to explore every nuance of this conversation, to pursue it to the limits of knowing and to include in it those at the margins of society.

Today, I see my university being slowly destroyed by political forces that are unconcerned both with education and the youth which has to be educated. There is an urgent need to confront these forces and not be cowed by them. If we do not come together as a community we will have ceded one of the last few, remaining locations from where we can stand up to the onslaught of brute political authority. We would have extinguished the light of knowledge.

Parinitha Shetty teaches at Mangalore University. The views expressed are personal