Brutal assaults on university staff and students by the police – ably assisted by hired thugs of this or that political party – are not exactly unknown on Indian campuses. For example, in the recent weeks, such action – always carried out in the name of restoring legal and moral order – have taken place in Himachal Pradesh, where students were protesting against astronomical fee hikes.
Still, it must be said that the midnight assault on protesting students of Jadavpur University by the Kolkata police force on the night of September 16-17th, 2014, adds some interesting features to this dismal phenomenon. Remember, the police were called in by the university’s vice-chancellor to attack his own students. Recall then that the students were there to demand a proper investigation into a sexual assault suffered by one of their own peers. Finally, reflect on the fact that after reporting the incident, the victim was told to keep quiet for her own good by the authorities. After all, they had to protect the reputation of one of India’s leading universities!
But if protecting Jadavpur’s ‘reputation’ was the vice-chancellor’s aim, it has not quite turned out that way. After the police put fifty-odd people in the hospital and entertained themselves in passing by molesting a number of other young women students, Kolkata saw the largest spontaneous popular protests in recent history on September 20th – with students, teachers and citizens marching, singing, demanding the resignation of the vice-chancellor. Police forces were posted at the university gates, allegedly to prevent the infiltration of agitators. In response, some of the university’s professors have suggested holding their classes on the pavements outside the campus. The vice-chancellor, after a short medical leave, has since been confirmed in his post by the West Bengal government.
If this had been the full story of the current siege of Jadavpur, it may have been possible to dismiss it as yet another depressing chapter in the ongoing saga of India’s institutionalized sexism and gender violence. Yet, the episode should also be seen as a part of much wider attack conducted by neo-liberal states on universities across the whole world today. Jadavpur does indeed present some local variations in this process, but it is by no means an exception. Only the historically illiterate or the willful propagandist will dismiss it as an example of Indian (or West Bengali) backwardness.
The eruption of student and staff discontent, although triggered by a specific case of (yet another) horrendous sexual assault, should be seen properly in the context of a general effort to degrade and destroy Jadavpur University’s academic capabilities. The past years have seen a whole raft of the changes to the university regulations and governance protocols, all of which aim to divert the power to take academic and administrative decisions away from properly constituted university committees to the vice-chancellor himself as well as to the state government.
These instances of mal-governance have been catalogued by the university’s teachers and are in most cases, available as public information. Among the most egregious of these have been the vice-chancellor’s overruling of a selection committee’s unanimous decision to hire an Assistant-Professor in the School of Illumination Science and Engineering Design in order to appoint a candidate with the right political connections; the revision of the state’s university laws (amendment act 2011, section 10.8) in order to grant the power of appointing teachers and deans of school solely to himself and the state government; the summary dismissal of the directors and joint-directors of 21 schools of inter-disciplinary studies – all of which were financially viable and ear-marked as centers of research excellence by the University Grants Commission of India (UGC); the long delay in approving university statutes in order to prevent the election of teacher’s representatives to the university court and councils.
Taken as individual instances, these may appear as quirks of an incompetent administrator. But taken together, as they should be, these provide a clear pattern of determined efforts to destroy the university’s autonomy and academic integrity that cannot be dismissed as accidental. We should pause here to take stock of just how extraordinary has Jadavpur’s national and international recognition been in recent times. Since 2001, it has been ranked as one of the 21 leading global research institutes (by UK’s innovation foundation); the second best university in India (by SCIMAGO rankings); 47th among the top 100 universities in BRICS and developing countries (Times Higher Education); and as one of first five universities ‘with potential for excellence’ by the UGC. And these accolades have been achieved by a state university not blessed with the lavish resources of India’s federally funded universities or the country’s new super-sized private education sector. It might seem extraordinary then that the state itself should be so determined to terminate, with extreme prejudice, one of its prize assets.
But that precisely is the point that makes Jadavpur a global story. For the pattern of administrative malpractices catalogued here – vice chancellors overruling properly appointed academics, decapitation of university councils and teacher’s unions, draining of power away from university senates and courts, pacification of students and teachers by ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ weapons – are all of faithfully replicated in campuses around the world where the gap between the income and power of the vice-chancellors and the broader academic community (including non-academic staff who provide indispensible logistical service) resemble the one that divides the big beasts of the business world and the rest of humanity. From Illinois and Columbia in the US, to Warwick, Kent and Middlesex in Britain, campus after campus has seen ‘business-friendly’ university administration dismiss staff, shut down departments, let research institutes starve, intimidate and harass students. If in Urbana-Champaign, the University of Illinois decided to ‘un-hire’ a professor for his views on the Israel-Palestine conflict, in Columbia one student is carrying around a mattress she was raped on to protest against the university’s refusal to investigate the case properly. If at Warwick, a senior professor who is a prominent critic of the university’s administration has been suspended on the strength of undisclosed charges, Middlesex has closed its world-leading Philosophy department on ‘financial’ grounds.
One of the primary functions of the neo-liberal state, which it ‘outsources’ to the universities it (less and less) funds, is to ensure the production of docile managers and consumers, not reflective human beings. It will do all in its powers to achieve this. It is far from coincidental that this rot from the top is always accompanied by the entrenchment of a culture of violence on campus, of which sexual assaults on women students is one telling example.
The funny thing about oppression is that it cannot exist without resistance. Those who poured out on to the streets of Kolkata to defend Jadavpur University were responding to the trigger of one horrendous incident, but it was one that summed up the longer, perhaps less visible but no less scandalous history of a campaign to paralyze the vibrant critical and intellectual energies of Indian universities. And had we listened more carefully, we would have heard in those raised Kolkata voices notes from Hong Kong, Istanbul, Mexico, New York, London, Glasgow, Delhi – a whole world saying enough was, finally, enough.
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