Educational institutions and class prejudice

The angry objections over my comments made in this column regarding the class nature of the Jadavpur University (JU) movement have shown unease with the comparison I made there with the radical student movements in the Sixties. Either the comparison has appeared to these correspondents as unnecessary, or the product of sepia tinted glasses, left wing conservatism,  motivated by anti-feminism that does not understand that gender has now substituted class, or as one JNU academic put it, we are now all workers. If we cannot think of pro-working class politics, we can at least pretend that the university as an institution is a factory. The unease is telling.

I do not want to make any further comment on the JU movement. However some of the larger concerns behind that column call for amplification. In the period between that column and this one, the students kissed each other and voted in favour of dismissing the Vice-Chancellor, the emeritus professors expressed concern over the present VC, the teachers nodded in agreement with the club of the elite professors, and the distinguished ex-teachers expressed anguish at the situation where a national treasure like the JU could be headed by a person like the present VC, and yet some other students who had assembled at the JU in support of the student movement there demanded that they be given freedom in their own university not to attend any class in order to appear for examination because among others Oxford and Cambridge do not have such stipulation. These do not require any comment. Clearly class prejudices are resurgent in society, more so in educational institutions. 

Yet interestingly these correspondents did not apply themselves to the task of investigating what is different and common in the educational institutions in the sixties and now, and therefore in the students movements in the two periods.   

In one sense the comparison is provocative because the nature of the educational institutions has changed. In the earlier epoch, middle class students predominantly came from clerical family backgrounds. Its relative innocence was marked by cultural, for instance, linguistic prejudice. That middle class has changed with the information sector and the organised service sector boom for the past few decades. Cultural prejudice is replaced by class prejudice. 

Besides, enormous government investment in select higher education institutions and fields has increased the pay of professors phenomenally. But the difference between ordinary colleges and the elite ones has also increased. The elite universities now have booming research centres and consultancy programmes appropriate to the neo-liberal agenda, aesthetics, and style of life. If there is less money for ordinary colleges and universities, there is breast beating about the exceptionality of these elite institutions – their human and other kinds of resources and wealth. One does not have to read Thomas Piketty to understand this. If this trend were to succeed, the university will soon become the ideal neo-liberal institution. 

Happiness, exotic pursuits, intense competition for academic excellence, and consumerism will mark the stakeholders of the neo-liberal educational institution. There is also intense competition among universities in attracting collaboration, and a sigh that we do not feature in that ultimate ugly marker -- the Shanghai ranking of the universities. 

In the Sixties, what the student movement therefore did in terms of linking up with students, youth, institutions, and localities of the lower classes may have been historic, but was also natural in some sense. For, after all, the cultured, educated, and proper people at that time held the denizens of the lower depths with disgust but also curiosity and fascination. But with meritocracy now reigning supreme, the gulf is wider. Neo-liberalism has incorporated sections of the Left also, because these sections of the Left had always prided themselves on superior culture, and now they cannot but value the qualities of merit, smartness, eloquence, and knowledge that are hallmarks of the students coming from the technical and intellectual stratum of society. In short compared to the Sixties the student community today is marked to a greater extent by class divisions. And, who does not know that class division in culture becomes, sooner or later, race division?

In an old mass university like Calcutta, burdened with the responsibility of guiding equally populous undergraduate degree colleges, the transformation to being a neo-liberal institution is difficult. In small, tight, exotic, and hothouse-like institutions the possibility of such transformation is greater.

We have thus a paradoxical situation. State investment in higher education increases but only in a differential way. Higher education expands, but access to higher education is increasingly featured by restrictions.

Knowledge transfer from the educated to the less educated or uneducated is becoming slower. Neo-liberalism has facilitated concentration of knowledge to the extent that the stakeholders of this concentrated world of knowledge have lost almost all organic contacts with the less educated sections of society. The North Atlantic tradition of academia has now taken possession of the imagination of the educated classes of the country.

The neo-liberal university is a self-engrossed institution with its own narcissistic practices that resist any idea or programme of sustainable resistance to neo-liberalism. It is also a self-righteous institution. Our President almost on a daily basis calls for our universities to become first world institutions. With the help of the modes of virtual communication the neo-liberal university becomes a member of a select virtual world. It takes months and years for a workers' or peasants’ struggle in one corner of the country to become known. It took not even days for the JU movement to become a global cause. The laws of elective affinities operate remorselessly.  There is an ethical illusion in such aspiration, whose object is the production of the cultivated individual who does not need to engage with the society. The university as a premier cultural institution facilitates the self-repeating metaphysical dance of capital.

We shall not have to wait for long. The corporate and the big business sector have started investing in higher education in a big way. But mark it. This will be mostly in liberal arts, human sciences, management and juridical sciences. In life sciences and other experimental sciences the investment dynamics will be of different type. There, the State will be required. Enormous amounts of money will characterise the pay scale, buildings, and the image making of these new institutions.

In this scenario who will think and speak of the institutions attended by the poorer classes? Typical in the respect has been the attitude of the Bengali intelligentsia. When the state government established universities and colleges in faraway places and remote corners, there was not a single voice of applause. The so-called progressive intelligentsia whined about buildings not coming about quickly an dearth of infrastructure. They dismissed them as only populist gestures. No student movement demanded increased outlay by the UGC for these institutions. Distinguished teachers did not appeal for funds. 

No wonder therefore that my reference to the Sixties was found irritating. While great movements and great times will always resonate with values and memories that people will cherish and try to re-enact, neo-liberalism wants the slate to remain always clean. Amnesia is the most effective instrument for neo-liberal reforms and self-cultivation.      

The author is Director, Calcutta Research Group