How To Kill A University

How do you redeem a 'doomed university'? It's a challenge that should worry Vibhuti Narayan Rai, the new vice-chancellor of the Mahatma Gandhi International Hindi University, a former policeman and writer, known for his candid novel on communal riots—Shahar Mein Curfew. I borrow the term 'doomed university' from the founding V-C of the university, Ashok Vajpeyi, a former bureaucrat and litterateur. In private conversation, Vajpeyi would say, "There are three kinds of universities in India: university, deemed university and doomed university." Needless to say, he considered his Mahatma Gandhi Antarrashtriya Hindi Vishwavidyalaya doomed. Vajpeyi's definition could just have been the odd poetic conceit, had the fact-finding committee of the Union human resources development ministry, headed by the eminent historian Bipan Chandra, not concluded that the affairs of the university were indeed in a big mess. For this, the committee squarely puts the blame on the ministry, specifically as it functioned during the NDA regime, and the second V-C of the university, G. Gopinathan. Both Rai and the ministry would do well to heed the Bipan Chandra committee's report, especially its recommendations.

But first, Rai is faced with a peculiar problem. The university's visitor, the president of India, has put in abeyance all decisions taken by Gopinathan and his handpicked committee which functioned as the executive, though illegally. The university meanwhile has functioned through actions emanating from the decisions put in abeyance. What does Rai do with things that are now a fait accompli?

The university suffered from a congenital contradiction, something that even the Bipan Chandra committee underlined when it said, "A major problem the university faced at its outset was regarding the nature of its mandate...how is it to be different from 200 or so Hindi departments (of various universities) or Hindi Pracharini Sabhas (organisations meant to popularise Hindi)?" True, a university is supposed to be a whole universe of knowledge as embodied in its numerous disciplines, departments, colleges, schools/centres etc. A language can be a medium of instruction and discourse in this universe of knowledge and also a discipline of study itself, as literature or grammar. But how can it be treated as a whole universe of knowledge that a university is supposed to represent? The Bipan Chandra committee acknowledges that the first executive, consisting of a galaxy of distinguished intellectuals, and the first

V-C grappled creatively with this question: "Both evolved a certain understanding of the vision of the university, viz. to develop Hindi as an international language of discourse in social science, humanities and sciences and to link Hindi with other Indian and world languages."

This would, of course, have required excellent teachers, infrastructure, innovative courses and activities. But our governments have long been accustomed to playing jokes in the name of Hindi. For instance, the university is located in Wardha, far away from its linguistic and intellectual catchment area, where no infrastructure existed, not even a proper bookshop. The Bipan Chandra committee records how the university, since its inception in 1997, was denied basic infrastructure, including an academic council and visitor's nominee, without whose presence it could make no worthwhile appointments, despite repeated urgings by its executive, the first V-C and the first chancellor Nirmal Verma, a distinguished Hindi writer. Yet, Vajpeyi managed to initiate some worthwhile innovations like a rigorous admission process, courses such as non-violence and peace studies and women's studies, compiling photocopied course material and inviting eminent people as guest lecturers for such courses, a linguistic mapping of the 53 dialects of the Hindi region, preparation of the latest scientific grammar and lexicon of Hindi and noteworthy publishing activity. Most of this was reversed by Gopinathan. The Bipan Chandra committee did not find him administratively or intellectually equipped for his job. He was obviously a political nominee of the last regime, though the report does not explicitly state this. His name was recommended by an ex-judge on the search committee whose justification for being there was hard to explain. Despite the committee's detailed record of Gopinathan's sins of omission and commission, things were allowed to go on till Gopinathan retired earlier this year. Between Vajpeyi and Gopinathan, 10 months had gone by without a V-C; between Gopinathan and Rai, four months elapsed.

Idiocy is no ground for action against a V-C, a top bureaucrat had said, citing autonomy when some executive members had confronted him with certain mindless decisions at the university. Indeed, it is generally the stuff our higher education is grounded in.