“Papa, I can see the think-tower!” That was what my daughter invariably said, between the ages of three and five, whenever we took a stroll or a drive through the Stanford campus. I had called the Hoover Tower a think-tank, too lazy to change my language for my child-questioner, and in her lisp, it became the “think-tower”. The highest structure on campus, it was visible from everywhere. As Roland Barthes had said, speaking of the Eiffel Tower’s omnipresence across the Paris landscape, that the only way to avoid seeing it was to get inside it.
One of the most prominent conservative think-tanks in the US, the Hoover Institution has always had an enormously difficult relation with its host, Stanford University, and particularly with the university faculty, who have often had trouble with the Hoover’s appointments. The greatest storm I remember during the years I taught at Stanford blew over the appointment of Donald Rumsfield, the former US Secretary of Defense, who was made Senior Fellow at Hoover, leading to an outburst of protests from faculty who expressed their outrage over Rumsfield’s complicity in the torture of prisoners in Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison and at the US detention facility in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Overriding the protests, Hoover appointed Rumsfield.
The staggering global influence and impact of the elite American private university have long been seen as complicit in repressive structures of state, capital and empire. Stanford, the university that gained prominence during the Red Panic of the Cold War and shot to its billions during the great expansion of Silicon Valley, is a striking example. Only recently was the university mired in a controversy over the termination of appointment of its sole lecturer in Cantonese, an act that for many carried the ironic echo of the wealth-accumulation of the university’s founder, Leland Stanford, on the backs of Cantonese-speaking migrant workers of the Great Pacific Railroad. The role played by slavery in the foundation of Brown University is now well-known. And one could go on, continuing all the way to the recent denial of permanent appointment to Cornel West at Harvard and its possible implications for the decolonise-the-curriculum movement that have gained significant momentum in Anglo-American universities.
The establishment of private universities in Asia, where higher education has mostly been a state responsibility, has ushered a new era of possibilities—and dangers. This is exactly why the recent resignation of a prominent public intellectual and critic of the Narendra Modi government from Ashoka University, where I now teach, is of crucial importance. Even though it is less than a decade old, Ashoka has gathered wide international attention and has, according to many, already emerged as India’s most innovative university for the liberal arts and sciences. It has also drawn, in equal measure, criticism and suspicion as an elite institution, particularly given its high tuition by Indian standards, which has also invariably created a student body that reveals a significant social homogeneity in a deeply stratified country.
It was from this institution that Pratap Bhanu Mehta, a celebrated political theorist and public intellectual and an outspoken critic of the Hindutva-driven BJP government, recently resigned, declaring that his public writings have increasingly made his association with the university a difficult and potentially dangerous one. A day after his resignation, Arvind Subramanian, noted economist and former Chief Economic Advisor to the previous Indian government, also sent his resignation, in protest over the conditions that made Mehta’s association with the university difficult to sustain.
Students and faculty have exploded in protests over these resignations, which appear deeply ominous in the current climate of governmental intolerance of free speech and dissent, and the national media has been agog this past week over the possible future direction of private higher education in India.
I learned the concept of academic freedom in the US, first as a student and then as a teacher. Notwithstanding larger patterns of material and ideological complicity of the private university in structures of power and capital, it cannot be denied that the principle and practice of academic freedom—the independence to learn, teach and research without obvious subservience to these structures—was zealously fought for, and for the most part, maintained, across American institutions. Freedom, of course, is a very slippery word—large and often-invisible structures of un-freedom often limit us even as we feel free in an immediate sense. But it will suffice to say that the contrast between the foundational and wealth-accumulating complicities of elite private institutions on one hand, and the everyday freedom granted to students and faculty to think, learn and practise on their own, was notable, striking and deeply commendable—even though many came to doubt the viability of this freedom during the years of Trump presidency.
This is a large and gaping question in India now for two key reasons. One is that privatisation of higher education is still an anomaly in this country—as indeed it is in most countries outside the US. The second is that governments have revealed a pattern of direct and ungainly political interference in the administration of public universities; this has attained tyrannical dimensions under the Narendra Modi government. The reason why there has been a great furore over the Ashoka resignations is a simple one: there is no room left for academic freedom in public-funded higher education in India. Will privately funded institutions be able to maintain this space of freedom or will they also cave into the larger climate of pressure and coercion?
Private universities occupy a place in India today that veers between confusion and suspicion. The post-independence legacy has been one of Nehruvian socialism, through which many of us got excellent college education practically for free as the government picked up the tab. True, the inheritance has predominantly been of a university system set up by the British to produce an army of clerks to run the empire, an approach that remains fundamentally unchanged for most public universities across the nation. You’re just lucky (as I was) to land up in an elite college within the federal university systems, usually in the major metro cities. A few unique universities were formed in the 20th century, either driven by anticolonial movements (Jadavpur University, Calcutta), or particular social and disciplinary visions (Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi, Hyderabad Central University, Hyderabad). All three universities—seats of excellence in a vast ocean of mediocre, bureaucratically minded, coloniallly inherited public higher education—have also been subjected to the worst violations of academic freedom in the current political regime, and that is no coincidence.
Private universities, on the other hand, simply evoke an image of ruthless profit—and shoddy quality to go with it. And the mushrooming private universities and engineering colleges, sometimes operating as outfits from residential flats in housing colonies, have justified the suspicion. Private ownership, in many instances, has only threatened academic freedom into narrower spaces. Individual or single-family/business group ownership has often, directly or indirectly, dictated, interfered or hindered student recruitment, faculty appointment and various forms of resource allocation.
That is partly the reason why Ashoka—and the newly founded KREA University near Chennai—have set up hopes of academic integrity and freedom. They are not run by any individual person or business house, nor are they profit-making institutions. They are instances of collective philanthropy—with over 150 founders, Ashoka is now the largest instance of such philanthropy in India. A large proportion of the founders are younger digital entrepreneurs. But suspicion of corporate complicity in the ideological stifling of dissent and freedom has justifiably refused to wither in what has historically been a socialist terrain of higher education. Just as crucially, in a public university landscape almost entirely tyrannised by a fervently anti-intellectual and intolerant government, some have been hoping for a space that would remain protected due to its independence of government financial support. Can private philanthropy indeed initiate a new space for academic freedom in India? Or is the very project doomed by neoliberal complicity from the start?
For a private university independent of state support, what can happen if it becomes recognised as a venue of consistent criticism of the current Indian government? Honestly, the current political regime in India is now so hostile that anything can happen. Several avenues of bureaucratic roadblocks are already open to the government. For instance, a large proportion of Ashoka’s faculty hold foreign passports (as do a much smaller segment of the students), and the government can easily make things very difficult for them, complicate visa applications, even limit participation by holders of permanent residence. Severe limitations have recently been imposed on the those who hold the status of Overseas Citizen of India. The university also depends on the government for many other issues, such as the acquisition of land for campus expansion, building, construction and other licences—and a hostile government can easily put roadblocks here. Finally, even though the core founding members are genuinely respectful of academic freedom, there are many within the large and ever-increasing body of donors and trustees who, given their beliefs and political leanings, are unhappy of ongoing faculty criticism of the government.
The differences between the trustees of a university, especially champions of private wealth, and its researchers and faculty are often a given, sometimes even reducible to the ideological gulf between the owners of massive corporate capital and those pursuing a life of scholarship. The crucial issue is whether an institution can maintain the due process of separation between the two functions of the university—fundraising on one hand, and teaching and research on the other.
Questions such as these make Ashoka a place of high stakes. The sharp protest and disappointment over these faculty resignations come from the stakes held by many in India today.
(Views expressed are personal)
Professor of English & Creative Writing at Ashoka University
