The End of Higher Education in `Swarnim Gujarat'

In an unprecedented move, the Govt of Gujarat has decided to implement the Sixth Pay Commission pay scale instead of the University Grants Commission( UGC) Recommended Pay Scale to the university and college teachers. This means that their salaries will be at par with bureaucrats and govt officials. In no other states has the state government flouted the UGC norms so openly and with such impunity. The move can seen as a strategic back door implementation of what is known as Common University Act, an Act apparently made to bring about uniformity in Higher Education but also to reduce `burden of higher education' by promoting privatization and commercialization of higher education. The whole game is to encourage ` Self- Finance' educational institutes and contract based appointments of the teachers and discourage granted and subsidized education. Not that anything is grievously wrong with the concept, but the problem lies in the way it is implemented. The way the State Govt took teachers for granted and penalized them is outright unjust. No other state in the country seems to follow this ` Gujarat Model'.

The roots of problem in Gujarat do not just lie in the present economic situation, but also in the politics of Mr Narendra Modi and his admirers. One of the smartest manipulators of media, Mr Modi knows that he will get admiration even if he is demonized by media and his detractors and so he uses his media generated persona to float ` airs' of various sorts. Swarnim Gujarat is one such brain child. Swarnim Gujarat or Golden Gujarat has succeeded in creating a belief that all is well in the state of Gujarat and not just that this is the Golden Period.

Gullibility is one fundamental trait on which politics all over the world survives and thrives. Gujarat is no exception. Teachers and intellectuals probably are the most gullible people in the country today. Family members of the people who died drinking illicit liquor in Ahmedabad and the family members of children killed by Tantriks in the Asharam Bapu Ashram know that there is no such thing like Swarnim Gujarat . Neither do the family members of people killed in the Post Godhra riots and various minorities buy the idea of Golden Gujarat. It is not just that insignificant and ideologically impotent political party called ` Congress' which dislikes the state under Mr Modi, it is also a fairly large number of people in the BJP who hate Modi and his coterie. With the present decision of the Govt, Mr Modi might probably lose many of his admirers among teachers and he doesn't care about it. For, as long as you have the media,you don't need any other propaganda machinery.

The best part of this crisis is it provides the much needed ` reality check' to those who live out-of-sync with present times. Teachers and academic institutions are reputed for completely being out of touch with the actual world outside and these kinds of blows bring them back to normal.

The title of this entry ` The End of Higher Education' is deliberately ambiguous. For the ` the End' can mean the final collapse and it can also mean ` the ultimate purpose' behind Higher education. This is for the second or third time I am participating in teachers agitating against the govt in my short career of 13 years. The question is, why does the society and its representatives think that higher education is dispensable and insignificant ? Why is it that if the teachers go on strike for routine administrative things like the implementation of pay commissions are not seen as creating any serious problems for society? Teachers not going to work is no big deal for society. One needs to ask why. I have seen many highly reputed educational institutions, like other institutions of the society, completely shattered and biting the dust. Most of them have become ` by the mediocre, of the mediocre and for the mediocre', where loyalty to the authorities has actually become ` merit'. Probably this is because of the large scale upheaval caused by the forces of globalization and economic liberalization which went on a rampage after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The present economic recession has brought this bull-in-the china shop machine of globalization to a grinding halt.

This moment of crisis is indeed a moment of agitation and resistance to contemporary fascism bred on omnipresent media but it is also the moment of introspection: we have to find out what is the ultimate purpose and function of higher education in very specific and concrete terms and then restructure our institutions on its basis. This is the quest for ` the true end' of Higher Education in Gujarat and probably in India too. The post-Cold war ideological vacuum, which resulted in the disappearance of critical discourses from public life, was filled up with regionalism and fanaticisms of all kinds in the past two or three decades. One of the most important functions of higher education in India today is to promote a critical form of cosmopolitanism which resists fanaticisms of Modi-Raj Thakeray and so many others politicians world over, by restoring critical spirit to its public domain. It would mean moving out of the walls of colleges and universities directly into public spaces. And given the possibilities of new medias like the internet with its social networking sites, blogs and other platforms, I think the teachers of today need to do their critical ` extension' activities on such platforms. This might mean , apart from the usual academic seminar- research publications, the teachers would do well to reach out to the places where young people really are, apart from classrooms- that is in the space opened up by the internet.

The post-colonial thinking looked at how the idea of nation was `imagined' and `constructed' in the times of print media. The post global contemporary culture has created newer ways of creating communities with the help of social networking and blogging and hence a newer way of `imagining' nation which is NOT primarily based on regional and local cultures. Globalization which people once thought would bring about the end of nation has actually resulted in newer ways of inventing nation and hence newer nations. It is in the context of this newer ways of imagining nation and culture that higher education in India and elsewhere will have to find out its true ` end'.

RETRIEVING THE SIXTIES:A UNIQUE ACADEMIC EXPERIMENT

We, at the Department of English, MS University, are doing a very interesting and probably unique academic experiment under the aegis of the UGC DRS SAP-I project. Our Dept is granted this project to research the ` Identarian Movements in the Western India in the period 1960 to 2000' by the University Grants Commision. This year we started a translation project called `Retrieving the Sixties: Culture in Gujarati Periodicals in English Translation'. The most interesting part of this project is that around 60-70 undergraduate and postgraduate students of English literature in our Dept are translating articles from Gujarati periodicals which had appeared in the decade of the sixties. The articles range from ones on literary subjects and problems of working women to tatooes, and our students were excited and happy about the idea. The students will work with teachers to finalize their work and we hope to publish it in future.The first stage of the project was the Translation Workshop we had on 29 Aug and it was great fun. The bright idea was Deeptha's and probably what we have on our hands is unique as far as the Dept of Englishes go. The Depts of English are notorious for their lack of direct engagement with immediate cultural environment ( some even complain that they are apathetic towards ANY cultural environment). We seek to remedy it by having teachers and students engaging actively with Gujarati culture.

The Sixties was a culturally exciting decade for many cultures across the globe. Think of the Vietnam War, the Hippies, the Chinese aggression and linguistic formation of the states in India. It was also the moment of Little Magazine Movements of varied sorts.This decade was also momentous in Gujarat. Various issues and debates of this significant phase of Gujarati cultural history are reflected in various periodicals. We felt it is important for the present generation of students to reconnect and reengage with the multiple currents that shaped Gujarati culture of this decade in order to understand some of the key issues of our own time. Translation of articles, which appeared in the sixties, can be a stimulating mode of retrieval and negotiation for the present generation of Gujarati youngsters.

In the post-Globalized world, it is imperative how we `read' the history of twentieth century to understand ourselves. In this light, I think the project becomes a very interesting one.