Wednesday, February 16, 2022

  Driving Stakes Into Our Heart : All  Hail (Hell?heel? Heil?)  Delhi University!

For a few years now, the expression 'stake holder' has begun to bother me. Possibly because I grew up in a simpler world where language was not so complex. What are the various meanings that the word stake connotes? 

At its simplest it seemed to be an active noun dating back to ancient times where  people  sharpened long sticks and then skewered whole animals on it. In one of the poems of Robert Browning that I teach, Fra Lippo Lippi speaks of the Christian martyr who was being roasted over an open fire and asking to be turned over to cook on the other side. So the stake when I visualized it was a sharpened stick , used for cooking no doubt, but  capable of injuring  living species, both animal and human.  Oddly, if we tweak the word  stake a little "steak"  or packaged meat is what we arrive at, with the same pronunciation, with an altered spelling. Perhaps the spear and the harpoon, were metallic versions of the stake  that could impale and injure. These  weapons of war, from the iron age were intimidating, to say the least, and  humans eventually continued  harpooning whales and seals, endangering them and pushing them into extinction.


The word 'stake' could indicate that  a wager that had been struck and was often associated with gambling, frowned upon by both religion and culture. I read Thomas Hardy's disturbing novel about Michael Henchard who staked his wife for drink and sold off both his wife  and their child  for a meagre sum in The Mayor of Casterbridge.  Since  I had  also been acquainted with the Mahabaharata, I couldn't help thinking that  poor Yudhistra, even if he allowed himself to be tricked by the conventions and forms in play, was staking his brothers, himself and subsequently his wife  Draupadi, while being goaded on by Sakuni , for recovering all manner of material, animal and human wealth, his kingdom, siblings and spouse. The word stake by implying that the loser was required to pay an enormous price, economic or emotional, left me with a sense of wariness. 

Meanwhile, modern life  was definitely a race, and the stakes were high, and you could be a holder of many hopes and aspirations, nightmares and disappointments.  Then of course, gambling was replaced by stocks and shares and companies, who had stake holders , investing in the finances.  The stakeholder, in this case, the investor, small or large became the person who earned a few rights and a lot of money because of the financial investment. All this made the world of commerce  transactional and attenuating and the  market  for stocks and shares that recorded bull runs and bear crawls ( humans turning into  aggressive animals here ) was very risky too. It seemed to  allow a few to gamble with money that belonged to the many.

 Imagine my surprise when from this gray, shadowy world of aggression and capital generation, this word was introduced by a former vice chancellor  almost ten years ago, when he spoke of stake holders in the university.  Disturbing enough to be a stake holder in a dog-eat-dog world..but why bring this term in to discuss  a central university comprised of  students, teachers and karamcharis?  Dinesh Singh was the cog meant to smoothen out the process of the corporatizing of a publicly funded  central university. It was no long about higher education, but the business of higher education. So keeping to the spirit of this sentiment, he ignored students and teachers and karamcharis and announced that he had invited stake holders to discuss the future of the University. These stake holders, had little or no investment in the university, but they had succeeded in the rat- race of life and were summoned, well -heeled and of considerable girth, to participate in the process of driving wedges ( also small sharp pieces of wood, meant to separate) between the real people who studied , worked and taught at the university and their relationship with university life and higher education.

 Teacher, student and karamcharis protested and succeeded in stopping the mayhem that was being unleashed for a period of time. However, remember the old adage about drawing  blood(for those with strong constitutions) or about stealing honey from the bees? The dismantling of  central universities  has been an ongoing process, too heady and too profitable to be scrapped.

The  scrunching of the academic calendar was followed by a bowdlerization of the syllabus. This led to the flight of seasoned intellectuals to  greener pastures(read Private Universities, in India and abroad) . Then a lockdown was instituted on teaching posts, so that while the old retired, there would be no fresh inputs into the system, only Adhocs,  dwindling in perpetuity as they got four month stretches. What else can you call such a period of employment , relentlessly forced on to our bright  young who wanted to teach and could have been trained to become better than the best? 

That history repeats itself and we do not learn  any lessons from it has been proved yet again, by the words uttered by the current Vice Chancellor of Delhi University. 

The stake holders (read the state, and its willing officers),  are now reinventing the first principles of the university. Turning it into an enormous production unit, since the time of the semesters, time, that precious unit of learning and growth has been pulverized and there are no  vacations for students, teachers or karamcharis. Terms are brutally short, although we seem to teach twice as much. Yet, given the paucity of time, students only absorb half of what they normally would, and forget quickly as they move to the next module, what they learnt in the first.

 The pandemic  has only added to our woes. Despite the abysmal shrinking of  vacation-time,  colleges are busy running add on courses and mentoring students as they hurtle out of online classes into online  examination sessions, so that they do not need to take a breather. The university is no longer the grand old space that invited hopeful students and teachers and nurtured them in its environs once. It is now   the site of frenetic activity, and students and teachers are jumping through all kinds of hoops, because the stakes have been set very high.  Now students can get credits from NAAC approved colleges and breeze in and out of one on line course into another. Even Dinesh Singh could not  have foreseen this, when he initiated the process of  dismantling   the university as a centre for learning and for debate, discussion, ideation  exploration and holistic growth.  Now, courses outlined by academics and experts in their respective disciplines  can be summarily rescinded, because the stakeholders do not want it. Who are these stakeholders? How have they usurped the freedom so central to academia?  Private universities were once a troubling space, because there was anxiety about the freedom available to the academic.  That has been sugar coated with the creature comforts that private universities provide to both students and teachers. Private universities take very good care of students who can afford them and of the teachers they successfully cajole to join  forces with them. While central universities seldom collect comparable funds, stellar learning was available to anybody who wished to avail of it, at a very moderate price.  All this is now up in the air.

  The Newest Vice Chancellor overtook Dinesh Singh in the  mendacity of his address to the capital at the  Indian Express Adda, when he assured an unknowing public that all the stakeholders have been consulted on NEP and the four year program. Nothing could be further from the truth. The majority of teachers in the university have ad hoc jobs, and continue to be subject to the whims and fancies of administrations that respond to the whip wielded by university officers, who act upon orders received from elsewhere. Permanent teachers who have job surety are currently skirting their way amid  NAAC forms and Promotional Avenues, that in the manner of the golden apples Melanion threw at Atlanta, keep them in thrall. The stakes are high for the state since it hopes to control the business of  higher education. The stake holders are the senior  officials of the university whose cudgeling of the university has broken its back and left it barely conscious. The  stakes are being driven through the heart and the mind of the university, and the holders of these stakes are not teachers, students or karamcharis, but a brute authority that is in control of the game.

After almost two years of a pandemic that has spurred on the grand dream of online education, with the budget declaring the opening of 400 e-universities, Delhi University's students and teachers are straggling back to interactive learning and teaching in a three dimensional world. This is going to be tough. Classrooms and corridors in colleges could possibly provide photo options for journalists who show us crowded marketplaces and streets  in order to scare us in the time of the pandemic.

 Have we as a university planned well for the post pandemic period.? No, not at all, because in a humane university shaping future citizens for a better world which has been reeling under the pandemic, some planning to reopen the university gradually would have been put in place, involving teachers and students in active conversation.  However we are back, largely from tomorrow and for a while we are going to be buffeted by the lacunae that will continue to  dog the university in its daily functioning. Yet we need to overcome , because it is not  young lives that are at stake. Career trajectories of young teachers have the four month old sword of Damocles hanging over them, in college departments presided over by lame duck professors who are watching their disciplines de-materialize while academic rigor goes up in smoke. This  Grand Old Central University,  cringes and shudders because instead of a celebratory  run up to its hundredth year, it  has put up on the stake, and roasted over the semesters  to such a sizzle that  the possibility of  becoming  altogether unrecognizable,  now begins to loom large. 

1 comment:

  1. Deeply worrisome, kudos Ratna, for putting it out the stakes so well. Swaty

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