What Ails Our Universities !

Prafulla Kumar Mohanty

Has anyone heard of a new invention or discovery coming out of an Indian University recently or anytime during the last 50 years? But we have heard and seen campus disturbances, teacher's unrest strikes and sine die closures. Jawaharlal Nehru University, Hyderabad University and Aligarh Muslim University were in the news for all wrong reasons. In JNU, a University established by Nehru, one of the greatest Indian minds, for excellence in research and new ideas was  mired in politics of a divisive kind. Certain student leaders  like Kanhaiya Kumar and others discussed with uncanny passion how to bring about the disintegration of India. Other student groups representing opposing political views clashed with the Tukde Tukde gang ( a sobriquet coined by other interested parties) and the great JNU came almost to a stand still. Dalit uprising and leftwing combative politics over the death of Rohit Vemula held the University hostage to activities which are least academic. Similarly the Aligarh Muslim University had its share of contribution to academic confusion over a Jinna portrait. No heartening news about a new book or even a tool or a medicine ever came from our Universities during the post-Independence years. We are proud of our Universities, the  IITS and IIMS and legitimately so. The students coming out of these hallowed institutions have been recognized all over the world. But how are they different from other professionals without contributing to the society's ease of living? Cheap and effective medicines for diabetes,  superior aeroengines or automobile engines or new methods in heart surgery are still imported from the so-called advanced world. I do not want to deprecate the indigenous things available here but our entire defence system is 64 percent Russian and the rest American or French. Even Israel with a population of a few lakhs produces things and ideas with their less number of Universities whereas we have so many technological institutes which merely dispense degrees and certificates.

When prospective employers are asked about our University products, most of them say that  our engineers are unemployable, our graduates are not fit to be even clerks and our doctors are not properly skilled. There was a time when Ravenshaw college ( now university) alone produced good number administrators, poets, scholars. Today all the Universities of Odisha put together do not produce even a quarter of that number. A University embraces all the knowledge of the world as its province and tries  to expand that province by its own contribution. The present brand of politicians ruling the country are proud of the Vedic culture and the ancient knowledge of the epic times. Some say that the Puspak Biman was something like a modern  aeroplane . Well prove it and bring the theoretical content before the world? If Ganesha illustrates plastic surgery of the Vedic past well theorize it properly for the acceptance of the world community. We have to come out of our past fixations for the world  and its values and properties change moment by moment.

The University is the place where ideas are born. A historian or economist should not only discuss what Marx or Keynes have said but think of the present situation of India and the world and frame new questions for further pursuit. How to solve the water crisis in India? - This is not a political question. This question should be asked in the Science laboratories of the Universities. Knowledge is no more mere power in the hands of a few people . Knowledge should be used by the scientists and specialists in the Universities to serve the needs of man in the here and now and in the hereafter.

I admit that the population pressure is felt in all Universities. We have fewer teachers, inadequate laboratories but we must remember that Pencillin was invented not in Cavendis Laboratory but in a small room. Darwin did not work in any great lab nor did the Indian thinkers invent Zero and Infinity in Harvard or in any Ivy League Institution.

The University does not mean an imposing building and well equipped labs and research facilities. It is like an Ashram where the Guru matters for he holds the universe in his palm to show it to the future of mankind. Campus politics is the bane of our Universities, The Universities must now purge themselves of this malaise and start new ways of thinking and looking at things.  The University must take over the authority of power by knowledge, invention and discovery.