The mindset of the university’s leadership is telling
NB: A timely reflection by an ex-student. The article speaks for itself. I will add some remarks about a scenario in which founders make sweeping public statements which subtract from the dignity of the Vice Chancellor and the academic community. To contrapose ‘Bhagat Singh’ with ‘boredom’ as the only two camps, so to speak, of intellectual pedagogy that ought to be available to Ashoka’s students, is neither a liberal nor moderate posture. A university ought to provoke students toward thoughtful curiosity and introduce them to fresh ideas. It surely cannot hope to succeed as a place of higher education and learning if they are bored by their experience in their classrooms and libraries.
A liberal democracy preserves the autonomy of the major spheres of public life, such as the judiciary, the press, public prosecution, and higher education. Above all, liberalism connotes the freedom to think and speak freely, to criticise one’s rulers and governments without fear and without intimidation. Totalitarian polities, whether of communist, fascist, or racist ideological inclination, do not permit such freedom.
Incidentally, the term ‘left-liberal’ is based on recent American usage, wherein the slightest hint of collective responsibility and social regulation is deemed to be ‘far left’ etc. This usage ignores the fact that historically, ‘liberalism’ was the label for the economic doctrines of colonial expansion. Quite simply, it implied the freedom of empire builders to conquer and subjugate. The term remains highly ambiguous today. The communist movement was vehemently opposed to liberalism. And whereas until the first world war, social democracy fought for and upheld democratic values, the advent of Bolshevism took a vast section of the left in a totalitarian direction.
It is simply misleading to use the hold-all term ‘left-liberal.’ Those communists who use it, or the term ‘left and democratic’, need to clarify their stance toward democracy – whether in India, or with reference to China, the USSR / Russia and other communist-ruled countries. Why did all movements led by Leninist parties, once in power, end up enforcing single-party dispensations?
Ashoka’s founders have not addressed the issue of the university’s belittling of a teacher for a research essay that irritated India’s ruling dispensation. The ramifications of this are well brought out in a recent article by Mukul Kesavan. Is there any evidence that the teacher concerned was motivated by radical left ideas, or preaching them in his article? Or is it the case that for Ashoka’s founders, any criticism of the ruling party amounts to radical leftism? How can you humiliate your teachers and hope to run a university? Why should you even want to? Instead of grandstanding on social media, why not have an open and civil debate about these matters with the academic community?
Teachers are the fulcrum of education. If you want Ashoka University to attract good students and to function as a hub of intellectual inquiry, defend your teachers, including those whose ideas embarrass you. Don’t chase away scholars or humiliate them in public. Not only is this a cruel practice, it undermines the dignity of the persons you have chosen to run the university.
Most of all, it is illiberal. DS
The tree on the height is its own enemy – Lao Tzu
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Ashoka University’s Reluctant Politics
This piece is a lamentation on the campus politics of Ashoka University,and a meditation on the future of private universities in India.
Ashoka, a private university in Haryana, was founded with a pool of investment from several different individuals so as not to be beholden to a single founder’s whims. It now seems that it is beholden to all their whims. As an alumna of its undergraduate programme, I am upset by Ashoka’s recent trajectory. A helpful article by an undergraduate traces the university’s sordid history with academic freedoms; the most recent event leading to the resignations of faculty members Sabyasachi Das and Pulapre Balakrishnan in the economics department.
A closer look at the article shows how thin the commitment, if any at all, to academic freedom truly is at Ashoka, with the university leadership repeatedly making hurried and obsequious attempts to detract attention and allay concerns of political “radicalism”. Ashoka’s flagship undergraduate programme is less than 10 years old, and it seems, to the founders’ dismay, that the issue of academic freedom rears its ugly head every few years. This leads one to believe that these events are not mere aberrations in the daily workings of the university but fundamental issues in its very constitution. Without concrete changes one can expect it to occur again, and again.
One then might ask, where do these issues arise?…
https://thewire.in/education/ashoka-universitys-reluctant-politics
An Ashoka for our time / Navneet Sharma & Prakrati Bhargava: No space for liberal education
Amita Baviskar: Ashoka and After: The Universities We Believe In
Ashoka University: Correspondence on Professor P. B. Mehta’s Resignation
After the truth-shower 