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Written by Amit Basole
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Monday, 21 January 2008 |
My fundamental
concern in my own work lies in knowledge production outside
the
University and in unsettling the real and perceived hegemony of the
university as a privileged site of knowledge production. I see social
theory produced within the western Academy and its satellites all over
the world as unable to break the hold of European liberal-radical
thought and hence look to see if other types of emancipatory/liberatory
discourse can come from non-university sites. So in a sense, the first
hierarchy I concern myself with is that between different types of
knowledges as defined by their institutional sites of production. Since
knowledge produced in different locations in society also acquires
labels such as "serious knowledge" versus "trivial knowledge", formal
versus informal/tacit, etc, I am interested in investigating these
labels. My first edu-factory post on Eurocentrism and the
multiplicity of knowledge production sites was reflective of these
concerns.
So while I am not insensitive to the debates
on the changes in higher education systems in the neo-liberal period,
my interest in them is located within this "larger" framework.
Since
this round of the Edu-factory discussions is supposed to focus on
"hierarchy within the higher education market, and the university as a
place of hierarchisation
in the labor market" my first thought was that I would not have much to
contribute towards this, particular given that many people on this list
have done excellent work on this issue. I have been reading Marc Bousquet's
"How the University Works" with great (and morbid) interest. Being a
graduate employee myself, and also somewhat active in the grad employee
union on campus, I recognize the importance of such struggles. The
capitulation of faculty-student body to the "will of the
administration" is depressing. One anecdote will suffice. Last
Spring, my institution, the University of Massachusetts decided (that
is, some top manager decided in the collective name of the University)
to award
an honorary doctorate to Andrew Card, a close associate of George W.
Bush and one of the pre-eminent architects of the War on Iraq. It is
hard to call
this a "controversial decision" because barring a few hard republican
party supporters, the faculty and the graduate and
undergraduate student bodies were quite united in their opposition.
Despite repeated demonstrations and protest, including booing and
placards
inside the hall as Card was awarded the degree (see
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dp4MYii7MqA)
the administration went
ahead with its plan. To me this blatant disregard of student and
faculty opinion was emblematic of the process of change described by
Bousquet. This was in Spring 2007. School resumed in the Fall with
hardly a whisper about this whole fiasco. Only after decades of
restructuring (of both organization and
discourse) could the management have such confidence, confidence in the
pliability or ineffectuality of the faculty and the student body.
But
all this is not news and is only preface to my main point. I persevered
in submitting a post because of the second aspect of the question
raised by Edu-factory editors. How to construct an autonomous university?
The first part of the discussion on hierarchies is supposed to inform
the second part on autonomous universities. Here I believe that some
lessons from the Indian experience could be the more relevant rather
than my own experience in the Western Academy. In the context of India,
this discussion on hierarchies and autonomous university assumes a
different guise. We are now speaking not only about hierarchies created
by higher education institutions in the formal labor market (the world
of written contracts, tax-paying firms and employees), but also in
society at large, where a vast number of individuals will never go to
university or participate in the formal labor market. Yet their lives
will be shaped by the university. A farmer has never gone to
agricultural college where an agricultural scientist works. Both have
knowledge but the knowledge of both is valued differently by society
and by the market. These two will never compete directly for the same
job (can the farmer be a visiting professor at our hypothetical
university?). The scientist produces knowledge in the form of scholarly
publications. The farmer produces knowledge in the activity of growing
his crop. The veracity of the scientist's knowledge is tested by
peer-review and replication in the laboratory or field. The veracity of
the farmer's knowledge is tested by nature's "review" and replication
in life. In response to a mistake, the scientist retracts his research
paper/finding, in response to a mistake a farmer may lost a significant
proportion of his income and go into lifelong debt. Further the
farmer's knowledge activity feeds me, yet I value his knowledge less.
Why?
I
am guilty of posing a simple binary and I have belabored the example
but I do have a point. I am sensitive to the interactions and porosity
of borders in my example (the farmer could be using hybrid seeds
developed by the scientist). But this does not alter the fact that
there are two compartment in the first place (between which the porous
border runs) and that the two interact asymmetrically. The hierarchy
between farmers and scientists or artisans and engineers, is not
peculiar to India or even the developing world. Neither is the
university the only institution implicated in the construction of such
hierarchies (the famous institution of "the market" is another). Note
that I am not saying that "knowledge produced in life" is always and
everywhere considered inferior to knowledge produced in the university
or in the laboratory. But it is sufficiently general a phenomenon to
warrant interest. Particular when we think about the characteristics of
an autonomous university, I think we should think about how it will
incorporate different types of knowledge. In India at least, a very
large part of knowledge production and transmission, particularly of
the kind that is directly relevant to sustaining livelihoods, takes
place outside the university. An autonomous university would be
required to be conscious of the multiple locations of knowledge
production in society, be they with farmers, artisans, women,
indigenous peoples. As Gigi Roggero noted, "The division between
intellectual and manual labor...is
not objective, but a device to hierarchize and to control labor power."
An autonomous university would be founded on a non-distinction
between the two, at least as far as respect for knowledge goes. It will
recognize that all work is "knowledge work." At the Vidya Ashram in
Varanasi, via the concept of dialog on knowledge in society, we have
arrived at a concept of a "lokavidya academy" (loka = people/world,
vidya = knowledge) which will be an academy that attempts to recognize
and represent all types of knowledge in society.
On
a related note let me bring in the issue of language here. The role of
language and translation and of global English, has already
been brought up several times in this round. To this discussion, I
would like to add another dimension of language, namely, the role of
language in formalization of knowledge, in making informal knowledge
formal. The university, almost by definition
produces and distributes formal knowledge. This question is
particularly relevant in the Indian context because the language of
higher education is English but this language is spoken by a very small
minority of Indians. The University is complicit is maintaining this
hierarchy of languages. This is a very old and heavily debated issue in
the post-colonial context. Ngugi wa'Thiongo has written about it, as
did Gandhi and Ram Manohar Lohia in their day. Thus a very important
challenge facing the autonomous university is the issue of the language
in which education will be imparted, knowledge will be produced. To
restore prestige to people's knowledge, prestige will have to be
restored to their languages. I am not saying anything terribly new. In
the current climate, as India becomes more and more dependent on
insertion in the global economy to sustain her "magical" rates of
economic growth, English language training centers are booming. But the
new economy only has place for so many. The majority is once again
excluded and it is their own knowledge in their own languages that
sustains them. The medium of instruction for higher education remains
an extremely complex and controversial question today. And again I
don't pretend to have an answer.
This brings me to the final and perhaps controversial point on localism
and the autonomous university. Jon
Solomon in an early post raised this issue and it was brought up again
in a later post, from where I quote. The worry is "that the
various attempts to construct alternative or nomadic university
experiences might end up reproducing ossified forms of national and
cultural resistance to the neoliberalization of the university."
This
statement needs some unpacking. It is clear that many forms of
resistance to neoliberal globalization are in fact national/cultural
(even the preeminent challenge of Islam, can be interpreted along
culturalist lines). Which of them are "ossified" and which are not? By
what criterion do we distinguish the two? While Jon may have intended
something different, in the liberal/radical European tradition of
social thought (in which we may include Marxism) there is a tendency to
frown upon cultural/nationalist resistance. It is equated with
conservatism, parochialism and backwardness. It is somehow inferior to
cosmopolitanism, internationalism, globalism. We want to be culturally
global (but not economically global, at least not in the current form
of globalization). Of course we are sophisticated enough to distinguish
between being culturally global and being culturally the same. We don't
want homogenization (mcdonaldization) but neither do we want
insularity. But to me there is nothing a priori objectionable about
either. We have seen malignant forms of both, benign forms of both.
Resolving the tension between a locally culturally grounded worldview
(which may form the basis of the resistance) and a benign view of other
cultures with a respect for their own struggles, their own existence
(in other words a benign enthocentrism), is a major challenge today.
Unfortunately there is not much in the European experience to help us
in this regard.
All we find is a parochialism of universals (to use Immanuel
Wallerstein's phrase) and an ethnocentrism in denial. An autonomous/open university must also be a local, non-parochial university.
I stress the local as much as the non-parochial.
Hopefully the foregoing is not entirely out of place.
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