The death of Delhi University has gone unremarked. It isn’t formally dead; it still educates tens of thousands of students but it is not, as it once was, a place where students and teachers desperately want to be. Some institutions within it, like the Delhi School of Economics, are in better health than others and some of its affiliated colleges are more desirable than others, but hard-working students and ambitious academics increasingly look elsewhere.
This is part of a broader tendency: the secession of India’s comfortable professional classes from public institutions of every sort, from hospitals to school boards. Upper-middle-class parents in India have always sent their children to private schools but these schools were generally signed up to public bodies like the Central Board of Secondary Education and, its lineal ancestor, the All India Higher Secondary Board, for their school-leaving examinations. The new, upscale, very expensive private schools that have mushroomed in India’s metropolitan cities prefer to work towards school-leaving qualifications designed by Western regulatory bodies like the A-Level and International Baccalaureate diplomas.
The devaluation of the public university is directly related to this tendency. The students who earn these diplomas no longer aspire to an Honours degree in Economics from Delhi University, once the Everest of a school-leaving student’s ambition. These schools, which often style themselves as ‘international schools’, prepare their students for American universities. Those students who can’t afford to pay their way through an undergraduate degree in the United States of America find a halfway house in the better class of private universities like Ashoka, Krea or Ahmedabad University, which teach courses modeled on American liberal arts colleges.
We are speaking of a super-elite sliver of India’s population, but small though this class is, its choices exert a disproportionate influence on how the Indian middle class views the world. Time was when powerful politicians and civil servants pulled strings to get their children into elite colleges affiliated to public universities like Loyola, St. Xavier’s, Hindu, St. Stephen’s, Lady Shri Ram, Miranda House, Fergusson, Presidency and so on. Their modern counterparts now try to shoehorn their children into East Coast colleges lapped by the Atlantic Ocean, not the Bay of Bengal.
One of the lessons we learnt from the collapse of the public distribution system was that the moment the middle class feels it has no access to a public good, it does everything it can to subvert or devalue it. We can see this happening in real time to India’s public universities. The systematic destruction of Delhi University is a case study in elite secession.
The pioneering work of destruction in this case was begun by the ministers of the last United Progressive Alliance government. The special achievement of Kapil Sibal, the then human resource development minister, was to wreck Delhi University’s most substantial achievement, the Honours degree. The Honours degree used to be a three-year programme that encouraged disciplinary specialisation. So if you did an Honours degree in History, you might do minor or subsidiary courses in an Indian language or another subject like philosophy but all your main courses taught you different aspects of history.
There were drawbacks to this system; it made young students commit themselves to subjects before they knew their minds, with no real access to other disciplines that might also interest them. For that, ironically, they had to choose to do the less desirable BA (Pass) degree, where they studied a mix of subjects. Also, it created an artificial and insuperable barrier between the Arts and the Sciences.
But its strengths outweighed these weaknesses. It worked within the limitations of Delhi University’s affiliated colleges. Individual colleges didn’t have the faculty or resources to teach a directory of courses in the way that vastly better funded American colleges and universities could. By offering a tightly defined Honours programme, the university created a degree that could be taught and examined in a reasonably standardised way across its affiliated colleges. So if a student earned a first class degree in Economics or History or Sociology from Delhi University, that
distinction mattered more than the prestige of the college she had attended. Delhi University’s Honours degree democratised undergraduate education without undermining academic distinction.
Kapil Sibal, who graduated from Delhi University and should have known better, chose to ram through a half-baked four-year programme that managed to dissolve the disciplinary focus of the Honours degree without adding anything that justified the
additional year. The only justification for a four-year undergraduate degree was that in some obscure way it dovetailed with American universities. Given that 99.99% of desi undergraduates would never see the inside of an American college, this was a fine example of policy-making for the top .01%.
The UPA had set a precedent that would allow the National Democratic Alliance to do its worst. Narendra Modi’s government first scrapped Sibal’s innovation, then reintroduced it. Now Delhi University has an American four-year programme with Indian characteristics. Students can exit the programme at the end of every year with a paper qualification — certificate, diploma, pass degree, honours degree — linked to the exit year. The trouble is that course design isn’t modular: so the student exits with the arm or leg or torso of a degree that wasn’t designed to be dismembered.
Admission to these degrees in Central universities has been centralised. Aspirants take the Common University Entrance Test and their rank in it determines the course and university that they will be assigned. The IIT/JEE test has become the grand-daddy of all forms of university entrance even though the nature and needs of residential engineering schools are radically different from those of traditional universities that teach a generality of courses. Cretinous tests based solely on multiple-choice questions now determine the merit of both students and teachers.
The sangh parivar is uninvested in universities that aren’t technological or professional schools. Its only interest in universities like Delhi University is ideological: faculty recruitment consists of packing departments with committed bhakts or pliable opportunists. The Communist Party of India (Marxist) destroyed public universities in Bengal by swamping them with its clients and cadres; the Bharatiya Janata Party is doing the same on a pan-Indian scale. The difference is that the comrades, thanks to Marx’s enormous influence on modern thought, paid lip service to a bastard intellectualism. Hindutva has no intellectual substance beyond an existential hatred of the Other. Reading Deen Dayal Upadhyay is like space-walking: you float through a vacuum at zero gravity. Public universities remade by his disciples will be malignant voids.
mukulkesavan@hotmail.com
