University to serve common people or help increase profits?

by Susantha Hewa

For many people in society, universities and academia remain a far-off entity with a certain halo, except when undergrads come to the streets to protest and confront the police. For all they (the common people) care, universities are there for those ‘smart students’ to receive higher education and get qualified for high salaried jobs. Few would dare ask whether universities have a more people-oriented role to play that would urge people to think of them as less unapproachable places.

Hasini Lecamwasam’s (HL) article “The case for a ‘university’”, which appeared in The Island of 16 April makes a strong case for narrowing down the existing gap between the universities and the general public by examining the smugly accepted and rarely questioned social, political and economic maxims that influence the processes of knowledge production in universities. In her opening sentence, HL comments on the universities’ aloofness from the common people. She says, “Any meaningful exercise in knowledge production centrally involves investigating the systems of thought that undergird our social, political, and economic arrangements, with a view to changing them to be better for more people.” She also critiques the ways in which market interests have been affecting our universities thus making them look more and more out-of-the-way.

Employable graduates

Market interests can be out of tune with academic interests, which would otherwise have been more attuned to societal needs. To take an example, let’s look at the trendy idea of university as a place for manufacturing “employable graduates”. “Why not?” one may ask. However, this seemingly reasonable question is far too narrowly premised often on focusing on the graduate’s career prospects with little concern for his due contribution to society or promoting the wellbeing of the taxpayers who have backed his education all the way. This questions the wisdom of an economy thriving on multiplying profits with little concern for the more fundamental question of aligning individual success more with the progress of the society than with boosting company’s profits. In fact, our education system, which has for decades been in congruence with a multilayered society based on wide income gaps and producing many social discontents, has to be objectively scrutinized; the sooner the better. If the personal goals of the individual had been made to be attainable through a more people-oriented education system that would have sufficiently appreciated the mutually-rewarding link between education and socio-economic stability, today’s crisis would have been more easily managed.

A good example of how market interests can tilt the scale of weightage given to subjects in favour of the business interests of the prospective employers can be found when you look at company priorities at job interviews. Companies prefer graduates with better English communication skills, despite their lower academic performance to those who have excelled in academic work but with no English language fluency to match. Surely, we can’t blame the companies whose interest lies not in academic excellence of whom they recruit, but in their fluency in English that can jack up their business. Why should they pay for the academic excellence of the candidates, if they can’t talk glibly to sell? On the part of the undergrads, why should they burn midnight oil to excel in academic work when the country cannot absorb them? Surely, their main concern is a well-paid job, a life of luxury and social recognition and all that glitz, which is reasonable in a consumerist society. In an economic environment where the most alluring aspect of education for the undergrads is made to be their future material prosperity rather than their aspirations being productively aligned with social wellbeing, the more sublime goals of education tend to become a bad joke. Bertrand Russell in his essay “Education” (Why men fight) says, “the economic machine holds them [students] prisoners”, and that it thwarts their finer impulses. He goes on to say, “… to all in some degree, education appears as a means of acquiring superiority over others; it is infected through and through with ruthlessness and glorification of social inequality”. Although Russell said so more than a century ago, his critique of misdirected education models has equal relevance in our own times.

Academia and ivory-tower

The word “academic” can be scary for a great number of people who have been denied the opportunity of higher education for different reasons. The word associates with all highbrow companions like scholastic, pedagogical, intellectual, erudite, cerebral, cultured, theoretical and philosophical. It also has another set of companions, like, for example, impractical, unrealistic, ivory-tower, irrelevant and suppositious, which are less imperious than the previous set. They inhabit another area of meanings which, more or less, revolve around the term “ivory-tower” – “a state of privileged seclusion or separation from the facts and practicalities of the real world”, as any dictionary has it. The Cambridge dictionary has the following sentence to illustrate its meaning: “Academics sitting in ivory towers have no understanding of what is important for ordinary people”. A bit embarrassing, isn’t it? However, there is no denying the fact that the word “academic” has for ages been regarded as highbrow, privileged and, more importantly, “aloof” from the common people, who earn a living “by the sweat of their brow”, as it were.

 Can this aloofness be linked with an overdose of education they have received? Perhaps, this “privileged seclusion” or the aloofness of the academics is not so much the result of any ‘exalting’ education they have received as their long-accustomed pact with the prevailing social hierarchy, which espouses segregation and disregards everything that is not one’s immediate concern. Dr. Shashi Tharoor in his book, “India: from midnight to the millennium and beyond” says, “Very few Indians have a broader sense of community than that circumscribed by ties of blood, caste affiliation, or village”. This lack of empathy with those “others” outside one’s little circles of buddies connected by family ties, race, ethnicity, religion, etc., is not possibly limited to Indians, but common to all societies whose education, culture, politics and economy accept segregation and its corrosive social effects as natural and, worse, desirable. Dr. Tharoor has a quiet laugh when he writes further down about “The Indian [who] wades through dirt and filth, past open sewers and fly-speckled waste, to an immaculate home where he proudly bathes twice a day”. However, the barb can well be a critique of any society where personal interests and societal interests are perceived to inhabit separate lands. What is worthy of scrutiny is whether education can, among other things, be engineered to promote a culture that can help converge these seemingly disparate interests, which many would, unfortunately, consider as normal.

Exemplar of social equality

When a university education is primarily thought of as a way of securing a prestigious position in society, rather than getting an opportunity for pursuing one’s academic interests, the knowledge and skills gathered thereby for working for self-fulfillment, along with promoting social well-being, the result would be to produce an educated class, preoccupied with securing a slot in the profit-making machine. Rather than urging them to think of common wellbeing, it would estrange them from society and encourage them to revel in their ‘superiority’. Among the undergrads, this can be seen in its most brazen form in ragging where the seniors treat the new entrants like dirt (let’s not talk about torture), insisting them to be respected by the latter as “Their Highnesses” (Jyeshta Uttamayas). What is manifest in this is their subconscious acceptance and fusion with a culture of social stratification which rationalizes the coercive power of the “superiors”. One would have expected higher education to broaden the empathies of the scholars, but the charms of “superiority” seem to hold sway. It is open to discussion and debate whether or to what extent the “academic” pecking order reflects the convoluted hierarchies of the wider world.

Hence, the aptness of the concluding line of HL’s article in which she refuses to go with the crowd but, “continue to push agendas of critical research (likely without funding) and critical discussion in classrooms and outside (at the risk of penalisation) within universities”, so that it will ensure a wider and stronger social relevance of the universities.