“Academia is now the perfect place for the intellectually lazy, the arrogant and the cowardly to pass their years as armchair activists.”

The above comments are neither the rant of a frustrated card-holding leftist nor the cri de coeur of a disgruntled critic of the Indian university system.

These lines are from the editorial of a contrarian conservative British magazine ‘Critic’ under the title “Death by degrees.” It further says that “the dream of the university is being killed by greed, dogma and bureaucracy.”

That is exactly happening in India. And to a greater or lesser degree, it is happening across the globe including the USA. Colleges and universities are facing death by a thousand cuts.

Thanks to the funds cut, the number of students opting for humanities is declining globally. If in the US and the UK, the university is vanishing for the less endowed, in India, it is the end of a dream for the large majority.

It is not hard to imagine what fate awaits public universities in India now that the government has decided to allow top American and British universities to set up shop.

These universities and institutes will decide the fees structure and admission guidelines as also faculty recruitment.

With higher fees, these elite universities will become even more elitist. Like the US, meritocracy in India too will become part of a caste system and a degree a mark of one’s wealth. Didn’t Hannah Arendt warn us that meritocracy without equality “is no less than a form of oligarchy?”

The editorial draws our attention towards another danger: “your theories may be ridiculous, your research pointless, your teaching useless; but who’s going to fire you when you support all the right causes?”

The conservative political leaders never tire of attacking liberal arts institutions as “bastions of liberalism.” There is no dearth of liberal arts naysayers who maintain that liberal arts degrees are worthless. Some American commentators strongly believe that foreign language requirement should be replaced by computer coding classes as there is no better intellectual challenge than writing code that teaches a machine to do exactly what we want. In recent years, many universities and colleges in the UK and US have cut their arts and humanities courses, in order to focus on “skills-led” learning.

Many in India have been made to believe that “a wealth of knowledge” matters far less than “economic wealth.” Tech jobs require specialised degrees in newer disciplines, so why bother about humanities!

A liberal arts education was once the price of admission into polite society. Today, students of humanity often face ridicule and contempt.

If you are a student of philosophy, you could be asked ~ do you want to be stuck in a library for the rest of your life? If you are pursuing art, you are least likely to get a decent job.

Have the universities become victims of digitisation of learning and the hegemony of technocratic culture? Have they lost their central purpose? Have we given up the much-cherished “Idea of a University?”

For English theologian and philosopher John Henry Newman, the ideal university is a community of thinkers, engaging in intellectual pursuits not for any external purpose, but as an end in itself.

What went wrong? Reasons are not far to seek. There was a time when the question of the meaning of life was central to the idea of higher education. Today, a university is being viewed by many as “a factory of knowledge” and as Yale Law School professor Anthony Kronman explains, the question of what living is for “has been expelled from classrooms in the blinding fog of political correctness.”

The higher educational institutions in India are sought to be made “schools of skills.” The present government has taken a grimly utilitarian view of higher education. The problem is that the utilitarian approach to higher education leaves very little scope for autonomy and innovation. Autonomy requires freedom.

India suffers from social hierarchies. When one person or group’s freedom and privilege results in someone else’s unfreedom, you can’t get a free society in action, what you get is hierarchy in disguise.

India’s biggest problem is that it spends very little on education. In the mid-1990s, Upendra Baxi, then vice-chancellor of Delhi University, wrote that universities in India were “on their deathbeds.”

India, the know-all ‘Vishwaguru’ also frequently fiddles with the system. The US became a great power because quality higher education was central to the American dream.

Particularly after World War Two, higher education was seen as necessary not only for a technologically skilled workforce but also as fundamental to cherished value of opportunity.

Higher education was seen as the primary locus for scientific research. As Catherine Drew Gilpin, the first woman president of Harvard University, says, “universities are meant to be producers not just of knowledge but also of doubt. They are creative and unruly places, homes to a polyphony of voices.”

You can’t become a ‘Vishwaguru’ by waging war on the academia. You must first become an open society. As Karl Popper, one of the 20th century’s most influential philosophers of science has said, an open society “demands an ethic of tolerance and intellectual modesty.” A nation progresses through democratic debate and a process of intellectual experimentation.

Today the war on intellect is no more confined to the authoritarian polities. Open societies are equally waging a war on academia. Big business houses and big tech companies in the US provide donations to academic institutions but these typically come with ideological blinders attached.

The University of Utah accepted a $10 million donation from the Charles Koch Foundation to establish a free-market economics programme to counter the ostensibly Marxian bent of the university’s economics department.

True intellectual diversity is essential to a university’s excellence. Science gives us facts; philosophy strives for wisdom and poetry gives us existential truth. Mozart has famously said that “the music is not in the notes but in the silence between.” Liberal arts are that silence in the cacophony of STEM disciplines.

A liberal-arts education provides critical thinking. It is also a training for citizenship. Humanities students need not despair. They can draw comfort from Shakespeare’s advice in The Taming of the Shrew, “no profit grows where no pleasure is ta’en.”    

(The writer is director, Institute of Social Science, Delhi)