With the NEP’s Focus on ‘Autonomy’, Are We Ushering in a Spirit of Academic Capitalism?

Pramod K. Nayar

In a perspicacious commentary on the National Education Policy 2020 (NEP), social scientist Satish Deshpande noted that multiple exit options “will certainly help in renaming drop-outs as certificate or diploma-holders. But they cannot ensure that these credentials will bring significant benefits for holders.”

He further noted that in the current system, “The indivisibility of the degree provided an incentive for students and families to try hard to complete their degrees.” Deshpande’s criticism is spot on. To push his arguments to the next stage, we can examine how the flexibility offered to the student is in fact illusory and mired in a whole set of troubling issues.

The rise of creativity

‘Creativity’ and ‘innovation’ in terms of study, personality development and institutional mechanisms are the operative words in the NEP, occurring on practically all pages of the document. A few samples:

“quality higher education must aim to develop good, thoughtful, well-rounded, and creative individuals…”

“It must enable an individual to study one or more specialized areas of interest at a deep level, and also develop character, ethical and Constitutional values, intellectual curiosity, scientific temper, creativity, spirit of service, and 21st century capabilities across a range of disciplines”

“…well-rounded across disciplines including artistic, creative, and analytic subjects”

“Imaginative and flexible curricular structures will enable creative combinations of disciplines for study… “

Then there is the emphasis on ‘mobility’:

“provide greater mobility to students in India who may wish to visit, study at, transfer credits to, or carry out research at institutions abroad, and vice versa…”

“[Currently, there is] a complete lack of vertical mobility for students from the vocational education stream …”

“The credit-based Framework will also facilitate mobility across ‘general’ and vocational education.”

Thus, mobility, choice, autonomy and creativity are to become the keywords for the next generation of students and for educational administrators. In and of themselves, of course, no one disputes their idealism. However, these concepts are also loaded with other value-systems in our contemporary era.

Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiapello in their The New Spirit of Capitalism (2018) note that autonomy, self-realisation, mobility and individual responsibility have been substituted for stability, the consistency of socio-economic and welfare structures and organised planning. Everything finally devolves on to the individual, in terms of planning, growth, choices, skill-sets and development, since there are to be no more supportive structures (including, one adds, fellowships, whose delayed payments have been in the news recently).

In order to fulfil one’s aspirations, one works even harder, since the responsibility is solely one’s own. It is in this context that one worries away at the emphasis on student choices, autonomy, creativity and responsibility.

Boltanski and Chiapello, studying management discourses of the 1990s, note that the workers are treated as being ‘more skilled, more flexible, more inventive and more autonomous’.

More worryingly, they note that in stressing versatility, job flexibility and the ability to learn and adapt to new duties rather than possession of occupation and established qualifications, while also stressing the capacity for engagement, communication and relational qualities, neo-management looks to what are increasingly called ‘life skills’, as opposed to knowledge.

Neoliberal flexibility

The IIT Bombay Liberal Arts program under its Centre for Liberal Education invites you, on its opening page, to ‘choose your own path to arts, sciences, or engineering’. The IIT Madras MA program speaks of itself as serving ‘the goal of providing people with the freedom to make their lives better’. IIT Guwahati makes a slight shift when it says of its Master of Liberal Arts: ‘this programme will enable students to make informed judgments and choices, but always with awareness and a sense of the ethical implications of those choices’.

About its MA programmes, the English and Foreign Languages University, Hyderabad, writes:

“We follow a modular approach – what is popularly known as ‘the cafeteria system’ – students can choose from a variety of courses offered in different areas, such as literature, linguistics, and language education and opt for a programme that best suits their goals and interests.”

For commentators, this emphasis on choice, modularity and autonomy is disquieting because they see this as pushing the education system into a neoliberal governance mode.

As Jakob Claus, Thomas Meckel and Farina Pätz put it in their essay on ‘Academic Capitalism’: “This responsibility is part of forming one’s adaptive and active personality. Creating and managing one’s curriculum in this respect is an exercise in interacting with as well as shaping and being shaped by changing environments and projects.”

For Claus et al, this so-called flexibility is in fact disguised social control. Reading the Liberal Arts programs in Europe via Gilles Deleuze, they note that, “The personalised freedom given to Liberal Arts students is accompanied by constant self-reflection and supervision structures.”

It is this strange mix of heightened control, expanded monitoring and presumed freedom that they draw attention to: “The potential student for the above mentioned Liberal Arts programs recognises flexibility, creativity, responsibility, freedom and self-reflection as a matrix of contemporary values within the new spirit of capitalism.”

Claus et al see the projection of creativity and freedom as actually enabling and amplifying supervision and monitoring by the institutions (since neoliberal societies shift the mode of social control away from the state to organisations).

One turns here to the NEP document which, as noted elsewhere, speaks of autonomy and greater regulation of institutions, often in the same breath. About assessment, the NEP is categorical: “HEIs shall also move away from high-stakes examinations towards more continuous and comprehensive evaluation.”

This seems to indicate greater and not lesser monitoring and supervision. Later, in an interesting passage about student activities that would ostensibly produce all-round development, the document says:

“all HEIs will have mechanisms and opportunities for funding of topic-centred clubs and activities organised by students with the help of faculty and other experts as needed, such as clubs and events dedicated to science, mathematics, poetry, language, literature, debate, music, sports, etc. Over time, such activities could be incorporated into the curriculum once appropriate faculty expertise and campus student demand is developed. Faculty will have the capacity and training to be able to approach students not just as teachers, but also as mentors and guides. “

One notes that the those deemed extra-curricular hobbies and ‘fun-and-games’ are to be incorporated into the curriculum with accompanying faculty expertise. Would this be freedom or supervision of even sports and cultural activities?

The two samples seem to imply the validity of the Claus et al’s argument about greater monitoring that lies underneath illusions of student choices and presumed freedoms.

Toward a pedagogy of the anxious?

The NEP does offer much to think about. As it moves into the implementation phase, we need also to think through the implications of some of the proposed changes.

As the policy makes choice and autonomy the centrepiece of student subjectivity, it overlaps with the neoliberal emphasis on responsibilisation. Individual decisions – course, instructor, program, institution – will determine the kind of success and subjectivity that emerges at the end of the process. As a supposed response to our over-regulated institutions, the policy treats the institution as a space of possibility and potential: you must choose your possibility to fulfil your potential.

In such a context of responsibilization and autonomy, we can think of a series of questions:

Are the students’ states of vulnerability being prised wide open when neoliberal restructuring offers freedom of exit options and freedom to choose any combination of courses without core disciplinary training in the guise of multi- and interdisciplinarity?

What forms of market-ready skills and abilities accrue to a student who chooses any and every mix of courses simply because she can, and exits with a diploma?

Will the versatility and creativity be at the cost of stable pedagogic systems, supportive nets (financial and other) and disciplinary strengths?

Are our institutions and their apparatuses structured to enable self-realisation, efficiency, rational choices and self-management, or would they induce, when student vulnerabilities are exposed to slowed-down job markets, lost disciplinary cohesion and so-called flexibility, greater anxieties?

Do such multiple choices lead to fulfilment or fragmentation of disciplines and of the self – as critics have noted about neoliberal subjectivity (see Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism) – in the guise of choice and autonomy?

These questions index what Noah de Lissavoy in Capitalism, Pedagogy and the Politics of Being has called ‘the pedagogy of the anxious’ – it is this pedagogy that we have to account for now.

(Pramod K. Nayar teaches at the University of Hyderabad. Courtesy: The Wire.)

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Allahabad University Admin Unmoved as Protests Against 400% Fee Hike Rage

Samriddhi Sakunia

Student protests, social media campaigns, a hunger strike and even attempts by a group of students to self-immolate by pouring kerosene on themselves – Allahabad University has seen it all in the recent past. And it all started when the University decided to increase fees by 400% for every course taught.

The decision to hike fees came at a time when the University was not functioning. The notification was issued in June. When students caught wind of the appalling news, protests began. Initially, the outcry began over social media but within a month, there was visible agitation inside the University campus.

Keshav Kumar, a student from the history department, narrated his plight to The Wire. The 23-year-old who hails from the Ballia district of Uttar Pradesh is currently pursuing a Master’s degree at Allahabad University.

Kumar’s father was a mill worker in Punjab before he had to stop working in 2017 due to a severe heart condition. The then 17-year-old Kumar did not know what to do, but being the older of two brothers, decided to step out of his home, educate himself and make things better for his family. However, when Kumar was in the second year of his graduation, the coronavirus pandemic touched down along with the subsequent national lockdown, adding pressure to his already financially unstable family.

Kumar began offering tuition classes but when these were not enough to meet his and his family’s requirements, his younger brother began working as an e-rickshaw driver.

For hundreds of students like Kumar, the fee hike is a big deal.

“Sometimes I’m not able to fill up the forms for various government exams that I want to take. That is solely because arranging a sum of Rs 500 – sometimes as high as Rs 1,600 – gets difficult and I have to ask different people, including my teachers, to help me with it,” Kumar said.

He added that he doesn’t travel home because of the additional expenses it entails.

The fees in the history department were increased from Rs 975 to Rs 3,600; a 369% increase. And the same is the case for other departments in the University as well.

The University’s vice-chancellor Sangita Srivastava said, ”Without the fee hike, it would be difficult to sustain the University. The University was completely out of funds and was taking this step to keep the education going.”

Further, University management has claimed that the sum the students will now have to pay is not so high as to merit protests in such huge numbers and that students can pay the sum that is being asked for.

However, the students have taken exception to the fact that the University management has allegedly not been responsive at all. For the past 19 days, at least five students have been on a fast-unto-death strike, the core reason being the management’s refusal to even engage in a dialogue with the students.

As per the professors and a few other authorities in the University, over 50% of the students of Allahabad University come from financially marginalised backgrounds.

Self-immolation

On September 19, Adarsh, a student at the University, along with some of his fellow peers tried to douse themselves in kerosene. Videos of Adarsh and the other students in a scuffle with the police and trying to put more kerosene of themselves made the rounds on social media.

Adarsh and others had been protesting for a long time, even before the fee hikes, against a range of issues. As students continued their agitation even after the administration asked them to stop, on September 18 police reached Adarsh’s home and told his parents about the protests he was involved in. The police allegedly told his parents to ask him to come or else “face the consequences”.

When Adarsh came to know about this, he saw it as the last straw and declared that if the V-C and college management did not agree to a dialogue with the students, he would take his life.

“When they did not respond to me by 11 am and did not even give me a time at which they would actually talk to me, I was left with no choice. Surrounded by at least 300 people, I poured a gallon of kerosene on myself. The administrators and other students there stopped me, and the police registered an FIR against me. However, I will still continue to protest and the University will have to bend,” Adarsh told The Wire.

Unlike Adarsh, Kumar is not usually a part of these protests. But he still wants the decision to raise fees to be rolled back. He said that seeing police lathi charge his fellow students while he is walking around campus makes him afraid. He said that he wonders what he will do if the protesters do not succeed, fearing that he will have to quit the University if the fees are not brought back down.

“I somehow managed to survive the pandemic, but a lot of my friends could not. Some headed back to their village to work in the fields. Others who did not have the nerve to go back home, joined banks or offices as security guards,” Kumar said.

After sending money for his family back home, paying his rent and keeping money aside for food and travel, collecting Rs 3,600 for his fees seems impossible to Kumar.

“Now the fee would be somewhere around Rs 3,600; how will I arrange that money? Post-pandemic, I do not even get tuition classes like before. I hesitate to even eat a plate of pani puri that other students have on a regular basis,” he said. “Paying this big sum will be challenging. Even to fill a form for my Masters and further education, I have to borrow money from my teachers, friends, and others. If this decision is not rolled back, I will probably quit.”

Boycott for professor who supported students

The students claim to have received zero support from University professors. What’s more, the only professor who chose to support students alleged that he has been completely boycotted by his colleagues.

Vikram Harijan a professor at AU, went on ground to support the protesting students on September 22. ”These students come from a really marginalised background. The annual income of their families is less than Rs 1.5 lakh. I myself have dealt with the such situation when I was a student,” he said.

Harijan now feels that his job may be on the line.

Harijan claims that there are a few professors who are in support of the students, but said that they will never come to the forefront for this very reason. “The country should have progressed in a JNU-model direction where, in our times, education was accessible to all,” he said. “Instead, we are moving towards the complete commercialisation of education. The infrastructure of the University in the past few years has seen negligible growth.”

At least two FIRs against 16 students have been filed at the Colonel Gunj police station in Allahabad. They have been charged under Indian Penal Code (IPC) Sections 147 (Rioting), 353 (Assault or criminal force to deter public servant from discharge of his duty), 504 (Intentional insult with intent to provoke breach of the peace) and 506 (Criminal intimidation).

Further, a total of eight students have thus far been hospitalised due to the toll the hunger strike has taken on their health. Yet, five students remain on hunger strike in the University.

The police and University management are adamant that protests will not be allowed and the hike will not be rolled back.

(Courtesy: The Wire.)