The university is conversation without winners or losers

Neera Chandhoke

Political Scientist

It is a truism to suggest that we live in troubled times. Every site of engagement with power — the university, the media, civil society — is being suppressed. The latest move is an administrative directive of Jawaharlal Nehru University. Dharnas, hunger strikes, welcome parties, farewells and DJ events held within a 100-metre radius of administrative or academic buildings, without prior permission, would attract a fine. This is part of the ‘rules of discipline and proper conduct of students’, according to the Chief Proctor Office Manual. The university authorities have reportedly stated that some regulations have been introduced to ensure that the academic process is not disrupted.

I have taught in Delhi University for most of my life — taken classes, supervised research and participated in administrative affairs. But I have also listened with fascination to impassioned speeches by students on the state of politics in the country and abroad, at times addressed crowds and marched in processions in protest against the latest injustice. There is so much passion on these occasions, such great desire for justice for fellow beings, such oratory and such humour. It energises all of us. Do we really need to discipline young people? We need to feel their yearning for justice. This gives us hope that our collective conscience is not dead. The imposition of disciplinary rules on student gatherings rings the proverbial death-knell for informed and energetic interventions in politics. This is a cause for concern.

If universities are not a site of critical engagement with power, which institution is? In May 1968, the student revolt in France against a culture that was hierarchical, conservative and moribund was transformed into a general strike that involved millions of workers. For the young, existing Communist regimes were no longer relevant. Certainly, capitalism was neither relevant nor desirable for human beings. Young revolutionaries were inspired by Che Guevara, Ho Chi Minh and Mao Zedong. They took their protests to the heart of radical culture, the Sorbonne on the Left Bank in Paris. Police crackdowns were resisted by bystanders, a salutary reminder that all of us have obligations to protect each other from police excesses.

May 10-11, 1968, is known in history as the ‘Night of the Barricades’. Huge demonstrations were countered by police repression and arrests. The outcome was counter-productive for those who wanted to trample upon the spirit of the young protesters. Police action elicited public sympathy for the students. As the movement spread to the rest of the country, and as young people demanded the destruction of all institutions that inhibited liberty and fraternity, workers called for one of the biggest general strikes seen in the country. Like every social movement, the 1968 student revolt left its imprint on France and also on what came to be known as the New Left. It inspired profound rethinking of Marxism that had degenerated into Stalinism. It also raised a relevant question: if young people do not remind us of what has gone wrong with our society, who will?

Protest is an intrinsic part of university life, but there is much more to the idea of the university. We are not speaking of institutions that churn out high-end labour for the market or coaching centres. The university is an experience; an end in itself. Students learn to live a life of the mind. They do so along with other students they might not meet in other surroundings. The mind flowers in solitariness, but also in conversations with others who have a different set of beliefs and who come from different backgrounds. The university, as noted Conservative scholar Michael Oakeshott had suggested, is ‘conversation’.

A conversation is not a debate in which there are winners or losers. Nor does it work towards a predestined end. A conversation is a process. Through multiple conversations, students recognise each other as people who count equally. Civilised communication enables them to re-examine their views in the light of other opinions. A conversation does not need a moderator. Nor does it need definite rules. The objective of a conversation is conversation itself.

The moment students enter into a conversation knowing that their voice is one of many and that there are no definitive closures, the moment they know that their knowledge is limited, as is the knowledge of the authors that they read, the moment they know that there are alternative experiences of the world, they enter the realm of critique of the self and of power structures.

Critique marks the difference between information and knowledge. The process opens up new horizons and ways of knowing. As a product of the destabilisation of conventional and hegemonic ideas, critique allows us to uncover meanings that are obscured by ideological manoeuvres. There are other ways of seeing, knowing, acting. The university as a site of critical conversation enables students to lay bare contradictions.

This brings me to one of my favourite detective novelists, Amanda Cross, the pseudonym of Carolyn Gold Heilbrun. Detective Kate Fansler, like Cross was, is a professor of English literature. When asked how she has managed to figure out who the murderer is, Fansler replies: “I am a professor of English literature, I know how to read between the lines.” University education teaches the young how to read between the lines and thus uncover lies and biases. That is why it is feared by power-holders, who were themselves students once.

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