When university professors stop questioning power

IN the increasingly bureaucratised and politically compromised landscape of Indian academia, institutes of higher learning present a telling microcosm. The erstwhile bastions of scholarly integrity and critical discourse have given way to a culture of administrative opportunism, wherein professors prioritise careerist advancement over intellectual pursuits.This fetishisation of power has not only eclipsed rigorous scholarship and the praxis of solidarity but also eroded the normative foundations of the academic profession. What ensues is not merely a scramble for institutional prestige, but a betrayal of the university's raison d'être as a sanctuary of critical inquiry and moral accountability.The ideals of academia, predicated on the pursuit of knowledge and the cultivation of dissenting voices, are being systematically dismantled, yielding to a culture of calculated complicity and uncritical acquiescence to dominant power structures.The professoriate of today has largely abdicated its critical responsibility to scrutinise power, contest injustice and articulate unvarnished truths, regardless of their potential to disrupt dominant narratives.Self-censorship has, therefore, emerged as a strategic mechanism for professional survival, wherein academics refrain from bearing witness against hegemonic power structures, aligning with resistance movements or contesting democratic erosion. This reticence is not born of intellectual lacunae, but of a fear that critique may imperil one's ascension in the administrative hierarchy.Consequently, public pronouncements are circumspect, scholarly articles shorn of polemical fervour and few academics dare to venture into the fraught terrain of dissent. The resultant silence constitutes a betrayal of the professoriate's sacrosanct responsibility to interrogate power and champion intellectual freedom.This is what Julien Benda diagnosed nearly a century ago in his landmark 1927 book, The Treason of the Intellectuals. He warned that when intellectuals align themselves with the political, nationalist or institutional forces of their time, they cease to be guardians of truth and, instead, become clerks or functionaries of the dominant order.Their vocation, once grounded in truth and moral universality, becomes subordinate to ambition and fear. Today, Benda's warning has become prophecy, with his words echoing with unsettling accuracy.Edward Said, in The Reith Lectures, later published as Representations of the Intellectual, took Benda's thesis further, arguing that the true intellectual is not a bureaucrat of state or institution but an "exile" who resists "co-optation" and speaks from a position of moral independence and critical irreverence to authority, even if it comes at a personal cost. The intellectual is not servile to institutions but holds up the idea of dissent with a voice of moral indignation. "The intellectual's role is to present alternative narratives," Said insisted, "to challenge orthodoxy, to question." And this includes the ability to read the subtext of dominant discourses, to see through the surface of official narratives and understand the structures of power and propaganda that sustain them. For Said, the public intellectual's role is adversarial: to question received dogma and to refuse the comforts of compliance. An intellectual who chooses silence in the face of injustice, Said argues, becomes complicit in the very systems they should be critiquing.Which brings us to Professor Noam Chomsky, whose idea of "manufacturing consent" must be at the heart of any intellectual's ethical framework today. Chomsky, in exposing the mechanisms by which state and corporate power distort public discourse, teaches us that to accept dominant narratives at face value is itself a form of complicity. The intellectual must resist the seduction of consensus, looking askance and fearlessly asking what is left unsaid, whose interests are being served and what forms of violence are being camouflaged by language.And what of the university, the site that is meant to house these intellectuals, nurture their courage and amplify their nonconformity? As Howard Zinn, radical American historian, argued, the university should never be a sanctuary for conformity. It must be a space of widening horizons, a place where thinking moves beyond borders, beyond the code of belief and into the realm of moral possibility. Zinn reminded us that history itself must be written "from below", from the standpoint of the oppressed, not the victors. Likewise, the university must be aligned not with state power or capital, but with the struggles for freedom, justice and truth.Understandably, lecturing, writing and research are not neutral acts, but interventions in culture, politics and society aiming for liberation. And if not, they risk becoming handmaidens of the state.Today, however, the intellectual has been largely domesticated. We, who live and breathe in the academia, are witness to the seminar gone sterile, the lecture apolitical, and the public statement absent. Professors write in the language of bureaucrats, lecture like diplomats within the constraints of the overbearing ideological environment and publish like acquiescent minions. The issues of our time demand a different response to the foundational questions of freedom and justice.Thus, pressing questions about the role of academia in the contemporary moment, arise. How can we conceptualise freedom in an era marked by pervasive surveillance and authoritarian governance? What forms of justice can be envisioned in a society fractured by communalism and entrenched inequality? Where does the university stand in relation to such global crises as war, genocide and ecological collapse?The absence of a robust critical voice from the professoriate is notable. If the professoriate fails to critique power and challenge dominant ideologies, the university risks becoming indistinguishable from the very structures it purports to critique. This raises fundamental questions about the purpose and function of higher education in a democratic society.The reclamation of intellectual authority necessitates a fundamental gesture of resistance, one that articulates a principled refusal to acquiesce to the dominant logic that subordinates intellectual integrity to ambition. This requires a critical interrogation of the quantification of knowledge, which reduces education to metrics and rankings and a steadfast defence of dissenting voices in the public sphere.Shelley Walia is former Professor, Panjab University, Chandigarh.

When university professors stop questioning power

Shelley Walia

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