Dear Sanjeev Bikhchandani, supporting Prof Mahmudabad is a matter of morality, not activism

The Print

a day ago

Recently, I read your response to an alumnus of Ashoka University published in ThePrint. It is one thing to evade some issues for practical reasons and strategic concerns, but making that into a position paper, setting a certain precedent is a very different matter altogether. Hence, I feel there is something to be discussed here.
My first memory of you is when you were addressing the first-year assembly at your alma mater and my workplace, St. Stephen's College, almost one-and-a-half decades ago. I have heard of and seen your support to the college, while also been a beneficiary of your positive responses to communications as a member of the college faculty.
Let us look at the immediate concern: Ashoka professor Ali Khan Mahmudabad put up a Facebook post against terrorism of all kinds. Was it polarising and hateful? Did it attack the Indian Armed Forces at a time when a war between India and Pakistan was potentially looming large? I couldn't find anything against institutional interests, constitutional values or human rights in his post. Had you – the Ashoka administration – found anything problematic, your distancing yourself from his post would have been quite understandable. I couldn't find proof of that in your letter to the alumnus. Did Mahmudabad's post end up 'offending a whole bunch of people'? It must have, but then critical thinking (that one defining characteristic of liberal universities, as per the Google AI response in your letter) doesn't allow us to join the bandwagon of the feelings of a 'whole lot of people'. Does it?
Some unanswered questions
You call the faculty, students, alumni, and workers, including the founders, the 'Ashoka community'. One member of that community is remanded. Whatever the issue is, don't you have the responsibility to make sure he or she gets legal support, and work for the sustenance of an ambience in which his/her rights are protected? Wouldn't that be a position of institutional morality?
Surely, the university shouldn't meddle with the legal processes. But providing legal support doesn't mean you support the views of the faculty or the student concerned. It only means you are trying to stand together as a community. The atmosphere of fear, which makes us avoidants in attending to certain duties of the community, will eventually make us shrink both individually and collectively. Isn't that concerning?
I felt you avoided answering these specific questions by invoking larger, abstract questions of activism in a liberal university.
Student collectives in universities have behaved in differently in three phases: when aristocratic young people were sent to medieval universities, they ganged up, created trouble, and ended up fighting with the local people – the infamous 'town and gown' quarrels that are associated with European universities in the Middle Ages.
But the religious scholarship took a scientific turn through conflicts in the 17th century. Later, in the early 20th century, students supported the ruling establishment, famously in defeating Britain's 1926 General Strike and and in siding with Hitler in Germany. The anti-establishment common sense of universities is a thing of the '60s: female, coloured, lower-class, and minority students entering the previously guarded space of higher education en masse had a major role to play in it. They opposed capitalism where capitalism ruled, resisted communism in Eastern Europe where communism was in power, delegitimised the Cold War world order, brought out the limitations of socialist rhetoric of upper caste-dominant countries like India and formulated a new set of values for political rhetoric and academic inquiry. Essentialising liberal universities as activist in nature is not historically tenable.
Universities have also never worked as per the intentions of their founders: the British government started colleges to produce clerks but the institutions became hotbeds of anti-colonial movements; Indira Gandhi's biggest academic investment, JNU, became a severe headache for her in a matter of six years. This is no surprise given the world does transform in ways we do not anticipate and universities are powerful ingredients and products of that process. In building a university, the community accumulates a culture beyond the topical and the immediate.
But through all these phases, universities have been seen as critical habitats of ideation –spaces that gathered, stored, and disseminated those ideas – and produced new ideas and frames in the process. Both under monarchy and democracy, universities have come up with conversations, discussions and devices that caused paradigm shifts in the way we conduct our lives because there was a space in which people were able to actualise themselves. So, every university has had a need to establish communities that allow individuals to be ethically themselves and confident in their academic journey through life. Universities don't compulsorily have to be liberal – they could be neo-liberal or even conservative. But what it can't do is to say it's not a community. Creating a sense of belonging – not the university belonging to us but we belonging to the university – is central, would you not agree?
Also read: There's a gap between what Ali Khan Mahmudabad said and what he's accused of—basic literacy
Public and private institutions
Ashoka University is a private university, and there is a school of thought that universities are best organised only in the public sphere. I have a different point of view. Given the huge leaps in technology and the very redefinitions of what it is to be human, a number of innovations are best done in private. For example, the Centre for Writing and Communication of Ashoka University is an effective and interesting innovation. Given the centre's structure and the numbers they have to deal with, a public university cannot do so and integrate new generational wisdom so easily.
The idea of demonetising public universities to support private ones is not just dangerous but also completely impractical: Ashoka, given its financial requirements, cannot replace public universities. While one needs to be highly critical of the cynical heedlessness that public university leaders sitting in the executive and academic councils have been showing, it cannot be blamed on private entrepreneurs. That is another matter altogether. Without that, public and private universities can co-exist, compete, and even collaborate.
A significant population of India has seen their financial condition improve in the last 20-25 years and private universities are one way to access that wealth. Academic orientation can function as a tributary in the field of art, nation-building, and knowledge production. Universities are spaces where people not only get degrees but acquire skills, develop perspectives, and learn to collectivise.
While your initiative to start Ashoka University is appreciable, your translation of the current problem is potentially debilitating to the very possibilities a university promises.
Lastly, a disagreement: St. Stephen's College had a very strong legacy of student activism – from CF Andrews, who taught at the college, raising his voice against British rule, to the women-led movements of the 2010s for equality and constitutional rights, especially the anti-CAA protests.
You studied in a publicly funded college. You had enough sense of belongingness to come back and continue your engagement with the community. It is a function of its institutional value that prompts such an act. Do Indian private universities want such a possibility, of being a space of tomorrow, in another 20-30 years, seems to be the question that lingers on in this whole episode.
Warmly,
Ashley
The author teaches English at St. Stephen's College, Delhi University. He tweets @NPAshley2. Views are personal.
(Edited by Aamaan Alam Khan)