Reimagining Crises in the Indian University
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Reimagining Crises in the Indian University Shreya Urvashi1 Received: 20 July 2020 / Revised: 27 September 2020 / Accepted: 5 November 2020 © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020
Abstract The public university in India was conceptualized to provide economically accessible and socially inclusive education. It has had the dual task of simultaneously critiquing and serving the nation. However, along with the declining quality of higher education, there has also been a significant decline in public funding recently. Increasing government intervention in the everyday life of university has further resulted in policies that inadvertently have much to do with increasing surveillance and regulation of university spaces. Placing this within the ambit of the national political situation, there was a lot of student activism and unrest on city streets and inside campuses. A global public health crisis in the midst of all this resulted in a tangential change from the above issues to those of infrastructure, access, and inclusion. At this juncture then, it becomes imperative to reevaluate the purpose of the existing institutions. The paper thus is an attempt to contextualize contemporary Indian higher education, in times of the pandemic. A qualitative approach using unstructured (physical and virtual) conversations along with literature survey has been used. An analysis of the factors, like research quality, institutionalized discrimination, infrastructure, and public funding, is used to decipher how the public university in India negotiates and exists as a prominent social institution in the country. Keywords Higher education · Crisis · India · Student activism · Access · Quality
Introduction Universities are free spaces. They can be considered as a catalyst of scientific and economic change, as well as a medium of equalization of chances and democratization of society by making possible equal opportunities for people—contributing not only to economic growth but also to social equality or, at least, lesser inequality. Writings of Beteille (2005), Viswanathan (2000), Misra (2018), and Guha (2007) reveal that education in a university should create a learning that cultivates universal values of equality, liberty, and fraternity for building a progressive nation-state. It should guide a progressive intellectual movement and cultivate the urge for social justice. However, a critical analysis of the intellectual and social history of a university reveals that it is a site of contestation between multiple * Shreya Urvashi [email protected] 1
Centre for Studies in Sociology of Education, Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai, India
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spaces and identities inherited and generated by the university itself (Gundemeda 2017). The social values and meanings attached to these spaces are highly conditioned by caste, class, gender, religious, regional, linguistic, and political ideologies of students. As a social institution, it is forced to engage with the broader social, political, and cultural
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