Those who still can, teach

But, as I said, not even the faintest blip. Well, perhaps the very faintest; there was a smattering of bored-looking photographers and journalists present at the scene. When the procession briefly blocked traffic while crossing Bahadur Shah Zafar Marg, the photographers stirred and started running backwards and snapping away in their mock-heroic style. Great, thought the lecturers, something on the front pages tomorrow. Perhaps even debate on the Big Questions over the following days and weeks: how do we want our university system to function? Make them vibrant centres of learning? Value quality higher education and educators? Produce students who choose meaningful careers in teaching and research? Resuscitate teaching in the pure sciences and humanities, without which no society can call itself civilised? 

“College Teachers Miss Classes” was the title of a report on the third page of one English-language daily. A couple of Hindi newspapers were slightly more sympathetic, but only slightly. As for television, there wasn’t a single report that day that I am aware of. An attitude of benign neglect, this, revealed in assumptions about teaching being a ‘noble profession’ (Read: teachers do not need incomes comparable to other professionals). Thus the march, the entire debate, sank into obscurity, part of the long-running, ritualised interaction between the state and its employees, a replay of the scripted drama that lecturers and professors enact each time a Pay Commission is announced. Last time, teachers were forced to go on a week-long strike, for dubious gain at best. This time, teachers have reason to believe that carefully wrapped between catchy-sounding phrases like “70 per cent increase in salary”, may be provisions that have the overall effect of increasing individual teaching burden and institutional surveillance (including student evaluations of teachers, an otherwise bright idea that remains wide open for misuse by college authorities under present circumstances).

In the absence of a sensible plan to revive the existing university system (of which one part will be decent pay and support for faculty research and development), a damning downward spiral has already been set into motion: if it is allowed to complete its logic, we face the prospect of a society with hundreds of thousands of semi-literate “English-speaking” graduates who provide the call center industry with its high-turnover human resources, but not a single PhD worth the name. And private higher education and new “world-class” universities like the proposed South Asian University (whose “CEO” is the eponymous Dr. Chadha of the Chadha Committee himself), should not be considered miracle cures; the record of private or semi-private higher education in India has so far been abysmal in many cases, and practically non-existent in the social sciences and humanities. More importantly, there is much that is ‘world-class’ in the current system already; there are thousands of committed, highly-qualified lecturers and professors in Indian colleges and universities who continue to inspire and educate their students in the face of dwindling institutional support, infrastructure, relative income and wider societal recognition. Teachers who already spend more than double the amount of time lecturing and in contact hours than do their colleagues in the first world. Teachers whose students sail through higher degrees abroad on the strength of their degrees from here; students who will in all likelihood earn a higher first salary than many of their old college teachers. You and I are products of this education system: what do you think your teachers deserve? A real debate at least?

The writer is a political scientist at Lady Shri Ram College, Delhi

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