An open letter to Professor Ranjan Chakrabarti, the Vice-Chancellor of Vidyasagar University. Given that economic growth is so eagerly sought by all nations, too few questions have been posed, in India as in the U.S., about the direction of education, and, with it, of democratic society. With the rush to profitability in the global market, values precious for the future of democracy, especially in an era of religious anxiety, are in danger of getting lost. ----- Martha C. Nussbaum (2007) Education for Profit, education for freedom. Lecture delivered at the Institute of Development Studies, Kolkata. It almost seems that the universitys motto, seek wisdom, has transformed into seek money and writing book doesnt qualify authors as significant contributors to this latter endeavour. ----- Victoria Burbank (2011). Writing a book at the University of Western Australia. Lecture delivered in the International Conference of the International Union of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences at UWA, Perth. Dear Vice-Chancellor, As one of the senior and founding teachers of Vidyasagar University, I was shocked and dismayed by your talk when you met the teachers of the university being flanked by the two Deans in the afternoon of 5th June 2013 at the Radhakrishnan Hall. First of all, let me frankly admit that I decided to write this open letter to you for remaining transparent to the university community and also outside the precincts of the university because, I believe that your deliberations along with the lecture by the Dean, Faculty of Science have wider significance related to the academic and social roles of university teachers in this era of globalization. I think the two epigraphs of this open letter offer a hint to how I view the trajectory of university education. Your meeting started with a college classroom level power point presentation of how to write a research proposal only for funding by the Dean Science, which seemed to me too trivial for the university teachers. Moreover, it contained some basic mistakes and omissions. Let me give a few examples. In one slide, the Dean Science had shown that international funding agencies judge projects on the basis of objective criteria while the Indian funding agencies judge the same by subjective evaluation through peer-review! I wonder from which source he got this funny idea. He should know that both Indian and foreign funding agencies have peer-review/expert-review processes and both have their objective and subjective criteria. The Dean Science, however, did not explain what he meant by subjective and objective in his lecture. He also did not discuss the issue of how to deal with ethical questions in the different science subjects in writing research proposals, which is one of the most vital aspects of a modern research proposal. Even an otherwise excellent proposal may be rejected on ethical grounds. His whole lecture lacked concrete examples from real research proposals, his own experiences and also the experiences of both successes and failures supposed to be pooled from the colleagues of his own faculty. On the whole, two things emerged from his presentation: (1) lack of preparation and homework and (2) complete disengagement with the faculty colleagues, while preparing his lecture. I hope next time he will be more prepared to make his lectures useful and interesting to us. In the meeting, you have started with bringing research projects with an exclusive emphasis for earning money by the university and you never mentioned that the chief aim of research at universities is to produce new knowledge and novel thinking and above all, to publish books and articles reaching international standards. This emphasis of earning money through research projects and simultaneous de-emphasis on the production of new knowledge was the theme which ran almost all-through your speech; and that dismayed me. At a more specific level, you pointed out that you have not observed an iota of team work among the teachers of the Department of Anthropology. I agree to differ. Because, you know that the Department of Anthropology is still the lone Department which has been able to start a lecture series publication. Our first book has already been published and the second will come out soon containing chapters by scholars of India and abroad having international reputation. These books are being jointly edited by the teachers of our Department. We have also published a valuable book on Rural Development jointly edited by us containing chapters written (among outside authors) by faculties of the different departments of our university. Our present Dean Science has written a chapter in the said book with his research scholars. We have also collaborated in research projects and training and supervision in collaboration with reputed national and international scholars including Veena Majumdar, Walter Fernandes, Ajit Banerjee, Alan Rew, Rene Veron and Slawomir Koziel. I hope you know that the last UGC visiting team has specially admired the research works done by the Department of Anthropology as commendable in its report. If you look carefully at the list of publications of our faculties you will find many articles written jointly by the faculties and research scholars. Our department also received UGC Infrastructure Development Grant and RFSMS scholarships for students successively for two sessions. During your tenure, we have organized six(06) UGC Merged Scheme lectures (including lectures by Alasdair Roberts and Rene Veron), a seminar on films in collaboration with the Anthropological Survey of India and an workshop on UG curriculum development which were planned and executed by the faculties of the department. We also invited you to deliver a special lecture on environmental history at our department in which all the faculties, research scholars and students of the department were present and debated during and after your lecture. On a more mundane level, our department has been awarded two certificates from the Controllers section for early publication of PG results; we always send the academic achievements of our department for the annual reports at early dates and arrive at unanimous resolutions in the departmental committee meetings. I hope you could recall how we struggled to make the Masters degree in Anthropology as M.Sc. in a united manner. All these joint and painstaking research and administrative works could not have been done without team work. We are ready for the NAAC visit to show our team spirit as we have done successfully during the tenure of the earlier Vice-Chancellors. Yes, we have healthy differences on many academic and pragmatic issues, even with the students, but professionally we always work hard for the development of our subject and the Department. The Department of Anthropology is an open society and we honour the individual efforts and arguments of every teacher of our Department. We work in a joint family without any patriarch. I am not complacent on our success and we will do more. We have not been able to apply for UGC SAP not for the lack of team spirit but for the sheer lack of specified number of full-time faculties to become eligible for the submission of the application to UGC. We should not forget that despite our repeated requisitions to all the Vice-Chancellors, our department has not yet been allotted a Laboratory Assistant and a full-time group D staff. In your speech, you have made a hierarchic distinction between Science and Arts Departments in terms of academic outputs and work ethic based on your occasional visits to the departments. I think pointing out of this kind of distinctions in a public courtesy meeting of the Vice-Chancellor and the teachers can be counter-productive instead of sensitization. I understand that you had all the good wishes for our success and that is why you singled out the Department of Anthropology and the Arts departments for constructive criticism, because you know that we have the potential to achieve more, but pointing out weaknesses and that too not based on concrete facts and figures have created a feeling of disappointment in my mind. Maybe, I expected more from you than the Vice-Chancellors who preceded you in the office. I should not take your valuable time anymore. In your talk, which you labeled as informal, you made a statement thrice, which scared me. You said that you are the Vice-Chancellor of this university and you will run this university for the next four years. So, whatever criticism or allegations we have about the university, we should submit those to you and not to any outsider. This has really surprised me because the statement goes against the basic spirit of any democratic country. I think you know better than me that a citizen of India has the right to complain against any public official to the superior authorities and the chain of complaints can move up to the President of India. Secondly, a university is run not by a single person, viz. the Vice-Chancellor, but by the teachers, students, officers and the non-teaching employees of the institution. Last but not the least, let me say that I liked the last part of your lecture very much when you said that the best mission for a teacher of a university is teaching. It filled my heart with joy and hope for the future of our university. I am however, still anxious about how you would keep a sense of balance in your vision and mission, which I honestly believe is being pulled by the opposing forces of making money and seeking wisdom. I hope you would read my letter in a good and friendly spirit, and if you think it is important you may reply, otherwise, just ignore it as one among the many letters I have written to you for the nurturing of critical thought at Vidyasagar University since I believe that there is no point in pursuing higher education without a dissenting voice. With my best regards, Yours Sincerely, Dr. Abhijit Guha Associate Professor Department of Anthropology Vidyasagar University. Dated 7th June 2013.
Posted on: Sat, 08 Jun 2013 16:42:19 +0000
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