University and the Real World: The Case for Encouraging Student Political Activism at Private HEIs

I hate that phrase “the real world.” Why is an aircraft factory more real than a university? Is it? In universities, I have had in my office ex-cons on parole, young people in tears racked with deep sexual problems, people recently released from mental hospitals, confused, bewildered, frightened, hoping, with more desperation than some of us will ever be unlucky enough to know, that they will remain stable enough to stay in school, and out of hospitals forever…In some ways, the university is a far more real-world than business.

—Richard Hugo, ‘How Poets Make a Living’, The Triggering Town (1979)

A senior leader at a private university in Dehradun, where the author once worked, while addressing students at their farewell, motivated them to exhibit patience as they begin their professional journeys. He explained that graduates receiving placements via the university were switching jobs within months. He did not say why they were doing that. Instead, he said, this tendency portrays the employee as someone impatient and opportunistic, which makes them a poor fit in a culture that rewards loyalty. Was such an impression worth earning by looking to satisfy one’s short-term goal of landing a meagre salary bump? When the alternative involves potentially reaping better, greater dividends by investing time and labour at one workplace for the longer term?

And it does pay to be loyal, the senior leader continued, invoking the example of Mr Ambani’s gift worth INR 1,500 crore to a loyal employee who had served in the company for more than forty years. A company will surely reward you—the students were told—once the company recognises that you have become deserving. To reach this stage, students only need to grind for the short term while ensuring to match their vision with the organisation's. In short, ‘Young people should focus on learning, not earning,’ he concluded.

This speech was received well by both faculty and students, if the applause that followed is any indication, which, frankly, is hardly a credible metric. In any case, the speech itself was deeply disturbing for two reasons. First, the obvious subtext of the senior leader’s speech was that students should put up with a low-paying employer to avoid damaging the university’s relationship with the companies it called in for placements. Second, the students accepted the content of this speech with hardly any resistance. But then again, can one expect any resistance from the graduates who, during their time at the university, never raised any concern regarding inadequate infrastructure or any other injustice that they faced, except in private conversations?

This reaction (or lack thereof) is in stark contrast to the behaviour of socially aware and politically active students at universities like the University of Delhi (DU), Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), Hyderabad Central University (HCU), Film and Television Institute of India (FTII), et cetera. An important difference between these premier institutions and most private universities is that of a vibrant culture of student activism and the existence of student unions.

To be or not to be political?

At its most simple, a student union is a democratic instrument that enables students to negotiate with the authorities. Why, then, is the popular perception of student unions negative? As a student, one is likely to have been cautioned by well-wishers against indulging in political activities. Anand Teltumbde’s essay ‘The university as passivity? The role of students’ political activism’ in The Idea of the University: Histories and Contexts (2019), edited by Debaditya Bhattacharya, tackles some of the main arguments against on-campus student activism. 

The first argument, iterated in a report of a government panel on the New Education Policy (NEP), reinforces the notion that political activism is carried out by ‘a small section’ of students as opposed to ‘the majority of serious students’ who only wish to engage in apolitical study (p. 199). The activities of the few become the cause of nuisance and disturbance for not just other students but also the university administration. This reasoning also appeals to the parents who would ‘neither like their own children “deviating” from their studies and indulging in politics nor like others to cause disturbance to their wards’ (p. 200). In the minds of average Indian families, student activism is something undesirable because “doing politics” is best left to hooligans, politicians, and hooligan politicians.

This reason appears logical enough when viewed from the point of view of safety, especially in light of the assumption that political activism is congruent with violence. But to give in to this assumption results in a twofold travesty: first, it effectively serves to propagate the philosophy of isolation by encouraging students to remain cut off from 'active' communities in the name of safety; second, the political space by default becomes available to only trigger-happy individuals to occupy without much or any resistance. This results in the unfortunate notion of democracy that will continue to gain visibility until responsible citizens decide to take matters into their hands to bring more civility into political processes. However, this essay is concerned with another assumption at work in the aforementioned argument that needs to be examined thoroughly: that the campus space is by default apolitical, disconnected from reality (which is political), and that it is only a small group of students who are driven to disrupt this balance to achieve their wicked purposes.

Teltumbde counters this logic by first tracing the roots of the word ‘politics’, which is the Greek polis, meaning ‘a community or populace or society’ (p. 201). If politics, as it is understood, is a natural feature of society—because society is a collective of the people—then, Teltumbde argues, the university must also possess this feature, as, etymologically, ‘university’ is related to universitas which ‘signalled only a collection of students, similar to the guilds of weavers or carpenters’ (p. 201). Hence, the only logic that can sustain the idea of the campus as an apolitical space is that there is a difference between a student and a citizen, which is that the latter is political while the former is not. And, since a majority (if not all) of the students are apolitical, focussed only on their studies, student politics should be banned from campuses. 

This logic is obviously—and pragmatically—false, as Teltumbde points out, ‘Students in higher education are voters in elections and are as such constitutionally reckoned as political stakeholders’ (p. 208). To this, one can argue, as M Venkaiah Naidu, a senior Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader, did, that if students are interested in politics, ‘they can leave studies and join politics’ (p. 199). Here, again, we find the same assumption at play: the university is an apolitical space and fundamentally different from the industry of politics.

How real is the real world compared to the university?

This argument is so pervasive—one is likely to have heard it at least once from a parent, a teacher, an admin, and a fellow student, each—that the fallacious logic at its base seems absolute. It takes on the appearance of infallibility because the relationship of students, as citizens, to the university space is different from their relationship to any other organisation, public or private. But at the level of the organisation itself, one would be hard-pressed to defend this logic. The Constitution of India guarantees each citizen the fundamental right to form unions and associations. The question then becomes, can any organisation, public or private, supersede this fundamental right to forbid its stakeholders from forming unions? 

It is not uncommon for private universities to have a clause in their contracts that explicitly deters employees from engaging in student union activities. In such spaces where professors and staff are contractually obligated not to exercise their fundamental right, to think that students can do it instead is a ridiculous fantasy. The private sector and unions are already considered far removed from each other in popular consciousness. Private universities stand further apart from the conception of unions in general, let alone student unions, as popular consciousness conditioned by neoliberal values dictates that universities have no space for politics. Can one say the same thing about the railways? That Indian Railways, the organisation, is an apolitical organisation, that it exists outside of the ambit of the real world? Can the same be said of the Regional Transport Office (RTO)? In fact, when an adult deals with these organisations, they are expected to perform as a responsible citizen. Be it as the service provider or the customer, citizens occupy the ‘real world’. By the same token, employees at the universities—teaching as well as non-teaching staff—are citizens holding up the organisation. The students—the beneficiaries of the education system, the customers, so to speak—are, by some sleight of hand, divested of their status as citizens. Why?

To answer this question, it has to be conceded that the identity of a student is, in fact, different from that of a citizen (even though they are the same). They are different, not in the eyes of the law, but in the eyes of authority figures in their lives, beginning with their parents. This difference is rooted in the material condition of the student. Education is typically paid for by the parents of the beneficiary. This transaction is accompanied by a sense of obligation. A student’s duty, then, also extends to their parents. The parents, the guardians, have sent their wards to study there—the students have not entered the university space of their own accord, because they cannot unless they can pay their fees themselves. Therefore, the university becomes a space where the domestic space overlaps in the form of paternal authority, which is often in perfect alignment with the administrative authority. It is, in fact, one of the first tactics used by the university administration to dissuade a student from their political persuasion: stop political activities, or we will inform your parents. This tactic is unlikely to work on an employee at the Indian Railways or the RTO.

This financial logic is also why the state of student activism at private universities is dismal, as private universities charge exorbitant fees. Teltumbde explains how this financial pressure not only structurally excludes people from lower strata, who are more socially conscious compared to their more privileged counterparts, but it also promotes the students who do enter these campuses to isolate themselves—ostensibly so that, in the absence of a politically aware peer group, they can focus better on their academics—to get a better return on their investment (p. 206). This, in turn, is accompanied by the neoliberal logic of competition—a concept that most people are reared on since birth. Peers become the ‘others’ that a student must compete with—for grades and for eventual placement opportunities. Students in such higher education spaces, where they spend the best part of their formative years, are thus processed to become passive citizens who also happen to be all too prepared, if not happy, to be exploited by cruel corporate overlords. 

Korean-German philosopher Byung-Chul Han, in his book Psychopolitics (2014), explains: ‘Motivation, projects, competition, optimisation, and initiative represent features of the psychopolitical technology of domination that constitutes the neoliberal regime’. Be it the senior leader in the introduction who motivated the students to submit to exploitation in the name of loyalty or the parents who make their wards believe that staying isolated is the only practical way of achieving academic excellence, every 'well-wisher' in the end becomes an agent of domination that the neoliberal regime thrives on, working through, as identified by Han, the instruments of ‘guilt and debt’, the fetters of the passive citizenry. Furthermore, this construction of a passive, apolitical citizen is anything but accidental. Neoliberal forces—‘teams of work study engineers, ergonomists, labour relations experts, industrial psychologists, and sociologists,’ writes Alexander Cockburn in Student Power: Problems, Diagnosis, Action—encourage this development ‘to ensure that the maximum surplus labour is extracted with the minimum of trouble’ (p. 8). This motivation works in tandem with the shadow curriculum at schools and universities that forces students to perform rituals of obedience to the point that it becomes their instinct, all with the aim to ‘conceal from the masses the fact that the material preconditions for social liberation already exist’ (p. 8).

The increasing pedagogical focus on vocational courses in line with the market’s need for skilled, employable labour further normalises anti-democratic behaviour in the name of industry-academia collaboration. The university, in its drive to produce said labour that can seamlessly transition into the working space, gleefully sculpts students into workers who are pliant, passive, and apolitical. Is this the role of higher education? If so, by creating easily exploitable people, either unaware or powerless to defend their fundamental right to a dignified life, such campuses are doing a disservice to a society that considers itself democratic.

Towards industry-academia-civil society collaboration

The narrative that university spaces are not part of the real world only serves to strengthen the culture of exploitation. For one, it instils in the students the belief that, once they graduate, they will be at the mercy of a cruel system that they cannot change. Even if, as workers, they wish for a change, they will lack the skills, the experience, and the confidence to organise themselves into associations or unions (which is a fundamental right)—counter forces that provide the workers with the power of negotiation to demand and create improved working conditions.

Higher education spaces are gladly shouldering the responsibility of upskilling the workers even before they enter the professional space, and the market is thankful for it. Even if one considers the fact that India’s higher education institutions (HEIs) are responding positively to the expectations of the industry’s progressive development, it must also be noted that the growing ease of business is happening in tandem with the increased exploitation of labour. To ensure that optimal dividends are reaped not just by the market but also by the people, HEIs must respond with equal eagerness to the expectations of civil society. This means enabling the students to acquire the skills needed to defend themselves against exploitation, which is their fundamental right guaranteed by the Constitution of India. For this, students need to be exposed to the ideas, concepts, and discourses that will enable them to develop a keen social and political awareness. In other words, more students must be taught humanities courses, along with a course on labour laws and employee rights, especially those students enrolled in vocational studies. NEP 2020 appears to facilitate progress in this direction. 

It mandates that ‘Departments in Languages, Literature, Music, Philosophy, Indology, Art, Dance, Theatre, Education, Mathematics, Statistics, Pure and Applied Sciences, Sociology, Economics, Sports, Translation and Interpretation, and other such subjects needed for a multidisciplinary, stimulating Indian education and environment will be established and strengthened at all HEIs’ (p. 37). However, despite its proclaimed objectives of creating individuals with ‘both the “foundational capacities” of literacy and numeracy and “higher-order” cognitive capacities, such as critical thinking and problem solving’ (p. 4), the NEP framework is poised to continue to only partially fulfil its objectives. 

Because the graduates of the future, like the graduates before them, when told to be patient and forego better opportunities in favour of grinding at the company their university got them placed in, will continue to applaud in agreement. They will do so because even though they may now have both the skill to adapt to new technologies as well as the skill to appreciate Sanskrit poetry, they will lack the courage to stand up against irrational arguments made by someone in a powerful position. Even if some among them will exercise critical thinking, ‘a “higher-order” cognitive capacity’, to identify the unfairness of being told to allow their first employers to exploit them to the fullest before offering that opportunity to the next company, it is another matter to expect that they will have the courage to organise into a community to demand better treatment. Even more important is to wonder whether the present system of education will ever produce a senior leader who will never ask such a thing of outgoing students in the first place. Is it possible?

I believe this is possible, and HEIs—including and especially private institutes—can play an instrumental role here. Just as students are expected to become a good reflection of the educational spaces they graduate from, the educational spaces must also take an interest in the well-being of students after their graduation. This can be something as simple as HEIs inviting the participation of companies with a good Human Resources (HR) management record on placement drives. As simple as professors and student representatives collaborating with the government in strengthening the labour laws. In other words, high-power committees must be established, or the power and function of placement cells need to be optimised to reflect a greater stake of the educational institutes in their alumni's well-being. Such a scrutiny-based support system will exert an additional force on the private sector to motivate them to protect and promote the rights of the employees in line with the nation's labour laws, while also, in turn, optimising these laws through a rejuvenated discourse. In addition to inviting technology specialists and industry experts to deliver lectures, seminars, and workshops, HEIs can look to invite union organisers and lawyers specialising in labour laws to empower the students to protect their interests.

These are some simple measures that are easily implementable. The least HEIs can do is encourage the students to go beyond bookish learning, to get a hands-on experience to practice the ideas and ideals they learn about—ideals that they are expected to aspire to in the ‘real world’. Campus politics, according to Teltumbde, is ‘the laboratory to test the efficacy of learning from classrooms—learning how to apply them, learning how to unlearn’ (p. 208). He asserts that students, because they have the ‘biggest stake’ in the future, have the ‘moral right to shape it with their activism’ (p. 202).

Personal is Political is Professional

This essay has been concerned with outlining the social forces, beginning with the domestic circle, that seek to dissuade students from engaging with activism. Part of the solution involves a change in the mindset at the individual level to initiate the afore-discussed pro-labour, pro-civil society developments at the institutional level. Not just the parents and the senior leaders, and everyone in between, but the students themselves, the young adults, must develop an action-oriented attitude to actively engage with institutional problems rather than leaving them to be solved by someone else. 

In an ideal scenario, this attitude must be nurtured by HEIs, both public and private. Doing so will also be in line with NEP 2020’s objective of creating ‘engaged, productive, and contributing citizens for building an equitable, inclusive, and plural society as envisaged by our Constitution’ (p. 5). However, currently, the anti-activism forces dominate in higher education spaces. These forces that unsurprisingly are also disproportionately neoliberal in nature, achieve their ends primarily by causing individuals to feel perennially exhausted, powerless, cynical, ashamed, and alone. Against this backdrop, it is natural for one to develop feelings of apathy for the fellows, disillusionment with the system, and pessimism towards the politics of emancipation. In other words, one feels more comfortable in becoming passive or apolitical. 

However, as Theodore Roosevelt, in his 1883 speech Duties of American Citizenship, remarked, ‘The people who say that they have not time to attend to politics are simply saying that they are unfit to live in a free community... If freedom is worth having... [it] must be retained exactly as our forefathers acquired them, by labour, and especially by labour in organisation…’ The isolationist forces can only be counteracted with radical optimism and empathy, along with the increasing reliance on a community of friends and peers, which can be achieved by adopting an ideology not of competition but of collaboration.

The author, Shubham Mamgain, is a student at DAV (PG) College, Dehradun.

Featured image credit: PTI