ADVERTISEMENTS:
Essay on Equality!
Our contemporary life is permeated by the contradiction between the principle of equality and the practice of inequality. This contradiction is particularly marked in India where a Constitution with a strong emphasis on equality confronts the most bewildering variety of inequalities in almost every sphere of life. But it is not confined only to India; it is a feature of the whole modern world where the social reality falls very short of the egalitarian spirit of the age. It was not always like this – in the past, particularly in India, a hierarchical order was more easily accepted by people, or at least it lay less heavily on their conscience.
The place of the university should be examined in contemporary Indian life in the light of the contradiction between the hierarchical social order inherited from the past and the present commitment to equality. We all expect the universities to reduce the constraints of hierarchy; but we also fear for their survival against the rising tide of populist demands. Before we can determine what the universities can do to resolve the contradiction between the ideal of equality and the facts of inequality, we must see how they themselves get caught up in it.
ADVERTISEMENTS:
The universities have come to occupy a large and a permanent place in Indian life, although academics like to talk about their being in the grip of crisis. There certainly is an appearance of crisis on the university campus in almost every part of the country, if not an administrative or a financial crisis, then at least a political one. A crisis in a university receives more than its due share of public attention since university teachers and students in India, as elsewhere, are articulate if not reflective persons.
As universities have grown in size, first students and then teachers have become unionized throughout the country. The demand for equality in the universities is not simply a matter of what is required by the free and unfettered pursuit of knowledge; it has to be seen also in terms of what is required by the government which finances them and by the unions which can decide whether they remain closed or open.
The Indian university is not characteristically a quiet place, tucked away in a remote corner. It has been from the very beginning associated with the metropolis. Further, universities have been established largely on the initiative of government, first the colonial government and then, after independence, the central and state governments.
The first three universities were set up in 1857 at Calcutta, Bombay and Madras which were the principal centres of British rule in India. Between then and 1947 when the country became independent, the universities grew at a modest rate, but since then the expansion has been rapid. There were 19 universities in 1947 and there are now 108 universities with a total enrolment of over 2.5 million students.
ADVERTISEMENTS:
The sixties was the decade of the greatest expansion of university education in India. Some forty new universities were added and the student enrolment grew at an average annual rate of 14 per cent. The rate of growth slowed down in the seventies when 29 new universities, several of them agricultural universities of small size, were added and student enrolment grew at an annual rate of only 4 per cent.
Given the enormous significance of demographic pressures in Indian society, this decline in the rate of growth might indicate the beginning of a new trend in the life of the Indian university. It is too early to speak with any confidence about such a trend because some of the change is notional, being the result of a shift in the cutoff point between secondary education and higher education.
Despite attempts by the University Grants Commission to ensure uniformity in matters ranging from teaching standards to salary scales, Indian universities in fact differ enormously in size, territorial jurisdiction, and material and intellectual resources. The three older universities are notoriously large in size, the oldest of them, the University of Calcutta, being also the largest with a total enrolment of over 150.000 students.
Others, such as Aligarh Muslim University with 13,094, Jawaharlal Nehru University with 3,781 and Visva-Bharati with 1,453 students, are of medium or even small size. The smaller universities tend to be residential whereas the larger ones can provide accommodation to only a small fraction of the student body.
Whether a university is small or large depends much on whether it is of the unitary or the affiliating type. In the former the university undertakes directly to enroll, accommodate and teach its students; in the latter a great deal of this is done through its affiliated colleges. In India the college came before the university, and without its colleges, the university could hardly cope with the pressure of students seeking its degrees. The unitary universities, which do without affiliated colleges, have smaller student bodies and are fewer in number, more than half of them being agricultural universities.
Most undergraduate teaching and a great deal of post-graduate teaching is done in the colleges rather than directly in the university departments. The affiliated colleges ‘cater to 88.5 per cent of the total enrolment of students at the undergraduate level; 53.1 per cent at the postgraduate level and 14.0 per cent at the research level. Teachers employed in colleges constituted nearly 79 per cent of the total number of teachers in the universities and colleges during 1979-80.’ Thus, the very large size of the Indian university is in a way deceptive.
At the undergraduate level, in the affiliating type of university, teaching is done separately in each affiliated college so that undergraduate classes are quite small even in a university like the University of Delhi which has a total enrolment of nearly 70,000 students.
There is between the college and the university department not only a division of functions but also an order of ranking. Conditions of work in the undergraduate college are not as good as in the university department and sometimes they are very bad indeed; the majority of them are controlled either by petty officials or by petty profiteers. The university departments have professors and readers in addition to lecturers whereas the colleges in general have only lecturers.
College lecturers do not necessarily have the same scales of pay as university lecturers and, even when they do, their service conditions are generally less favourable. The unionization of teachers has given college lecturers an increasing voice in university affairs and there is growing pressure from the unions for leveling out distinctions of rank within the university.
ADVERTISEMENTS:
The goals of university education are many and diverse. Even the most ardent egalitarian will not argue that the pursuit of equality, let alone its attainment, should become the sole concern of the university. At the same time, if this becomes a major concern of the intelligentsia as a whole, it is difficult to see how the universities can remain indifferent to it. Having turned the light of criticism on the social hierarchies outside, the universities cannot screen their own internal arrangements from the same light.
There is hardly any institution in the modern world which provides a more congenial ground than the university for experiments with equality. It brings together individuals from a variety of classes and strata: how successful is it in enabling them to deal with each other ‘on individual merit’, regardless of social background? To the extent that the university stands between the institutions of home and work, does it do any better than these in dealing with men and women on equal terms, irrespective of sex?
Then there is the succession of generations and the question of giving equal consideration to the claims of youth and age; this question is touched upon briefly and incidentally, and so far it concerns the issue of promotion by seniority.
The university has obligations to the wider society outside, and it is often reminded of its obligations by the press, by parliament and by the ministry. Since university education is expensive, and since its expenses are met out of the tax-payer’s money, the press and parliament ask for evidence to show that the benefits of university education are widely, if not evenly, distributed throughout society.
Any government in a country such as India has to cope with enormous populist pressures, and it is only natural that it should try to pass some of these pressures on to the universities. The universities are generally improvident and can rarely do with what resources they get, hence they are always ready to make concessions to populist pressures if that gets them a little more money.
It is not easy to measure the contribution made by university education to the attainment of equality. For one thing, this contribution may not be direct; for another, it may not be apparent in the short run. We have also to consider the argument that, by diverting scarce resources from primary and secondary education, university education might in fact hinder rather than help the equalization of opportunities in society as a whole. This is particularly the case in a country like India where large numbers of people do not get even the benefits of primary education.
Even for countries that can manage to send everybody to school, there is no clear evidence of the gains to equality from university education. The rapid expansion of university education does not guarantee the reduction, not to speak of the elimination, of social inequality.
After noting this expansion in America, a recent study declares, somewhat indignantly – ‘Colleges and universities play a crucial role in the production of labour power, in the reproduction of the class structure, and in the perpetuation of the dominant values of the social order. Those who hope for the elimination of the class structure through the expansion of university education will have to wait for a very long time.
It will be a mistake to think that only radical academics in America express indignation when they find that their universities are reproducing the class structure. Such indignation is very widely expressed and perhaps quite widely felt. The Commission on University Education, set up under the chairmanship of Dr S. Radhakrishnan shortly after independence, declared – ‘Education is a universal right, not a class privilege.’
What the Commission probably had in mind is that access to the university should not in principle be denied to anyone, not that in practice everyone who asked for a place in a university should get one. Nor is it likely that the Commission had in mind the immediate abolition of the class structure. But this much ought to be clear, that so long as society has a class structure, university education will continue to be more or less of a class privilege.
The concern for equality was carried over into the second major commission on education set up in independent India, the Education Commission of 1964-66, under the chairmanship of Dr D.S. Kothari. The scope of the Kothari Commission was wider than that of the Radhakrishnan Commission since it covered primary and secondary in addition to higher education.
It not only included the attainment of equality among the objectives of education—school education as well as university education—but also assigned a more active role to education as an instrument of social change: ‘If this “change on a grand scale” is to be achieved without violent revolution (and even for that it would be necessary) there is one instrument, that can be used; EDUCATION.’
Actually, both the Commissions produced very sober and judicious Reports, formulating a whole range of goals and objectives for university education, and drawing attention to the practical difficulties of harmonizing them. At the same time, they have served to give shape and substance to the argument that the universities can no longer justify themselves by academic attainments alone, but must orient themselves to a definite social purposes, or even that their academic attainments must be judged in the light of that social purpose.
Edward Shils has argued in his Jefferson Lecture that ‘the idea that universities could create social equality’ is a new one. In the United States it caught the imagination of the public only after the Second War. This is not to say that in the past people did not recognize that universities could and should be used as means of social ascent by talented individuals lacking the advantages of birth. In fact, special endowments have been made in the universities from the Middle Ages onwards precisely with that end in view.
Such a conception of the university does not call for an end to the existing system of stratification but, rather, takes its continued existence for granted. Totally different from it is the conception that the university should play a major part, if not the central part, in transforming a hierarchical society into an egalitarian one, or a class-divided society into a classless one.
It should not be difficult merely to recognize that the pursuit of equality through increased opportunities for individual mobility is different from the creation of equality by abolition of the class structure. What is difficult is to accept all the implications of the distinction without yielding to the temptations of rhetoric. Increasingly, on public occasions such as convocations, academic dignitaries call upon the universities to take the lead in the creation of full equality, although in private they readily admit that such an objective may not be very realistic, and that the universities should try at least to give more people a better chance.
The Radhakrishnan Commission, which declared that ‘education is a universal right, not a class privilege’, also pointed out that ‘in most countries of the world there is an ordered hierarchy in the universities’. As institutions, the universities have had a very long and a very chequered history, and it is difficult to form a realistic idea of what they may be expected to do without some consideration of their history.
The most important part of this history from our point of view lies in the way in which the university has changed from being an institution adapted to a hierarchical social environment to one more in tune with the contemporary spirit of equality.
Indian universities are of relatively recent origin, and the ones that we have today have very little to do with India’s ‘ancient and medieval centres of learning’.” If they have links with the medieval world, then indeed these links go back, through the British universities of the nineteenth century after which they were modelled, to the world of medieval Europe.
The first Indian universities were established in 1857 in the three presidency capitals of Calcutta, Bombay and Madras, and they took the English universities—in particular London as it then was—as their model. There was to be a break with the indigenous intellectual tradition, imprisoned as it was in the immobile world of religion and caste, and an entry into the expanding universe of liberal Western ideas.
We must remember that the nineteenth century was a period of great expansion in the building of universities in England where, until the University of Durham was set up in 1832, the two universities of Oxford and Cambridge had between themselves held the field for more than six hundred years.
The Indian universities were in their structure very different from Oxford and Cambridge in either the nineteenth century or earlier, but it would be impossible to exaggerate the significance of these two institutions as ideals of university life and university education in nineteenth-century India, and indeed right until the time of independence.
From the sociological point of view the real achievement of Cambridge and Oxford lies in the success with which they have conducted their passage from the medieval to the modern world. It is not simply that some of the best work in the humanities and the sciences is still conducted there, but also that their roots go directly back into the Middle Ages which are visibly present in them to this day.
The traditions of Oxford and Cambridge reach back into an historical age in which the contemporary concern for equality would appear strange and unfamiliar. Medieval European society was a hierarchical society, and when the first universities were set up—in Bologna, in Paris, in Oxford and in Cambridge—people did not think that the established hierarchy must pass away or that the universities must play a main part in their passing away.
On the contrary, the universities not only contributed to the elaboration of the ideas which kept the hierarchy in place, they also reproduced the same hierarchy in the organization of their own internal life. From the twelfth, thirteenth and fourteenth centuries to the fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth, the universities of Europe—certainly Oxford and Cambridge—became progressively more hierarchical as they became better endowed and better established.
In the light of what we expect of our universities today, two striking features of these medieval institutions were their close involvement with the church and its hierarchy, and the total exclusion of women from them.
Scholars frequently came in order to be trained for the church, and fellows looked to the church for spiritual comfort as well as material advancement: the patronage structure of the university and its colleges was until quite recent times closely linked with that of the church. The question of equal, educational opportunities for women did not arise as the education of women had no place in either Cambridge or Oxford until about a hundred years ago.
Family background had an acknowledged place in the classification of students in Oxford, and the following categories were officially used-baronis filius (sons of noblemen), equitis filius (sons of knights), armigeri filius (sons of esquires), generosi filius (sons of gentlemen), plebei filius (sons of commoners), and clerici filius (sons of clergymen). In keeping with traditional distinctions of status, sons of bishops were listed with sons of noblemen, not of clergymen.
Those of inferior status paid smaller fees, but those of superior status were entitled to take first degrees after nine instead of twelve terms of residence. It is noteworthy that these categories were used until as recently as 1891 when the Registrar of Oxford began to record the father’s occupation instead of his status. In Cambridge the privilege whereby sons of noblemen were excused from taking examinations was abolished only in 1884.
The marks of invidious social (as opposed to academic) distinction were visible also in the internal structure of the college. There were the distinctions, first, between master, fellows and students, with their respective privileges. ‘Students’ themselves were of various kinds. The core consisted of the ‘scholars’ who, like the fellows, were supported by the foundation: the college provided them with education as well as bed and board.
But there were others who had to pay for what the college gave them – these included ‘pensioners’ who were ordinary fee-paying students in residence, and ‘fellow commoners’ who paid extra and had the privilege of dining with the fellows. At the bottom were the ‘sizars’ who, in Cambridge, were granted the benefits of college life, including education, in return for menial services rendered to the more privileged members of the college.
Similar distinctions were maintained in the French universities under the ancient regime. Philippe Aries writes – ‘An edict of 1626 reveals- the existence of similar customs in the colleges of the University of Paris- the colleges separated the boarders from the dayboys, the laymen from the clerics, but also the sons of good family from the poor students who acted as college servants.’ These distinctions were closely associated with the corporate life of the colleges, and became particularly marked with the dominance of the university by its colleges in Cambridge, Oxford, Paris and elsewhere.
Even older than the colleges and their internal stratification was the preoccupation of the medieval universities with their privileges, liberties and immunities. From what we read about Bologna, Padua and Montpellier, this kind of preoccupation was no less marked in the so-called ‘student-universities’ than in the ‘magisterial universities.’
We are struck by the endless petitions from students and masters, jointly and severally, to the authorities—the Pope, the Emperor or the city—for the grant, extension or restoration of legal and quasi-legal privileges of every conceivable kind. Medieval society was one in which people worried little about equality in the abstract and much about privileges in the concrete, and the medieval university fought hard for its privileges and watched over them with a jealous eye.
If we dwelt on the place of privilege and patronage in some of the most renowned universities in the world, we have not done so in order to argue that merit did not find any place in them. It would be capricious to maintain that Cambridge and Oxford devoted all their attention to social origin and none to individual merit. Their history in almost every century is too full of illustrious names in every field of learning to allow such an argument to be taken seriously.
The point is to make it simply that, an institutional order based on privilege and patronage might still have within itself considerable room for the recognition, cultivation and promotion of individual merit.
This may sound paradoxical in terms of our modern conceptions of fairness and justice, but the historical evidence quite clearly shows the capacity of institutions to accommodate contradictory principles that appear to be contradictory. Indeed, it is their capacity to accommodate such principles that gives to institutions their living quality and ensures their viability by enabling them to adapt themselves to changing historical conditions.
There is need to emphasize the dynamic tension between the attention to social distinction and the recognition of individual merit within the older universities right until the end of the nineteenth century. No one will say that a privileged social background counts for nothing in Oxford or Cambridge today, but attention to it has become muted and has had to yield ground to other considerations.
Throughout the last hundred years people from an increasingly varied social background have found their way to these institutions, occupying positions of distinction in them. The demands at home and abroad of an expanding capitalist economy played some part in this in the nineteenth century, and the two World Wars in the twentieth.
Through all the changes that these older universities have undergone since the end of the last century, their institutional basis has remained secure and dependable. Their legitimacy as institutions designed primarily for the pursuit of learning has never been seriously threatened. The Indian universities enjoy nothing like the same kind of legitimacy.
The institutional arrangements for even such routine activities as the completion of courses or the conduct of examinations are insecure and undependable. Those who seek to put on them the whole burden of initiating and carrying through a momentous social transformation do not always remember how weak and infirm they are as institutions.
As compared with England till the end of the nineteenth century or even later, the universities in India have been far in advance of society in repudiating traditional social distinctions. In England certain distinctions continued to be maintained, at least in the older universities, long after they had become obsolete or anachronistic in the wider society. There is nothing in the constitution of the modern Indian university which requires the maintenance or even the recognition of the traditional distinctions between castes or between the sexes.
These distinctions are nevertheless carried into it from the environment on which it depends for its supply of students and teachers, and it has to devise ways and means of dealing with them. Oxford and Cambridge in the nineteenth century maintained many medieval features in a society in which characteristically modern ways of life were becoming established. In Calcutta, Bombay and Madras, on the other hand, the universities were struggling to emerge as islands of modernity in a society still set largely in its traditional hierarchical mould.
Originating in the nineteenth century, the Indian universities were imbued with the characteristic liberal enthusiasm for opening careers to talent. The liberal concern for the individual, irrespective of race, caste and creed, is the guiding principle of the entire Report of the Radhakrishnan Commission. ‘The fundamental right is the right of the individual, not of the community.
Every young man must have an equal chance with others to make the most of his abilities. To the extent that the Indian university seeks to give primacy to the individual, it is and must remain at odds with the structure of traditional Indian society or what survives of it.
We would like to emphasize the lack of harmony between the organizing principle of the university, for instance, by the Radhakrishnan Commission, and the traditional institutions of village, caste and joint family. While the modern university is different in its orientation from these institutions or even antithetical to them, it cannot be segregated from their influence, precisely because no university in the modern world can be insulated from its social environment.
It is this that makes it particularly important for us to realize that the institutional foundations of the Indian University are weak and infirm, whereas the scope and pervasiveness of the traditional institutions are far-reaching, not to say overwhelming.
We can no longer believe, as we could to some extent when the country became independent, that time and the mere expansion of higher education would sweep all traditional barriers aside. We now know that this expansion itself can be made to serve the interests of caste and community – it is not merely the luxuriant growth of caste-based colleges, but also to the reinforcement of the communal character of an institution such as the Aligarh Muslim University.
If the institutional foundations of the Indian university are weak and infirm, this is at least partly because its span of existence has not been very long: we must never make the mistake of measuring the life-span of institutions by that of individuals. Even though the first three universities were established in 1857—at about the same time as some of the great civic universities in England—they did not for at least the first fifty years of their existence have anything of the corporate character of the older European universities.
Throughout the nineteenth century, the first Indian universities confined themselves almost entirely to regulating courses of study and conducting examinations. Since they did no teaching or research, there was hardly any academic staff and only a meagre administrative staff; ‘. . . persons eminent in literature and science acted as Boards of Examiners and persons known for their administrative and public services were nominated as the Chancellor, Vice-Chancellor and the Fellows, who together constituted the Body corporate of the University’.
In 1916, under the Vice-Chancellorship of Sir Ashutosh Mukherji, the University of Calcutta took the lead in establishing Postgraduate Departments of its own, and set about appointing University professors and lecturers. Bombay and Madras followed alter, although at least until the time of independence Calcutta continued to enjoy pre-eminence in research, particularly scientific research. At the same time, examining remained a major concern, and in Calcutta it began to paralyse administrative work and, after that, academic work within a decade or two of independence.
Calcutta, Bombay and Madras set precedents for the universities in pre-independence India by having first an establishment for dealing with examinations and then organizing teaching and research: the University of Delhi, which was established in 1922, appointed its first Professor only in 1942.
By the time the country became independent nearly a hundred years after the first universities were set up, the idea at least has taken root that a university must have a corporate character from the very start, that is must concern itself with teaching and research and not just examining. This clearly is the idea of the new university we find expressed in the Report of the Radhakrishnan Commission, and it is embodied in the new central universities set up since independence.
An outstanding example is the Jawaharlal Nehru University, established in 1968, which from the start has had not only students, but also professor, readers and lecturers; libraries and laboratories; classrooms and hostels; and, above all, a campus of its own with an energetic campus life. It has deliberately restricted the number of students in order to maintain a student-teacher ratio consistent with a healthy corporate life.
Unlike the run-of-the-mill university in pre-independence India, which had little room for research, the Jawaharlal Nehru University has concentrated much effort on research; it has perhaps gone to the other extreme by keeping more or less clear of involvement in undergraduate teaching and examining.
In nineteenth-century India the focus of corporate academic life—a life of interaction between students and teachers—was not the university but the college. Colleges were already in existence when, in 1857, the first three universities were established. Hindu College (which later became Presidency College) was established in Calcutta in 1817; Elphinstone College in Bombay in 1834; and Presidency College in Madras in 1840.
Throughout the nineteenth century it was to colleges such as these that students came for higher education. The universities were there to maintain uniformity of standards by regulating courses of study and conducting examinations. The establishment of the universities also gave an enormous boost to the establishment of new colleges all over the country.
One cannot emphasize too strongly the part played by these nineteenth-century colleges in the creation of a new social class and a new kind of sensibility. It was here that the ‘modernization’ of India began, and it was also here that India’s ‘dependency’ on the cultural resources of the West was sealed. These colleges provided not only a new system of knowledge to which many turned with enthusiasm, but also a privileged setting for a new kind of sociality promising inexhaustible possibilities.
The best of the nineteenth-century colleges were established either by the government, for example, Presidency, Calcutta and Elphinstone, Bombay; or by missionaries, for example, St. Xavier’s, Calcutta and St. Stephen’s, Delhi. In both cases the teachers were often Englishmen or other Europeans. The colleges were small places where close interaction was not only practised but also encouraged.
Edward Shils has suggested that, being under the spell of Oxbridge, they concentrated almost exclusively on teaching, and failed to develop a tradition of research. With the establishment of University Departments after 1916, and the growing accent on research in them after independence, even the best colleges began to lose the pre-eminence that they had enjoyed for a hundred years.
Today it is accepted by all that the university ought to have a corporate character that it cannot really flourish in the absence of a ‘university community’ – one no longer asks whether to have a university community or not, one wonders how much of it can be held together.
The university campus is a feature of all central universities—which are on the whole the best endowed—although the new ones, like the University of Hyderabad, are still in the stage of construction and the old ones, like the University of Delhi, are already overcrowded. A distinctive feature of the Indian university, at least in the phase during which it has a proper campus, is that it provides, or is expected to provide, housing for staff as well as hostels for students.
The college or the university provides a privileged setting for experiments with a new pattern of relations among persons: this is no less true of Jawaharlal Nehru University in the 1980s than it was of Hindu College in the 1820s. If there is any setting in India in which social relations among persons are relatively unconstrained by tradition, it is neither the office nor the factory, nor even the political party, but the university campus. Nor is this true only of the advanced or liberated campus in the metropolitan city; for life in even the most remote campus in a backward state has a different quality from the general pattern of life in its hinterland.
Nothing could be more crass than the belief that young men and women in India come to the universities with the sole object of getting degrees. Young men—and especially young women—also come in order to experience a kind of life which they have never experienced in the home or the neighbourhood and which they fear they may never experience again.
It is well known that colleges and universities in India are in turmoil. The demographic and economic factors behind this turmoil are also well known. The universities are overcrowded, their hostels are inadequate, their libraries and laboratories are ill-equipped, and there is a general lack of facilities in them. Moreover, university education is no longer a guarantee of employment, and the number of unemployed B.A.s, M.A.s and Ph.D.s rises every year.
But these material causes do not account for the whole phenomenon since the best-endowed universities, such as the Jawaharlal Nehru University, are no more free from turmoil than the worst-endowed. Beyond the demographic and economic factors there lie social causes – the social world of the university is in fundamental opposition to the social world outside.
The Indian universities and colleges, being modern rather than medieval foundations, never nourished the kinds of invidious distinctions which the European universities had to contend with when they began to modernize themselves in the nineteenth century.
They did not grade their students as ‘fellow commoners’, ‘commoners’ and ‘sizars’ in the way in which the colleges in Cambridge and Oxford did for centuries; they did not have different conditions for admission to their degrees for sons of noblemen and sons of commoners as did these universities; and the segregation of women never became an established tradition within the university, no matter how strong such a tradition might have been outside it. If the historical roots of these universities do not go very deep, this also means that they did not have too many hierarchical traditions to outgrow.
The colleges throughout the nineteenth century, and when they became established, the universities until the time of independence, accommodated only small numbers of individuals and mainly from the upper strata of society. There might have been attempts from the start to mix the castes and communities promiscuously together within the institution, but that was very different from having them equally or even equitably represented. These were privileged settings in which people coming mainly, though by no means wholly, from privileged homes sought to establish new norms of social interaction.
It is difficult to see what success they could have achieved outside of such small and privileged settings.
But they did achieve some success, and it would be wrong to denigrate or ignore the achievements of the colleges and universities in their early phase of growth. It is true that when we go through the names of the distinguished graduates of Calcutta University, we are struck by the preponderance of names from the three upper castes of Brahmin, Baidva and Kayastha.
But from the very early days of Hindu College, the group that formed itself around Derozio had set about ignoring the distinctions of caste, and in the twentieth century Calcutta University not only accommodated but also honoured such men as Brajendranath Seal and Meghnad Saha who came from traditionally disprivileged castes.
With the increase in the number of universities and the growth in their population, the social composition of the university is now more mixed than it used to be. More people now come to the university than before and they come from a wider range of castes, including castes from the middle and the bottom of the traditional hierarchy. Even so, the various castes are not equally represented, or represented in proportion to their strength in the population as a whole.
If we go by caste, there clearly is rather better representation than before; if we go by class, in the sense of family income or occupation, the picture is far less clear. This kind of change, particularly since independence, has come about partly through academic competition and partly through political pressure. But the very urge to have a more equitable representation of all the major castes in the university has given a different turn to the initial experiment to create a new pattern of relations within the university community without consideration for caste.
Ironically, it is in the ‘elite’ institution, where social and academic privilege is most in evidence, that considerations of caste play the least part in interpersonal relations within the university community. The poorly-endowed provincial universities, which depend almost wholly on their immediate environment for the intake of both students and staff, are more manifestly in the grip of caste and other traditional distinctions.
If the role of caste is not evident in the relations between students and teachers in the classrooms, it is certainly evident in the relations among students in the hostels. But even here there is a change, the inequalities of caste have again become mainfest not so much because everyone accepts them, as in the past, as because so many are now trying to overthrow them.
There is one area of relation within the university community where change is most marked in the more privileged institutions, although it is evident everywhere, this is the relation between men and women. Women began to make a place for themselves in the universities almost as soon as they came into being in India, unlike in the West where the universities kept women out for centuries during which time they acquired markedly male traditions.
The University of Calcutta, set up in 1857, allowed women to take the B.A. examination in 1878 and the first women graduates took their degrees in 1883; the University of Bombay followed shortly after. Colleges for women began to come up in the nineteenth century, and when the postgraduate departments came up, women found their way in there as well.
University and college education for women was a highly restricted affair in the nineteenth century and it remained restricted until the middle of the twentieth. Even today there is no question of absolute equality between men and women in any numerical sense, but the changes in both quantitative and qualitative terms are worth noting. The number of women enrolled as students in colleges and universities rose from six in 1881-2 to 256 in 1901-2, and stood at 23,207 in 1946-7 on the eve of independence.
Since then the rise in student enrolment has been very rapid; from 43,126 in 1950-1 to 170,455 in 1960-1 to 655,822 in 1970-1; in relative terms there were 10.9 women for every 100 men in 1950-1, 16.2 in 1960-1 and 21.9 in 1970-1. The number and proportion of women teachers in colleges and universities have also gone up; from 1,815 (8.5 per cent of the total) in 1950-1 to 6,923 (12.5 per cent) in 1960-1 to 19,390 (15.0 per cent) in 1970-1.
It is not necessary to go wholly or even mainly by numbers. Women have by now competed successfully for the best places in university examinations and the highest positions in faculty appointments, not in every university or in every faculty, but in a sufficient number of cases for them to be able to feel secure about their academic achievements within the university. The success of women is particularly visible in the better, metropolitan universities, whether we take the Universities of Calcutta and Bombay among the older ones or Delhi University and Jawaharlal Nehru University among the newer.
All of this has been accompanied by a marked change in the social participation of women in the universities, whether as students or as teachers. For women, even more than fop men, the university is not only a place of work, it is also a place of recreation, and, for some of them, perhaps the only place of recreation. There is more equality between men and women in both performance and participation in the university than anywhere outside. But we must see this transformation for what it is: it is overwhelmingly, if not entirely, a middle-class, or, if the phrase be preferred, a bourgeois phenomenon.
The Scheduled Castes (Harijans) and the Scheduled Tribes (Adivasis) constitute a tiny section of the middle class, unlike women who make up half of it. Together these two groups of communities comprise over twenty per cent of the total population of the country. They have for centuries been socially and economically disadvantaged and, although their disabilities have been removed by law, they continue to suffer from a number of disadvantages in fact.
The progress of education, particularly higher education, has been slow among them, despite attempts by the government to hasten it through free ships and scholarships. Social prejudice has to some extent obstructed the academic achievements of the Harijans and Adivasis, but a more serious obstacle today is the abject poverty of the vast majority of them to whom even the benefit of literacy comes very slowly.
The number of lecturers belonging to the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes is small, and the number of readers and professors much smaller – 46 readers out of a total of nearly 7,000 and 20 professors out of a total of over 3,000. Once again, the question is not simply of numbers. Harijans and Adivasis have not become a visible or significant academic presence on the campus, whether among students or among teachers. This is particularly true of the more esteemed metropolitan universities such as those of Calcutta, Bombay and Delhi.
The way in which the gap between men and women has been narrowed in the university stands in marked contrast to the continuing gap between the upper castes and the lower, or between the middle class and other social classes. It tells us a great deal about how far the universities can go in the creation of equality, but it also tells us something about the ways in which discrimination operates in the larger society.
There is no doubt about the discrimination that existed and continues to exist between men and women within the family, but the discrimination that operates within the family is different not just in degree but in kind from the one that operates between castes and between classes. To be sure, middle class parents discriminate between their sons and their daughters, but they do not discriminate between them in at all the same way in which they discriminate between their own children and the children of others.
We have tried to argue that the Indian universities have made some progress in the pursuit of equality in at least some directions. But they have not all moved forward to the same extent in every direction, and some appear, at least from certain points of view, to be moving backwards. Paradoxically, it is in the most ‘privileged’, or ‘elitist’ or ‘exclusive’ institutions that the relations among castes or between the sexes are least marked by the kind of invidious distinctions that have been traditionally their most remarkable feature.
If the universities can supersede the invidious distinctions upheld by tradition only by remaining as privileged enclaves in the larger society, we must ask how far they can be expected to go in their efforts to create social equality. Clearly, they have other aims and responsibilities, including the creation of new knowledge and the promotion of individual talent and ability.
The university has to ensure, if it is to function as a place of learning, that those whom it admits to its membership or to its degrees have the capacity to measure up to its academic demands. As the Radhakrishnan Commission put it, tersely, ‘Intellectual work is not for all, it is only for the intellectually competent.’
Some might feel uneasy about having to reconcile the dictum that ‘intellectual work is not for all’ with the sentiment that ‘education is a universal right’. To be sure, the two may easily be reconciled in principle by requiring, firstly, that certain forms of discrimination be rigorously excluded from the university, and, secondly, that certain other forms of discrimination be applied equally rigorously.
But there are enormous practical difficulties in ensuring that these two seemingly simple requirements be simultaneously met, and it is impossible to escape the suspicion that the wrong kind of discrimination is being made under cover of the right one. Such suspicion is present in all universities in the modern world, but it is endemic in India where traditional distinctions are all-pervasive outside the university, while within it academic standards are weak and unreliable.
How does a university make its academic standards firm and reliable, and how does it create confidence among people in its academic standards? There can be no general answers to such questions, and we can go only by historical examples. The European universities did not acquire their acknowledged place in public life in a day or even a century. Oxford and Cambridge had passed through many vicissitudes before successfully evolving their own criteria of discrimination as a result of centuries of trial and error.
Our own universities have had little time to grow into institutions with their own criteria of discrimination, accepted within and acknowledged outside. They had hardly settled down to an academic existence before being caught in the toils of nationalist politics, radical politics, and, above all, populist politics.
To discriminate consistently according to academic criteria alone is a difficult undertaking, and there are many diversions along its exacting course. Success in such an undertaking calls for a capacity for independent judgement and a respect for independent judgement that come only from long experience. It is a part of the routine of every university to exercise such academic judgement in the admission of students, the award of scholarships and fellowships, the appointment and promotion of faculty members, and so on.
No university can ensure fully against errors of judgement in any of these matters; but, where many are called but few are chosen, as in the Indian universities, it takes little to convince people that academic judgement is generally—or even necessarily—vitiated by social or political prejudice.
It will be difficult to pretend that there is in India very much confidence in the university’s capacity to exercise academic judgement without fear or favour. The lack of confidence is not only widespread outside the university it is conspicuous inside it as well.
A clear indication of this is the increasing amount of litigation in which the universities have become involved over appointments, over admissions and over examinations. There are universities that have acquired certain notoriety by making appointments on considerations other than those of merit; the pendulum has now swung to the other extreme, and the ‘stay order’ from the High Court against appointments has become almost a routine in some of them.
It will be absurd to argue that scholastic ability and academic attainment count for nothing in university appointments and admissions, even if we concede that other considerations count for something in them. Although such comparisons may not reveal very much, it will be a fair guess that at least in the better Indian universities academic considerations still count for rather more in admissions and appointments than they did in, let us say, eighteenth century Oxford.
But perhaps what matters more than the selection procedures actually used is the confidence of people in the fairness of these procedures, and there is little doubt that this confidence has declined during the last thirty years. It is this erosion of confidence that puts people in the mood to argue—not always seriously, but with a certain insistence—that since the universities have failed in their academic responsibilities, they ought to justify themselves by contributing more directly to social reform if not to social revolution.
Even where academic criteria are not strictly adhered to in appointments and admissions, it does not follow that this is because discrimination is being practised, consciously or unconsciously, in accordance with traditional principles of exclusion.
Firstly, academic criteria themselves are not always or even generally unambiguous.
Secondly, their true nature and significance are not always understood by those who have the responsibility to apply them.
Thirdly, those who seek to manipulate the system use quite complicated calculations, leading to gradations that differ, and sometimes differ quite widely, from the gradations of the traditional order.
Even those who might like to uphold the invidious distinctions of the past cannot any longer do so openly within the university, but have to act under the cover of upholding academic ability and academic efficiency. Far from eliminating all forms of inequality, the modern university creates new inequalities, but by a process of competition in which ‘pure merit’ is believed to count as against race, caste or sex, or what is loosely described as ‘social background’.
It is not as if there are no critics of the new inequality of merit established by the university, particularly through its examination system. Two kinds of criticism are commonly made against it. The first is that the excesses of un-tempered competition are of high cost to the individual and to society as a whole as seen from the human point of view. The second criticism is that the inequalities established by competition do not tell us much about merit in any fundamental sense, but only about performance of a particular kind.
Ideally, it might appear possible to separate out the contribution to scholastic achievement or academic success of ‘pure merit’ from that of ‘social background’. In practice it is difficult, if not impossible, to do this. It is not only about the difficulty of separating out the contributions of ‘heredity’ and of ‘environment’ to intelligence, because academic appointments and admissions are not made on the basis of ‘generalized intelligence’ and are not claimed to be made on that basis. The university claims merely that it disregards social background, selecting persons according to a particular kind of ability, wherever such ability might be found.
Now, it is well known that ability of the kind valued by the university is not found evenly distributed among the strata, and between men and women. This being the case, one would expect men from the upper strata to be represented in excess of their proportion in the population, without the university consciously discriminating against either women or the lower strata in its admissions and appointments.
In other words, the university tends to reproduce, at least to some extent, the existing inequalities in society. But it must be realized that when this happens, the responsibility for it does not rest only with the university; at least in the case of the disparities between men and women, it rests much more with the family.
Perhaps one might say that people can be taken on by the university only where they are left off by the family and the school. The university does not have access to individuals in their natural condition. If the schools prepare children from the different strata unequally for university education, the university might cancel out some of these inequalities, but not all of them. If the family does not prepare its sons and its daughters with the same care for school education, the school can—if it has the will—make good the disparity to some extent but not to the full extent.
The university can to some extent correct the disparities due to social background with which its population is already encumbered at the time of entry into it. It can do this to some extent because the family, the school and the other institutions of society might stifle but cannot destroy the capacity for intellectual growth among individuals against whom they discriminate on social grounds, i.e., on the ground that they are women or of a lower caste or an inferior race.
In regard to women this is proved by the many examples of great academic success, particularly in the better Indian universities during the last two or three decades. It is true, nonetheless, that the individual must have more than average intellectual ability in order to attain average academic success if he or she has also to overcome the disadvantages of social background.
The Indian university is not always able to provide the kind of congenial setting that makes it easy for talented individuals to overcome the disadvantages of social background. It is not always possessed of a clear judgement of the issues involved, and, even when it has the judgement, it might lack the will to act in accordance with it. Its judgement is clouded and its will sapped by too many pressures from within and outside.
It is difficult for the university to maintain clarity of judgement and firmness of will in the handling of social problems once it begins to lose confidence in its academic standards. The feeling that it can and must create social equality here and now is easily replaced by the mood that it can do nothing to reduce the disparities between individuals that they owe to their social background unless the government or some other political agency intervenes and imposes a radical solution from outside.
We cannot, in the modern world, expect the university to remain fully insulated from external political pressures. The universities are in fact more exposed to the outside world today than they have ever been before, and we need not take very seriously those academic enthusiasts who seek the intervention of their chosen party—either the ruling party or an opposition party—in order to secure full autonomy for their university.
At the same time, we cannot remain heedless of the cost to the academic life of the university every time we invite the intervention of government in its affairs. There are those in the university who are always ready to do a little more for the promotion of social justice, fearing that they can do very little to redeem its academic fortunes. And there are those in the government who are quite happy to pass on to the university as many of their own social and political responsibilities as they can safely discard.
Thirty-three years after independence Indians with a social conscience have begun to feel that the universities have made little if any tangible contribution to the spread of equality in their society. They have begun to wonder what became of all the Plans that were made for directing education to a new social purpose, and to ask where all the money went that was poured in for the building of new universities and the expansion of old ones. Perhaps the universities might have done a little more than they actually did; certainly, they have done much less than they were expected to do.
In a society which is divided into innumerable tribes, clans, castes, sects and denominations in addition to various linguistic, religious and other minorities, and where collective identities are very marked, people find it natural to ask whether the proportion of university graduates (or of college lecturers) in their community is equal to, greater than or less than their proportion in some other community or in society as a whole.
In fact, this is one of the characteristic forms, if not the most characteristic form, in which the problem of equality is coming to be posed in contemporary India. And a whole new language of discourse—involving phrases such as ‘backwards’ and ‘forwards’, ‘minorities’ and ‘majorities’, ‘quotas’ and ‘reservations’—has begun to animate the debate on equality and social justice.
It will be a mistake to think that the frame of mind is unknown outside India. It is fairly common in other Asian countries and seems to be rapidly gaining ground in at least the universities in the United States, despite the pronounced individualism characteristic of that society. Those responsible for making appointments in the American universities have now to pay attention to achieving and maintaining some kind of balance between the claims of men and women and of the various ethnic groups.
Not to have any women, Blacks or Hispanics on the faculty is to expose it to the charge of practising discrimination against them, for it is undoubtedly the case that they are grossly under-represented in the American university. Again, in America as in India, the government is deeply involved in this process, and Edward Shils has charged it with wishing ‘to displace intellectual criteria and to diminish their importance in order to elevate ethnic and sexual criteria’ in the selection process.
We consider the American example to be of very great significance because it shows that even in a society which places the highest value on individualism the ‘quota principle’ can make some room for itself. But there are also profound differences between India and America. American society lacks the multiplicity of castes and communities characteristic of India, hence there the main emphasis is likely to be on quotas for women, whereas in India the special claims of castes and communities are likely to receive far greater public attention.
Caste quotas are very much in harmony with the character of Indian politics, which is not to say that ethnic quotas are unknown in American politics. However, the most important difference is that academic life in America, unlike in India, stands on firm institutional foundations; hence the American university has better resources than the Indian to contain social demands that are not necessarily consistent with academic requirements.
In India the principle of caste quotas in public appointments has been officially accepted for a long time. The British shaped it into an instrument of policy from a characteristic combination of moral and tactical considerations – they felt some genuine concern for the advancement of socially-dis-privileged persons, but they also found it convenient to keep the natives divided.
The quota principle did not lose ground after independence, as some had hoped it might, but became more firmly entrenched. It is true that university appointments are not made directly by the government, but they are widely viewed as being analogous to government appointments.
A government committed to democracy and development is expected to have a socially-relevant employment policy, and, where university education has grown largely on the initiative of government, as in India, people naturally expect the universities to make their appointments within the framework of that policy.
It cannot be too strongly emphasized that in India for many, perhaps most, people university employment is a kind of government service. University and college teachers, in their turn, see themselves as being more like civil servants than like doctors, lawyers or writers. It is true that the bureaucratization of the academic profession has taken place to some extent everywhere, but in India it was there from the very start.
The first universities were set up by the government, but, before that, there were the government colleges like Presidency and Elphinstone where professors were and still are appointed on terms and conditions modeled on the civil service.
The Indian Educational Service was in fact a branch of the civil service and its members, who occupied senior staff positions in the better government colleges, enjoyed in their time (1864-1924) as much prestige as the professors in the best Indian universities.
It will be impossible to understand the pressures on the universities to promote equality by becoming more representative without some understanding of the political compulsions of job reservation. Today job reservation enjoys the support of all political parties, although some might support it mainly out of prudence. The strong advocates of job reservation appeal to the Constitution, but the constitutional position is neither clear nor specific.
Art. 335 of the Constitution merely says that the ‘claims of the members of the Scheduled Castes and the Scheduled Tribes shall be taken into consideration…in the making of appointments to services and posts in connection with the affairs of the Union or of a State’. This is a weak recommendation in comparison with the clear provisions in Arts. 330 and 332 regarding the proportions of seats in Parliament and the Assemblies to be actually reserved for the Scheduled Castes and the Scheduled Tribes.
Job reservation is in fact practiced much more systematically and extensively than is strictly required by the letter of Art. 335 or the more capacious Art. 46 which directs the State to ‘promote with special care the educational and economic interests of the weaker sections of the people’. There are specific quotas for the Scheduled Castes and the Scheduled Tribes for appointments as well as promotions to posts in the various branches of the government.
But more important than that, there are in many states quotas for a whole range of castes and communities over and above the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes on the ground that they also constitute ‘backward classes’ or ‘weaker sections’ of society. Sometimes these weaker sections are able to use very strong political pressures to have their weakness officially acknowledged. Till the sixties the Supreme Court sought to restrict the use of caste quotas, but in recent years it appears to be taking a more tolerant view, admitting reservations even beyond fifty per cent of the positions available.
It is difficult to determine the correct moral position on a question of this kind, or even to decide whether there has to be only one correct position. The principle of equal opportunity cannot be tested in a vacuum it has to be judged by its fruits. It will be unreasonable to complain when equality of opportunity leads to inequality of result, for that is a necessary consequence of academic competition. But there will be reason for misgiving when the inequalities that result from academic competition reproduce identically the same pattern of inequalities that prevailed in the traditional order.
This misgiving will be reinforced when there is independent evidence of social prejudice in the university against traditionally-dis-privileged strata. It will then be up to the university to take note of such evidence, to keep a watchful eye on social prejudice, and to construct selection procedures with built-in correctives against it. It is true that the line between social prejudice and academic discrimination is a thin one, but the university must bear the responsibility of drawing it, for no other agency can draw it.
Those outside the university must realize that even if the university succeeds in eliminating all social prejudice from its selection procedures, the inequalities generated by academic competition will at best differ somewhat, but not a great deal, from the inequalities of the traditional order. Men and women students, students from professional and peasant families, Brahmin and Harijan students are very differently equipped intellectually by the time they seek admission to the university at the age of nineteen or twenty.
It would be foolish and irresponsible to expect the university to wipe all these differences away by the wave of a magic wand. Anyone who has taught in a university knows how little he can do to alter the mental habits of students who have passed their teens, and how hard it is at that age to raise the ill-equipped student to even the level of the average. So if students leave the university in roughly the same order of rank in which they enter it, that is not necessarily because those who start at the bottom are prevented from moving up in the order by the active operation of social prejudice within the university.
Thus we must clearly distinguish between two things- on the one hand, the elimination of all forms of social prejudice against the traditionally-dis-privileged sections of the population; and, on the other, the creation of a faculty or a student body in which all sections of society will be represented in proportion to their strength in the population. It cannot be too strongly emphasized that the second objective cannot be automatically realized by simply eliminating prejudice within the university, while leaving untouched the other institutions of society, e.g. its domestic and economic institutions.
No doubt, a representative character may be artificially imposed on the university from outside by a comprehensive system of quotas. But that is more likely to prevent than to promote the equal participation of all individual members of the university in its corporate life.
Every time a candidate of superior academic merit is passed over to make place for one who is less than his academic equal, some damage is done to the foundations on which the university stands. It is not clear that the damage becomes smaller when justification for such action is sought in the need for creating parity between castes. One may doubt whether it is at all possible in this day and age to establish parity between castes, and whether it is worth trying to pursue such an elusive objective at the cost of the individual.
The University Education Commission of 1948-49 had warned against the consequences of the ‘rationing of seats’ among castes and communities, its argument against such rationing was that ‘It would tend to increase the stratification of our society. To insist on quotas for communities would be to assume that the nation is composed of separate and self-sufficient groups, which is a negation of our national idea and democratic principle.
Discrimination practices generate tensions and the spiritual damage caused by them is not measurable. Education should not be used for creating or deepening the very inequalities which it is designed to prevent’. In other words, the university cannot pay its debt to society by sacrificing individual merit on the plea of promoting parity between castes; the attempt to promote such parity will lead not to the weakening of caste but to its strengthening.
If the university is to play any part in freeing society from the grip of traditional distinctions, it must promote the individual as against caste and community. To be sure, it must attend to special needs where such needs exist, just as it must encourage and reward outstanding merit wherever such merit is found. But these special needs must be seen as the needs of individuals, just as outstanding merit is always recognized as individual merit. The university as we know it today is equipped to attend to the special needs only of individuals, and not of castes and communities.
If it tries to attend to the needs of castes and communities, it cannot remain what it is. It cannot distribute its rewards—whether examination grades, or scholarships or faculty appointments—on the basis of quotas determined by political bargains. Above all, universities should not allow themselves to become hunting grounds for leaders of castes and communities negotiating for shares in their rewards for their own constituents, irrespective of merit. They will contribute little, if anything, to the attainment of equality in that way, and they will certainly undermine their own institutional foundations in the process.
In a country with a vast population of illiterates, university graduates are a privileged category by the very fact of having been through a university. But this is not necessarily how it appears to them. A university degree is a necessity for the better kind of employment, but it is no longer a guarantee of arty kind of employment. The large increase since independence in the number of universities has been accompanied by a corresponding increase in the number of unemployed graduates.
Having to bear the responsibility for the overproduction of graduates, the universities are particularly sensitive to pressures for the creation of additional employment for them. The most direct way of responding to these pressures is of course to ask for the creation of more employment within the academic system by adding to the posts in the existing universities and colleges, and by establishing new colleges and new universities.
There is a close and acknowledged link between the expansion of university education and the problem of employment. It would be futile to pretend in a country like India that the university needs to attend only to ‘academic’ problems, leaving other institutions to deal with ‘social’ problems.
The university cannot insulate itself from social problems, and the most pressing among these is the problem of employment; fair employment, just employment, equitable employment, and, above all, more employment. In India the successful academic must be able to find or create jobs for at least some of his students; to pretend to judge him solely by his qualities as a scholar or a teacher would be disingenuous.
It is impossible to create or find jobs in the university without recourse to government. Indian universities are in theory autonomous institutions, governed by their own Acts, Statutes and Ordinances.
In practice, however, their dependence for funds on government requires them to bring their rules of appointment and promotion into alignment with government policy on employment. The manoeuvres through which this alignment is brought about are varied and complex, but some sacrifice has always to be made of academic criteria to what the government of the day considers to be the criteria of social justice.
Two conspicuous examples of this are appointment according to community and promotion according to seniority, both of which are advocated as measures of justice and equity without consideration for the specific needs and objectives of universities as institutions.
From time to time news items appear in the press about measures being contemplated by government to remedy the inadequate representation of socially backward communities on university and college faculties.
According to a newspaper report, ‘A statement circulated among the members of a parliamentary committee shows that there is no lecturer belonging to Scheduled Castes or Tribes in Aligarh, Hyderabad and Jawaharlal Nehru Universities while there are three each in Banaras and Delhi Universities and one in Viswabharati.’ There were indications of threats by or on behalf of the University Grants Commission to stop the flow of funds to these universities if they failed to remedy this lack of representation.
Various parties are involved in these pressures to ensure equity between castes and communities within the university. Apart from the legislatures and the ministries of the union and state governments, there are the University Grants Commission and the Commissioner for Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes. The office of the Commissioner is an important one, created under the Constitution of India to watch over the interests of the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes.
In recent years successive Commissioners have increasingly argued for the reservation of jobs in virtually every area of public life. The models in all such cases are the services under the union and state governments where strict and elaborate procedures have been laid down for the reservation of posts for various castes and communities.
The Commissioner for Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes has for over a decade recommended the reservation of lectureships in universities for the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes. Finding the response of the universities to be less than satisfactory, the Commissioner ‘suggested that a directive should be issued to all the Universities making it obligatory on their part to introduce this reservation. The University Grants Commission has, however, expressed its inability to issue such a directive as U.G.C. Act does not empower it to do so.
The Ministry of Education and the University Grants Commission have, therefore, been advised by the Commissioner to ensure that the Act is suitably amended so as to enable the University Grants Commission to issue a directive to all the Universities for implementation of the safeguards in service matters.’ The amendment of the Act, it hardly needs to be said, will have far-reaching consequences for the central universities which have so far successfully resisted pressures from such quarters to alter the conditions of academic appointments.
The state universities have been, on the whole, more accommodating in these matters. Job reservation in general has been a major issue of public policy in the southern states, particularly Karnataka, Kerala and Tamilnadu, to a larger extent than in north India. Parties with very different political complexions have been in office in these states, yet they have all accepted job reservation on a very wide scale.
Firstly, a very large number of communities in addition to the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes have been granted concessions in the matter of employment; secondly, such concessions have been extended to virtually every form of public employment in addition to the services under the state government.
The state of Karnataka has gone furthest in systematizing the policy of job reservation. In Karnataka University at Dharwar, ‘The reservation for Scheduled Castes/Scheduled Tribes in the appointments to the teaching posts are made on the basis of the directions of the State Government from time to time. They have reserved posts for Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes and backward tribals and other backward classes to the extent of 15%, 3%, 5% and 28% respectively.’
Thus, more than half the posts are reserved on the basis of caste and community, and, of the reserved posts, more than half are earmarked for the Other Backward Classes consisting in the main of various castes and communities.
Apart from the high proportion of teaching posts reserved for particular castes and communities, what is striking is the manner in which the universities have followed the government in its rules and procedures. After all, the universities might have gone their own way in seeking to ensure a wider representation of the various sections of society on the ground that the requirements of a university faculty are different from those of a government bureaucracy. But in many cases they have decided not to do so.
The Karnataka State Universities Act, 1976 says that, in making recommendations for appointments, ‘the Board shall follow the orders issued by the State Government from time to time in the matter of reservation of posts for the Scheduled Castes, the Scheduled Tribes and other backward classes of citizens’. Similarly, The Kerala University Act of 1974 lays down that in making appointments to both teaching and non-teaching posts the university must observe the provisions of the Kerala State and Subordinate Services Rules in regard to the reservation of posts.
Among the states of northern India, Bihar followed for several years the practice of making university appointments through the State Public Service Commission. The Public Service Commission’s enjoy a certain authority in India by virtue of their reputation for fairness and impartiality.
The Bihar Public Service Commission was called into use in making academic appointments after the normal machinery in the universities had fallen into disrepute because of widespread allegations of corruption and nepotism. But the regular use of the Public Service Commission must lead in the end to the displacement of the requirements of academic discrimination by those of administrative or procedural uniformity.
Government service enjoys high prestige in India, and there are certain conditions of government service, such as security of tenure and regularity of promotions, that have a large if not universal appeal among university teachers. University teachers in India enjoy virtually the same measure of security as government officials, but the prospects of promotion are different in the two cases.
When university teachers compare themselves with gazetted officers in government service, they find that, although they start on broadly the same salary, their prospects of moving into higher salary grades are much smaller. Thus, the demand for ‘meaningful avenues of promotion’ has gathered strength among university lecturers in all parts of the country. This demand is accompanied by a jealous and watchful eye for cases where the claims of seniority are overlooked when lecturers move to readerships, or readers to professorships.
In effect the overwhelming sentiment among university and college lecturers is that there should be more room for promotion and that promotion should be by seniority; in that way all who succeed in entering the university service as lecturers at the same time will have equal chances of becoming readers. Here again, the universities in Bihar have taken a lead by deciding that all lecturers will automatically become readers after thirteen years if they have Ph.D. degrees and after eighteen years if they do not.
This reflects not so much a commitment to equality as the urge for security and a safe upward passage of those with their feet on the first rung of the ladder. The state may subsidize upward mobility to a certain extent, but even in this its role is strictly limited in an economy of scarcity. To what extent this kind of subsidized mobility can create equality of condition or simulate equality of opportunity is a different question altogether.