Musings on contemporary academic culture -II

Guest Blogger

Pratiksha Baxi

For the comments posted here and many emails, much gratitude to everyone for reflecting on my previous post. Although the individual accounts of angst have not been shared with everyone on this blog, I am gratified to have been the recipient of many a confidence and indicate these here without naming individuals.

Some have been curious as to why chose to write this post, what was the trigger? In it self it is an interesting question when do people decide to “out” an issue that has troubled for a lifetime? Perhaps it is the idealism of hope – a hope that things can and will change if we talk about it in a collective and constructive way.

Why frame the issue around rights or right to information – perhaps simply to begin to find the language of rights for the experiences collated below:

Racism: Friends and students from the North East who have often complained of automatically being considered “stupid” and faculty expressing surprise when they discovered that they were actually were brilliant at their work.

Casteism: The idea that a student who gets a fellowship on the basis of caste or tribe criteria is a “parasite” is a loathsome form of discrimination practised everyday in the academia.

Sexism: Brilliant women scholars have been denied professorial positions in the social sciences.

What then happens when these scholars appear for job interviews? What happens if the candidate is a good scholar but unable to speak eloquently in English? What happens if the candidate has the ‘wrong’ politics, wears odd clothes or is ‘too fat’? This is just the tip of the iceberg since most interview committees have no clue how to interview candidates with various disabilities, if they ever decide to fill this quota. Ashley Tellis tells us what happens if you are a good scholar, meet the criteria, and speak well – but you happen to be gay and encounter the homophobia of a committee.

Another senior academic advices us in a mode of irony, “whatever happens, do not write bad book reviews, if you want a job”.

Many a friends spoke about feelings of humiliation at interviews – I have my own share of stories to narrate – but biography is often reduced to gossip. At any rate it is hard to prove discrimination and harder to fight sexist, communal or casteist comments at an interview. Surely it is difficult to come up with a witty rejoinder which does not offend everyone to a question such as: “what is the economics of rape?”, “you are a muslim, do you support Pakistani terrorism?” or “why do you live alone?” The best is when the same set of people who interview you again and again ask you, why you have no teaching experience – duh! It is harder still to tell a male professor in your department that he is sexist to the core when he says, “you can not teach in an undergraduate college because you are too thin”. Or to another professor, who says “you are too soft spoken to teach – you will need a mike” [those with disabilities will never make it in such a context].

Can we not do something about the process? Or as another friend suggested, should we innovate and introduce the American method of job talk? A job talk would entail a departmental seminar, interaction with students and the committee to actually engage intellectually with the candidate’s work. But graduate students, friends in American Universities, also narrate how broken they are by the system and struggle to find the confidence to write again. What is the critique of the US job talk model?

Until this discussion happens in India, why are there no guidelines as to how to conduct an interview? Maybe minor etiquette could be a small beginning which accords the candidate with dignity. We could script it as follows:

1. Introduce the committee to the candidate
2. Offer her a glass of water and perhaps even smile joyfully at the candidate
3. Read her CV, SOP and publications in advance
4. Ask questions relevant to her research and teaching
5. Do not frown, yawn or sleep through the interview
6. If the candidate does not wish to answer a question or is nervous, find another good question.
7. Do not raise your voice or fight amongst yourself in front of the candidate
8. Do not make sexist, caste-ist or communal remarks
9. Do not ask about the candidate’s personal life
10. If you are well mannered you may even escort the candidate to the door.

Is it at all possible to give constructive feedback to candidates who wish to re-apply and make them welcome again to another round of interviews?

And if you are very clear that someone is never going to make it to your department, please do the act of great kindness a senior professor in my department once showed me, by advising me to apply for jobs elsewhere.

I agree with Hutom Pyacha that the problematic is not confined to Universities. [Read this to know what Hutom Pyacha stands for] Research Centres and many Law Schools do not even follow the minimal guidelines which are a norm in the UGC governed institutions. Abysmal levels of accountability exist wherein academic on contract jobs persist for the longest period of probation ever known in the academia. I have heard of faculty being punished for raising issues of accountability in Law Schools – do the National Law Schools have student/teachers unions or redressal mechanisms that exist elsewhere? Could LAOT share experiences about Law Schools with the rest of us? Do we know how many women are professors or heads of institutions in the field of law? Neither JNU nor DU has ever appointed a woman as a Vice Chancellor.

Why do people not speak out? Not surprisingly many share the view that sadly Universities often remain anti-academic and punitive spaces. To quote a friend, it is ‘a totally reactionary institution, one that evolved with the modern military and Catholic Church in the middle ages and has not changed much since…’ While our experiences of University spaces are complicated and contradictory, and it is hard to generalise but nonetheless the responsibility of crafting a vibrant University space remains ours, and maybe someone out there who matters will listen and care about our fling with the academia. I am grateful that LAOT provides this space.

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1 comment
  • The following poem is a reflection on Pratiksha Baxi's earlier post on contemporary academic culture. I am a doctoral student somewhere in India.

    And then the quest for light becomes a thirst, a yearning
    And then the quest for freedom becomes the liberation of a journey
    I don't know what lies at the end of the journey,
    I don't know the quality of the light at the end of the journey,
    But I know what is now is darkness,
    I know I can stand still,
    I know I can walk back
    I know I can walk ahead
    I know the road to freedom is lonely,
    There are few walking on the road
    Too many others have been broken down,
    Too many others have been bought over by the allure of conveniences
    Too many have been assassinated on the way.
    Too many have calculated too much
    And even refused to begin the journey
    I don't know what will happen to me
    Yet I walk on,
    For there is liberation and joy now
    On this road,
    Even if there is an assassination lurking somewhere
    In the shadows of tomorrow.

    Thus I walk on,
    I refuse to look over my shoulders,
    I refuse to imagine the conspiracies, feudalisms and fears
    That can converge at any moment
    In the attempt to eliminate me.
    But I am eliminated already,
    If I refuse to walk on,
    If I surrender,
    I silence my dissent.

    The recklessness is not that of a martyr
    The search is not for a heroic fame
    For mine will be a quiet assassination
    Quiet but brutal.
    And I will disappear without a trace,
    Without a muffle,
    Without a tear shed perhaps,
    They will say, 'We told him so'
    'He didn't listen.'
    The joy of the oracle of the doom coming true.

    Yet the child builds the castle on the sea shore
    Her mother does not ask her to stop building
    Because the oracle predicts that a furious
    Wave will consume the castle.

    But they calculate too much
    And currently surrender and silence yields for them
    A better calculation
    Than the principle of rejecting oppression
    The simple joy of having cast aside the fear of the oppressor

    And thus even when I am assassinated
    I will die in joy,
    The joy of not having feared death.

    And even after they assassinate me,
    My assassins will live in fear,
    They will fear my ghost.
    My death itself will only be an incomplete task
    They will have to murder my ghost as well
    They will have to murder every memory of mine
    Every murmur that leaves behind a trace
    Of my existence and story
    Lest another start walking on the same road.

    And they, who calculate too much
    Live in the traumas of their calculations.
    With every passing moment,
    Another shred of their conscience dies
    It is lost to the algebra of gain and loss
    And soon their idea of joys becomes smaller and smaller
    With every passing moment
    Their conception of the self becomes narrower still
    And soon the self becomes so narrow
    That the joy of life, the nectar of the infant and the innocent
    Is lost forever.
    What is left is only the thrill of a calculation.

    They tell me that they want to
    Keep 'good relationships' with everyone
    Thus the idea of 'relationship'
    Becomes more important than the idea of virtue.
    And thus they embrace the oppressors
    And a shameless camaraderie of calculations results.
    And I am shunned
    Viciously, ruthlessly, brutally.

    And yet it is I who love the oppressor more
    More than the calculators,
    For I seek to end the oppression in them
    And liberate them
    Even as I liberate myself.

    But the calculators are adamant.

    Yet since they want to hold 'good relationships' with everyone
    They want to hold a 'good relationship' with me as well
    And they congratulate me for
    Having passed a small milestone.

    Perhaps not realising that
    I am beyond hollow formalisms
    That virtues are more important than relationships
    That one day of freedom is more than a thousand nights
    Of unfreedom and slavery.

    And I await my assassination
    And the calculators wait for the oracle
    Of doom to fulfill itself
    So that they may be joyously proved right.

    Yet I will die a free man.

    And the calculators will live as slaves.

    Regards,
    Srinath Jagannathan