‘Destructing’ a University
A cursory Twitter search for “azim premji university” today gave an interesting glimpse into a place that exists not 2 hours away from me. A multivocal, multifocal picture emerged as if one were stitching along the edges of a mosaic. Here, images from a protest that has students condemning the administration’s lack of response for what is, they say, an arbitrary charge for an essential service. There, a snippet from history of an important personnel having spoken with George Soros, the newly minted economic enemy of India amid the Adani scandal. Scrolling past, one sees glimpses of known faces in known spaces and ordinary university life, framed within the advertorial narratives that most organisations, foundations, universities routinely perform in this LinkedIn era. Or criticisms, that have abounded against any development sector university — — that they are left-leaning, urban Naxal dens that will emancipate by force, destroying cultures chock-full of tradition in the process.
Of course, the list is topped by a reminder that I am ‘Following’ the university page, whose tagline reads “Education for Social Change (in capitals) — Towards a just, equitable, humane and sustainable society (in small).”
Def-C
When criticism of the university arises from challenges to the definition of the university, parallel narratives ought to emerge. The spectacle of such protests are similar to the usual sloganeering, the usual picketing and the usual burst of creative engagement that all protests carry — the challenge, however, harks to definitions embedded in university cultures. In the IITs, for instance, when students ask what ‘leaders for the world’ means in the face of caste and class oppression, it is a definitional challenge, however muted its execution. The demand from the university is not to merely reshuffle its processes to accommodate someone marginal, someone unrepresented — it is for the university to dismantle itself so that recreation may begin.
This reconstitutional approach is upsetting: of course, one is upset by the abandonment of everything sacred, everything routine, everything normalised. In universities, for instance, professors have a hard time digesting that students (even resident students) would have vestiges of existence outside of academics. If classrooms don’t run like they should, professors ask, would not the university (or the universe) crumble upon itself. It would indeed do so in an act of violent unparalleled destruction. The ethics of such destruction forms but the more important question.
The flipside of such destruction, in the throwing open of the toolset to anyone who would dare use a hammer, is that the image of the reconstruction is seldom defined. It is often a loose demolition crew that harangues the facade of the university — their words often hurled at each other, reflecting, deflecting and landing somewhere in the pulsating web of discourse that will form the basis of a new map, a new place. Something will come to replace the university, something that emerges from the politics of a million different voices, subject to social and moral pressures, subject to commitments both individual and collective and subject also to whims and desires. When the call is to make the rules of speech, one has to be used to a certain clamour. One also has to believe that differences will be ‘addressed’ in the least, resolved or done away with in the most extreme cases.
Infinite Scroll
In a format familiar to social media users, stories, narratives, content roll up indefinitely to present old media. Walking backward, I discover, to the extent I seek, a certain history of how things were and how we got here. Scroll too far too fast and you risk losing the specifics of a ‘trend’, a specific theme in the scheme of things. Scroll too slowly and you risk warping a surveyor’s sight with specifics — except that the survey itself is warped by choices and recommendations, by public engagement of people who are not you. Twitter, like other platforms, tends to guess what I should see as I take a stroll, the politics of visibility playing out in miniature swordfights between influential posts.
If I am not careful, it is easy to be swept up in a narrative of photoshoots, of students and professors posed carefully for a camera, the exact shot simultaneously with the rise and ebb of carefully orchestrated, often practised, exhibitions, talks, seminars. In a way, it evokes the sunset pictures of and from the university library, naturally staged for consumption. Of course, when the university account tells me that this is what the university is, I do not question its veracity, try to peer closely, peel off layers of meaning.
The challenge arrives soon after, in posts that show a picture from its other side. Pictures which widen the view, telling stories of what was happening when a landscape was staged, unrolling the picture beyond the gaze of the steady camera. In a recent meme on the university protests, the creator used an interesting format: that of multiple clips which, unfortunately, repeated the same set of images. An exercise of novelty featuring the familiar, it did not widen the perspective enough for the ironies of singular definitions to appear. There is a distance between the views we represent and the manner in which we represent them, a distance that a billion-dollar platform addresses, a distance that is covered by the act of juxtaposition and contradiction.
There are also the regular negations. If Azim Premji University claims to be just, equitable, humane and sustainable society, the allegations are that it is precisely the opposite. Ideologues for the opposite, it is alleged, the university unveils itself as a corruption of everything it professes. These narratives puncture a certain veracity of image, delegitimising the authority of the official narrative. The rules, however, remain the same — one is either proving or disproving justice and equity commonly understood, as if the meanings are given for universities across time and space. One does not need to otherwise engage with the university to attack or defend it on this front; indeed, students themselves take charge of rising to the university’s defence and the defence of the professors otherwise disparaged in the protests.
Mutually Assured Destruction
There is no denying the cyberfabric on which the university is embossed, apart from its other existences — in its reputation, its intent, its physical expanse and its daily social practice. Voluminous, the fabric is open to tearing, shearing, stretching to conceal and reveal different stresses, different views that are collocated. Yet, in an intimate metaphor, I find that I am woven within the same fabric, the ripples on its surface scratching my skin, revealing and concealing me. When discussing the notion of destruction with an acquaintance, I was told to add a few qualifiers to the process, to name it mutually assured destruction. With the conventional university breaking down, the parts of its tradition that reverberate within me break down as well.
There is a possibility in this situation. One of Coetzee’s characters explicates how for nations, the fundamental rules of survival make Mutually Assured Destruction a shared fear, a situation one rationally imagines the other nation not to engage in. Of course, Coetzee destabilises this view by pointing to the construction of a rational enemy as opposed to an irrational one, the latter for whom the fundamental rules of survival do not hold true. I imagine there is a third alternative, of a mutual disregard for the rules of survival as rational enemies, as deeply empathetic ones who understand the interrelationships of our existence. A mutually assured destruction, then, is not a warning against the status quo but an invitation to disrupt processes that keep us outbound. A mutually assured destruction is a long thought about the nature of the university that we will one day build.
How this transforms stories on my Twitter feed remains to be seen.
