Where is the Vice Chancellor in Azim Premji University?
Prof Santhakumar has an interesting take on Azim Premji University’s allegedly efficient administration. His argument: a hierarchy, touted as an organisation geared towards efficiency, picks up the “cosmetics and rituals” of power. Cosmetic because it is layered on something else probably substantial; ritual because it is vested with symbolic practice. There are bells and whistles attached with hierarchical positions, and one spends so much time sounding them that there is little time for meaningful work.
His alternative is the APU model: decision-making by appropriate facilitators, without a sense of hierarchy, is what allows meaningful action. His metaphor of an absent office, therefore, feels appropriate: cabins become floors, separation becomes integration, and decisions are taken in the midst of rather than from certain places. All universities, he argues, should consider this approach to align their practice with their intentions.
I have been part of a few student collectives in my life, teaching, creating awareness, protesting. I desperately want to echo Prof Santhakumar’s sentiments, to find some value in the non-hierarchical systems that I have been privy to. If he is correct, it is an affirmation of some beliefs that I have come to hold over the years.
Of course, his claims warrant attention, particularly about the stakeholders who become qualified decision makers for a university. A university is more than a workplace: its primary pedagogical role renders students important stakeholders. When I was studying in IIT Kanpur, we argued that all workers, including contract workers, were university stakeholders. We also argued that the university is intertwined socio-economically and morally with its community, and university participants have responsibilities toward this community. Decision-making, however, requires more than an identification of stakeholders — it requires us to define roles and tasks for each stakeholder. I shall assume here that Prof Santhakumar is not of the radical ilk who claim that all such groups should be part of university decision-making — he might very well attest to such claims, but I will not second-guess him or discuss the implications of this view here — but try to argue that even with the limited idea where faculty and administration take decisions collectively, the outcome in APU is not efficient. Prof Santhakumar is wildly off mark.
Our understanding of a university: aspects of efficiency, governance, trust, ethics, pedagogy, space — is often limited by the place which we occupy within it. Prof Santhakumar admits that he is a “full-time faculty here”, and with the lofty cabins and corner windows which accompany his position, perhaps students on the ground are a distant concern. I, however, am a student on the receiving end of a wisdom of efficiency and can only relate it with my own experiences and that of other students I meet. There may be errors when I interpret his article, but such errors need to be mentioned against a broad-stroke understanding of the word ‘university’. If indeed decision-making practices in APU make it an efficient ‘university’, what defines this word? Is it a hollow shell, a placeholder for which different people with different experiences of a university can derive similar conclusions? Or does it have shared meaning, where efficiency is at least tested empirically against multiple experiences?
Prof Santhakumar glosses over the specific historical situation that ‘these people’ find themselves in right now — and I will talk primarily of students — such that his argument about the specific case of APU loses much effect. Whether his overall argument still holds, then, is something I open up but do not resolve.
Institutional Mechanisms
Prof Santhakumar argues along three fronts the way I read him. First, APU gets more done with less number of people. Second, APU allows people with “qualifications and experience” to make decisions. Third, it is a good thing that APU does not allow offices for its functionaries. For the last year and a half, students have argued against each of these points, identifying how they are either false or dangerous for us.
Let us examine them one at a time. Prof Santhakumar assures us that the University administration is an efficient one. For which processes? Would it be wrong to expect that an institute shows the most efficiency in processes that are mandated, relevant or necessary for it? Processes which a university is called upon to perform most often should perhaps be the hallmarks of its efficient administration. Then why have students time and again criticised the same processes?
The starkest example is perhaps the scheduling in the undergraduate programme, where ‘efficient’ allocation of classes in the timetable conspicuously left out time for lunch for some batches. While this idea in itself is concern-worthy, it assumes new proportions when we juxtapose it with the administration’s claim that it considers food its responsibility, and abhors ‘misuse’ of food scholarships.
Or consider student concerns around grievance redressal systems: the Disciplinary Committee and PoSH. Students have often asked for transparent guidelines for these committees. Open meetings, which we were promised at the beginning of this semester approximately four months ago, are yet to happen. When the committee members were changed, some students had to remind the administration to send an email with this basic information. Recently, in the wake of tensions around the now-defunct Community Governance body, both faculty members and members of the administration admitted that their processes of communication were poor — something they were trying to ‘fix’ by including faculty members in key positions within the administration. The inclusion of students in all such bodies remains a distant dream.
Are these systems, then, efficient? Students privy to these issues would perhaps disagree. Prof Santhakumar mentions that systems at APU need additional steps to make it more effective. I have heard parallel arguments within the university as well, where students are told that the processes which have gaps today will be made better tomorrow. Yet, incremental changes, wherever they have been made, have come after deliberate student action. Does that mean that the institute recognises that its processes are an outcome of such action? I suspect not.
Principled Positions
Prof Santhakumar claims that a Vice Chancellor need not concern themselves with issues of infrastructure development, leaving decisions to experts who have “qualifications and experience”. At the same time, faculty members have spoken about how decisions are arrived at from the top or from somewhere else, woven within euphemisms of ‘principled positions’.
Unlike its moniker, a principled position is not one that is arrived at based on certain principles — principles that are made explicit so that it is accessible for everyone. They are positions which masquerade as principles, their genesis unspoken, transforming other discourses in their wake. For the longest time, students demanded shuttles to and from external residences which the university had put them in, but their compelling reasons were discarded because the university was ‘cutting costs’. It took serious incidents of harassment and a student body, who would not tolerate these incidents any more, to get the administration to reverse its position.
Imagine creating a Community Governance team with a vertical of university members who would look after sustainability. Someone somewhere decided that the team could only work on ‘positive engagement’, a term as vague as the throwaway verbiage around ‘positive outlook’ in cheap self-help books. Structural changes were outside the purview of this team. Imagine, therefore, a group whose qualifications, however miniscule, and whose experiences, however stunted, were not considered in suggesting changes to institutional practice. In Prof Santhakumar’s imagination, such a discrepancy should not have occurred.
The Office
What is an office? Is it necessarily endowed with the “cosmetic rituals” that Prof Santhakumar speaks of? Perhaps an office is less than a cabin and a nameplate; perhaps it is a bounded space and time signalling that a specific action is being performed. With this delineation comes visibility, and perhaps with that accountability. In the different student collectives I have been a part of, such delineation has been quite important.
In IIT Kanpur, when I attended meetings of Hamara Manch, a group which discussed worker issues and concerns, they were clear that they would meet every week at a set time at a set place. In Prayas, which was a teaching intervention for students around the campus, we had two designated rooms in the Students Activity Center. When we established Unmukt, a gender-sexuality forum on campus, we wanted for ourselves a university email id and room. In Azim Premji University, when we began the Student Panchayat, we decided that we would meet every Friday at the Plaza at a set time. The constitution drafting committee recently carved out an email id, though it still struggles with a definite time and place for meeting. Protests, despite their diffuse nature, have found somewhat of a place at the Hinge.
The lack of a Vice Chancellor’s office or offices for PoSH and DC, thus, may be a cause for concern. If students’ allegations are correct, the lack of defined office space and time is the shirking of accountability, evidenced by the repeated shuttling of concerns from one administrative official to another. Earlier this semester, students clearly asked the Student Affairs to get “everybody associated with this issue” at one place so that they would not be sent running from pillar to post for simple grievances to be addressed. Students have often wondered where we should protest if there are no particular places where administrators are seated. People who can be anywhere can sometimes, quite conveniently, be nowhere. When is the lack of a Vice Chancellor’s office the lack also of a Vice Chancellor? Prof Santhakumar does not address this but he claims that the APU model “seems a lot more closely aligned with the specific social purpose of the university”. It is a tough sell at best, if not incorrect.
Can there be an imagination of this idea of an office in a way that necessitates a Vice Chancellor to have an office, to have office hours? I think such a move is necessary for accountability, though perhaps not within conventional frameworks that create a bells-and-whistles condition. What this imagination translates to is something to consider seriously, perhaps by listening closely to what students are saying right now on campus.
