Academic freedom in peril
Avijit Pathak | 28 November 2023 | Tribune India
RECEPTIVE: An academic institution should be open to new ideas, new possibilities and even a radical ‘paradigm shift’. PTI
IT is obvious that in these troubled times, when the tyranny of power tends to suspect all alternative voices, our educational institutions cannot remain insulated as creative sites of scholarly debate, dialogue and intellectual contestation. No wonder, the spirit of academic freedom, as a series of incidents in recent times indicates, is in danger. It is becoming increasingly difficult to express even the slightest ambiguity in the ‘official’ truth. Take, for instance, IIT-Bombay’s cancellation of Prof Achin Vanaik’s proposed talk on the Israel-Palestine conflict; or the police complaint filed by some students of this institution against a professor and a guest lecturer for the screening of a documentary film, Arna’s Children. It is sad that instead of engaging in an informative and academically enriched conversation with their professor or the guest speaker, they saw the entire academic exercise as a ‘support for Hamas and terrorists’.
There should be no room for physical and psychic violence in the academic culture.
In another incident, OP Jindal Global University in Haryana asked Professor Vanaik to express regret over a teach-in session on the history of Palestine. Talk to any sensitive and intellectually honest academic from our universities — whether from elite/liberal/private institutions or our much-condemned public universities — you are bound to sense the fear among the faculty. In an era where even a select part of your lecture can be transformed into a ‘viral video’ for the consumption of those whose ‘nationalist’/‘religious’ sentiments are hurt instantly and quickly, leading to immediate filing of FIRs, and where university authorities seldom come forward to safeguard the dignity, safety and freedom of the faculty, what else can you expect? Indeed, our academic institutions are decaying.