Universities all across the world are considered to be the bastions of dissidence and resistance. Their extraordinary capacity to bring about a qualitative transformation in the institutional framework of a particular country is democratically advantageous. The convivial environment of universities is conducive to the cultivation of a critically charged political mindset. The fecundity and imaginative power of this kind of democratic mindset can greatly facilitate the development of society.
The recent attempts to depoliticise universities is extremely disturbing. There are two causal factors behind this attempt to evict universities from the body politic. First, the advent of neoliberal education has necessitated the obliteration of critically conscious universities. In lieu of these universities, new commercialistic institutions are being set up, which, like business barons, want to make money by promoting the sale of commodified knowledge. This commodification of knowledge has very neatly mopped up the complete idea of free education. Earlier, it was incumbent upon the welfare state to properly manage the equitable distribution of education and its ultimate aim in the educational domain was to democratise. But, with the introduction of neoliberal education, the whole concept of a welfare state has been rendered fatuous and anarchic, which can only be recommended by a socialistic cretin. Now everything is dependent on market forces, which act as the ‘magical invisible hand of the market’. This ‘liberalisation of education’ has certainly liberated education from knowledge.
Second, the authoritarian rightwing coloration, which the democracies of the world have acquired, has certainly helped in the comprehensive destruction of public education. The interrelationship between rightwing populism and neoliberalism has been appropriately analyzed in the paper, Neoliberalism and rightwing populism: conceptual analogies, written by Stephan Pühringer and Walter O Ötsch. By reading this, one can comprehend the accelerated pace of destruction of public education.
The depoliticisation of universities is essentially a well-thought-out, despotic strategy to slice off education from politics. A critical and knowledgeable citizen always presents an existential threat to any fascistic regime. Constructive criticism originates from this sense of criticality, with which the educated citizen is equipped. Education inculcates political, social and economic consciousness and this consciousness is a deadly, ruthless tool, which can make conspicuous chinks in the majoritarian edifice. An educated citizen is also a democratic citizen who tries to materialise the constitutional rights which have been conferred upon him/her by the democracy in which he/she is living. Educated citizens also try to establish democratic equilibrium by constantly questioning the ruling dispensation.
In a nutshell, an educated populace initiates the ‘Gramscian ideological war’, in which the continuous disarticulation/rearticulation of the ‘organic ideology’ presented by the governmental machinery as the general worldview results in the debilitation of its ‘consensual hegemony’. The construal of public opprobrium as an ideological war may seem a gratuitous amplification of its magnitude, but in today’s world of ‘informational autocracy’, I think the usage of that term in this context is justified.
In informational autocracies, the efficient manipulation of information serves the utility of carefully constructing the majoritarian consensus, which demagogic populists require to perpetuate their rule. This heavy dependence on informational manipulation accentuates the role of what Louis Althusser called “ideological state apparatuses”. These help in the creation of a “mediated experience of the world”, in which the ubiquity of state power is established through the dissemination of its ideological material. So in an informational autocracy there is the predominance of consensual rule rather than coercive rule.
Due to this consensual rule, the importance of the educated citizens – and the universities which produce them – increases greatly. An effective counter-narrative made by the conscious citizens can easily facilitate mass mobilisations, because the falseness of governmental propaganda is exposed when these conscious citizens make a concerted effort to dissect the propagandist platforms of the government.
The possibility of weakening the authority of the government emanates from the universities, which pedagogically reconfigure the students to teach them the grammar of protests and democracy. So governments all across the world have decided to segregate the educational territory from the democratic fiefdom. An extremely efficient organisational structure has been provided by neoliberal education, through which this complex operation can be carried out. Neoliberal education has done this surgery by rapidly privatising education and gradually transforming it into an elitist privilege.
The universities, in contradistinction to the newfangled neoliberal markets of education, are the only remaining beacons of hope for democracy. Their atmosphere has still not been vitiated by the crassness of consuming knowledge. These universities still have the power to comprehend and question the authoritarian mechanisms. Those studying in these universities try to associate themselves with the socio-cultural complexities of their country. These students have chosen to transcend the vacuous dialogue about jobs and have instead engaged themselves in democratic conversations about their country. The government is hellbent on destroying these creative wellsprings of dissent and discourse.
Yanis Iqbal
Aligarh, India
Coventry University UCU 