By Ganeshdatta Poddar
Abstract
The public university in India functioned smoothly during the early years of independence because of the formation of a 'general public' in the aftermath of independence. The fragmentation of the general public into 'multiple publics' in the 1970s and the 1980s got reflected into the travails of the public university. By the 1990s, the eclipse of the general public by multiple publics, and the making of a 'Hindutva public' transformed the Indian social and political landscape as never before. The public university as a microcosm of society mirrored this development. By the beginning of the present century, 'multiple publics' and 'Hindutva public' jostled for public sphere, making the university space confrontational and rendering the public university dysfunctional.
It is in the prevailing conditions of despondency that a private university was conceived in the first decade of the present century on the lines of the US system of undergraduate liberal education. Today the landscape of Indian higher education is dotted with public and private universities. In the last decade, with systematic attempts at saturating the public sphere with Hindutva public (attempts by Hindu nationalists at creating an all-India Hindu community through homogenization), and the government declaring its intent in their National Education Policy 2020 to do away with difference between a public and a private university, the Indian university today is more vulnerable than ever before to meddling by government. This paper tries to understand the travails of a public university in the light of the changing nature of society as reflected in the composition of the university community of a public university.
Keywords
public university | general public | multiple public | Hindutva public
About the Author
Ganeshdatta Poddar works at FLAME University, Pune, India, where he has taught Political Science and Basic Spanish since 2008. Before joining FLAME, he taught Spanish and Spanish-English-Spanish translation and interpretation. Poddar gained his higher education at Delhi University, JNU, New Delhi, IIT-B, and SPPU, Pune. His research interests include Indian social and political thought; social and political issues of contemporary India; and the history, society, and culture of South Asia, particularly faith traditions and the interface between religion and politics.