Short Summary
Universities have a central role to play in societies like India to exemplify how people from diverse communities can come together to embody Indian Constitutional values of justice, liberty, equality, and fraternity which can then be emulated in society. However, in practice, we have seen Higher Educational Institutions themselves can become socially toxic and exclusionary environments (Subramanian, 2019; Sukumar, 2022). Hence, the foundational training through the curricular and co-curricular interventions at Azim Premji University has been designed to ensure that ethical praxis is foregrounded, both in relationships within the University as well as outside it. As these attempts are in their nascent phase, the long-term success of these interventions will depend on the continued commitment to the aforementioned areas of diversity and inclusion, ethics before knowledge, as well as promoting community engagement and social enterprise initiatives.
Introduction
At the time of India’s independence in the mid-twentieth century, when its literacy rate stood at 12%, education was seen to be pivotal in achieving the values of justice, liberty, equality, and fraternity framed in its newly formed Constitution. India’s Constitution makers were aware of the inequalities present in the country based on caste, gender, class, ethnicity, and religion, and therefore barred all forms of negative discrimination while making provisions for affirmative action to support historically oppressed groups. BR Ambedkar and Jawaharlal Nehru, two exemplary freedom movement leaders, gave high emphasis on providing equal access for all communities in Higher Education so that inequalities can be reduced, and human capital can grow (Thami, 2007). They understood that the substantial potential of Indian youth could only be realized if we can remove the various forms of physical and social barriers that are pulling them back. However, the journey in the past seventy-odd years has not been a smooth one, as higher educational spaces have absorbed the social hierarchies and exclusions of society to restrict the expected potential (Subramanian, 2019; Sukumar, 2022). Thus, instead of being agents of social change, Higher Educational Institutions (HEIs) in India have quite often aided in maintaining the status quo or even in increasing inequalities.
In such a context, when the philanthropist Azim Premji started a new University, it was quite important to understand the pitfalls in which HEIs can get stuck and ensure that the right educational culture is created during the foundational phase. In this short piece, I am primarily going to focus on three aspects of our attempt to make the University an agent of social change. Of course, this does not capture everything about higher education or what is being done at Azim Premji University (APU). My aim is only to bring the spotlight on the often missed out aspects of higher education that can help in creating the right foundation.
Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion
When a university proactively declares the purpose of higher education to contribute to a “just, equitable, sustainable and humane society,” it has a big responsibility to get it right – firstly on its own campus. It is not enough to get a diverse student body (which most public universities get if they implement affirmative action fully) but it is more important to ensure that all the students flourish, both academically as well as socio-emotionally. Most times, in our experience, a student suffers academically when they are either socially alienated and/or emotionally disturbed. Equity and inclusion, therefore, means not only academic support for those coming from under-prepared backgrounds but also physical accessibility and socio-emotional forms of flourishing that need both direct and indirect interventions.
Many universities have found a strategy to provide academic support to students but not everywhere it is done with a complete understanding of the social complexities that come with it. There is a strong correlation between the quality of schooling a child gets and their location in the social hierarchy, which implies that any supportive measures need to ensure that they would not reify the social hierarchies into academic hierarchies by labelling students as “weak”. In addition, efforts to include cultural diversity of marginalized cultures, including languages, food practices, sports, music, dance, literature, icons and leaders, festivals and other forms of cultural knowledge are crucial, as that plays an important role in their socio-emotional flourishing. At APU, we tried to do this through the curricular as well as co-curricular work, so that the students have a firsthand experience of a diverse and inclusive environment that can then be created in other places where they go, including their homes and communities.
Ethics before knowledge
Another big pitfall in modern Universities in India? is the conception of value-free knowledge which can lead to an unethical relationship between the University and nature/society from where the knowledge is extracted/sourced (Srinivasan, 2018). Historically, we know that the idea of value-free knowledge emerges due to a misconception of nature as inert and brute, working mechanically on mathematical laws. Proctor (1991) argues that similar ideas got translated into social sciences and informed the modern educational system too. As a university that offers science, social science, and humanities courses, we were quite aware of the problems associated with isolating ethics from knowledge. Firstly, it can persist the assumption of value-free science as if there is no ethics of curiosity (Sarukkai, 2009). Secondly, it can lead to problematic ideas on research and methodology as if there is no ethics of theorizing (Guru and Sarukkai, 2012). And thirdly, it can also symbolize a disconnect between the University and nature/society as if there is no ethical responsibility on the University for how research is conducted and knowledge is produced, and then to pay back to the communities where it is being sourced from.
Hence, in our design of the curriculum and the residential life of the students, we took great care to introduce ethical thinking and praxis as well as other foundational skills before the students start getting deep into their disciplinary knowledge. This was done through various curricular and co-curricular interventions. For instance, teaching ethical reasoning, contextualized in real-life social and public issues that we are facing locally and globally, was an important area to be introduced in the 1st year for all disciplines. Another important aspect was one-on-one mentoring of students by faculty and conflict resolution in the residential life was done by using ethics of care principles – those of dialogue, caring relationships, the importance of reason and emotions, and most importantly the role of exemplary action (Noddings 2013). In classroom discussions, on the sports field, in arts and culture activities and in creating a supportive environment for emotional and mental health, a democratic and caring ethos was imbued in the culture of the place. After being equipped with such ethical and critical thinking skills, students were initiated into becoming agents of change both within and outside the University.
Community engagement and social enterprise initiatives
Another important aspect of becoming a responsible University is to acknowledge the situatedness of its own presence in the local, regional, national, and global context. Many universities have an excellent atmosphere of openness and diversity inside their four walls and almost a negative impact on their surroundings (in terms of gentrification, increased inequalities, social alienation, etc.), making it no better than gated communities that isolate themselves from their context. However, at a university that emerged from its experience with government schooling, it was clear that engaging with State and Civil Society would be of central importance. Apart from the field practice components that are part of the curriculum, students initiated quite a few efforts both to engage with the local community in the neighborhood as well as set up social enterprises that can build interventions for specific social issues. They volunteered their time to support migrant workers in the neighborhood to access social security benefits as well as provide daycare and educational support to their children. Many other students were interested in setting up social enterprises and more than 15 such organizations have been setup with varied social outcomes, right from employing people with disabilities for a dignified livelihood to supporting indigenous communities in making a sustainable living from forest produce.
When the pandemic-induced lockdown hit in 2020, we realized that the peri-urban communities living around our university were quite ill-prepared to deal with both the health as well as livelihood challenges that came with it. What started as relief work in providing food essentials and health support to the communities was soon formalized as a systematic approach where students and faculty can engage with local communities in the neighborhood on concerns of education, health, livelihood, ecology, and governance. Students are now volunteering their time to work with community libraries, government health centers, conserving local ecology, establishing a local farmers market and much more. The approach followed in such initiatives is to bring together local state institutions, communities and youth groups, as well as University members in a dialogic participative manner. This has inculcated an enterprising spirit among the students to take up issues that are of concern to the local communities and work with them to execute possible interventions.
Conclusion
In this article, I have attempted to articulate the social responsibilities that Higher Educational Institutions in India have towards their own students and staff, as well as towards the communities that they are situated in. These responsibilities are informed by the ethical values embedded in the Indian Constitution which Azim Premji University has also foregrounded in its mission and objectives. As a comparatively new University, the proof of the pudding is in institutionalizing the efforts for long term responsible outcomes. In this article, I have highlighted three such areas which are of extreme importance – Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion; Ethics before Knowledge; Community Engagement and Social Enterprise Initiatives. The hope is to continue deepening the work and exemplify such practices for a cultural shift in Higher Educational Institutions in India.
Guru, G., & Sarukkai, S. (2012, May 30). The Cracked Mirror: An Indian Debate on Experience and Theory.
Noddings, N. (2013). Caring: A Relational Approach to Ethics and Moral Education, Second Edition, Updated, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.
Proctor, R. N. (1991). Value-Free Science?: Purity and Power in Modern Knowledge. https://doi.org/10.1604/9780674931701
Sarukkai, S. (2009). Science and the ethics of curiosity. Current Science, 97(6), 756–767. http://www.jstor.org/stable/24112112
Srinivasan, S. (2018). Liberal Education and Its Discontents: The Crisis in the Indian University. In Taylor & Francis (1st ed.). Routledge India. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429450976
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