what is the mission of the university?
I teach in a university located in a remote corner of the third world. I often wonder if the universities in such unreached locations are serving any 'purpose' at all. If yes, what must be the mission of such universities?
The world's first universities were established at Bologna, Salerno and Oxford etc during 11th/12th centuries as a "community of scholars",right? Even India had ancient universities such as Nalanda and Taxila, and Egypt, Alexandria. But what hapeened to sholarship and the sense of community in this globalized world now. The situation is rather grim in the ersatz universities of the third world.
People came to universities in the ancient times egged on by their passion for learning and scholarship. Now, are they just degree-minting macines. The university administration is bothered to somehow keep the academic 'machine' running and keep doling out degrees year after year. And, in the process, conscientious individual academics have become alienated, atomized individuals, reduced to merely cogs in the machine. Is the university just an assembly-line factory and the faculty the 'workers', just serving a formless 'management' . I believe, in vain though, that a good university is one in which things move quietly, where some alchemy amongst the ignited minds produce a daily creative tension and sometimes even generate a few original thoughts or products, and the faculty and students manage themselves rather well without seemingly serving any amorphous administration.
But the way things are in the wretched universities in poor societies are such that, one feels as if one is shouting in the wilderness. The faculties daily grind consumes most of his time, rarely involving his creative mind at all. He simply goes through the motions, and administration could care less even if he keeps his mind in the deep-freeze .
He is given a small cabin and sometimes even a phone-booth sized so-called lab. And he is assinged his 'teaching load". Most of the time his mind is given no share in working out the overall mission of the university, the dept he blongs and the course he is supposed to teach. Most of the grand designs are dictated by senile senior gentleman teachers who realized long time ago that the reptilian portion of the human mind gets more benefits than exertions of the higher cortical faculties.
I read long time ago about an Arab scholar who was unrecognized in his own land and he goes to some european university and writes home that, "here i am given some value for my yearning for scholarship and here i find a flame kindling another flame".
But now in these accursed acdemic ghettos, the flame of scholarship is assaulted by so many inimical forces: the strong winds of globalization, the loss of community of scholarship, academic isolation, lack of infrastructure, and a nurturing millieu, faculty politics, student activism and indifferent mass of students.
The faculty here goes through the grind of teaching and more teaching, year after year and he is never academically galvanized to perform as a scholar/scientist but to show the semblance of following the norms of the global university, every few years he is asked to give an account of his number of publications(remeber number is the catchword here, not its relevance or its prospects), that too during the time of his promotions.The major activity that he was engaged all those years.i.e. teaching, hardly gets a mention and makes no difference if he was teaching with daily exertions or dictating from jurassic notes. He is aked to prove himself during times of promotion to higher grades by the so-called quanity of publications.
All he was given was a small boutique, a few glasswares and some ancient euipments(that too,rarely)....and never again a discussion on these vitamins of scientific scholarship till the promotion time comes. That his acdemic 'virility' is abruptly tested: "how many issues you got,man"? Is it not like an athlete engaged his whole life on training for marathon race is suddenly asked "what are your sprint track records"?
Who (and how) will keep the academic flame in the third world universities as a:
"Candle in the wind,
Candle,candle
Burning bright, in the pitch-dark
A lily in the mud!"?
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