We have come a long way since establishing the first three universities in India — in Bombay, Calcutta and Madras — in 1857. Despite the significant role institutions of higher learning, especially universities, have played in shaping intellectual and social life in India, there is an appalling lack of reflective discussion on the idea of university education in our policies and practices.
The University Grants Commission (UGC), which was set up in 1953 and became a statutory body in 1956 to regulate Indian higher education, is time and again at the centre of public debate due to its policy decisions. The inconsistency of its stances on issues such as M.Phil, PhD, and CARE-list journals, often invites criticism. Yet, in these debates, both the policies and the ensuing critiques often miss a crucial element — reflection on the very idea of the university and the nature of learning it should aim to foster. Therefore, it becomes essential to ask: What kind of institution is a university? From where and how has it come to us?
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The Western legacy
Though India boasts of ancient universities like Nalanda and Takshashila, our understanding of what kind of institutions they were —their disciplinary matrix and their pedagogical methods — is too limited to reconstruct their models. Our contemporary universities, for good or bad, have travelled far by inheriting the structures of the Western model. Therefore, understanding the intellectual history of universities in the West is a crucial step for developing policies and practices that can shape the future of universities in India.
The university, one of the oldest institutions, next only to the army and church, has played an important role in shaping Western culture and civilisation. This role, however, is not without its crises. From Immanuel Kant to Jacques Derrida, philosophers have long debated the challenges faced by universities. As Shashikala Srinivasan, in her book Liberal Education and Its Discontents (2018), identifies, the debate on university problems in the West has often been articulated in terms of the idea of education, the nature of knowledge and learning that it involves. To make sense of contemporary challenges, it is helpful to delve into the historical development of the institution.
The pre-history of university in the Greek tradition
Medieval Europe birthed the institution of the universitas, which, in Latin, means whole, the universe, or the world. In Roman law, it implies persons associated with guilds, societies, corporations or bodies. It was a guild formed for the pursuit of learning by monks and was rooted in theological studies. Later, it became a place for instructing children of the ruling class, building them into gentlemen. Despite the transformation of the university from its theological roots into a secular institution, the pursuit of learning and the cultivation of the self remained central to the idea of the universitas.
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The pre-history of universities in Europe may be traced back to the Greek tradition. The aspirations of the modern idea of the university resonated with Socrates’s dialogic method, Plato’s Academy, the Aristotelian disciplinary matrix, and goals of inquiry. If, as philosopher Michael Oakeshott emphasises, the university should be a place where many voices join in the conversation, Socrates, whose pedagogy engaged others in dialogue, and his dictum “an unexamined life is not worth living” should guide the university culture, not to mention Plato’s dialogues and cave allegory. Aristotle’s model of rational enquiry, his convictions in metaphysics about scholars’ desire to know the world for its own sake and other intellectual virtues exemplified in his works should continue to inspire contemporary university practices. Therefore, one can see Western scholarship often revisiting the Greek tradition.
The Humboldt model
The ideal of university education, articulated by Wilhelm von Humboldt, a 19th-century Prussian educationist and reformer, inspired the establishment of the University of Berlin in 1809-10, a modern university, which became a global reference point. This idea of a university, which went hand in hand with the formation of nation-states in Europe, was conceived against vocational education, polytechnics of the Napoleanic period. For Germans, nation-building involved the noble idea of bildung, cultivating the self of the citizens through liberal arts education. Within this grand idea, voices like Martin Heidegger later thought about the university as serving knowledge to the state.
The university was conceived as a research institution, but the activity of research was not understood as a means to an end — for example, producing patents — but for bildung. It was presumed that along with material institutions like hospitals and revenue departments, reflective and scholarly institutions like universities were also a necessary condition for leading a “good life”. While the Humboldt model focused on the freedom to teach, learn and research, John Henry Newman’s The Idea of a University in Britain conceived the university as a place for imparting universal knowledge resulting in broader liberal education; it argued that knowledge can be its own end.
University for India in the 21st century
Over the last 800 years, the concept and practice of university education have undergone a sea change, resulting in a vast body of knowledge about its past and future. Therefore, I am not proposing the idea of going back to the classical notion of the university. Instead, I roughly suggest, as Sheldon Pollock elsewhere has, that knowing how people acted and made choices in the past will help us make informed choices in the present.
Though we use terms such as liberal arts education, conference, seminar and research to refer to knowledge production in contemporary times, we have yet to make sense of them as historically handed-down legacies with loaded content; simply reproducing them as blanket terms will not help us. Without historical understanding, these practices appear as mimicries.
In an age where artificial intelligence (AI) is reshaping the knowledge economy, the notion of bildung becomes even more urgent. AI tools like ChatGPT, for example, can produce better write-ups, but they cannot cultivate the self. Additionally, if we understand the university as a space for different voices conversing, our interdisciplinary centres, irrespective of sciences and humanities, will truly begin to converse with each other.
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Likewise, understanding the university’s mission as producing knowledge-makers, those who seek knowledge for its own sake will provide much-needed clarity for UGC’s initiatives to train teachers as scholars and scientists.
Holding on to the idea of the university sketched above is wise but it is wiser to look for alternative modes of learning and inquiry both in the West and elsewhere for building universities in the 21st century.
The writer, NIF translation fellow, teaches English literature at Tumkur University. His translation of D R Nagaraj’s Allama Prabhu and the Shaiva Imagination, will soon be published by Permanent Black
