Commonwealth Games in Delhi: Down with eviction of students from College Hostels!

July 6, 2010 by 1 Comment

Down with eviction of students from College Hostels!
Onwards to students self-activity!!

The current administration of Delhi University has attempted to reshape the University through a series of sinister agendas – be it the introduction of semester system, the European Studies Programme or the biometric identification system. All of them have shared one thing in common: the thwarting of democratic debate on proposals for change, and the routine violation of regulatory protocols.

The latest episode has been the eviction of students (2,000 students according to reports) from a number of hostels in Delhi University in order to make them available for the Commonwealth Games. Hostels are being renovated and beautified for the officials and visitors of the Games, while students are scrambling around for their own accommodation. The students, like the 40,000 families on the Yamuna bank, are now among the many that have been displaced in the name of national glory. What comes into question is the fact that the University has agreed to avail of 20 crores of rupees from the Commonwealth Games project without taking any cognisance of how and where such resources are generated. It has thus become an accomplice in the larger process of reckless corporatisation that the whole city is undergoing in the bid of becoming a “global city”.

This has left students at the mercy of private accommodation, with its unregulated rents and precarious guarantees. Rents are rising in anticipation of the increased demand for PGs and flats, forcing many existing residents to move out and making accommodation unaffordable for incoming residents as well. The University has made no attempt to devise a mechanism to control or subsidise rents. The inflated prices that students pay are in effect the costs they bear for the cosmetic surgery DU is undergoing, and by extension, the hidden burden they carry for the Commonwealth Games. Some newspaper reports even indicate that hostel fees may increase after the hostels have been “upgraded”. Moreover, the lack of a viable and safe alternative has compelled many girls seeking admission in DU to rethink their decision. The University has also failed to consider living conditions around campus, especially from a gender-sensitive perspective. We can only begin to imagine what it must be like for those with physical disabilities to navigate around dug-up roads, unmarked holes and hazardous construction material.

The students are told that their eviction is “for their own good”. It is “for them” that the authorities are “improving student infrastructure”, making “world-class” hostels. Where was this concern for well-being when the college authorities took the decision to evict students? Not once was there any dialogue with students about this “upgradation”, or about the best and most suitable way to go about it. Instead, the whole decision-making process was shrouded in mystery, leading to utter chaos and confusion: while Hansraj made its hostel residents sign a bond last year declaring they had no objection to being evicted between July and October 2010, Miranda House students have still not been officially informed about the eviction!

We cannot allow the University to get away with such deliberate and avoidable irresponsibility. We make the following demands from the University:

• We demand the provision of alternate accommodation for evicted students.
• This accommodation should be at par with the hostels, both in terms of prices as well as qualitative conditions such as basic amenities and safety.
• We also demand, as conscientious members of a larger community, that this provision not be met at the cost of another section of society.

On our part, let us work towards creating another space, a commune perhaps, an imaginative and practical alternative that is self-governed by members of the university community, a cooperative living space that meets its own needs and conducts itself in a responsible and democratic fashion.

If you are angered by what you see around you in the University, and indeed, in the city, if you want to speak out against the shrinking of democratic space and are ready to reclaim what is rightfully yours, please come and join us!

THIS IS OUR UNIVERSITY! LET’S SPEAK OUT!!

University Community for Democracy

Contact: cwgresistance@gmail.com * Malay 9871924612 * Naina 9313356046 * Praveen 9911078111

Filed Under: DIARIES Tagged With: , , ,

University Struggles at the End of the Edu-Deal

April 16, 2010 by Leave a Comment

George Caffentzis

We should not ask for the university to be destroyed, nor for it to be preserved. We should not ask for anything. We should ask ourselves and each other to take control of these universities, collectively, so that education can begin.

– From a flyer found in the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts, originally written in the University of California

Since the massive student revolt in France, in 2006, against the Contrat Première Embauche (CPE), and the ‘anomalous wave’ in Italy in 2008, student protest has mounted in almost every part of the world, suggesting a reprise of the heady days of 1968. It reached a crescendo in the Fall and Winter of 2009 when campus strikes and occupations proliferated from California to Austria, Germany, Croatia, Switzerland and later the UK. The website Tinyurl.com/squatted-universities counted 168 universities (mostly in Europe) where actions took place between 20 October and the end of December 2009. And the surge is far from over. On 4 March, 2010 in the US, on the occasion of a nationwide day of action (the first since May 1970) called in defense of public education, one of the coordinating organisations listed 64 different campuses that saw some form of protest. (Defendeducation.org). On the same day, the South African Students’ Congress (SASCO) tried to close down nine universities calling for free university education. The protest at the University of Johannesburg proved to be the most contentious, with the police driving students away with water cannons from a burning barricade.

At the root of the most recent mobilisations are the budget cuts that governments and academic institutions have implemented in the wake of the Wall Street meltdown and the tuition hikes that have followed from them, up to 32 percent in the University of California system, and similar increases in some British universities. In this sense, the new student movement can be seen as the main organised response to the global financial crisis. Indeed, ‘We won’t pay for your crisis’ – the slogan of striking Italian students – has become an international battle cry. But the economic crisis has exacerbated a general dissatisfaction that has deeper sources, stemming from the neoliberal reform of education and the restructuring of production that have taken place over the last three decades, which have affected every aspect of student life throughout the world.(1)

The End of the Edu-Deal

The most outstanding elements of this restructuring have been the corporatisation of the university systems, and the commercialisation of education. ‘For profit’ universities are still a minority on the academic scene but the ‘becoming business’ of academe is well advanced especially in the US, where it dates back to the passing of the Bayh-Dole Act of 1980, that enabled universities to apply for patents for ‘discoveries’ made in their labs that companies would have to pay to use. Since then, the restructuring of academe as a money-making venture has proceeded unabated. The opening of university labs to private enterprise, the selling of knowledge on the world market (through online education and off-shore teaching), the precarisation of academic labour and introduction of constantly rising tuition fees forcing students to plunge ever further into debt, have become standard features of the US academic life, and with regional differences the same trends can now be registered worldwide.

In Europe, the struggle epitomising the new student movement has been against the ‘Bologna Process’, an EU project that institutes a European Higher Education Area, and promotes the circulation of labour within its territory through the homogenisation and standardisation of schooling programs and degrees. The Bologna Process unabashedly places the university at the service of business. It redefines education as the production of mobile and flexible workers, possessing the skills employers require; it centralises the creation of pedagogical standards, removes control from local actors, and devalues local knowledge and local concerns. Similar developments have been taking place in many university systems in Africa and Asia (like Taiwan, Singapore, Japan) that also are being ‘Americanized’ and standardised (for example, in Taiwan through the imposition of the Social Science Citation Index to evaluate professors) – so that global corporations can use Indian, Russian, South African or Brazilian, instead of US or EU ‘knowledge workers’, with the confidence that they are fit for the job.(2)

It is generally recognised that the commercialisation of the university system has partly been a response to the student struggles and social movements of the ’60s and ’70s, which marked the end of the education policy that had prevailed in the Keynesian era. As campus after campus, from Berkeley to Berlin, became the hotbed of an anti-authoritarian revolt, dispelling the Keynesian illusion that investment in college education would pay down the line in the form of an increase in the general productivity of work, the ideology of education as preparation to civic life and a public good had to be discarded.(3)

But the new neoliberal regime also represented the end of a class deal. With the elimination of stipends, allowances, and free tuition, the cost of ‘education’, i.e. the cost of preparing oneself for work, has been imposed squarely on the work-force, in what amounts to a massive wage-cut, that is particularly onerous considering that precarity has become the dominant work relation, and that, like any other commodity, the knowledge ‘bought’ is quickly devalued by technological innovation. It is also the end of the role of the state as mediator. In the corporatised university students now confront capital directly, in the crowded classrooms where teachers can hardly match names on the rosters with faces, in the expansion of adjunct teaching and, above all, in the mounting student debt which, by turning students into indentured servants to the banks and/or state, acts as a disciplinary mechanism on student life, also casting a long shadow on their future.

Still, through the 1990s, student enrollment continued to grow across the world under the pressure of an economic restructuring making education a condition for employment. It became a mantra, during the last two decades, from New York to Paris to Nairobi, to claim that with the rise of the ‘knowledge society’ and information revolution, cost what it may, college education is a ‘must’ (World Bank 2002). Statistics seemed to confirm the wisdom of climbing the education ladder, pointing to an 83 percent differential in the US between the wages of college graduates and those of workers with high school degrees. But the increase in enrollment and indebtedness must also be read as a form of struggle, a rejection of the restrictions imposed by the subjection of education to the logic of the market, a hidden form of appropriation, manifesting itself in time through the increase in the numbers of those defaulting on their loan repayments.

There is not doubt, in this context, that the global financial crisis of 2008 targets this strategy of resistance, removing, through budget cut backs, layoffs, and the massification of unemployment, the last remaining guarantees. Certainly the ‘edu-deal’, that promised higher wages and work satisfaction in exchange for workers and their families taking on the cost for higher education, is dissolving as well. In the crisis capital is reneging on this ‘deal’, certainly because of the proliferation of defaults and because capitalism today refuses any guarantees, such as the promise of high wages to future knowledge workers.

The university financial crisis (the tuition fee increases, budget cut backs, furloughs and lay-offs) is directly aimed at eliminating the wage guarantee that formal higher education was supposed to bring and at taming the ‘cognitariat’. As in the case of immigrant workers, the attack on the students does not signify that knowledge workers are not needed, but rather that they need to be further disciplined and proletarianised, through an attack on the power they have begun to claim partly because of their position in the process of accumulation.

Student rebellion is therefore deep-seated, with the prospect of debt slavery being compounded by a future of insecurity and a sense of alienation from an institution perceived to be mercenary and bureaucratic that, in the bargain, produces a commodity subject to rapid devaluation.

Demands or Occupations?

The student movement, however, faces a political problem, most evident in the US and, to a lesser extent, in Europe. The movement has two souls. On the one side, it demands free university education, reviving the dream of publicly financed ‘mass scholarity’, ostensibly proposing to return to the model of the Keynesian era. On the other, it is in revolt against the university itself, calling for a mass exit from it or aiming to transform the campus into a base for alternative knowledge production that is accessible to those outside its ‘walls’.(4)

This dichotomy, which some characterise as a return to the ‘reform versus revolution’ disputes of the past, has become most visible in the debate sparked off during the University of California strikes last year, over ‘demands’ versus ‘occupations’, which at times has taken an acrimonious tone, as these terms have become complex signifiers for hierarchies and identities, differential power relations, and consequences for risk taking.

The contrast is not purely ideological. It is rooted in the contradictions facing every antagonistic movement today. Economic restructuring has fragmented the workforce, deepened divisions and, not last, it has increased the effort and time required for daily reproduction. A student population holding two or three jobs is less prone to organise than its more affluent peers in the ‘6os.

At the same time there is a sense, among many, that there is nothing more to negotiate, that demands have become superfluous since, for the majority of students, acquiring a certificate is no guarantee for the future which promises simply more precarity and constant self-recycling. Many students realise that capitalism has nothing to offer this generation, that no ‘new deal’ is possible, even in the metropolitan areas of the world, where most wealth is accumulated. Though there is a widespread temptation to revive it, the Keynesian interest group politics of making demands and ‘dealing’ is long dead.

Thus the slogan ‘occupy everything’ – building occupation being seen as a means of self-empowerment, the creation of spaces that students can control, a break in the flow of work and value through which the university expands its reach, and the production of a ‘counter-power’ prefigurative of the communalising relations students today want to construct.

It is hard to know how the ‘demands/occupation’ conflict within the student movement will be resolved. What is certain is that this is a major challenge the movement must overcome in order to increase in its power and its capacity to connect with other struggles. This will be a necessary step if the movement is to gain the power to reclaim education from the hands of the academic authorities and the state. As a next step there is presently much discussion about creating ‘knowledge commons’, in the sense of creating forms of autonomous knowledge production, not finalised or conditioned by the market and open to those outside the campus walls.

Meanwhile, as Edu-Notes has recognised,

already the student movement is creating a common of its own in the very process of the struggle. At the speed of light, news of the strikes, rallies, and occupations, have circulated around the world prompting a global electronic tam-tam of exchanged communiqués, slogans, messages of solidarity and support, resulting in an exceptional volume of images, documents, stories.(5)

Yet, the main ‘common’ the movement will have to construct is the extension of its mobilisation to other workers in the crisis. Key to this construction will be the issue of the debt that is the arch ‘anti-common’, since it is the transformation of collective surplus that could be used for the liberation of workers into a tool of their enslavement. Abolition of the student debt can be the connective tissue between the movement and the others struggling against foreclosures in the US and the larger movement against sovereign debt internationally.

George Caffentzis is a member of the Midnight Notes Collective. Together with the collective, he has co-edited two books, Midnight Oil: Work Energy War 1973-1992 and Auroras of the Zapatistas: Local and Global Struggles in the Fourth World War. Both were published by Autonomedia Press.

Acknowledgements

I want to thank the students and faculty I recently interviewed from the University of California, the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna and Rhodes University in South Africa for sharing their knowledge. I also want to thank my comrades in the Edu-Notes group for their insights and inspiration.

Footnotes

(1) Edu-factory Collective, Towards a Global Autonomous University, Brooklyn, NY: Autonomedia, 2009

(2) See, Silvia Federici, George Caffentzis, Alidou, Ousseina, A Thousand Flowers: Social Struggles Against Structural Adjustment in African Universities, Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2000, Richard Pithouse, Asinamali: University Struggles in Post-Apartheid South Africa, Trenton: Africa World Press, 2006 and Arthur Hou-ming Huang, ‘Science as Ideology: SSCI, TSSCI and the Evaluation System of Social Sciences in Taiwan’, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, Volume 10 2009, Number 2, pp. 282-291.

(3) George Caffentzis, ‘Throwing Away the Ladder: The Universities in the Crisis’, Zerowork I, 1975, pp. 128-142.

(4) After the Fall: Communiqués from Occupied California, 2010, Accessed at http://www.afterthefallcommuniques.info.

(5) Edu-Notes, ‘Introduction to Edu-Notes’, unpublished manuscript.

Courtesy:MUTE

Filed Under: DIARIES Tagged With: , , ,

Press Release on the JNU incident

April 14, 2010 by Leave a Comment

Campaign against War on People

On 9th April, 2010, ‘JNU Forum against War on People’ organised a cultural programme titled ‘A Cultural Evening of Protest against Operation Green Hunt’ at Godavari Dhaba in JNU to oppose the sate-military offensive on tribals of Eastern and Central India. The programme included, as its pamphlet clearly states, a play called ‘Sadak’ written by Habib Tanvir, screening of documentary and songs, poetry, performances by students from JNU, Jamia and Delhi University. As soon as the programme started, a group of miscreants led by ABVP and NSUI leaders tried to disrupt the event by shouting slogans and abusing the organisers. Apprehending an attack on the performers, students present in the audience formed a human chain around the stage. However, the ABVP and NSUI hooligans broke this human chain forcefully, physically assaulting and injuring students, to clear their way to the stage. They disconnected the electricity, destroyed audio-visual equipments, vandalised the dais and beat-up anyone, who dared to come on their way. Number of students were injured in this attack and had to be taken to AIIMS for medical help. While ABVP-NSUI-YFE goons went on the rampage, the chief security officer of JNU, who was present at the spot, remained a mute spectator. The next day, when students were protesting against this incident, once again some ABVP-NSUI-YFE miscreants started pelting stones at the protesters and tore down the posters of ‘JNU Forum against War on People’.

In Delhi University we have seen similar attacks by fascist forces on students’ events as well. Two months ago, a mobile book store by ‘Janchetna’ was attacked by ABVP hooligans, where they tore books and damaged the van before students came out in numbers in protection of their own space. It is evident from these incidents that the fascist forces are afraid of any kind of pro people programme. They want to rob our democratic spaces by force. They want to silence any voice, which raises question on people’s misery, state repression and dismantling of democracy.

The JNU administration, instead of taking steps against these lumpens, is trying to propagate all sorts of misinformation about the incident. First, the administration raised the issue of prior permission for holding a meeting, knowing fully well that the cultural programme was hold at a ‘dhaba’ and there is no provision for and precedence of administrative permission for such events. We have experienced similar selective administrative harassment in Delhi University as well. It has become a standard practice of the university administration not to clamp down on the perpetrators of such incident. Instead these incidents have been used as an excuse to snatch away the remaining limited democratic space through official-legal measures. JNU administration has gone a step farther on this occasion by joining the ABVP-BJP-NSUI- YFE chorus of branding the event as an ‘anti-national’ protest. It is perhaps a cruel joke (and indeed a fascist strategy) that the architects of Operation Green Hunt, which has resulted in loss of life and livelihoods of millions of people, are claiming to be ‘patriots’ today!

Worldwide, universities have traditionally been a crucial space for freedom of expression, the exploration of ideas and critical debate. They have always been, and should always be, sites where even the strongest critique of the state can be – in fact, must and should be – made possible. This is an essential character, not just of the university as an institution, but of the democratic principles of the society it exists in. The JNU incident, once again, reveals the systematic way in which the democratic spaces are taken away by a nexus of fascist goons and the university administration.

We, ‘Campaign against War on People’, a community of students and teachers of Delhi University, unequivocally condemn ABVP-NSUI-YFE for the attack. We also condemn the JNU administration for their vicious propaganda campaign and for failing to take steps against the miscreants. We demand the following measures be taken immediately

1) Disciplinary actions must be taken against these goons, who are destroying the democratic fabric of our universities.

2) JNU administration must apologise for their misinformation campaign.

Filed Under: DIARIES Tagged With: , , , ,

Correspondence Pamphlet No 4: The Student as a Worker

March 9, 2010 by 2 Comments

This pamphlet was read and distributed in the Seminar, “Dismantling Democracy in the University”, organised in the University of Delhi on March 4 2010.

Is the semester system good or bad? If we say it is bad then why do we say so? I would say, and many might concur that privatization of the educational sector is also bad. Why do we say that? In the final session, we will discuss ‘politics in the university;’ why do we need a politics at all here? To begin to answer any such questions a more fundamental question needs to be addressed. What is the university and what do we do here?

The university is a workplace, where students, teachers and the karmcharis work. What is work about? It is about production – human beings are creative, and we create in our workplace. As creative beings we find fulfilment in what we create; what we create is an extension of ourselves, through which we reach out to others who are also part of society. In the university knowledge is produced; we study, teach, research and discuss. As creative beings involved in the production/creation of knowledge it is through the knowledge we produce that we put forth ourselves, our identities to the world. To truly find fulfilment, to be happy in other words, we would like to determine what we create, how we create and with what we create; this holds equally for teaching, learning, researching and by extension discussing. Although some could argue that the work place, in this case the university is not that important a site in our lives, home is more important. But honestly, we spend so much of our time and energy here, that it would be foolish to argue that it has no bearing on our happiness; some amount of thinking should make this seem self-evident. So then assuming that for happiness it is necessary for this space in its capacity as a workplace be fulfilling, we can contend that: it is important for us to have a say in the decisions that determine its running. So if new changes are being imposed into its structure, we as the people who work here, and to whom by extension this place belongs, have the right to not accept these changes, and even to remodel older structures. What determines our likes and dislikes is the ability or inability of these structures to gives us space for the fulfilment of our creativity.

In this framework of ‘those who work’ in the university, students are an uncomfortable fit. When the teachers view them, or the administration, the students are either consumers or products. They are paying for a commodity, education, which they should get – so if teachers go on strike, they break the producer-consumer pact. Or it is the task of the teachers to prepare students for the market, so if they go on strike, they are hindering production. When individuals situated in the university, as subjects, look at the university, they see that while for those who “work” here it is the permanent site of labour, for the majority of the students, it fails to have any connotations of finality. Studenthood is a temporary state, a purgatorial interlude that precedes entry into the heaven of work and salaries. When one tries to “politicize” this space, one of the main problems one faces is that students do not feel that they have much to gain by its improvement – “I’m here only for one more year.”

A substantial number of professors have been cribbing about the semester system, but there is not much they can do. They are afraid to go on strike, because they themselves feel that by hindering production and by breaking the consumer pact they will be ‘harming careers’ and might bring the wrath of the ministry on them. On there own, they cannot stop these developments. They need to communicate with the students, establish a bond altogether different from the pedagogic one that exists right now. They need to be able to think about students differently, students as part of the same continuum as they, working in the university, desiring fulfilment, affected by what affects the teachers. In a system where value is eternally deferred, the formal manifestation being exchange value, even when they start getting salaries they don’t get fulfilment. What is common to the time when they will get salaries and now, is that in both realms they labour, work, make use of their creativity, and in circumstances that they do not determine.

If I were to translate ‘creativity’ in the register that agitational politics usually makes use of: it is nothing but our capacity and need to labour. Understanding creativity like this would allow us to elaborate upon the nature of the said continuum. When Marx says ‘working class,’ does he mean only the ‘male, white, industrial proletariat?’ Maybe. But what was the logic behind designating somebody a worker? The working class is that section of the people on which work is imposed; the people who are alienated from their creativity, who are forced to create in circumstances that they do not want to create in, and who as a result will have to fight to be able to determine these circumstances. There was another concept, that Marx often made use of: the collective worker. The collective worker is this continuum, a continuum beyond localized time or space, of the working class subjectivity. The collective worker is a universal, common to all those on whom work is imposed. Work is imposed on the collective worker: the collective worker is made of various people on whom work is imposed in various ways; in a different way in the factory, in a different way in agriculture, in a different way in the university, in a different way in the household. So work is imposed on the professor in one way. We propose that work is imposed on the student in another. Studenthood is a phase in the life of this ‘collective worker.’ It doesn’t matter if some students come from rich households, if some will go on to become factory owners, or vice chancellors, at the moment of studenthood they are part of the collective worker. Professors and students are part of the same continuum. They together occupy the university, and in fighting for self-determination they are essentially on the same side. So in opposition to the student as a consumer, and the student as a product, is the student as worker. That the student does not create ‘value’ does not matter, because capitalism decides what is valuable and what is not: but this does not change the fact that work is imposed upon the student.

Anyhow, we need self-determination for happiness, and for self-determination we have to fight. The tribal in Chhattisgarh might need to fight the police, multinationals, and the armed forces for self-determination, the factory worker will need to fight the factory owner, we have to fight the administration, the vice chancellor for instance. If students, teachers and Karamcharis work in the university, what right has any random person to determine what will happen here? The Vice Chancellor and his pals are not elected representatives; they come in through mechanisms in which we have no say. Today we might be fighting the semester system, or the service regulations, or against the attendance rule, fee-hike or for timely payment of karamchari salaries, but we also need to fight the arbitrariness with which these problems impose themselves upon us. It is not enough to say that the vice-chancellor should not bring in the semester system, we have to ask why the vice-chancellor should do anything at all? If there has to be an administrative body, then we should elect it, and have the power of immediate recall, if what we don’t want to happen happens. Of course all this is a long way off, but are we even ready to think our problems through? If we don’t push further than questioning a move here or a move there, we should know that till there is an administration, such things will happen.

What about political students’ organizations: essentially left organizations. How do they see the university and the students? They too seem to not think of the university as a valid site for struggle. For them it seems, the struggle is always somewhere else: in the forest, or in the factory or in slums? Of course it is there. It needs to be fought there. But it is also here. And it needs to be fought here as well. The university is not a place where activists are to be made to go and fight elsewhere. Unless we bring the struggle home, fight the particular forms of power that we face, transformation can never happen. I don’t intend to be vituperative; these are not charges. It is just an appeal to rethink the aims of struggle in the university.

Someone could ask, ‘what if we do get this right to determine what happens here? What if we are allowed to elect our own administration? Does this mean our problems are over?’ No, of course not. If we struggle merely for power to regulate, it won’t take us anywhere. Once we gain it, instead of the current administration some of us will be mediating between the market and the university. The outside, which will continue to be a problem, arbitrary, based on the idea of profit, not human happiness, will still determine us. Self-determination will not be complete in this localized fashion. Our demand for self-determination at a local level can only be tactical, not the final end. People everywhere face the problem that we face here, in different forms, in different degrees; but essentially the same. True self-determination, true democracy can only come when the structure that centres this dynamic is destroyed. People struggling in their respective circumstances, for self-determination, will finally need to come together to push the struggle to its culmination. But this is a somewhat larger matter. We start with what we face, with the local structure through which power tries to determine our lives. In the process we will of course, as Laclau would say, solve a number of small problems, make our lives in the university a little better, bring a greater degree of democracy here, but we must keep in mind that these small things are not the end, because the end is that which seems impossible right now; this impossible can be made possible, through an act which will retroactively make its own impossibility the condition of its possibility, shifting the horizon of possibility altogether.

Filed Under: DIARIES Tagged With: , ,

Seminar: “Dismantling Democracy in the University”

February 26, 2010 by 1 Comment

DATE: March 4, 2010
VENUE: Hindu College, Delhi University

Session 1 (11 am to 12: 15 pm) – Academics, Politics and the University

Chair : Sunil Dua
[Department of English, Hindu College]
Speaker 1: Pothik Ghosh ………………………………………..11 AM to 11. 20 AM
[Editor, Radical Notes (radicalnotes.com)]
Speaker 2: Abhijeet Phartiyal…………….…………………..11. 20 AM to 11. 40 AM
[Correspondence (Group)]
Chair’s comment and Discussion…………………………….11. 40 AM to 12. 15 PM

Tea Break……………………………………………………….12.15 PM to 12. 30 PM

Session 2 (12: 30 PM to 1: 45 PM) – Deconstructing the “semester system”

Chair : P. K. Vijayan
[Department of English, Hindu College]
Speaker 1: Harriet Raghunathan …….…………………………12:30 PM to 12: 50 PM
[Department of English, Jesus and Mary College]
Speaker 2: Shomojeet Bhattacharya.…………………………..12: 50 PM to 1. 10 PM
[Department of Economics, Kirorimal College]
Chair’s comment and Discussion……………………………….1. 10 PM to 1. 45 PM

Lunch Break……………………………………………………….1.45 PM to 2. 15 PM

Session 3 (2: 15 PM to 3: 30 PM) – Education in the Era of Late Capitalism

Chair : Neshat Qaiser
[Department of Sociology, Jamia Milia Islamia University]
Speaker 1: Malay Firoz ……………………………………..…..2: 15 PM to 2: 35 PM
[Department of Sociology, Delhi University]
Speaker 2: Ravi Kumar……………………………………..…..2: 35 PM to 2: 55 PM
[Department of Sociology, Jamia Milia Islamia University]
Chair’s comment and Discussion……………………….……….2: 55 PM to 3. 30 PM

Tea Break………………………………………………..……….3: 30 PM to 3: 45 PM

Session 4 (3: 45 PM to 5: 45 PM) – Rethinking Politics in the University

Chair : Paresh Chandra
[Correspondence (Group)]
Speaker 1: Delegate from Disha Students’ Organization
Speaker 2: Delegate from Students’ Federation of India
Speaker 3: Delegate from New Socialist Initiative
Speaker 4: Delegate from All India Students’ Association

Discussion

Filed Under: DIARIES Tagged With: , , , ,

Young, educated and jobless in India

December 3, 2009 by Leave a Comment

Craig Jeffrey

There is mass unemployment among India’s graduates. What can be done for them?

In 2005 I spent time with a student named Rajesh in Meerut College, in Uttar Pradesh. Rajesh was in his early 30s and had been studying in Meerut for 13 years. Like many long-time students there, he described himself as “unemployed”, someone “just waiting”.

There are many like Rajesh in Meerut and across northern India. Behind the image of tech-savvy IT specialists in India lies a dispiriting picture common throughout Asia, Africa and Latin America: a multitude of educated but unemployed young men.

The sources of this problem are not difficult to identify: rising education rates have led to higher aspirations around the world. At the same time, governments have often cut the public sector jobs upon which educated people formerly depended. The result in numerous places has been the “overproduction” of educated people: the “men hanging out on the street” that seem to feature in so many travel accounts and contemporary anthropologies of poorer countries.

Over the past 15 years I have been doing research funded by the Economic and Social Research Council on the problem of educated unemployment in Uttar Pradesh, whose 190m people make it India’s most populous state. Many parents in Uttar Pradesh are able to finance school and university education for their children. But these graduates find it impossible to obtain salaried jobs.

The sheer scale of the problem of youth unemployment is staggering. There are regularly more than 10,000 applicants for a single government post in Meerut. Students there tell me that to get a job it is now necessary to possess “source” (social connections) and “force” (the money for bribes).

Students’ anger is compounded by their fury at educational decay. Lack of investment in higher education and widespread corruption in many universities has undermined the value of students’ degrees. Things came to a head in 2006 when it emerged that, as an economy measure, the registrar of a prominent university in Meerut had been sending masters theses to be marked by school pupils, some allegedly as young as eight. When students discovered what had happened, they came into the streets to burn their degrees.

Some young people in Meerut give up on the search for salaried work and return to farming or manual labour. There are MAs, even PhDs, working in the fields of Uttar Pradesh. But like Rajesh, many students respond to unemployment by simply remaining in education, collecting degrees, and hoping that their luck will change.

What are the social and political implications of this mass unemployment? At the family level, the impact is marked. Those unsuccessful in finding decent, permanent jobs often face parents who resent scrimping and saving for their sons’ education. Parents often complain about the sacrifices they made to educate their children. Moreover, young women sometimes work in the field to keep their brothers in college – and this has led to many tensions between siblings.

What of political unrest? Commentators in the past have tended to imagine these men as either politically apathetic or violent threats to civilised society. My research – which involved years of interviewing and hanging out with young men – has tried to move beyond these stereotypes. To be sure, some unemployed young men have been involved in violence, such as the Hindu/Muslim riots and pogroms that erupted in India in the early 1990s. But the reality may be more mundane. Jobless young men have adopted one of two strategies in contemporary Uttar Pradesh. Some use their free time and skills to advocate on behalf of the poor. There are many such “social reformers” in Meerut, who often voice critiques of the Indian state, but tend to avoid violence.

A second group work as political entrepreneurs at the local level: they call themselves “fixers”. These men traded on their knowledge of how politics works at the local level, to sell places in private universities, extract bribes from government officials, or steer contracts towards favoured businessmen. These men do use violence and their actions encourage the further proliferation of corruption in Uttar Pradesh.

Mass unemployment among the educated in India may have contradictory implications. On the one hand, it may lead to the emergence of a set of people who can play key development roles in the countryside and small towns. These bright young “social reformers” are keen to find outlets for their zeal. On the other hand, there are many young men whose joblessness has provoked aggressive individualism and an “anyhow” mentality when it comes to making money. The Indian government and international organisations need to get much better at enrolling the first group into processes of planned development, and persuading the second group to redirect their energy in more positive directions.

The time is also ripe for a broader discussion of mass unemployment among educated young people across the world. What do they have in common? How do their responses differ? How might governments and others address the problem? The answers to these questions are likely to reveal a great deal not only about youth the world over, but about the chance of progressive social change in places like India.

Courtesy: Guardian

Filed Under: DIARIES Tagged With: , , , , ,

13th November Public Meeting

November 14, 2009 by 1 Comment

A public meeting was organised by Campaign Against War on People in The Faculty of Arts, North Campus, DU on the 13th November. In spite of BJP’s Delhi Bandh call, and DUSU’s call for a University Bandh, slight rain, and posters for the event having been mysteriously torn up, over a hundred and fifty people attended the meeting. Representatives from many organisations including PUDR, AISA, Disha, DSU, Jan Hastakshep, Correspondence, JNU Forum Against War on People and NSI addressed the gathering. The group also launched its signature campaign against the state’s offensive addressed to the Prime Minister, which will be circulated in the university during the next few weeks. The event also included musical performances. Videos of the event will be put up soon.

Filed Under: DIARIES Tagged With: , ,

SCIENCE-TECHNOLOGY-STUDENTS-WORKERS UNION

April 5, 2009 by 2 Comments

A Leaflet

Today is the time of economic crisis. All national and multinational companies are feeling the effect, especially, the workers in them. Millions of workers have lost their jobs throughout the globe. This is not the first time that the workers are facing such problems. Several times in the last century similar problems have been created for workers. In the beginning of this century, after the 9/11 attacks, there was a similar period. Production of workers, i.e., students coming out of universities have outnumbered, by more than a hundred times, the intake capacities of companies. The only solution that has been offered is competition. Study hard… compete and get better appropriated than your fellow mates. There can be just one solution – the “better” students/workers, i.e., those who are compliant to the bosses’ interests and demands, will get or sustain their jobs; and, in that case there will be a growing brigade of unemployed and underemployed (underpaid, casual and temporary) workers, still expecting and competing to get accommodated. All this is because something needs to be sustained in the companies, namely, high profits. That can’t be compromised or shared with workers!!!

Some of us are over-optimistic about getting out with an MBA degree and joining some company in a highly paid managerial post. This section needs to realise that the intake capacity with regard to these posts in companies is much more restricted than that of workers proper. They share the same fate in a much larger magnitude. When there is a reduction in the number of workers, managers who “manage” them will be more and more redundant.

In this process of profit realisation, the sufferer is the student and/or the worker community. They compete and struggle amongst and against each other, weakening themselves ‘as a whole’.

It is high time for this community to get organized and cooperate in their struggle for liberation, rather than compete against each other. It is high time for them to ask themselves what they have lost in the process of competition and assess the magnitude of what they are going to lose if they continue competing blindly. It is high time they get organized and ask the big bosses of companies and the governments as to why ‘we’ have to lead a life of subjugation so that the profit is maintained. It is high time for them to choose between this alternative path of questioning the present state of affairs and the path of blind competition.

Science-Technology-Students’-Workers’ Union (STSWU) is an organization that provides this alternative platform to students and workers to meet the challenges of their class – locally, nationally and internationally.

To join, contact Satyabrata.
Email: satyabrata@radicalnotes.com
Mob. No. 09238535626

Workers of all countries, unite!

Filed Under: DIARIES Tagged With: , , , , ,
«Previous Page