Is UGC govt's propaganda arm?

The attempt by the University Grants Commission (UGC) and the All-India Council of Technical Education (AICTE) to force students and teachers in colleges and university campuses across the country to listen to Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s speech, broadcast live on Monday, has stirred a hornet’s nest. Modi made the speech as part of Pandit Deendayal Upadhyaya’s birth centenary celebrations and the 125th anniversary of Swami Vivekananda’s address at the Parliament of World Religions in Chicago in 1893. Opposition parties dubbed it Modi’s agenda to “saffronise” higher education. Academicians condemned it as an intrusion on academic freedom. Expectedly, West Bengal, Kerala and other non-BJP ruled states resisted the move and several students and student organisations boycotted the speech. A girl student at the University of Mysore had this to say, “We are not interested in such speeches, but the authorities are forcing us to watch it. The Centre is violating our freedom of expression.” Is this the ‘Integral Humanism’ of Upadhyaya? Would Swami Vivekananda have approved?

That the entire exercise was undertaken on orders of the political bosses in the Union Human Resources Development ministry and was not part of the regulatory functions of the two bodies is clear from the tone and tenor of the circulars they issued. In its circular to higher education institutions across the country, the UGC described the programme as “life changing” and asked universities and colleges to make arrangements for the live telecast of Modi’s speech. A similar circular was sent by the AICTE to the directors of technical colleges. Ironically, Modi’s speech underlined the difference between his preaching and practice. “There is no better place for creativity and innovation than university campuses,” he said. The most essential requirement for creativity and innovation is freedom, which includes freedom to question well-established norms and paradigms, the freedom best manifested in youth. By using regulatory bodies like the UGC and AICTE to impose a particular world view on young minds, his government is killing that spirit.

University autonomy and academic freedom are concepts well-accepted as part of the fundamental right to freedom of speech and expression. As Justice Frankfurter of the US Supreme Court held in 1957, a university has the right to decide what to teach, who to teach, how to teach under the US Constitution’s First Amendment. Acceptance of this tenet has enabled American institutions of higher education to maintain supremacy in global rankings. The Modi government will do well to remember and heed the words of the Radhakrishnan Committee, on the basis of which the UGC was formed through an Act of Parliament in 1956: “We must resist, in the interests of our own democracy, the trend towards the governmental domination of the educational process.”