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Our institutions of higher learning are beholden to those that control the purse strings. They willy-nilly fabricate theories and cognitive cobwebs that suit the class interest of the ruling elite and debilitate the liberating spirit of the poor. They pedal anodyne nostrums and placebos so that they continue to enjoy the favours of their patrons. They tremble when it comes to conscientizing the exploited and the oppressed. They prefer to cling to their credo of political purism. They throw into limbo their critical awareness and creative impulse. Instead of being original in their thought and action, they delight in repeating the past or imitating the West. Unless the sublime spirit of venturesome research and steadfast devotion to truth and an unflinching commitment to universal welfare of the upanishadic times is revived, HE cannot recapture its lost glory. People are moved not by reason alone but by cultural symbols also which our centres of higher learning do not seem to be well-equipped to evolve. The globalisation phenomenon, a new homogenising development, is likely to severely distort the role of HE. Instead of empowering the people, it is empowering the International Capitalism by permitting free entry for multi-national corporations. Capitalist ideology thus is going to have a stranglehold on HE robbing it of its academic freedom, making it its subservient tool and preventing it from acting as a powerful vehicle of social change.
V
The idea that HE has a role to play in the promotion of social change and scientific temper is based upon a number of suppositions and prevailing norms of the age:
(i) that HE functionaries have a social responsibility towards the community, has to be treated as a categorical imperative, an axiomatic obligation.
(ii) that institutions of higher learning are part of the wider social system and in order to survive they must have structural, functional and developmental linkages with that system. If they do not develop a two-way communications channel, entropy will set in.
(iii) that a university must act as a repository and vehicle of universal culture transcending all barriers of time and space, divisions and denominations. Only then can they be imbued with a spirit
तुलसी प्रज्ञा अक्टूबर-दिसम्बर, 2000
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