ABSTRACT
This chapter prepares the ground for a manifesto on Indian higher education, by marking out its historical transition from a state-funded welfare model to a neoliberal oligarchy of private economic interests. The author contends that this period of transformation does not just produce a more flexible and exploitable labour-force for the international market, but also irredeemably converts the very nature of the intellectual ‘input’ that goes into manufacturing such a workforce. Faced with a complete implosion of the use value of education – that is, its potential for democratic-critical inquiry and social sensitivity – within the profit-motives that govern its exchange in the international market, the university too is peddled as an absolute commodity. The successive weakening of a secular-democratic consensus as central to the idea of higher education makes the latter serve as an apology for communal-fascist forces, while being harnessed to the empire of global finance capital. Addressing income-wealth inequalities through capital controls and a thoroughgoing overhaul of the economic policy framework, Patnaik suggests, might be the only route to “reviving” university systems.
