ABSTRACT
This chapter sees in the ‘crisis’ of the Indian public university not only the all-too-visible attempt by ruling-party hegemonies to appropriate regimes of intellectual production, but also (and more importantly) the lingering policy imbalances of a Nehruvian legacy. The large-scale bureaucratization of the academy, as the practical underside of state funding, has increasingly eroded the parrhesiac potential of university communities – till the recent NPE draft goes on to unabashedly propose a centralized mechanism of faculty recruitment from cadre-based education services. Commenting on the recent re-invention of liberal arts education within exorbitantly priced private university curricula, Chaudhuri urges a serious engagement with the ‘new humanities’ from within public-funded institutions of higher education today. It is only through the interconnectedness of these disciplines that the public nature of the public university may now be realized, in forging an alliance with all ‘other’ meanings and possibilities of the human as the pre-condition of democracy.
