ABSTRACT
Unfolding in the form of a personal memoir, Subramanian’s essay contours the transformations within the university-‘idea’ from the 1980s until now. She recounts her professional engagement with diverse institutional settings – ranging from central to state universities and independent research institutions – to bear witness to the ways in which formative cultures of reasoning and a spirit of cross-disciplinary dialogue were central to the building of that ‘idea’. Despite internal administrative lapses and occasional torsions specific to contexts and regimes, what fundamentally characterized the university space was an amplitude of academic freedom that consisted in deep structures of collegiality, commitment and intellectual conviction. Anxieties of influence did not come in the way of one’s self-investments within a discipline, nor were departures of thought derided for their non-allegiance to dominant methodologies of ‘work’. In all of this, Subramanian sees a mode of being-at-the-university that was allied to the visionary project of its future – something that now faces the threat of erasure by organized practices of ideological censure and their spawning cultures of thuggery.
