ABSTRACT
In her essay, Ania Loomba compellingly argues that the task of defence – demanded of us by routine instances of right wing violence on Indian university campuses – cannot prevent a critical attentiveness to the failings of public-funded higher education in the country. It is crucial, therefore, that we constantly redirect our attention to the structural problems that have resulted of the legislative-institutional priorities of public policy – alternating between an incomplete decolonization of university pedagogies, unthinking mimicry of American educational models, increasing centralization of unwieldy structures through top-down bureaucratic fiat, systemic curtailments of academic autonomy, gaping resource-disparities between different tiers of public institutions and a half-hearted attempt at strategic inclusion that falls far short of the will to substantive social justice. Drawing occasional parallels with the Euro-American directions in higher education, Loomba establishes that the ‘idea’ of the university – as a free space of self-determinative practice – has historically existed as a ‘compensatory ideal’ for the public spheres excluded from rights of access to such practice. These constitutive tensions that define the imaginative and material ‘limits’ of the university must be engaged with, through diverse disciplinary traditions that make visible its everyday contradictions and ruptures.
