ABSTRACT
Rina Ramdev’s argument around the fetishization of ‘excellence’ – as the only rationale of the neo-liberal university – takes recourse to the audit practices that have come to determine funding patterns for Indian public higher education. The increasing significance of a model of punitive audit for public universities, as evidenced in the workings of NAAC or NIRF, only goes on to confirm the state’s withdrawal from both ‘performing’ and ‘non-performing’ institutions in the excuse of ‘autonomy’ or ‘austerity’. Furthermore, the essay argues that the logical inversion of ‘autonomy’ as reward for ‘performance’ cannot but make the former seem like the privilege of the elite few, as opposed to the inescapable networks of control and surveillance that mark the destiny of the public university. Notwithstanding the logic of competitive self-auctioneering that this ‘politics of ranking’ subjects both institutions and its individual participants to, the author sees the public university’s future in a movement beyond its own safe enclosures of intellectual retreat.
