The Educated Subjects

This article looks at the connection between higher education and governance in contemporary India. To understand the connection one has to understand the connection in the context of the shifting contours of both higher education and governance. ¹ Taking off from contemporary debates on higher education and governance, where an across-the-board governance model is at times suggested for a homogenised category called ‘higher education’ (when both governance-models and imaginations-philosophies of higher education are variegated and disaggregated), the article looks at the (‘original’) idea of the university and of higher education and the changing philosophies of education. It also looks at the shifting ideals of the political (here understood as the dimension of governance) and the economic in the larger context of the cultural. Nation building post-Independence (when developmentalism with growth and welfare was the goal) and post-globalisation (when the fostering of a neoliberal order is the goal) also feature in this article as relevant to the understanding of the connection between higher education and governance.