ABSTRACT
This essay offers an unsparing critique of the moment of ‘GATS-ification’ of higher education in India, and the eventual shift from an old liberal university format of Nehruvian lineage to the neo-liberal factory-image. Underwritten in this is an integral change in the nature of the commodity form peddled by the university – such that what is on sale is no longer simply the labour power of the formally educated worker, but the value represented by the university itself at the site of entry. The depreciation of productive (specialized) labour as only secondary to the circuits of ‘value’ generated by the university-as-commodity results in systematic creation and preservation of a ‘surplus population’. It is for such a ‘surplus’ of human non-capital – produced and sustained by the university – that policy instruments like the Foreign Education Providers (FEP) Bill are manoeuvred as providing alternatives of technical/vocational incorporation. Chandra consummately holds that the university’s claims to future capital and job-creation exhaust its current re-invention as the shadow-form of a factory – inventing ‘pockets of de facto slave labour’.
