Beyond the boundary

University life should be able to meld diverse intellectual activities and human experiences

The daily opportunity of rubbing shoulders with active

research scholars stimulates learning and lends extraordinary value to life in the university. I have always felt that there is a need to have an academic culture in which we could have wide-ranging experience that would lead to the overall development of critical faculties. I wish universities in India would begin to show some more ardour for academic and cultural activities, which should become a daily experience, not a rare event.

The idea of such a vibrant academic environment took my mind to a meeting I attended at the ‘Triangle Club’ at Cambridge that takes up dialogues across the borders of science, theology and philosophy. A lively discussion would often continue for hours over port. The question taken up that day was the relevance of culture, politics and history to social behaviour and society’s attitudes towards knowledge, belief, arts, morals, law and customs. Such diverse intellectual activities, I could realise, address several questions pertaining to diverse theoretical and political positions. An interdisciplinary approach of this nature, therefore, is committed to social reconstruction by critical political involvement. The aspiration is to always understand and change the structures of dominance, particularly in industrial capitalist societies where the areas of media,

literature, sexuality, fashion and technology are of utmost significance.

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At the end of the day the computer enthusiast or the scientist does unwind in a theatre or a concert hall or spends an evening in the company of a book or listening to music. And who says that science is not pertinent to the social sciences? The scientific finding that chaotic systems embody deep structures of order is one of the widespread implications that have attracted interest across a spectrum of disciplines, including the Humanities. Varying ideas of order and disorder enable original readings of scientific and literary texts from Newton’s Principia to the hyper real ‘Cybria’ of Baudrillard, from Dadaism to the post-industrial forces of production.

Principles of academic freedom and of the imagination, of opening up new courses or options to build connections between the university and the larger community are a must. As Chomsky says, it is a commitment to a ‘free marketplace of ideas’. Real reform is possible not by enforcing restrictions, but by constructing alternative programmes inside the university which can succeed in attracting the more creative students and faculty members. Alternative programmes of study and action, of teaching and research are very compelling on intellectual and moral grounds, and will have great impact on the intellectual ambience of the university.