Minding your Words: How fine words about higher education betray empty ideas
Higher education, and particularly the university system, is receiving unforeseen attention in India. With the emergence of private players committed to building institutions bench-marked against global standards, and the government interested in giving a face-lift to the public university institutions, we can expect some significant changes in higher education in the forthcoming days. However, something in the talk about reforming higher education and the university system indicates that a lot of these efforts may be chaotic, impulsive and even outright misdirected. Here are some symptoms and diagnoses about what the talk could be indicating. It is worthwhile to remember that this analysis is based solely on the words used to describe aspirations and plans and not based on any assessment of objective conditions.
Notice the focus on interdisciplinarity. From being a fashion statement touted by a few elite institutions, the word interdisciplinarity (a neologism, lest we forget) has now become staple in any conversation about higher education. The Google N-gram says that the word took off sometime after the 1950s and has been on a steep ascent ever since. It so happens that a lot of good research today is interdisciplinary. However, it makes little sense to aspire to be interdisciplinary in your research. You may be better off aspiring to the older ideal of finding truth, despite the fact that the millennials have pronounced the sentence on truth: “whose truth and which truth?” they ask angrily. Very significant questions those, if you are in an epistemology class trying to decide the best way of describing what knowledge or truth is. Only that, in your workaday life, either as a carpenter or as a physicist, you don’t need to know what knowledge is, or what truth is. You just need to know what is relevant and true about the thing at hand. And when you start paying attention to truth, you will also see that others, from other disciplines, may have a thing or two to say about it. Here is the first sign of trouble: a lot of our talk about higher education focuses on interdisciplinarity, whereas, higher education is in fact about instilling a desire for the pursuit of truth.
Another instance of semantic mayhem is the use of the word innovation. Every university claims to be innovative in doing something or innovating something. Again, do not get me wrong. All good technology, all effective solutions, all scientific theories would have done something innovative to succeed in the face of the challenges they set out to address. It is only that what they did was not a thing. They did whatever was the right thing to be done in that context. It is nearly useless to learn about innovations in the abstract, without learning the nitty-gritties of the domain in which those innovations were made. Of course, there might be that serendipitous trigger of an idea in a biologist’s mind when she is listening to Feynman on physics. But the serendipity can equally occur when she is listening to Hans Zimmer. Ok, maybe not. But you get my point. Rather than ask students to innovate, you are better off asking students to pay attention to the different aspects of the problem at hand, run scenarios and take into account as many contextual clues as might be possible in devising solutions. In short, we may be better off making students understand the problem situation closely rather than asking them to innovate. And we may be better off ourselves following this rule too.
A third example is about the word relevance. Most universities want their curricula and research to be relevant to the needs of the society. It is a lofty ideal indeed and it is hard to nitpick about this without sounding churlish. But, look at it again. Agreed, an irrelevant idea is also a useless idea and a great idea is usually relevant. After all, the meaning of saying that something is useless is that it is irrelevant. And to say that something is good is to attest to its relevance. But then, relevance is not an attribute of a thing, like colour, shape and size are attributes. It is a judgment one makes about the way a thing is used in a particular context. Knowledge does not respond to the criteria of relevance or irrelevance. Only particular pieces of information could be relevant or irrelevant in dealing with specific situations. Any knowledge, however acquired, needs to be conserved, once it is acquired: whether it is the knowledge of calculating time by looking at shadows or figuring out the therapeutic use of plants by tasting them. Therefore, it is not anybody’s business, least of all a university’s, to pass judgment on the relevance or irrelevance of any forms of knowledge. Rather, it is the task of a university to teach students to pay attention to relevant facts, and figure out which ones are irrelevant, in solving particular problems.
We could multiply these examples. But it is important to notice a pattern in this distortion. Our talk about universities, higher education, and knowledge production at large, has been rendered a huge disservice by this variety of talk. What is wrong with this talk? Take the contrast between interdisciplinarity and truth. Truth is a cognitive goal. When you are thinking about solutions to a problem, you have to keep an eye on the facts of the matter, as also on the truth of your statements about them. In contrast, interdisciplinarity is not a cognitive goal. You don’t need to do anything about it when you are thinking about a problem. Thinking hard about a problem also means looking around for solutions in other places than the usual. It is to search in other disciplines, sometimes teaming up with people from those other disciplines. Interdisciplinarity is a description of the product of your thinking. You could say that your solution to a particular problem was interdisciplinary. You may also want to say in retrospect that you could find a solution to the problem you were investigating only because you went the interdisciplinary route. But what you are doing is still solving the problem you encounter and so you are constrained and directed by the conditions and features of the problem. You are not directed by any interdisciplinary motivations or goals.
Like interdisciplinarity, innovation and relevance are not cognitive goals. They are not what you need to keep track of when pursuing knowledge. They are words which only help you describe the product of your thinking once those products are in place. It is hardly useful in the process of making those products. In short, words like interdisciplinarity, innovation and relevance are not cognitively significant in the process of knowledge building.
At an extremely general level, we would all agree that thinking about higher education means thinking about cultivating specific cognitive habits and the institutional arrangements needed to inculcate those habits. How could our talk ever live up to that task lumbered with such words?