Interview with Dr Sarmila Bose
This is part of a series of interviews with academics. Find out more about Woolf and the academics who are driving research forward at woolf.university.
1. Sarmila, your academic interests span a wide range of subjects, including history, politics, public policy and law. However, you were also trained as a lawyer and worked for several years as a political journalist in India. How does this professional experience intersect with your academic job?
I studied history, politics and public policy (which included a fair bit of economics and statistics) because I could not separate them in terms of the questions that interested me. It is essential to know what happened in the past in order to understand contemporary politics, and how can we come up with the most appropriate public policies without a solid grounding in history, politics and economics, and an understanding of the social and cultural circumstances in which those policies would be applied? The subjects I studied are closely related and intertwined with one another. The interdisciplinary aspects of my collaborative work go further. My recent work examining the migration legend and identity formation of the so-called ‘kulin kayasthas’ of Bengal was a collaborative endeavour with three geneticists, combining historical and genetic analysis. It was challenging and exhilarating, pushing the methodological frontiers to examine historical migration and identity formation over many centuries, which is a riveting story in itself, but also highly relevant in its implications for present-day politics in India. The compartmentalisation of different areas of study seems to be a relatively recent phenomenon. In the past scholars seemed to have been well versed in a wide range of subjects that are grouped today under humanities, social sciences and natural sciences.
I have always been interested in applying the findings of research to practical problem-solving in society. I grew up in Calcutta. It seemed obvious that eliminating poverty and inequality should be at the heart of our collective professional endeavour. I found my experience as a political journalist and an academic to be highly complementary, with each enriching the other. My academic background helped me to bring analytic thinking and research findings to my journalistic work, while my extensive field experience as a journalist gave me a depth of knowledge and understanding of India which would have been impossible had I remained confined to academia alone. While different in key aspects of timescale and nature of output, academic work and journalism are similar in many ways, such as the importance of determining the right questions to ask, fieldwork and gathering of evidence, analysis of complex material, and judgment in the treatment of incomplete or contradictory information.
My current research is on political trials in or related to India. I am studying trials from the British colonial period and independent India, but I am also interested in some instances of what might be termed political trials from earlier periods, from a different landscape of jurisprudence. My legal training is extremely useful in evaluating trial material. However, I am also interested in a continuing engagement with public interest and social justice issues beyond academia. As an academic and journalist I found it frustratingly limiting to only be able to research, write and report on injustices in society, when what was ultimately needed was representation. I find the combination of academic and practitioner work extremely satisfying. My higher education is almost entirely from the United States and I have also worked there. In my experience it is quite common for academics in the United States to be involved in the world of practice in parallel with their academic work. As with journalism, I believe my academic interests and practical legal experience are highly complementary.
2. Woolf education prioritises a personal form of education based on the Oxbridge style of tutorial teaching. What is your experience with tutorial teaching at the University of Oxford, and how do you see it as relevant today?
I have taught in the United States, United Kingdom and India, including in the tutorial system at Oxford, and am able to compare the different methods of teaching across three continents in very different educational systems. The tutorial system at Oxford reminded me of the tradition of highly individualised learning in India. I learnt music in India from my ‘gurus’ who were the masters of their particular genres.
At Oxford I asked my students to submit their weekly essays the day before the tutorial (they often arrived late at night!). I read the essays before the tutorials. This enabled me to provide written feedback on the essays, but it also allowed me to spend the hour focusing on the individual needs of the student, as demonstrated by what they had written. In some cases teaching in pairs was more helpful, as the students could interact with a fellow student. In other cases, one on one teaching was more suitable. I found the individualised teaching to be great for academics who genuinely love teaching. However, the vast and wide-ranging reading list, a legacy paper that could not be changed and teaching compressed within eight weeks, was problematic. This problem would be mitigated if the academic doing the teaching had the freedom to design his or her own course, as is the case in the United States, and by teaching over longer semesters.
I believe Woolf makes a very valid point that this kind of individual, personalized teaching may be the one thing that could remain the preserve of humans in a world of machine learning. It does not merely impart knowledge, but through the personalised dialogue can guide students towards how to think about complex issues, foster curiosity and inculcate critical thinking.
3. What are the greatest challenges now facing institutions of higher learning? How do you see the Woolf project addressing these challenges?
Woolf has correctly identified the problems faced by both academics and students in the current system of established educational institutions. Students are burdened with increasing costs and debt, even for a mediocre education. Many able students around the world cannot access the high quality education they deserve. At the same time the majority of academics face a life of job insecurity, which results in a poor quality of life and prevents them from doing their best research and teaching. Many highly able people have left academia or are subsisting at its margins.
What Woolf is proposing promises a radical transformation of higher education on a global scale. By utilising the latest technological developments Woolf proposes to offer students high quality education with personalised teaching at a far lower cost, without necessarily having to travel great distances or live away from home or work. It offers academics a secure livelihood with the freedom to teach what they want and be able to focus on long-term research, while being based where they choose to live. Woolf places highly individualised teaching at its core, but would make it possible for academics to teach students around the world, eventually in multiple languages, and for many more students across the world to access high quality personalised education. This project has the potential to not only address the problems afflicting higher learning today, but to re-shape teaching and learning worldwide.
Learn more about Dr Bose’s research and background at her website here.
Learn more about the Woolf project and the people involved on the Woolf website.
