Higher education is an amazingly diverse field. On one hand, we have the historical varieties of higher education. Different systems had developed in the ancient worlds of  China, India and Greece. Arab scholars in the first five hundred years of the founding of Islam developed knowledge systems in their specific institutional settings for the practice of knowledge. Today the west European university is almost a universal orthodoxy as the knowledge institution.

However, more and more knowledge is being created outside the university – in the research wings of financial institutions on one end and in the grassroots movements of NGOs and various social activist groups on another end of the spectrum. But even within the university system, the liberal arts university is taking a backseat to management schools and knowledge institutions that can further perceived and real economic objectives of the ‘powerstream’ ( I do not want to use the word mainstream because it is a cluster of the power elites that determine direction and the bulk of the populations follow this ‘powerstream’). Another point worth bringing into the picture is the relation between knowledge and real life. There are some areas of life where a professional’s ability to gain respect and earn a decent livelihood is almost entirely dependent on the knowledge and degree acquired in the university system and there are professions where the university system’s influence is rather small. It is hard to imagine a self-taught doctor who has learnt to do neuro-surgery without having gone to a medical school. On the other hand, I am yet to come across an accomplished journalist who did a degree in journalism and it is almost inconceivable to think of a politician who studied politics in university.

The role of higher education also varies enormously between innovative societies and imitative ones. The brightest minds of the science and technology labs in the Ivy League campuses play with the frontiers of human knowledge. In contrast, the bright minds of Japanese universities very often try to make a western invention more marketable. Within societies under the same state structure too, university means different things to different people. Some university campuses in northern India act as breeding grounds of the political elite in the Delhi-centric political system and the Indian Institutes of Technology produce nuts and bolts in the western capitalist system at a cheap price that too paid by the Indian taxpayer.

Like the exceedingly limited march of the enlightenment ideals of rationality and progress around the globe, university too has penetrated the world outside western societies through skewed second-rate imitations of the ones that developed and took shape in late medieval and early modern Europe. Buildings have been built, departments have been created; but minds have not got inspired to the creation of humane societies. Universities have dished out degrees and individuals have tried to earn their security in an uncertain world and yet the uncertainty has only increased more than ever before. And, it is not only that the university system in the ‘first world denominated third world’ that has not had the liberating effect on its societies, the social role of universities in the west too have become more and more marginalised by staid economic activity.

In this chaos, can I say something with clarity? Possibly, not. I did most of the interviews relating to my research on university intelligentsia and social transformations in a period when the western world was gearing up to cope with the attacks on New York and Washington in September, 2001. When my research is drawing to a close a divided answer has been played out. What is interesting to note is that policy makers ignored almost entirely the opinion on the streets of western cities. And, these were young people, many of whom were university students or have been in the recent past. My work on Slovenia, Poland, Bangladesh and India tells me that it is on the university campus – though not so much in the classrooms – that young minds get inspired in political and philosophical directions which shape their later engagement in developing a just society. It’s not true of a large majority necessarily but the vocal minority remains to be vocal and active in their lives after university. If one could think of building a mechanism whereby bright minds on campuses will be heard by policy makers in Kremlin, or White House or Tienanmen, we may have less tragedies globally. I heard Rada Ivekovic, a Croatian philosopher, now teaching at the University of Paris 8, a couple of months ago in Calcutta. She told us that the fact that a few generations in Yugoslavia did not have any political agency led to the end of Yugoslavia being so painful and so fraught with upheaval. The world and its constituent societies are at a stage where a similar thing seems to be happening on a much larger scale. The logic of the market is dwarfing the rationale of ‘the human condition’. The university is first and foremost about ‘the human condition’. Let us try to get that moving once again. On a policy level that would mean greater engagement with society and for each one of us, immediate societies and near and distant ones.  Also, getting out of complacency and creating partnerships for knowledge and action, not only between biotech labs and transnational seed companies but also between schools of social thought and protest movements against big dams.

This would also mean purging the university of its unitary philosophical structures of knowledge. Knowledge systems that are unitary will most likely result in unitary Washingtons or unitary Beijings. A multi-polar world can emerge possibly, only if there is a  polyphony in knowledge systems that is accepted between societies. So, let’s try to implant many voices, sometimes cacophonous, to get the university moving beyond the confines of research monographs, and the world moving beyond the belief that there is one western truth and its concommitant systems for the universal deliverance of man.

My research marks somewhat of a  mid-point in a search I began when I started knowing about the student movements of 1960s in various parts of the world. Let me end with the polyphony that I found in a comment relating to those times. In a BBC radio discussion on writers and politics in 1988, the Italian academic – novelist Umberto Eco was asked what he thought was the political role of the intellectual. Eco said that in 1968 when students came to the university, they said that they would not learn mechanics because it was a dirty capitalist trick and it only taught people how to drive airplanes. In 1988, when students were coming to the university, they were only interested in learning mechanics so that they could drive airplanes. So, Eco, says, “ In 68, I said, mechanics was not that bad and in 88, I say mechanics is not all that good.” This, in Eco’s view, was the political role of the professor. This, in my view is the philosophical role of the university. If the university fails to impart that politics to its graduates, it would have failed to justify its existence.