University and resistance: New state and new struggles

Abstract

Resistance movements in India have often found support and sustenance within universities that have offered profound association, critical engagement, expertise, camaraderie, and, in some cases, even leadership. Working within the structural confines of statism, nationalism and global capitalism, universities have managed to advance critical instruction, pedagogical innovations, and political resistance. This dialectical relationship between the university and society emphasizes the position of educators as inextricably linked to the social production of labor power. With the power to equip students, teachers not only become conduits of emancipatory knowledge but also have the power to politicize students and transform the classroom into spaces of resistance against capitalism, that has consistently emphasized education as a commodity. As a result, universities have offered and preserved crucial spaces of radical (re)thinking and a critical platform for waging a war for democracy. A new form of protracted and collective political resistance is necessary if democracy is to be restored from the ruins of unrestrained capitalism. Being the meeting points of decades of collective struggles of students–teachers–workers, universities may yet again offer that if they survive the assaults of neoliberalism and evolve to preserve its progressive social character.