Musings on contemporary academic culture -II

Guest Blogger

Pratiksha Baxi

For the comments posted here and many emails, much gratitude to everyone for reflecting on my previous post. Although the individual accounts of angst have not been shared with everyone on this blog, I am gratified to have been the recipient of many a confidence and indicate these here without naming individuals.

Some have been curious as to why chose to write this post, what was the trigger? In it self it is an interesting question when do people decide to “out” an issue that has troubled for a lifetime? Perhaps it is the idealism of hope – a hope that things can and will change if we talk about it in a collective and constructive way.

Why frame the issue around rights or right to information – perhaps simply to begin to find the language of rights for the experiences collated below:

Racism: Friends and students from the North East who have often complained of automatically being considered “stupid” and faculty expressing surprise when they discovered that they were actually were brilliant at their work.

Casteism: The idea that a student who gets a fellowship on the basis of caste or tribe criteria is a “parasite” is a loathsome form of discrimination practised everyday in the academia.

Sexism: Brilliant women scholars have been denied professorial positions in the social sciences.

What then happens when these scholars appear for job interviews? What happens if the candidate is a good scholar but unable to speak eloquently in English? What happens if the candidate has the ‘wrong’ politics, wears odd clothes or is ‘too fat’? This is just the tip of the iceberg since most interview committees have no clue how to interview candidates with various disabilities, if they ever decide to fill this quota. Ashley Tellis tells us what happens if you are a good scholar, meet the criteria, and speak well – but you happen to be gay and encounter the homophobia of a committee.

Another senior academic advices us in a mode of irony, “whatever happens, do not write bad book reviews, if you want a job”.

Many a friends spoke about feelings of humiliation at interviews – I have my own share of stories to narrate – but biography is often reduced to gossip. At any rate it is hard to prove discrimination and harder to fight sexist, communal or casteist comments at an interview. Surely it is difficult to come up with a witty rejoinder which does not offend everyone to a question such as: “what is the economics of rape?”, “you are a muslim, do you support Pakistani terrorism?” or “why do you live alone?” The best is when the same set of people who interview you again and again ask you, why you have no teaching experience – duh! It is harder still to tell a male professor in your department that he is sexist to the core when he says, “you can not teach in an undergraduate college because you are too thin”. Or to another professor, who says “you are too soft spoken to teach – you will need a mike” [those with disabilities will never make it in such a context].

Can we not do something about the process? Or as another friend suggested, should we innovate and introduce the American method of job talk? A job talk would entail a departmental seminar, interaction with students and the committee to actually engage intellectually with the candidate’s work. But graduate students, friends in American Universities, also narrate how broken they are by the system and struggle to find the confidence to write again. What is the critique of the US job talk model?

Until this discussion happens in India, why are there no guidelines as to how to conduct an interview? Maybe minor etiquette could be a small beginning which accords the candidate with dignity. We could script it as follows:

1. Introduce the committee to the candidate
2. Offer her a glass of water and perhaps even smile joyfully at the candidate
3. Read her CV, SOP and publications in advance
4. Ask questions relevant to her research and teaching
5. Do not frown, yawn or sleep through the interview
6. If the candidate does not wish to answer a question or is nervous, find another good question.
7. Do not raise your voice or fight amongst yourself in front of the candidate
8. Do not make sexist, caste-ist or communal remarks
9. Do not ask about the candidate’s personal life
10. If you are well mannered you may even escort the candidate to the door.


Is it at all possible to give constructive feedback to candidates who wish to re-apply and make them welcome again to another round of interviews?

And if you are very clear that someone is never going to make it to your department, please do the act of great kindness a senior professor in my department once showed me, by advising me to apply for jobs elsewhere.


I agree with Hutom Pyacha that the problematic is not confined to Universities. [Read this to know what Hutom Pyacha stands for] Research Centres and many Law Schools do not even follow the minimal guidelines which are a norm in the UGC governed institutions. Abysmal levels of accountability exist wherein academic on contract jobs persist for the longest period of probation ever known in the academia. I have heard of faculty being punished for raising issues of accountability in Law Schools – do the National Law Schools have student/teachers unions or redressal mechanisms that exist elsewhere? Could LAOT share experiences about Law Schools with the rest of us? Do we know how many women are professors or heads of institutions in the field of law? Neither JNU nor DU has ever appointed a woman as a Vice Chancellor.


Why do people not speak out? Not surprisingly many share the view that sadly Universities often remain anti-academic and punitive spaces. To quote a friend, it is ‘a totally reactionary institution, one that evolved with the modern military and Catholic Church in the middle ages and has not changed much since...’ While our experiences of University spaces are complicated and contradictory, and it is hard to generalise but nonetheless the responsibility of crafting a vibrant University space remains ours, and maybe someone out there who matters will listen and care about our fling with the academia. I am grateful that LAOT provides this space.

Musings on contemporary academic culture

By Pratiksha Baxi [Guest Blogger]

[Pratiksha Baxi is no stranger to us, having written her first provocative post recently for us on tabloidization of law. Today, she seeks to initiate another debate on the aberrations of academia in our universities through this guest post.]

The discourse on the right to information has affected university spaces in more than one ways. One of the foremost shifts has been in the realm of everyday discourse within the work space. Minimally, the spectre of a potential RTI application has re-structured the manner in which records are maintained and decisions taken. While the right to information is usually seen as increasing work load, a form of harassment or at best, bad manners, it has not really inaugurated a new culture of accountability. Take the instance of the process of hiring academics in Universities. Despite the growing number of opportunities for University jobs, many talented researchers struggle to make ends meet and fight failing confidence due to repeated injustices. Yet biographies of academic discrimination remain the gist of whispers and gossip. These do not translate into a constructive discussion of how we may make higher education accountable and hospitable.

A lifetime in University spaces in Delhi, across disciplines, amounts to cataloguing histories of humiliations and witnessing angst about the romance with an uncaring academia. Every other department acquires its own history through the years which constitutes its present. The divisions within each department over ideology, standards, schools of thought and personalities leave behind a wake of blameless victims in every other generation of young and then not so young researchers who aspire to teach. Not unlike kinship or caste groups, these departments classify individual academics and future generations of students [who may then aspire to teach] into set lobbies. Norms of sociality observed elsewhere in life are suspended when dealing with these outsiders – such that even everyday courtesies such as a greeting are withdrawn. It is not uncommon for academics to describe how deeply personal such hostilities are. Gossip about the deemed outsider determines the interpretation of merit. We realise again and again that the Curriculum Vitae needs the energy supplement, a real time Facebook.

The recluse or the renegade who resists the system of patronage by enacting a refusal of sycophancy, blind loyalty or obedience is habitually punished. S/he is punished for not belonging to the correct genealogy, for ideological differences, for lack of social capital or even for not being charming enough. Not unlike ragging, the temporal lag wherein inter departmental politics plays out to deny, exclude or humiliate the textual children of hated colleagues is routine in our Universities. Those who speak of principles and academic standards to ask difficult questions often face situations wherein everyday work life is made horrendously difficult.

Why are our professors not disturbed by the wide spread perceptions that they demand a following that must be submissive? Surely this is a poor reputation? Why do we not have a tradition of critique and care that co-exists? Instead, we are culturally disciplined by the values ascribed to the “guru-shishya” parampara, no matter how secular everyone is. This normalising discourse means control over students and aspirants to the profession from using the languages of rights and discrimination as a form of public critique. This disciplinary discourse prevents the spirit behind the people’s movement which wished to create the right to information as a route to accountability from actualisation.

Rather than create a restfully active environment conducive to the life of the mind, we witness severe unhappiness marked by insecurities, envy and politics of the most banal kind in the academia. Surely Universities must be spaces where we learn how to converse – confer – however, very often such spaces, especially staff council or faculty meetings, enact violent or mannerless forms of communication. Why is it that there is no discussion about why does higher education promote the ethic of competition and humiliation rather than care and hospitality?

The problem of sexism in universities is part of a larger culture of valourising patriarchal values of patronage and docility. Feminists cannot succeed in challenging the gross manifestations of gendered discriminations within the academia, unless a foundational cultural challenge is offered to how we wish to be, as academics, at our workplace. Rather than reproduce the canon, we ought to welcome newness, recognise transgression and autonomy as cherished values and promote an ethic of accountability. It is our responsibility to assuage hurt, correct past injustices and find a different voice. For every broken person who is unable write after encountering the inhumanity which abounds in our universities, each one of us is responsible for destruction rather than creation of the life of the mind. Is it not high time we find a different voice?

The NUJS Law Review: another step towards reviving strong legal scholarship in India

The new National Law Schools have often – and justifiably – been criticized for their failure to develop a strong scholarly and research tradition and a corresponding body of scholarship on Indian law. The reasons for this failure are quite complicated, and are the subject of considerable debate. One measure of scholarly contributions is the existence of a quality journal. Two decades after the establishment of the first National Law School in Bangalore, there is no single journal within the country which can justifiably claim that it matches the heights reached by the Journal of the Indian Law Institute in its first two decades (even that esteemed journal has since been unable to consistently keep up with that level of quality in recent years).

The good news, however, is that most of the new schools now acknowledge this lacuna, and are taking steps to address it. One such measure is the renewed focus on student edited journals, and the determined efforts of their editorial boards to raise the profile of their publications by soliciting high-quality pieces from lawyers and academics within India and abroad. Simultaneously, the journals also provide a vehicle for well-researched pieces by current students, thereby paving the way for a future generation of homegrown academics. Significantly, a number of these journals have chosen to digitize their issues, and have also made efforts to provide free online access to archived issues. The trend was initially started by journals at the National Law School, Bangalore (the National Law School of India Review, the Socio-Legal Review and the Indian Journal of Law and Technology) and has been followed by NALSAR Hyderabad (the Indian Journal of Constitutional Law and the Indian Journal of Intellectual Property Law).

This post seeks to highlight the emergence of the NUJS Law Review, which has joined the trend noted above. Although only three issues old, it is quickly moving towards the achievement of its founding objectives of becoming a “medium of expression and preservation of legal research” while simultaneously serving as “an important component of legal education, training and skills learning for the students of NUJS.” The archives section of the dedicated website of the journal (perhaps a first for a student-run journal, although the IJCL has a tie-up with the commercial database Indlaw that allows it to have a separate section on an existing website) now features the full contents of the first three issues of the journal.

Each of the three issues features stimulating articles on topical issues by some leading foreign (usually German) and domestic scholars, while also containing shorter comments and notes by NUJS students. The subjects canvassed so far include : international criminal law, EU integration, , IP law, WTO law, telecommunications law, election law and a host of other topics. The book review section of each issue covers significant books on Indian law that have been published recently. Many of these articles make for interesting reading. Given my own interests, I found articles by Professors Goerlich (providing a German constitutional analysis of the death penalty) and MP Singh (which is probably one of the early published analyses of the Ashoka Kumar Thakur case) particularly stimulating.

What is most heartening about the journal is that the quality of its student-authored contributions appears to be steadily improving. The third issue in particular presents the work of a team of students, who call themselves ‘the basis structure research group’ and have authored a set of six articles focusing on various aspects of the Kesavananda ruling. Even as I have only begun to make my way through these articles, I am struck by the intellectual ambition and rigour of the analysis on display. As explained in the joint foreword by the authors, the project appears to be the result of a two-year study, and the final papers offer many provocative leads on a subject which may well be the single most analysed issue within Indian constitutional law scholarship.

The NUJS Law Review is somewhat unique in having chosen to be a quarterly. Given that more established journals have had trouble in bringing out even one annual issue in recent times, this fact is itself an indication of the ambitious nature of the project. If the fare that has been on offer so far is anything to go by, we may well have good reasons to closely watch out for succeeding issues.

Prashant Bhushan's talk in Oxford (and legal and political criticisms)

Update: Arvind Narrain's LASSNET paper linked below (and here).

Prashant Bhushan (noted public interest lawyer) presented a carefully-researched paper titled Sacrificing Human Rights And Environmental Rights At The Altar Of “Development” in Oxford on the 14th of March 2009. The full-text of the paper can be accessed here. Citing several cases, the talk concluded as follows:

The trend of recent cases, therefore, suggests that (1) the Court has often subordinated civil liberties to the perceived imperative of state security, particularly in the context of the recent “war on terror”, (2) The Courts’ liberal and expansive pronouncements on socio-economic rights under article 21 have not been matched by a determination to implement those rights, (3) That since the liberalization of the Indian economy, even the courts’ rhetoric on socio-economic rights have been weakening, (4) That very often the Court has itself ordered the violation of those rights, violating in the process even the principles of natural justice, (5) That whenever socio-economic rights of the poor come into conflict with environmental protection, the Court has usually subordinated those rights to environmental protection, (6) That whenever environmental protection comes into conflict with what is perceived by the Court to be “development” or powerful commercial vested interests, environmental protection is usually subordinated at the altar of “development”, or such powerful interests. There are of course exceptional judgements which defy these trends, particularly from High Courts.

One strand of discussion that emerged after the talk (although not necessarily directed towards Bhushan's paper and one with which he sympathised) related to the nature of academic criticism of judgments. The argument was that Indian legal scholarship has usually offered political criticism of judgments, but a 'legal critique' has not always been forthcoming. While the importance of the former cannot be denied, the latter may sometimes be useful (if only strategically, since legal language is one that judges understand better).

The discussion made me think about Arvind Narrain's paper presented at the LASSNET conference where he made a similar point in the context of the queer rights movement. Except those adhering to legal realist schools of thought, few of us will consider the following claims to be legally plausible (whatever our position might be ideologically):

1. That by providing due process norms for determination of who is a foreigner, Parliament had in effect allowed unrestricted immigration, which amounts to external aggression under Article 355--therefore the IMDT Act was unconstitutional.

2. That the Chief Justice of India's Office is not part of the Supreme Court, nor is it a 'public authority' under the RTI Act.

How then do our top lawyers get away by saying things any competent first year undergraduate will know to be nonsense? Don't legal academics need to share some blame for allowing them to get away with such arguments? (Of course there have been exceptions, and the claim that most critique is only political is a huge generalisation. The claim is admittedly anecdotal, and perhaps only relative. Yet, I believe the broader argument stands.)

Legal and political critiques

Some readers have asked me to elaborate upon the distinction between legal and political critiques. Admittedly, the distinction is not always clear. But very broadly (and with many exceptions), I think the effect of an order in a judgment can be criticised on the basis of various political values, while how that result was achieved (i.e. the reasoning in the judgment) may be subject to legal criticism. In effect, the latter claim recognises that interpretation is not an unrestricted exercise--therefore, it believes that the (caricatured) legal realist claim that 'law is what the judge had for breakfast' is wrong. One may disagree on what makes an interpretation illegitimate. Examples include Hart's famous 'vehicle in the park' problem, or Dworkin's hypothetical judge Hercules who must adopt the best normative principles that fit within a given legal history. Whatever may be one's approach to legal interpretation (except Legal Realism), at least some interpretative exercises will be illegitimate. This is an internal legal critique--when the Court says that delay by rule of law procedure for nationality determination encourages 'external aggression' and therefore such procedure is unconstitutional, that is not an interpretation most normative appraoches to law can sustain.

This is only a general explanation. Sometimes law itself may deem certain results to be impermissible--criticising these results can thus be legal as well as political. I must reiterate that I think there is enormous value in political critiques. I just think that there is value in legal critiques as well (strategic as well as normative). In failing to make them, we in fact allow the law to be what the judge had for breakfast.