Another student has taken his own life, leading to a few days of intense TV debates aimed at boosting TRP ratings, before we quickly return to business as usual. A student jumping from a college building is just another statistic added to an ongoing record of administrative indifference. The recent death of Nithin Raj at a dental college in Kannur is the latest example in another caste discrimination tragedy. Whoever called the educational institutions ‘a temple of learning’ had no idea what a temple was supposed to mean or had extreme hatred towards temples. Our colleges are slaughterhouses where the dreams of marginalised individuals are systematically destroyed by a privileged academic elite. Nithin, a Dalit student who reportedly faced relentless taunts about his skin colour and background, chose to leap from a five-storeyed building rather than endure the daily humiliation he faced in the classroom. Nothing much has changed from the day when Rohith Vemula took his life for the crime of committing the “fatal accident of birth.” Our campuses are medieval fiefdoms.
We grant unchecked power to the faculty members, and they think they are divinely ordained. In our country, a 19-year-old is considered mature enough to elect the government of a nuclear-armed nation. However, the moment that same individual enters a college campus, they become inmates of a correctional institute, and the faculty becomes the jail wardens, drunk on power. One of the batons that these modern-day torturers in these cloistered institutions possess is the outdated attendance system. This insistence on compulsory attendance is not about education; it serves as a form of confinement. They are well aware that unless they shepherd the students into forced confinement, no one would waste their time attending their boring lectures. Mediocre instructors are given a captive audience over whom they can act like tyrants.
Not many countries treat students as serfs. In Europe and America, higher education treats students as adult consumers. You pay for the credits, and if you choose not to attend a lecture, you accept the consequences on your final exam. There are no jailers disguised as professors counting heads or “marking” attendance. In the ‘decadent’ West, a student is an adult consumer; here in the land of divine Gurus, he or she is just raw material for a professor’s fragile ego
The Thorat Committee report, which investigated discrimination at AIIMS, along with various subsequent commissions, highlights how “continuous evaluation” is often used to address personal grievances and reinforce caste hierarchies. This system is intentionally designed to lack transparency. For example, a teacher’s mood during a viva-voce (oral examination) can ultimately determine whether a student from a rural background has the opportunity to become a doctor. Internal assessment is nothing but legalised extortion, a tool for the academic elite to extract servility from those whose surnames or skin tones offend their fragile, casteist sensibilities.
I remember my time in a professional college that was anything but professional. Professors took out their personal grievances on the students. Some performances included flinging the record books that a student might have toiled on for many nights into the drainage, tearing off project reports, abusing and insulting the students and their family members for no reason and such things. Coming from a modest background, I was an easy target for professors who mistook their positions for a license to bully. I wore my worn-out chappals like a badge of poverty that my professors used for target practice. My stuttering English was their midday entertainment, a circus for men who would be cooling their heels in a psychiatric ward in any sensible society. While this was how they treated a poor but ‘upper caste’ student, the fate of those coming from the poor and ‘Dalit or tribal’ background was worse. Many of us had thick skins and laughed off such antics by our ‘teachers’ as ‘nut cases’, but not everyone is blessed with rhinoceros hide. There were a couple of suicides on our campus, but since it was before the era of social media and TRP hunters, these tragedies went unnoticed. It is difficult to imagine even the prime minister of India holding the kind of powers that a college professor holds over the hapless students. A signature on a lab report can affect their future. In a system designed this way, if more college faculties don’t become despots that a Hitler can be proud of, we can only thank their goodness of heart.
Why do we tolerate a closed institutional environment where a teacher can demand servility in exchange for a passing grade? A student isn’t just fighting an outdated and irrelevant syllabus; he is dodging a system that spits on his social origins and mocks his skin tone. The hierarchy within education is so rigid that there is no room for dissent or dialogue; it resembles a “Kangaroo Court” within the faculty room. Indian civilisation had always deified the ‘Gurus,’ but the modern ones are merely employees of a college with a paycheck, glorified ‘babus’ demanding the reverence due to ‘holy babas’. Mata, Pita, Guru, Daiva goes the saying, placing Guru above God. If many of the teachers are gods, count me as an atheist. The respect needs to be earned through their deeds, not because they happened to be employed at an institution.
Abolish the farce of mandatory attendance. Stop the legalised extortion of internal marks. Let evaluation be transparent and external, stripping the HOD of his petty God-complex. As of now, our tax money is funding a network of goon-training centres where the next generation is trained in obedience rather than innovation. The “merit” we so loudly defend in television debates is often just a mask for the privilege of belonging to the right caste or the right economic bracket.
We will keep losing promising individuals like Nithin and Rohith in our country. The same bigotry that affected our villages a century ago is flourishing in our campuses now. The faculty are the zamindars, and the students are the peasants. The transition to adulthood should not be a test of how much mistreatment one can endure from a psychopath with a PhD and a fragile ego.