In centenary 12 months, Visva-Bharati stays in news for wrong reasons

For the Rabindranath Tagore-founded Visva-Bharati, 2021 was meant to be a 12 months of celebrations, marking 100 years of the college, however it stands overshadowed by COVID-19 and fixed clashes between the Vice-Chancellor and the employees.

On Friday night, Manas Maity, a Professor of Physics, filed an FIR on the Santiniketan Police Station towards the Vice-Chancellor, Prof. Bidyut Chakrabarty, for humiliating academics throughout an internet assembly on June 8. While it’s extremely unlikely that something of significance goes to return of the criticism, the FIR is a sign how the college is marking its centenary.

“I guess something must be happening [to mark the centenary] but most of us have no idea about it,” mentioned a instructor who has been employed with Visva-Bharati for over twenty years now.

Ever since Prof. Chakrabarty took cost in November 2018, the college has been in news for all of the wrong reasons: a gag order on employees, a number of new dos and don’ts imposed on academics of an establishment that has been in existence for a century, fixed issuing of show-cause notices in search of to self-discipline staff, eviction of “erring” college students from hostels, development of excessive partitions across the campus, and battle with the native inhabitants.

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“As humans we tend to live through landmarks like birth anniversaries, a decade, or a centenary. Our natural tendency is to value these landmarks as course-correction moments. Visva-Bharati has completed 100 years, one would justifiably wish this would be a year of introspection, but the institution seems to be hurtling along the path of all the ills that have befallen it under the present dispensation,” mentioned educationist Sudripta Tagore, a former scholar of the college and a descendant of Rabindranath’s household.

“Denial is one such ill that plagues the institution today — that is the gift to Visva-Bharati by its administration on its hundredth year. Another gift is walls, both literal and figurative,” Mr. Tagore mentioned.

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A senior academician who was carefully related to Visva-Bharati for a few years however who didn’t want to be named, mentioned: “How does the Tagore model of education square up to the much-touted New Education Policy; why it is important for the entire world to emulate the nature-based education system that Tagore had envisaged; what is the value of interfacing with the community; why we must integrate the sciences and humanities with creative arts — these are some of the questions that Visva-Bharati could have addressed in its centenary year.”

“But the present administration is busy with all non-Tagorean thoughts such as erecting walls around the campus, alienating the community by eviction, humiliating the teachers by summary suspension and issuance of show-cause notices. There is no discernible attempt to put the COVID-derailed educational system back on track. Instead, a fear psychosis is being created all around.”

Visva-Bharati was formally established as a college in 1921, regardless that it had existed as an academic centre — in the type of an ashram college — since 1901. Together with the Banaras Puucho University (1916) and Aligarh Muslim University (1921), the three establishments had been rooted in conventional Indian values and, not like different Indian universities of the time, didn’t comply with the British mannequin of schooling.