To say that one has to save NITC presupposes that there is something from which it has to be saved. It is well known to the insiders and to a certain extent outsiders that NITC is in deep crisis; the stench of decay which was covered up by those in power is slowly but steadily seeping though its decorated walls. The truth that the emperor is stark naked is out and the only question that remains is, are there any children bold enough and innocent enough to shout it. This blog aims to give space (or hyperspace a la Baudrillard) to such cries of rebellion against the farce being acted out in NITC by corrupt and fascist authorities at this moment with tax payers money. All those who have not fallen into the pit of greed, selfishness and self promotion by playing support cast to the power centers are welcome to air their views and to lay down the facts which will help in unearthing the root causes of the decline of this institute.

As a first step (a rather tentative one), let us try to list, in the order of increasing seriousness and complexity, three main issues plaguing NITC now.

1

The most self evident problem that NITC faces now is naked corruption; it will never be an exaggeration to state that corruption has become the hallmark of NITC. And it seems to know no boundaries, from the lowest levels of administration to the highest level the stench of corruption is so widespread that it is now being seen as normal. Let us try to list out some curious facts about our institute: the canteen and mini canteen contract is being given to same person for over 30 years now in spite of the fact that the food is well below average and the price level is at par or even higher than the normal market rate; the chief engineer was given extensions after extensions after his retirement ignoring protests from many quarters by the current Director who never blinks an eye when very good faculty members leave NITC due to unsatisfactory working atmosphere; almost all the construction work is being done by the same contractor; after the process of yearly faculty recruitment, no selected list is put up anywhere, the waiting list is non existent and when at last the administration was forced to publish the selected list because of RTI applications the list turns out to be a joke. Talk to anyone you see at kattangal and he will tell you how lower level contracts are handed over in NITC, how much you have to pay and to whom and you will be surprised at the extent of corruption. Real estate business men, engineers and middlemen in and around Calicut will be able to tell you a lot about the corruption at the higher tiers of the ladder, but its extent is very clear once you take a look at the construction works going around the campus. It is evident that many are making huge chunks of money at the expense of this institute and at the expense of the common man who pays to keep institutes like this running. We believe that there will be broad consensus on the view that these persons are criminals of highest order and should be dealt with an iron hand; but there is another small group who are even more vile that the corrupt ones.

These are people inside our institute who, over the course of the last few years, have clearly understood that the best way for self promotion and for moving up the ladder is to play support cast for the current administration by providing them with support from all sides. Such people get posted to almost all the “chairs” because the administration is sure that they will never ask disturbing questions and shall play the role of intellectual slaves to

perfection. In doing so, this group gets out of the way blessings in the form of professorships, new “schools”, UG and PG programmes, research grants, lavish trips and even playgrounds. One such “school” (they gave it a fancy name which has nothing to do with the type of work done inside) was sanctioned overlooking much more legitimate claims and in another case a UG and PG programme was sanctioned which is working so fine that they are conducting walk in admission now. This group has to be characterized as much more vile that the corrupt coterie as they are showing the audacity to further their career interests by giving unstinting support to the corrupt and in doing so are sucking the very blood out of NITC.

Corruption of this magnitude on all levels is not just a financial issue; it is an academic issue too. In the pursuit of money by any means the people with power are showing no regard at all for the long time planning aspect and are giving sanctions to projects based on their scope of making easy money and not based on their utility to the institute in the long term. Crores of rupees in being wasted on erecting huge buildings which are far too big for

the concerned departments and they are being allotted to people who act second fiddle to the administration. Courses are sanctioned not based on academic considerations but to please those who are supporting the corrupt coterie and what is even worse, the faculty recruitment process has become a complete farce. All these have a direct impact on the academic standing of the institute and students and sincere faculty members will be very badly hit by these. The biggest impact of this culture of corruption is to set up an environment inside the institute wherein greed, personal bias, cheap self promotions and naked loot are legitimized; a situation has arisen inside NITC in the past half a decade or so in which it is impossible for anyone to survive and to prosper without internalizing these rotten values. This, in our view, explains the loss of many excellent faculty members in the

last few years; they were not ready to trade their identity and to go along with this culture. Many of the students are forced into a subdued existence because their independence in thought and action are no longer welcome here. The greatest tragedy in this state of affairs in that some among the student minority have actually started internalizing these values as in evident from the fact that none of the ‘Ragam’ festivals in the last 4 years has been properly audited and it is common knowledge that this minority is grossly misusing the funds with the implicit permission from administration and in particular the self appointed cultural commissar of NITC Mr. Saseendran.  (It is very interesting to study the evolution of this self appointed students welfare commissar and the central role that he continues to play in all the rotten games going on inside NITC, but this is not a space for that, we will

give that in a different post)

2

The second issue that our institute is facing today surfaces itself once we ask this simple question: Why, in spite of this naked looting, has not any popular movements being mobilized against the rot? It is very important for us to try and analyse this lack of any serious rebellion. The situation at NITC has steadily gone from bad to worse and from worse to outright pathetic in the last 3 or 4 years. Thus, it would only be very normal to conclude that the main responsibility for this degradation lies with the current administration at NITC which consists of a Director imported from Warangal to boost the academic ‘credentials’ of the institute and his handful bunch of support cast. It has to be said that there is a strong case for such an argument but to base our analyses on this one reason alone will be naive and will be guilty of over simplification. It would be the same as arguing that the cause of the rise of fascism in Germany was Hitler; Hitler was only a symptom, the social, economic and ideological conditions for the growth of an ultra right movement like fascism existed in the fabric of post war German society; Hitler and his party just took advantage of it. Any analyses of the pitiful condition that NITC finds itself in now will only be worthy if it tries to explain the conditions that helped the current administration to follow an autocratic path unchallenged. For this, a peep into the past is unavoidable.

Many senior faculty members here bear witness to the fact that during the beginning of his “reign” the current Director was very apprehensive and unsure of what to expect from NITC. He is even on record saying that he is being very careful in making decisions on even small matters because he has heard that keralites are known for their social vigil and political commitment. But such doubts and apprehensions seem to have evaporated very fast as we proved by our behavior that NITC is an island inside Kerala, walled on all sides, which share nothing in common with the critical spirit of the people of the God’s Own Country. When the new administration under the able direction of the Director began slowly to set in motion the wheels of degradation, it was not the faculty who protested, it was not the staff, but it was a bunch of students who stood up taking upon themselves the mantle to fight. The issues that they took up then are as pertinent now as they were then: the widespread corruption related to new constructions, the indiscriminate felling of tress in our campus in the name of development, the idiotic policy related to the repeating of courses, the price rise in the college canteen, decision to destroy the invaluable herbal plantations for building the library, the naked irregularities in faculty recruitment and so on. Many of us are now realizing and are indeed ready to accept that a lot of these issues were very genuine; but what is of interest is not our repentance now but our reaction to the student movement then.

The way in which the NIT administration dealt with the student movement is typical of all autocratic regimes. The merits of the arguments and protests were not considered and the movement was instantly characterized as one ‘designed’ to politicize NITC. It is true that the protesters were organized under the banner of a student organization, but refusing to see the merits of their protests and instead spreading baseless fear amongst all about ‘sinister’ designs to ‘capture’ NITC was aimed at deflecting the spotlight from them and it did the trick. These students were accused of trying to spread a ‘trade union’ culture and its one of those great ironies of history that the same word would be used by the Director to characterize the Faculty association and even by Kapil Sibal to ridicule striking IIT professors!!! The faculty and the staff swallowed the administration’s arguments without questions and obediently assisted them in the fight against ‘politics’. Now after 3 years, at least some of us understand that by deflecting attention form essential issues to an ‘imaginary’ threat, the official think-tank took all of us for a jolly ride; we were fooled! This strategy was not the brain child of NITC administration, but is one which has been honed to perfection by many autocratic and corrupt regimes to keep their people under control by generating an imaginary ‘enemy’. For those who are interested, Noam Chomsky’s work gives a graphical description of how the “Red scare” was used by the US administration to justify blatant genocides in many parts of the globe and to keep public opinion favorable. Currently, Islam phobia is being used to the same effect. This is what Chomsky calls the ‘manufacture of consent’; at NITC the specter of politics was successfully used to manufacture the consent needed to crush genuine student movements with the help of faculty, staff and other students who assisted thinking foolishly that they are doing a great service to the institution. It is only now that the real meaning of what we have done becomes clear: we have effectively helped the administration to stifle all protests, to silence all voices bold enough to question and to prepare ground for autocratic functioning and naked looting of public wealth. If the faculty and other students had extended issue based support to these protests, by now G.R.C. Reddy would have been back in Warangal nursing his wounds and crying over his lost dreams.

The bottom line of this dose of history is that politically and ideologically informed people and movements were and are constantly tarnished and ridiculed by the officialdom and its cronies at NITC. They are typically characterized as motivated by ‘external’ elements and as a totally unacceptable ‘plague’ to academics. The students and faculty members are indoctrinated with the official storyline about the need to keep ‘politics’ away from the campus and a vast majority of them buy these arguments without a whimper of questioning. Those close to power at NITC and those who are benefiting from it like to present ‘politics’ as empty rhetoric carried out with the help of ‘outside’ forces and as perpetual trouble makers hindering the progress of the institute by resorting to violent strikes and protests. How much truth is there in such claims and why are the power centers

this much afraid about ideologically inspired people and the movements led by them? The reason for this is implicit in their utterances itself, philosophically and ideologically informed people are in fact ‘trouble makers’ and ‘rebels’ and if there is a strong presence of such persons and movements the power centers can rest assured that their loot will always be questioned at every turn. What is even more alarming to them is that these people do have the power and organizing capacity to trigger mass protests against the rotten administration and to actually effect real changes in the power structures at NITC. Much of what goes on around us in the name of politics is pretty rotten stuff, but real political awareness and movements have nothing to do with them. Well meaning people at NITC who are fed up with the current situation and who wants to do something about it, but have bought the official idea that ideology is bad did try to make use of nonpolitical means of protests. The current state of the faculty association which tried to protest in an ‘academic’ manner is a point worth noting, it was simply crippled by those in power.

The proponents of 'apolitics' will be doing a great service to NITC if they realise that India is the result of one of the biggest political movements of modern history, (It was Gandhi who told students to throw away their books and join the struggle for independence, NITC professors, if active then, would have accused him of being nonacademic and being motivated by 'nasty external' elements), it is because of a long drawn out ideological and political battle that everyone in this state got the right of self determination irrespective of their caste or creed, the eight hour workday that you are enjoying now was won on the sacrifice of thousands of people, there is not even a single right on earth that has been granted voluntarily by the power structures, the soil on which you stand and talk about 'dirty politics' is soaked with the blood of martyrs on whose political struggle this country and state was built. And when you think that all this happened just 60 odd years ago it clearly demonstrates the extent of our hypocrisy. To say that we should fight the corrupt and fascist coterie at NITC using 'nonpolitical' means is like saying that you should fight the British imperialism through courts and other structures that they have build; the structures of power are build only for taming protests and if we have to fight them, we have to resort to ideologically and politically aware movements. It is not that Saseendran and Paul Joseph doesn’t know this, they know it very well and they know it too that if a politically active movement takes place their honeymoon with power is over and it is this realisation that is forcing them to discredit politics and philosophy. It is a dark joke to see these people talk about 'outsiders' and 'outside motivation' etc, who are these outsiders, they are the general public, they are the real owners of this institute, it is their money that is being pumped into this institute to keep every 'academic' well paid and well fed, contrary to what the Director and self proclaimed commissars pretend, the 'outsiders' are the real financiers and owners of this place and we are all his employees; in other words the 'outsiders' are the real 'insiders'. The 'academics' inside this institute seems to think that a shop keeper at kattangal has no say in the matters of the institute, he is wrong, people have a big say and they have a right to know and to correct things happening inside, if anyone is uncomfortable with this he/she would be well advised to move to a private institution.

3

Over points 1 and 2 we have seen how corruption is eating away the very roots of this institute and how it is having an adverse effect on the long time planning and academic climate of NITC. We have also seen how the absence of genuine ideological movements is hindering any chance of their being a resistance against this corrupt administration and how the power centers are working overtime to see that such movements are quashed before they are even born. Now we shall move on to what is, in our view, the gravest issue that our institute is facing and which is the root cause of all that is wrong with NITC at this moment. We shall not try to deal with this issue comprehensively here, the issue is too deep and vast for that, we shall try that in another post dedicated fully to addressing this problem; here we shall give the main points. We shall begin by citing some concrete facts: For the first time in its history, an assistant professor at NITC was denied promotion a year ago because of his inability to bring in funded projects, the officialdom at NITC is now proclaiming openly that the main aim of the institute is to prepare students for the software industry and not in any sense ‘educate’ them, ‘industry oriented’ courses are getting the nod ahead of ‘knowledge oriented’ courses because the latter is seen as a waste of money, the research duration of a scholar was extended by a year because of the fact that he didn’t include any ‘practical’ applications in his thesis, faculty promotions and research thesis submission is being decided by the quantity of publications rather than the quality of work, in spite of having a PG course the math department recruits only faculty in computational areas and physics department in applied physics areas, (it will be interesting to know who teaches General Relativity in physics department now) the placement department head goes from class to class preaching the sermon that reading newspapers, literature, philosophy etc are a waste of time and students should only be reading business news. The above events may look independent of each other when you first see them but they are not, they are the manifestations of the same culture being cultivated very consciously in educational institutions around our country by the corporate – conservative politics nexus.

The phenomenon was christened “Academic Capitalism” by Sheila Slaughter and refers to the movement among the corporate planners to make public education into a private good which produces work power for the industry [2]. This means that the corporate sector wants state funded education to be organized in such a manner so as to produce obedient, well trained (not well educated), conservative young men and women who can be safely recruited and made use of by the corporations to make unlimited profits. Over the past 20 years or so, the central planners have been working overtime to make sure that the IITs, the NITs and other engineering colleges become places for breeding ultra right wing workforce and nothing else and all the different facts mentioned above are its consequences. It is very clear that the production of such an impotent workforce is not possible if the student community reads standard newspapers and become politically aware, if they want to read they can read popular junks like Chetan Bhagat or Frederich Forsyth, if they want to see films they can see horrible bollywood or Hollywood craps, if they want to read papers they may read business dailies which legitimize greed and idolize profit; but they should be shielded from the real stuff because that will give them the insight and the knowledge to ask questions and to rebel against corporate culture. The corporate world and their friends in the placement department know what happens to a young man when he is allowed to read Neruda and sees:

I
am the one who remembers,
although there are no eyes left on the earth,
I’ll go on seeing
and that blood
will be recorded here,
that love will go on burning here.
There is no forgetting, ladies and gentlemen,
and through my wounded mouth
those mouths will go on singing.

or what changes inside him when he reads Chomsky:

“Predatory Capitalism is incapable of meeting human needs that can be expressed only in collective terms, and its concept of competitive man who seeks only to maximize wealth and power, who subjects himself to market relationships, to exploitation and external authority, is anti human and intolerable in the deepest sense.”

They know very well that their game is over once a student gets hold of a copy of the Nobel Prize winning novel “The Golden Notebook” by Dorris Lessing and reads:

“Ideally, what should be told to every child, repeatedly, throughout his educational life is something like this: ‘You are in the process of being indoctrinated. We have not yet evolved a system of education that is not a system of indoctrination. What you are being taught here is an amalgam of current prejudices and the choices of a particular culture. The slightest look at history will show how impermanent these must be. You are being
taught by people who have been able to accommodate themselves to a regime of thought laid down by their predecessors. It is a self perpetuating system. Those of you, who are more robust and individual than others, will be encouraged to leave and find ways of educating yourself – educating your own judgment. Those that stay must remember, always and all the time, that they are being moulded and patterned to fit into the narrow and particular needs of this particular society.”

Young men and women, if let free to do serious reading will turn up in the placement department and ask the question why it is mandatory to put on shoes when appearing for an interview and what makes full sleeve shirt more ‘decent’ than half sleeve ones? It will take much more than a shirt printed with flowers to logically defend these idiotic practices. These young people will ask the corporate CEOs what their firm has got to offer which is worthy of a human being and that question will signal the end for corporate power. So it is extremely important, from the point of view of the power centers, to see to it that students do not get deep knowledge; the best way is to discredit all that is deep and rebellious and to make the students into mere puppets learning the standard tools. It is this duty that much of NITC is doing now; they are serving corporate power.

A couple of years ago, there was a discussion at NITC on the idea of giving the degree 'Doctor of Engineering' instead of the normal PhD (Doctor of Philosophy); the proponents of this idea thought that the concept of PhD was too old and is not relevant to our times. This is an extremely important point of view because it points out the direction in which the institute is moving now. The idea behind PhD is the conviction that when you go deep

enough in any field, philosophical shades begin to appear and so original research in any field is essentially nothing but a philosophical quest. In fact science itself began as a part of philosophical investigation and it was seen as a tool to investigate natural phenomenon. This changed with the advent of the modern industry and science and engineering began to be seen as having nothing to do with philosophical investigations. This development was triggered with blessings from the industry which wanted the tools of science to be used as profit making machines. But still genuine deep thinkers continues to be philosophically oriented. Einstein is the most famous example and his philosophical and literary orientation is legendary. We have already seen how deep thinking among young people can herald the end of corporate culture, so it is crucially important from the point of view of profit mongers to assure that deep thinking is not cultivated and that students and faculty members are not given the freedom to see the beauty hidden inside their respective fields of study. They should see all that they study as tools for acquiring a good job or as tools of publishing a paper and getting a promotion, then they will never ask disturbing questions. The whole academic culture is being tuned to do exactly this job by the central planners and institutes including NITC are walking into the trap. Lets take the example of the condition which is slowly being implemented that all faculty members need to bring in sponsored research projects. This condition is the norm in united states and its aims and the politics behind it has been very well documented by eminent theoretical physicist Lee Smolin [3]. Funding comes from either the government agencies or from private corporations and the vast majority of such funding goes only for projects which are useful either for defence forces or for private corporations. Smolin, in his wonderful book, sights the example of a Nobel Prize winner in physics whose salary was cut down by the university because of his decision to work on fundamental problems which have no chance of bringing in any kinds of funds. So the concentration on funding has a clear political side to it, it is to make sure that faculty members and consequently students do not 'waste' their time working on fundamentally important and deep scientific questions. If anyone tries to do that he/she will have nothing to show as yearly funding obtained and it will be very hard for him/her to progress. The central government, with the strong support of the corporate lobby, is slowly beginning to implement funding based channeling of research here also and our 'academicians' are supporting it whole heartedly without knowing that they are losing their academic independence once and for ever; from now on corporate interests will decide on what we shall do research on. This is a clear cut political and ideological move supported by right wing politicians and corporate interests and NITC is unaware of it because they are being told that political consciousness is a bad thing. You need to have a high level of ideological knowledge and awareness to understand the politics behind funding agencies and the 'apolitical' movement led by Saseendran, Paul Joseph, Sureshbabu etc makes sure that this does not happen. It was Simone De Beauvoir who wrote that: "Indifference is also a stand", in the same sense it should also be said that apolitics is also politics, it is a tool in the hands of those who wants to support right wing conservative politics and wants to help private greed. If someone proclaims to you that he is 'apolotical' you can be pretty sure that he has strong sympathy for right wing politics. (Deep study of this phenomenon of 'apolitics' and its connections with private capital has been done by Slavoj Zizek, Terry Eagleton and Naom Chomsky among many others and detailed analysis can be found in their writings).

If you analyse the academic stipulations being implemented at our institute, you can easily see that every one of them is tailor made for achieving the above mentioned aim. Take the over importance given for the quantity of published work and the virtual negligence about its quality. If you are reacquired to publish n number of papers within a fixed span of time in order to land a promotion or if you are forced to publish a stipulated number of papers to get your degree it is evident that you will be forced to do substandard work. What is more important is that any chance of deep fundamental investigation is ruled out as in that case you will never be able to meet the condition of publications. (Einstein took 11 years to formulate General Relativity, Andrew Wiles published nothing for 10 years when working on the proof of Fermat's Last Theorem, Perelman worked for 8 years and came up with the proof for Poincare Conjecture). These policies are aimed at killing originality in research and education and to force young minds to work on 'practical' problems which are useful for private capital to make profit, they are aimed at churning out an academic system in which survival is equivalent to working for corporates and originality means death. This is the culture which permits the math department to conduct a PG Programme without having a single pure mathematician in their department. In spite of all these problems, if a faculty or student at NITC decides to work on original problems, then it is a political act, it has more power than thousand slogans and it is a rebellion against the whole corporate ideology; it is in this broad sense that the 'politics' have to be seen by real academicians. There are many dimensions to this complex issue that needs to be examined but we hope that central point is clear. A national movement is going on to shift the academic and research culture in favour of corporate interests which gives minimal importance to real fundamental questions and the whole administrative machinery is being tuned to make sure that this is implemented. This is a completely ideological conservative and politically right wing agenda and can only be understood and countered by strong progressive political struggles.

Conclusion

In conclusion, it will be fair to say that the agenda of right wing political elements and corporate capital to make educational institutions like NITC into production centers of a robotic workforce is being smoothly carried out here. There are two prerequisites for such a plan; the first one is the existence of a faculty and student community which is politically unaware and ideologically dumb. The second one is an administration and its supporting cast which is sufficiently self centred to carry out these vile plans without any remorse. Both are there in our institute and that is our main problem. We have wondered why no action is being taken against the current administration by those in the higher reaches of power in spite of there being very strong clues about wide spread irregularities; we now understand that the freedom to loot comes as the prize for following orders from above and for systematically and meticulously dismantling the educational fabric of the institution and replacing it by a culture based on greed and selfishness. The effect of such a culture can be catastrophic. To quote Chomsky again: "A depoliticized population could very easily be mobilized into thinking it's somebody else's fault: "Why are our lives collapsing? There have to be bad guys out there doing something for things to be going so badly'. If you can whip people into irrational frenzies like that, they can be extremely dangerous: that's what 1930s Fascism came from, and something like that could very easily happen here". Another effect, apart from fascistic tendencies that Chomsky is mentioning, is for the student community to move towards religious fundamentalism. This explains a tremendous increase in fundamental religious movements in our institute in the

last decade. The 'apolitical' gang does not have any reservations against such elements and are always ready to give these movements space inside the institute, in fact many in the 'apolitical' gang are active sympathisers of religious fundamentalism of one sought or the other. To be creative and to have an individuality are two basic needs of a human being and when he finds himself in a culture created especially to quash any sought of meaningful creative activity and to encourage the loss of individuality, he will try to attain a certain level of self respect by the use of power and by degrading others. This is the root cause of the sadistic act of ragging; ragging is not a policing issue as made out by the supreme court and accepted without question by the institutes, it is a cultural and political issue in the sense that it is the reaction of young men and women to an environment that does not give them space for creation and building an individual identity. When Saseendran tries to stop ragging by using iron rules, he is treating the symptom and not the real disease; the real cancer is himself and his friends who are trying overtime to create a system which is completely anti human. What is therefore needed is a comprehensive change in the way NITC is being governed which should bring about a drastic change in culture; this cannot be done in 'apolitical' ways because these issues are very political, rebellion should take the form of strongly political organisation and ideological motivation.

[1] See the Chapter “The Red Scare”, pg no. 185-191, “Necessary Illusions: Thought Control in Democratic Societies” by Naom Chomsky.

[2] "Academic capitalism and the new economy: markets, state and higher education" by Sheila Slaughter, Gary Rhoades.

[3] "The trouble with physics: The rise of string theory, the fall of science and what comes next"  by Lee Smolin