Fiddlers on the roof

For the last eighteen years, I have been with this historically great university. I have gained quite a lot of happiness and satisfaction while working in my field. But the satisfaction comes through because, now and then, good, devoted, academically sincere people come together and we are able to achieve some good results. As an institution, the university is not much help. We keep bothering ourselves over trivial difficulties, which should not have occured in the first place. And the university never moves a muscle...and this happens often enough to warrant such a general statement.

We do scratch out tunes with the difficulty of the proverbial fiddler on the roof... Things do get done sometimes... But the varsity sure tries hard to take away all the pleasure from anything creative.

Now, you may ask 'who' exactly is this university that I am refering to? Let me keep the identity of the university shielded. Because I do not want to talk and discuss the misfortune of a single institution really. I repeat the question- who exactly is this UNIVERSITY? I can answer in one word. Its 'us'. The academic - or rather the so-called academic community. For all the universities are made up of this basic "stuff'", with all their proper PhD holders, Masters and so on. So in a sense they are the universities.

As I analyse all the failures around us, I realize that the academic community is the most responsible for what has befallen us. A big question-mark on my own community! I have serious doubts; I feel, that to a great extent, the mediocrity of those stamped out as academics has caught our once great universities by the neck. This mediocrity gets reflected in almost every academic endeavour.

What has become of the people who are supposed to provide intellectual leadership to society? Where has their self-respect disappeared? Why have they become so submissive before the 'higher-ups' who are usually appointees of the powers that be and often not academically sound, forget intellectually superior? What is the quality of research that has earned them their PhDs? How many of their theses are worth the paper they are written on? Is it not that the research work itself is far less important than the increment it will fetch? How many research guides destroy their students through torment?... To an outsider, some of these questions might appear unthinkable... They might be shocked by the variety of the follies of the academic community.

From fresh lecturers in small colleges, to the very senior professors enthroned in the HoD's chair; they all bask securely in the protection of empowered mediocrity.

Through this blog I want to talk about the many micro-macro examples of this process- namely the 'empowerment of mediocrity in our universities'. Step by step, we may be able to understand the anatomy of the weakened body of excellence.