One of the things we recognise as we grow older, is that
time has a different connotation. When we are young, we have so many
responsibilities. For women, particularly, the day unfolds with a myriad things
to do, as they are responsible for the routines of the house and all who belong
to it, or are passing through. Every day is marked by a need to perfection, and
we bungle along in our 20s feeling that we have to keep integrated, keep
everyone happy. There is a startling sense of solitude, because others are
intent on the same task. As Ph.D. students, we find that the world begins to
close in on us. We meet our friends, fleetingly as we run to one errand or
another. The isolation of the Phd student is a well known factor, for the gang
life of the M.A and M.Phil is over, and now they have to prove themselves by
original work. For social scientists, this is hard. There has been so much that
has been written on any subject, that making a dent in the discipline is
impossibly hard, and yet, it is the only way that they can write about what
they are inspired by.
Now that I am in my 60s, and look at the young people around
me, I recognize that their challenges are much harder than mine. The milieu is
such, that the State, actually imagines that academics when employed in state
run institutions, are government
servants. It is true that the older
generation does have the privileges of free speech and medical benefits, pension and
so on, but the abilities and orientations of academics as a tribe are generally different. An
academic is someone who recognizes the importance of freedom of thought and
ideas. A bureaucrat recognizes that responsibility to the institution he serves
is paramount, he or she must deliver to the people, and explain to the
politician that his/her wishes are subservient to the order that he serves.
Now, the problem with politicians is that they come and go.
They recognize this, and it makes them nervous. Bureaucrats who serve
politicians, rather than the constitutionally bound statutes of the sovereign
republic are even more nervous, because they are bound to the whims and fancies
of the orders they receive from the political party and its representatives.
The documentation of their anti constitutional activites are now recorded so
steadily by multimedia that we have no cause to fear that they go unnoticed or
unrecorded.
The output of a Ph.D. student depends on many factors. For a
Sociology student, the very preoccupation with finishing on time is the only
marker of his success. If he or she misses the date of submission, then the
work of the last eight years is gone! The problem with our bureaucrats and
politicians is that they are so overwhelmed with the success of the West in the
indexes of everything, but human rights, they spend all their time trying to
imitate them. So by taking away the flexibility of the time that a doctoral
candidate can have, the student is constrained to a new way of doing things.
The first thing that goes for the Sociologist in the new system is of course
time spent in the field. The old battle between deduction and induction, time
honoured in terms of the pressure to use questionnaire methods within four
months, rather than interview schedules running into a year and a half of
interactions, which in turn, can change
the relationship between the social scientist and the respondent, is probably
the most vivid aspect.
The discussion on the ethnocide of marginal communities, the push
toward structures which can only be supported by electricity, the inability to
accept that farming communities must not be brought under industrialised
systems of farming, but must have the support to grow food for themselves and
the market, is now continually on the anvil. Ofcourse, that there is no water, and that
electricity is always desired but one of the most vulnerable of resources, complicates the story somewhat. The Death of
the Village is now so elaborate a myth, that it fuels the desire to move the
entire rural population out, and have planet earth emptied of its native
populations, so that a chosen class of people can survive the impending meteor crash. advertised by NASA. Because ideologies, Left, Right or Centre, push for
industrialization, they mark indigenous populations as not in synchrony with
the race to keep up with the West. The West itself is rethinking its
orientation towards industrialization by marking out the East as the site of its
sweat shops. Whether it is human labour, or the garbage and industrial waste
disposal systems, the site of praxis constantly moves
Eastward.
All of this means that the social science Ph.D. student has to rethink
the parameters of his/her own commitment to understanding what the present is.
It is constantly changing, and the reflexivity of people and occupations
depends on the right to life. By taking away the academic’s preoccupation with
changing structures and social dynamics, by fixing him or her to clock time,
and office hours and a notion of governmentality that is contract bound, the
singular ability to think outside of the box is threatened. What is required
now is to understand why a new army of ideologically influenced university
bureaucrats think that because they are
representative of a new world order which smacks of authoritarianism and hierarchy,
they really think that the academic can be boxed in.
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