Countering intellectual sterilisation in the HE system

A few days ago I was talking with a scholar friend of mine and he shared how his cousin, in the name of seeking assistance for writing a dissertation, had plagiarised his entire PhD dissertation. This is not the only incident of ‘peer plagiarism’ that I have come across.

In my PhD days, I met several colleagues who boasted about the originality of their research project despite paraphrasing others’ theses. I used to be shocked by the ways in which such research works were institutionally accepted.

These habitual practices of fake research works in India are the result of a global project of systemic and epistemic fabrications, which are, says Linda Tuhiwai Smith, “inextricably linked to European imperialism and colonialism”.

I have always been intrigued by the question of why fake research works are habitually celebrated and original research works demeaned across several educational institutions in India. To me, this is not just a subjective question. It requires a methodological investigation of the different motivational factors that have given birth to hoaxed research outputs in India.

At the inception of the European colonial era in India, the linguistic, curricular and disciplinary originality of the pre-colonial education system disintegrated and was replaced by the colonial/European education system.

The colonial/European education system was carved out through hunting, gathering, trafficking and distorting the native indigenous knowledges.

The indigenous natives in India were first robbed of their diverse constellations of knowledge systems and then they were convinced (through seduction as well as coercion) that their ‘original’ methodologies of knowing and learning were by default inferior to the ‘fake’ knowledge systems of the Europeans.

This idea of fakeness evolved out of a sense of collective intellectual insecurity on the part of the European colonisers who felt threatened by the unmapped epistemological and ontological terrains that existed outside the geopolitical borders of Europe.

So, in order to overcome this sense of threat, Europeans started carving out global projects of physical and psychological imperialism and in order to rationalise and authenticate those projects they set the foundations for a glossary of fakeness.

The glossary of fakeness was underpinned by socially, culturally, racially, politically, geographically and economically hierarchical terms and phrases like ‘modernism’, ‘development’, ‘intellectual emancipation’, ‘religious freedom’, ‘economic progress’ and many more.

Even after the obliteration of the physically visible European colonial empires in India, the colonial/European glossary of critical fakeness has successfully countered the resistance of indigenous natives; has epistemologically mutated across social, cultural, political, racial, economic and geographical borders; and at present is being methodologically implemented by India’s higher education institutions through “large systems of authoritative control, standardisation, gradation, accountancy, classification, credits and penalties”.

Laboratories of assimilation

The Euro-North American-centric higher education institutions of contemporary India function as dictatorial coliseums of knowledge production and their habitual performances of teaching and learning, in the name of creating ‘smart, unique, honest and globally responsible citizens’, push learners into laboratories of social, cultural, racial, linguistic, political, geographical and topographical assimilation.

Within such laboratories, learners are epistemologically decapitated, brainwashed and sterilised through ‘one-size-fits-all’ curricula that have been exclusively sanctioned by the colonial West. After decapitating, brainwashing and sterilising, the one-size-fits-all curricula turn learners into repeaters of colonial/Western knowledge.

As repeaters, researchers continue to reproduce the colonially manufactured glossary of critical fakeness, which, through motivating researchers to indulge in ‘peer plagiarism’ and converting them into intellectually impotent beings, allows the capitalist educational institutions in India to continue to fulfil their self-profiting goals and turn the higher education system “into a marketable product bought and sold by standard units”.

The practices of peer plagiarism and self-profit compel learners to compromise the epistemic quality of their research works and to focus on numerical quantity of publications through parameters like ‘number’ of papers published, ‘number’ of monographs published, ‘number’ of conferences attended, ‘number’ of lectures delivered, ‘number’ of events organised, ‘number’ of study and research modules developed, etc.

The glossary of critical fakeness justifies and glorifies these quantity-specific parameters through the usage of words and phrases like: ‘holistic growth’, ‘professional commitment’, ‘diversity’ and many more.

The practice of peer plagiarism in India has gained authentication to such an extent that any honest effort from researchers to engage in original research works gets officially condemned in many educational institutions in India.

Quantity-centric academic and research systems do not allow academics and research students enough time for reading, discussing and creating intellectually enriching spaces for disagreements and arguments. Therefore, a large number of discussion forums and research spaces in India end up becoming a repository for epistemological recycling, intellectual name-calling and consensual plagiarising.

So, how can we create healthy, resilient and collaborative research spaces in India?

In the process of exploring the possibilities for counter-resistance, I do not aspire to curate a one-size-fits-all doctrine for all. Instead, I am making an effort to curate a shared space of collective exchanges where every individual from every corner, irrespective of their institutional affiliations and career stages, can walk in and put forth their arguments without any prejudice.

Some of the possibilities are:

• Dismantling the quantity-based Academic Performance Index: The Academic Performance Index (API) is a parameter that is centrally used by higher education institutions in India to assess the performance of their academic staff and researchers and is quantity-centred in nature.

Under the API, academic staff are expected to publish a certain number of research papers, participate in a certain number of conferences, deliver a certain number of invited lectures, attend or organise a certain number of workshops, etc.

Due to the quantity-centric approach of these parameters, scholars feel academically overburdened and are compelled to engage in spite of not being intellectually ready to do so. As a result, in order to safeguard their positions in the academic institutions, scholars resort to fake research works and peer plagiarism.

This approach can be dismantled by shifting the intention and the function of the API from a quantity-centred approach towards a quality-centred approach. The higher education institutions, instead of focusing on ‘numbers’, should focus on ‘quality’. Such an approach would not only take the pressure off ‘rapid and shortcut knowledge production’ but will also encourage scholars to engage in honest and serious research.

• Dismantling the top-down approach to theory and praxis: In a large number of educational institutions in India, theory is taught in a top-down manner. In other words, students from the field of humanities are taught theory first and then they are asked to connect their theoretical knowledge to their habitual experiences.

This approach is logically problematic and epistemologically assimilative in nature. On the one hand, this top-down approach imprisons scholars within a one-size-fits-all theoretical dimension, and on the other, it prevents scholars from contextually understanding the links between theories and praxes.

This vertical process of theoretical learning (first theory and then praxis) needs to be uprooted by reversing the top-down approach of learning theory and praxis into a bottom-up approach.

Instead of introducing the phenomena of theory and praxis in a generalised and hierarchical manner, lecturers should share with students how theory and praxis function in collaboration with each other and how they should be understood and interpreted within specific contexts.

This transformation would allow scholars to navigate the ways in which they can build their research in a diverse and unique way.

• Dismantling the dictatorship of teaching staff: Another possible way of creating counter-resistance against producing fake research works in India is to transform the role of the teacher from being a dictator to being a collaborator.

A large number of teachers expect students not to question them about anything and to blindly follow the knowledges that they dictate to them. This dictatorial approach intellectually sterilises students to such an extent that, after a certain point in time, students acknowledge their state of epistemic impotency and fail to think and act independently.

Therefore, it is necessary for teaching staff to transform and adopt a decentralised role by working in collaboration with students and creating shared spaces of knowledge production. For instance, instead of dictating notes, they should give autonomy to students to generate intersectional spaces for peer discussions, where the teacher may function as a co-participant.

Obviously, these proposals, which are an incomplete list of possibilities, call for a long-term transformation and should be consistently implemented in a collective and discursive way. A global project of counter-resistance against critical fakeness and intellectual sterilisation is urgently needed. Let’s create it together.

Sayan Dey is a postdoctoral fellow in the Wits Centre for Diversity Studies, University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa. He is currently working on his book Green Academia which will be published by Routledge under the series Academics, Politics and Society in the Post-Covid World. His areas of research interest are sociology, anthropology, archaeology, race studies, cultural studies, food humanities, culinary epistemology and critical diversity studies. He can be reached at www.sayandey.com.