These are, however, dangerous times. Such crises allow The State to assume extraordinary powers, and ordinary rule of law disappears. Aristotle the Geek has a good post on this today. Also recommended is this interview with Dr. Binayak Sen on Naxalism in Chattisgarh, where he talks of “State terror.” These are all warning signals. Things are going haywire in India. We must be even more vigilant.
As if on cue, the UNDP reports that India is one of the worst places in the world to live, ranked 134 out of 182. I am sure this UNDP team never visited Jharkhand or Chattisgarh, or Manipur, which must surely be worse to live in than any place in Africa. We are fast becoming “The Darker Sub-Continent.”
It should therefore come as no surprise that not a single Indian university figures in the list of the world’s top 100 universities released today – this, while the entire focus of The Chacha State has been on “education.” What education can they deliver with the worst universities in the world?
John Rae’s Life of Adam Smith contains this remarkable passage on Oxford in those days, a rich and well-endowed university where learning had long been under a “total eclipse.” Read on, carefully:
Smith’s residence at Oxford fell in a time when learning lay there under a long and almost total eclipse. This dark time seems to have lasted most of that [18th] century. Crousaz visited Oxford about the beginning of the century and found the dons as ignorant of the new philosophy as the savages of the South Sea. Bishop Butler came there as a student twenty years afterwards, and could get nothing to satisfy his young thirst for knowledge except “frivolous lectures” and “unintelligible disputations.” A generation later he could not even have got that; for Smith tells us in the Wealth of Nations that the lecturers had then “given up all pretence of lecturing,” and a foreign traveller, who describes a public disputation he attended at Oxford in 1788 says the Praeses Respondent and three Opponents all sat consuming the statutory time in profound silence, absorbed in the novel of the hour. Gibbon, who resided there not long after Smith, tells that his tutor neither gave nor sought to give him more than one lesson, and that the conversation of the common-room, to which as a gentleman commoner he was privileged to listen, never touched any point of literature or scholarship, but “stagnated in a round of college business, Tory politics, personal anecdotes, and private scandal.” Bentham, a few years after Gibbon, has the same tale to tell; it was absolutely impossible to learn anything at Oxford, and the years he spent there were the most barren and unprofitable of his life. Smith’s own account of the English universities in the Wealth of Nations, though only published in 1776, was substantially true of Oxford during his residence there thirty years before. Every word of it is endorsed by Gibbon as the word of “a moral and political sage who had himself resided at Oxford.” Now, according to that account, nobody was then taught, or could so much as find “the proper means of being taught, the sciences which it is the business of those incorporated bodies to teach.” The lecturers had ceased lecturing; “the tutors contented themselves with teaching a few unconnected shreds and parcels ” of the old unimproved traditionary course, “and even these they commonly taught very negligently and superficially”; being paid independently of their personal industry, and being responsible only to one another, “every man consented that his neighbour might neglect his duty provided he himself were allowed to neglect his own”; and the general consequence was a culpable dislike to improvement and indifference to all new ideas, which made a rich and well-endowed university the “sanctuary in which exploded systems and obsolete prejudices find shelter and protection after they have been hunted out of every corner of the world.” Coming up from a small university in the North, which was cultivating letters with such remarkable spirit on its little oatmeal wisely dispensed, Smith concluded that the stagnation of learning which prevailed in the wealthy universities of England was due at bottom to nothing but their wealth, because it was distributed on a bad system.
The “small university in the North” was Glasgow. Scotland was then far, far behind England in everything. Whereas the Thames outside London was a “forest of ship-masts” way back in the days of the Magna Carta, barely any ships came up the Clyde when Smith was a young lad in Glasgow. It is for the development of a backward place that Smith advocated free trade and the end of all monopolies. This is seen in his subsequent strong support for free trade for Ireland in the 1770s, which was then probably the most backward and poverty-stricken province in the whole of Europe.
The story of the great “Scottish Enlightenment” centres around the University of Glasgow, in the back of beyond, a fourteen day journey from London. It is a story of people, not buildings, not equipment, not great libraries, nor huge funds. Extremely remarkable people, among whom Adam Smith was a much loved colleague. There was Black, the chemist, who discovered latent heat; there was Hutton the geologist, who discovered the first theories of the earth’s crust. But the university went further, inviting James Watt to set up his workshop there after the Hammermen’s Guild had refused him. It is here that the condenser for the steam engine was invented. The university encouraged Foulis, the printer, who went on to achieve great distinction in the quality of his books. They even set up a design school. They took an interest in agriculture, textiles – even to the extent of presenting a prize for the “best hogshead of strong ale.”
Universities require people; that is, people who “produce knowledge.” If the most backward province of Britain could enlighten the whole of Europe and America on free trade and the “system of natural liberty” – and on many more subjects besides – then we have hope. But it lies outside The Chacha State.
I leave you with that thought.
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