By – Amar Yumnam
A few months back, there was a news report of the DM University of Manipur entering into global relationship. I felt good as the widening of relationships and deepening of the shared analytics are increasingly important for academic and technological transformation. It should be worth mentioning here that the speed and depth of technological advancement of China is the dependence and orientation on university-based research unlike in other countries oriented to corporate-based research.
But I was extremely shocked when I saw the recent report of signing five agreements with foreign universities on a single day. It immediately occurred to me that Chandbabu, VC, does not know what is inter-university collaboration. He is thinking of only numbers and photographs in the news media. After repeatedly thinking over, my surprise was taken care by his more of clerical experience and orientation than of academics manifesting in lack of knowledge of what a university is like and the knowledge evolution.
Entering into any kind of international relationships calls first of all understanding the scenario of the self both at the provincial and country levels. Second, being a region with a differential history with geography bordering and belonging to the South East Asia, understanding the difference in differentials is paramount. I would like to refer to April 2026 Report by a Committee consisting of ten experts from different universities on the responsibility given by the Chancellors of Vanderbilt and Washington Universities to examine the situation of Humanistic Studies and Social Sciences in the US: “Scholarship on matters of human concern has been a source of controversy from the start— witness the trial of Socrates for corrupting the youth of Athens. In recent years, however, the complaint has assumed a more specific form, namely, that the traditional goal of coming to understand the human world through careful scholarship has been subordinated to, or even displaced by, a “political” goal: the aim of realizing a conception of social justice nowadays associated with the progressive left.
More specifically, the complaint is that scholarly standards for the assessment of academic work have been distorted within these disciplines both to privilege work on topics that are taken to be relevant to social justice, and much more importantly, to replace more traditional standards for assessing academic scholarship with political standards designed to ensure that only politically acceptable work is published, taught and valorised. The sharpest version of the complaint traces this distortion in scholarly standards to a pervasive repudiation of the very idea of scholarly objectivity in favour of the view that since claims to knowledge are inevitably ideological, it is fair game to assess academic scholarship on political and social grounds. The result of this distortion, the complaint continues, is an academic ecosystem in which much of what passes as scholarship in the humanistic disciplines is in fact a mix of tendentious, biased research, feeble academic agitprop and jargon-laden nonsense.”Well did Chandbabu apply his or collective mind in signing the agreements? First, there is need to identify the weakest and the strongest areas of academic strength of the University, given the contextual realities. This would determine the focus of the collaboration – to correct the weaknesses or to widen and deepen the strengths? The balancing exercise is not like standing in the sun for sunlight. Second, it would be about finance. Inter-university collaboration is not like friendship with a neighbour. A university facing serious challenges in paying entitled fellowships of the students cannot afford the indulgence in any random agreement whatsoever.
Further, there were mentioning of technology. After the Second World War the focus on science and technology research has been visible. But this underwent a rethinking and reorientation of approaches after the appearance of Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions in 1962. This led to the linking up of scientific research with historical perspectives: “Perhaps science does not develop by the accumulation of individual discoveries and inventions. Simultaneously, these same historians confront growing difficulties in distinguishing the “scientific” component of past observation and belief from what their predecessors had readily labelled “error” and “superstition.”The more carefully they study, say, Aristotelian dynamics, phlogistic chemistry, or caloric thermodynamics, the more certain they feel that those once current views of nature were, as a whole, neither less scientific nor more the product of human idiosyncrasy than those current today. If these out-of-date beliefs are to be called myths, then myths can be produced by the same sorts of methods and held for the same sorts of reasons that now lead to scientific knowledge. If, on the other hand, they are to be called science, then science has included bodies of belief quite incompatible with the ones we hold today. Given these alternatives, the historian must choose the latter. Out-of-date theories are not in principle unscientific because they have been discarded. That choice, however, makes it difficult to see scientific development as a process of accretion. The same historical research that displays the difficulties in isolating individual inventions and discoveries gives ground for profound doubts about the cumulative process through which these individual contributions to science were thought to have been compounded.” Social Science today is Social Science with the earlier boundaries disappearing. In the end, inter-university research is not a whimsical kind of exercise. Look around as to what is happening contextually and around the globe.