Hardly the soft sciences

The social sciences and humanities will be critical in helping us understand what the sciences will become in the future

Common sense has defeated the social sciences and humanities in India. As the rush for college seats begin, parents worry if there are any viable options outside of medicine, engineering, management or studying abroad. What good would a B.A. in history or sociology do other than a roll-of-the-dice chance at the civil services? As a historian, I have often faced blunt questions: what can a job prospect possibly be if you spend three/four years learning the causes of Mughal decline or the Permanent Settlement of 1793? This ably describes why most people see the social sciences, with the exception of economics, as a losing proposition. But has the tide begun to turn?

One of the most significant bursts of funding in the social sciences and the humanities occurred during the Cold War years. The United States, keen as it was then to establish spheres of influence, invested heavily to learn about how societies understood themselves and which ideology appealed to what individual. The money ran into hundreds of millions of dollars with the Ford Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation and the Carnegie Corporation of New York pulling funds from deep pockets. The Social Science Research Council and the American Council of Learned Societies were other key players who helped sponsor innumerable workshops, conferences and academic seminars. These efforts resulted not only in a vast number of publications, but helped develop many enduring concepts which arguably continue to explain the world we live in. Scores of scholars, research communities and university departments, in being caught up in strategic concerns, ended up harnessing the social sciences and humanities to understand how nations and societies dealt with authority, ideologies, politics and power. Hardly the ‘soft sciences’!

With the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union, funding for the Area Studies expectedly dried up. On the other hand, academic explorations under the rubrics of nation-making, democracy, globalisation and multiculturalism could hardly wield the previous heft.

In a study published in Research Trends (2013), Gali Halevi and Judit Bar-Ilanit point out that globally the financing for humanities sharply fell between 2009 and 2012. In part, while the 2008 financial crisis could be blamed for the sudden yanking of the proverbial rug, the loss in the lustre of the social sciences had already begun by the mid-1990s following the steady commercialisation of education. Unsurprisingly, student debt and education loans fell harder on those in the social sciences, arts and humanities than they did on those pursuing vocational skills such as engineering. At heart, however, this big turn against the ‘soft sciences’ was what Bill Reading described, in his classic The University in Ruins(1996), as the sustained attempt to transform the university from previously serving as an “ideological arm of the nation-state” to instead now being redesigned as a “consumer oriented corporation”. By morphing the citizen-student into a consumer-student (weighed in by debt), the actual rout of the social sciences was announced.

Reduced funding

It is amidst the aftershocks of this change in the meaning of education that we should make sense of Ella Delany’s startling report in The New York Times (December, 2013) in which she catalogues a growing disquiet against the humanities and social sciences. In 2012, a task force convened by Governor Rick Scott of Florida recommended that students majoring in liberal arts and social science subjects be made to pay higher tuition fees as they were in “nonstrategic disciplines”. Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott in 2013 “reprioritised” 103 million Australian dollars from research in the humanities into medical research. In Britain, Robin Jackson, chief executive of the British Academy for the humanities and social sciences, in 2011 announced that direct government funding for humanities had been withdrawn and was to be replaced by tuition fees “backed up by government loans”.

Is this total defeat? Ironically, just as the social sciences and the humanities are being written off in many countries, there have emerged vigorous calls for resituating its importance. Notably, climate change research and global environmental change programmes the world over are stridently advocating for what they term as the urgent need for “integrated analyses”. It is imperative, they argue, that the natural sciences be drawn into productive dialogues with the social sciences in order to explore critical themes such as global sustainability and green development.

One of the most significant international science initiatives in recent times called the Future Earth has, in fact, in their ‘Strategic Research Agenda’ (2014) urged for initiating a new generation in interdisciplinary and integrated research which can grapple with the realities of a warming planet. The initiative, however, is not entirely novel. For decades now, interdisciplinary efforts such as science studies, environmental history and full-fledged post graduate programmes under the rubric of science-technology-environment-medicine (STEM) have successfully broken down the hard divides between the natural sciences, social sciences and the humanities. These interdisciplinary initiatives have also compellingly revealed that the natural sciences are ideologically driven and are often oriented by political practice. In effect, the social sciences and humanities will be critical to help us understand what the sciences will become in the future. Significantly, given that an entirely new script for economic behaviour is being drafted in the context of climate change, these conversations have acquired pressing strategic consequences for the developing world.

The Indian scenario

The university system in India is, unfortunately, ill-prepared to take up these challenges. In part, it has put all its research and teaching eggs on the vice-chancellor system for administering higher education. The vice-chancellorship, as an organisational logic, is an ailing legacy and remains a bad marriage between the Mughal Jagirdari system and the rigidity of the British colonial bureaucracy. The higher you go up the administrative ladder, there is less transparency, accountability and intellectual oxygen.

There is an urgent need to initiate a generational change in our university leadership, with fresh blood and new ideas brought in with rigorous metrics to judge the performance and contributions at the very top of the administrative chain. If the social sciences and the humanities in India are to be cutting edge by providing knowledge for the future, then the old has to be entirely dismantled.

(Rohan D’Souza is associate professor at the Graduate School of Asian and African Area Studies, Kyoto University.)

Keywords: universities, higher education, social sciences, humanities

A return to social science

The social sciences have declined as part of the imagination of the university. The subject has been appropriated by security agencies, think tanks and marketing outfits which substitute their current interests for democracy

There are moments in history where talent clusters in little pockets to produce a new excitement around knowledge. One senses a wonderful sparkle about scholarship, a sense of excitement and gossip which spreads all over. All one needs is a few books, a café, a lawn and a few scholars committed to chewing on an idea. One’s sense of the world changes as we watch them play with an idea. What then grows is not just an idea, but a group of friends, a community, and a commons of insights which attracts people from all over. I remember one such place used to be the wonderful group Rajni Kothari built in Delhi in the 1970s and the 1980s. Rajni is now almost forgotten but his ideas are still relevant to the problems of today.

This is an era which has seen the literal death of the Congress, the end of the Planning Commission, the rise of new majoritarianism, the decline of the great social moments; yet, one cannot think of one article or one book which captures this world adequately. Adding insult to intellectual injury, we have a whole array of diasporic intellectuals whose ideas of India are literally embarrassing. Their pastiche of nostalgia, didacticism and post-modernity adds little to the study of everyday issues. There have been a few exceptions to this dismal scene. One thinks of Ashis Nandy or U.R. Ananthamurthy. Both realised that the worlds they were critiquing and celebrating were disappearing before them. It is at these moments that one misses the magic of Rajni and his conversations on politics.

Studying democracy

The house that Rajni built was a bungalow with a few lawns. At lunch every day, the lawns housed an array of chairs, and scholars came, ate and talked. They discussed politics but what they celebrated was democracy, and democracy in all its variants was something all its scholars were committed to. Studying democracy became a ritual game, where experiment followed experiment. Rajni led the group, coming in largely at lunch time, clutching scraps of paper; many were old envelopes on which he jotted notes. Others would walk in. What one ate for lunch was incidental. What one talked about at lunchtime shaped the ideas of a generation.

Rajni brought his sense of Gujarati entrepreneurship to ideas. He triggered election studies inviting political scientists like Myron Wiener, Robert Dahl and Karl Deutsch to India. But politics was more than elections. Rajni and his colleagues realised that social science needed new experiments, new ways of thinking. He created the China Group so that China could be studied as the relevant other. He encouraged Future studies which was the one place where dissenting intellectuals from Eastern Europe could gather safely. The future was treated as a different country that Stalinist regimes of that time need not be paranoid about. He introduced a voluntary group called Lokayan which became a site for a range of grass-root imaginations. Lokayan went beyond the logic of expertise, the arrogance of intellectuals to listen to the experiences of ordinary people. In many ways, the creativity of the network lay not in its originality but in its ability to listen, adopt, mix and rework points of insight.

Rajni helped seed the People’s Union for Civil Liberties (PUCL) to create a tradition of on-the-spot investigations to investigate the violence of the state. PUCL-PUDR (People’s Union for Democratic Rights) produced the classic report on the 1984 riots “Who are the guilty?” PUCL — which was civil society’s presence in every major moment of violence, investigating, chronicling the fate of the victim — has sadly almost disappeared today. One of the ironies we face is the vulnerability of civil society institutions as generations change. His search for different ways of thinking about governance created the journal Alternatives, which he founded along with Dick Falk and Saul Mendlovitz. The scholarship on security demystified security as something constructed by experts. It transformed the discourse into an open-ended demand for people’s security, where peace was something demanded by a people than as a consequence of security. Behind the technicality of all this scholarship, Rajni chaired an oral tradition, a classic adda of politics at lunch time, which made politics come alive.

Politics, for Rajni, represented the most open of systems. Education was elitist, the bureaucracy a club; only politics introduced new forces and new ideas with exciting regularity. It was only in the political domain that the elite, our second-hand elite with its first-hand pretensions, could not remain knowledge-proof about the changes modern democracy was creating.

Pluralism of social science

The Emergency destroyed many of the old hegemonies as a generation of social movements challenged planned development, interrogated the accepted categories of science and questioned the validity of economics as a form of expertise. Rajni and his group were at the forefront of this bandwagon of ideas which dulled the economist’s halo and returned a sense of everydayness and complexity to democracy. I must point out that this was not easy to achieve. Economics was the dominant social science and the aura around planning added a mystique to economists like Sukhamoy Chakraborty, Sen and K.N. Raj. Delhi School was the Mecca and Marxism or some variant of socialism, the dominant ideology of most intellectuals. I remember Rajni handling overbearing Marxists with aplomb. But more than that, what Rajni and his group tried to show was that the categories of each discipline created a captive mind. More than ideology, dominant classifications became the iron cages of the era.

For a reinvention

This thinking added to the pluralism of social science in many ways. It challenged the hegemony of economics and the dominance of Marxism as a dominant intellectual perception. It showed that the university, ironically, was not always the source of original theory. People resisting the regime or the social movements helped invent more understandings of the political than our sedate universities still living off old textbooks on political theory. One was like a collection of heresies, the other a catechism, a collection of orthodoxies that the church or the party could be fond of. Yet, there was something human about the process, where alcohol and laughter often added to the celebration of social science. What gave power to the group was that it behaved like a commons and yet tolerated individuality and difference. Rajni’s was the one institute which openly resisted the Emergency. Everyone, from the gardener and the chowkidar to the academic fellow, was party to the decision-making. It became the benchmark for a later era. As the community aged, it became a dull imitation of itself, idiosyncratic in parts but without realising it was banalising itself. What I will do is to summarise the insights it offers as a fable.

This exploration of the social sciences re-examined a whole glossary of concepts like development, the non-party process, voluntarism, human security, decolonising knowledge and sustainability. Whatever the temporary excitement of a concept, all were validated by the democratic impetus and democracy in turn was interrogated and fine-tuned according to fresh redefinitions; as policy gets confused with politics and think tanks pretend they are democratic instruments. The social sciences have declined as part of the imagination of the university. The subject has been appropriated by security agencies, think tanks and marketing outfits which substitute their current interests for democracy. What we need today is a Futures unit among non-government organisations to challenge the think tanks as a technocratic imagination. We need to rip through the sanitised picturesqueness of the Human Development Reportand unravel the nature of violence today. We need to show the creative power of the informal economy rather than treat it as a space to be colonised. Our critique of science needs to be extended to a full-fledged critique of science in relation to a non-Promethean world. We need to collaborate with the ideas of scholars like Gustavo Esteva or Boas Santos who have emphasised the move from liberation to emancipation; where the victim confronts his roots in future oppression. All this would have been done in a non-Utopian way where everydayness, irony and laughter add a touch of scepticism to this work. All this would have been done without nostalgia.

We need a new heuristics for social science, a new attempt to invent a sociological imagination. As a society, we need new mindsets to create a new style of social science, a thinking which can revive the dullness of public policy and the hysterical triteness of social change. Only such a heuristics can reinvent democracy from cliché to a new sense of community.

(Shiv Visvanathan is a professor at Jindal School of Government and Public Policy.)

Keywords: social sciences, Rajni Kothari, Ashis Nandy, study of humanities, pluralism, voluntarism, marginalisation of social sciences, Lokayan, People’s Union for Civil Liberties, PUCL human rights