Shreekant Sambrani was the founder director of IMRA in Anand which, like many such initiatives in Gujarat, seems to be doing very well by its students.
He has an article in the Indian Express
A dear friend, whose sharp intellect and matching outspokenness I admire in equal measure, recently sent me a comment he called “Rejoinder to Pratap Bhanu Mehta”. My friend contended that in his earlier newspaper columns and television interviews, Mehta did not substantiate his arguments using academic rigour. The friend defined basic rigour as “requiring collection of verifiable data-evidence, and its rational or scientific analysis to come to academically justified conclusions”. With all due deference to my friend, I must strongly disagree.
Will the Professor give any rational reasons for his disagreement? Let us see.
My friend is hardly alone in using the term academic freedom while commenting on Mehta’s dramatic exit from Ashoka University. Virtually every comment on l’affaire Ashoka is centred on academic freedom. That is where the discussion gets muddied.
True enough. Mehta left his students in the lurch. He damaged their life-chances. Academic freedom was irrelevant. The guy could have completed the term and quietly left after a replacement had been found.
Mehta clearly wore two hats while he was at Ashoka or earlier at the Centre for Policy Research.
No. He wore only one hat at his place of work.
He was an academic at his institution, conducting research and disseminating its findings, as well as teaching students as part of an academic syllabus. But he was and continues to be a widely-read columnist in a general broadsheet newspaper, writing on a wide diversity of topics of interest to him. In this latter role, he may draw upon his own research, but he clearly uses a variety of sources that shape his judgements and opinions.
Mehta may have been anything he liked in his private capacity. But at work he wore just one hat.
It is incorrect to use academic freedom interchangeably with freedom of expression.
It is perfectly proper to use 'academic freedom' interchangeably with 'freedom of expression' when it comes to any activity performed in the academy by an academic.
Suppose Mehta, in his private life, was the dungeon master of a sado-masochistic club. His employers may have taken a dim view of this activity of his and pressured him to resign- perhaps citing a morals clause in his contract. This is not a case of 'academic freedom' being breached. It is a case of a man admitting that his private conduct had caused 'reputational damage' to the Institution. His resignation was the remedy he offered to the tort he had inflicted.
The two concepts are not the same.
Yes they are- in an academic context. Academic freedom means freedom of academic expression.
Academic freedom implies an absence of restrictions on what one may research on one’s own or as part of an agency or teacher in an institution.
It also extends to what one may say in an academic context.
This freedom is, however, bound by the rigour implied by my friend.
No. It may be bound by protocols it itself invokes- but, equally, it may not be. A good faith breach of such protocols is an error not an offense.
Researchers are obligated to state clearly their objectives, sources of data, and methods of analysis.
This is not true. Only when publishing within a specific, protocol bound, context is there any such obligation. But one may stipulate that one is not following those protocols.
Moreover, the process of analysis must be replicable.
No. There is no such requirement. In any case replicability can only arise after publication.
This means that anyone else using the same dataset and method must be able to come to the same conclusions as the researcher.
Nonsense! A careless error does not invalidate the entire project. Moreover, 'dataset' and 'method' are not wholly algorithmically specifiable- unless the subject has 'univalent foundations' of a type not currently known to exist in Mathematics.
What the Professor has said is very silly. The fact is we live under Knightian Uncertainty. Thus, as time goes by, our Bayesian priors change. So even if, synchronously, 'Aumann agreement' obtains, this is more and more unlikely as time goes by. Why? More information is available such that the underlying Structural Causal Model is better 'factorized' or parameterized. Since we know more, we can avoid 'Simpson's paradox' type problems. Graph theory has more purchase because though neither the dataset nor the method has changed, nevertheless the SCM is better understood.
That is what the peer-review process emphasises.
But that safeguard can be swamped by citation cartels.
In the case of non-data-based conceptual or theoretical research, internal consistency embedded in inductive logic is the criterion to be used.
No. Predictions are what matters. Do they prove true or false? If they are true, it is worth finding a consistent, parsimonious, inductive model. Otherwise, ignore that shite.
But the theme of research or intellectual discourse through lectures, seminars or publication is entirely, and at all times, a matter of choice for the scholar.
No. A scholar may be paid to work on a particular project in a particular way.
Freedom of expression is a much more tolerant concept.
Concepts aren't 'tolerant' or 'bigoted'. We may say they are fuzzy or elastic or capacious or empty. The concept of 'free expression' is less context dependent than the concept of 'academic freedom' and thus has a wider range.
A person expresses one’s own opinions or judgements based on one’s own thinking.
A person may offer as his own the product of another's thinking. This sort of oikeiosis is perfectly legitimate provided it is acknowledged- or such a presumption exists.
The only limitation is that this should not provoke others to physical violence and acts of destruction.
This is false. There is no 'heckler's veto'. The Professor does not seem to be aware of the Law in this regard.
We in India and in some other countries often stipulate that freedom of expression should not cause offence to accepted social mores or religious beliefs of others.
No we don't. 'Accepted social mores' are not protected by law. Nor are religious beliefs- as opposed to sect specific values. Thus you can mock belief in God with impunity. But, you may be prosecuted if you mock the God of a particular community.
But liberal democracies such as the United States and countries of Western Europe do not impose such restrictions.
Yes they do.
In fact, the judiciary in the US has repeatedly ruled that pornography is protected by the right to free speech, however repugnant it may be to public morality.
Nonsense! The Miller Test is still operational. It has 3 prongs-
Whether "the average person, applying contemporary community standards", would find that the work, taken as a whole, appeals to the prurient interest,
Whether the work depicts or describes, in a patently offensive way, sexual conduct or excretory functions[4] specifically defined by applicable state law,
Whether the work, taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.[5]
The work is considered obscene only if all three conditions are satisfied.
Why is this silly professor telling such stupid, ultracrepidarian, lies?
Similar logic makes it extremely difficult to obtain convictions on charges of libel and defamation. Only the right of privacy prevails over freedom of expression in liberal societies.
Says a fucking cretin who doesn't know shit about the law. What kind of Business School employs idiots like him? Why does the Indian Express publish such worthless shite? Most business people know that you have to be very careful of libel and defamation charges in America. Editors should also know this. Suppose you malign an American Corporation- e.g. ABC news vs Beef Products- you could end up paying out hundreds of millions of dollars!
Seen thus, Mehta’s newspaper columns or media interviews are a matter of his exercising his freedom of expression. One may disagree with him in part or in totality, but that is no ground whatsoever for denying him his right to express his views.
Mehta has not been denied this right. He is still publishing in the Indian Express. Why does this cretin mention this?
A public commentator is often a bit of a tub-thumper, a sceptic, an agnostic, a polemicist even, who could be a thorn in the side of the elites.
Or an object of ridicule for folks like me who firmly believe that all Indian Professors with phoren PhDs have got shit inside their craniums
History is replete with dissenters enriching a society’s intellectual life. Consider our own çarvakas, who defied Sanskritic puritans to advocate consumerism;
Fuck happened to them? They disappeared over a thousand years ago.
Socrates, whose defiance cost him his life;
His refusal to leave Athens, when he had the chance, is what got him killed.
Martin Luther, who founded Protestantism;
and thus triggered Religious Wars and Pogroms which left millions dead
Emil Zola, whose J’accuse became a war cry for generations rebelling against arbitrary injustice,
Fuck off! Zola helped the Dreyfusards. That's all.
among others. Closer to our times, Linus Pauling, who won a Nobel for chemistry, was also awarded another for his peace activism which challenged the nuclear weapons orthodoxy.
Which is how come nobody has ICBMs any more.
Noam Chomsky is as much known for his championship of dissent as he is for his linguistic theories.
But is shite in both departments
Paul Krugman regularly fulminated against the Republicans and former President Donald Trump in the pages of The New York Times and it did no harm to his solid reputation as a Nobel-winning economist.
Krugman has helped lower the reputation of Nobel-winning economists all over the world. Still, he told Ashoka students just recently that 'in this globalized world, for India to get into the market space vacated by the Chinese manufacturers, particularly for labour-intensive goods, it will have to be ready to do two things: First, make policy choices that are realistic and not ‘precocious’ and second, be ready to accept that rights and freedoms of labour, in particular will be sacrificed. The wise counsel of Krugman was that India will have to be prepared to negotiate the space between rights/freedoms and share in the world market of course, up to the point where “labour is not getting killed”. (Atul Sood writing in Kafila)
Societies everywhere and at all times have been notoriously thin-skinned about such critics.
Sadly, a lot of those critics turned out to have rather soft, easily crushable, craniums. That's why Society still exists.
Yet, for the most part, history has recognised their signal contribution, recognising them as the ultimate sentinels of liberty.
But History itself has been recognized as a shit subject only fit for low I.Q pedants or child-minders.
We need to recall that great French pamphleteer-polemicist of the 18th century, François-Marie Arouet, better known as Voltaire. He held the French aristocracy, church and the bourgeoisie all in contempt and suffered his critics as fools. Yet he said, “I disapprove of what you say, but will defend to the death your right to say it.”
No he didn't. That phrase was falsely attributed to Voltaire. It originates in the work of Evelyn Beatrice Hall.
Why is this stupid fool who doesn't understand Epistemology, who is clueless about the Law, now parading his ignorance regarding European Literature? How fucking useless is this cunt?
Talking of the Mehta episode as a challenge to academic freedom has been a grievous error.
No. Either, as Mehta & Subramanian &Co suggest, Ashoka is clamping down on academic freedom so as to curry favor with the BJP, or else they are lying. It may be that Mehta & Subramanian were looking for an excuse to get away from rural Haryana. They want to get sinecures in Biden's America- pretending to be refugees from Modi's Fascist regime- where there will get lots of money from the anti-India lobby.
Academic freedom is important, but no one has called Mehta’s academic output into question (I doubt if many are even aware of what it is).
Because all similar 'academic output' in India is utterly shit.
Freedom of expression is, however, a far greater asset of democratic people and needs to be zealously protected.
But the guy still has a column in the Goenka's paper!
It is not that Mehta’s views are always acceptable. Although his column is invariably the first thing I read in the mornings when it appears, quite often I find it difficult to agree with him. Yet his contribution invariably enriches our intellectual life.
But your intellectual life is shit you big fat cretin!
That is the real issue, and not what happens to Ashoka University, its promoters, donors, faculty and students.
The real issue is that Indian Professors are utterly shit. They can't reason and they can't write a single sentence without revealing their stupidity and ignorance. Still, it seems IMRA is doing well. Institutions matter. Professors don't because their brains rot away quickly enough.
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