Cautionary tales for Indian conservatives: American universities and the perils of illiberal left-liberal politics

Generations of students have been taught by professors who provide a starkly one-sided view of the world. (Photo via Pixabay/Pexels)

About 20 years ago, I wrote a book on the Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT)—what was it about the system that it could produce excellence that was recognized the world over. To research the book, I travelled across the world to meet some of the most successful IIT alumni in a range of fields—business, technology, academia, research. During these conversations, several IITians, in leadership positions in giant global corporations or extremely successful entrepreneurs, said that they wished that the IITs had more liberal arts/ humanities courses.

Greater exposure to the humanities, they thought, would have given them a more rounded and mature perspective on how the world functions. Instead, they had to learn all of that by trial and error in the first few years of their careers. In truth, the IITs have always had strong humanities departments—from languages and literature to history, psychology and other social sciences. What most of these successful IITians were actually telling me was that they never took these subjects seriously.

I was reminded of this recently when I saw an interesting statistic relating to Columbia University in the context of the Israel-Hamas war. Columbia is one of the top private universities in America, and is No 23 in the latest QS World University Rankings. Among business, economics and law faculty members, 89 condemned the Hamas attack on Israeli civilians on October 7, while only 12 thought that the attack was justified. In the STEM departments—science, technology, engineering and mathematics, 224 teachers condemned with a mere 10 thinking differently.

But in the humanities and social sciences departments, 150 faculty members believe that Hamas was justified in raping and killing civilians, including babies, with only 93 denouncing. This is also a trend observed across liberal arts professors and students on many elite campuses in the West, with public demonstrations in support of Hamas. And these demonstrations began as soon as the news of the Hamas atrocities broke, before Israel started its military operations in the Gaza Strip.

The reason is simple. Over the last four decades, left-liberal academics have taken over the humanities departments in Western universities. Empirical studies show that professors who identify themselves as left-liberal now outnumber conservatives in these departments by ratios that go up to an absurd 17 to 1. The chances are low that anyone can today get a teaching job in political science, history, philosophy, anthropology, mass communication or sociology if they are not avowedly leftist. The consequences of this trend, the capture of the humanities by the left, have been broad-ranging.

One, generations of students have been taught by these professors who provide a starkly one-sided view of the world. To know more about how freedom of thought, expression and discussions has been curtailed on American campuses, one can read the excellently researched and thoroughly impartial works of Greg Lukianoff, president of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression.

Two, the rise of the now-powerful woke movement, based on “intersectionality” and critical race theory, standard fodder today in every Western humanities course. Wokeness is built on a hierarchy of victimhood, where your gender, sexual preference, religion and the colour of your skin automatically confer you victim or oppressor status. The social impacts are manifold. Real violence by the “victims” is seen as freedom of expression, while mere words uttered by the “oppressors” are seen as violence. Crime rates have soared in some US cities run by woke politicians after police budgets were slashed severely, because the police are “oppressors”. Google “shoplifting in San Francisco” and you will get hundreds of videos of people grabbing whatever they want and coolly walking out of the stores since under California state law, stealing goods costing less than $950 is usually not treated as a punishable crime.

In some American states, pre-teen children are being allowed to have sex change surgery without the consent of their parents. Biological men are being permitted to compete in some women’s athletic events.

Three, a logical extension of these weird theories, is that Jews, being generally an enterprising lot in spite of being hounded, oppressed and genocided for two millennia, are “oppressors”. This has found expression in the anti-Semitic protests and physical assaults on Jews in the last few weeks across the West.

The people of Indic faiths may be next in line. After all, Indian-Americans have the highest mean income among all migrant groups. “Caste discrimination” has suddenly emerged as an issue for some woke American politicians. At least two lawsuits were filed. Both have been dismissed. But bills are being introduced in state legislatures and seminars are organized regularly to tell the world that Hinduism is a blot on the world’s religious landscape.

The leftist establishment has managed to literally change the meaning of words. Language, after all, is the most effective weapon that the powerful can wield. If you control words, you control minds.

“The limits of my language mean the limits of my world,” wrote the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. Anyone who has read George Orwell’s 1984 would know this well. Big Brother’s Newspeak, “designed to diminish the range of thought”, replaces “warm” with “uncold” and “bad’ with “ungood”. Among the many pithy slogans used to keep the population docile and obedient are “War is peace,” “Freedom is slavery” and “Ignorance is strength.”

So the term “liberal” today has nothing to with its original meaning of being open to different viewpoints. Today, someone sending death threats to J.K. Rowling for saying that biological men who claim to be women should not be allowed to use women’s restrooms is called “liberal”. People who laugh at Hindu women for wearing sindoor or fasting for one day in a year, but support religious leaders who want all women to cover themselves from head to toe and fast from dawn to dusk for a full month are termed “feminist” and “progressive”.

Volodymyr Zelensky is supposed to be the last man standing defending “liberal democracy”. This, when he has banned all opposition parties, shut down all media that is critical of him, jailed politicians he does not like on charges of treason that attract the death penalty, enlisted 65-year-old men in the army and sent them out to be slaughtered in a war he has no hope of winning, uses neo-Nazi quasi-armies that flaunt their ideology, and no one seems to know where many billions of dollars of Western aid to Ukraine ended up.

But these academics and activists, who also claim that “2+2=4” is just another cultural construct and mathematics is racism, seem to be winning right now. They are also adept at influencing and using Western mainstream media, which is filled with their woke ex-students.

We see some signs of this humanities education capture taking place already in India. No empirical studies have been done yet, but enough anecdotal evidence is available. Speak to any professor in these departments in any leading Indian university or read their social media posts. There is an undercurrent of that thoroughly discredited ideology called Communism and a compulsive deracination in what they say.

Perhaps they speak from conviction, perhaps they speak to keep their career prospects safe and alive, perhaps they are scared of social ostracism. In a candid moment, a few years ago, a Delhi University professor told me that it is dangerous in the professor’s common room in his college to even suggest that the Narendra Modi government may have got a couple of things right.

The IITs too have expanded their humanities departments quite a lot over the last decade. Whereas one could only do a PhD on the town planning and drainage systems of the Indus Valley civilization earlier, now one can also do one on “The Indus Valley civilization as an ancient Marxist utopia”. The government’s New Education Policy too pushes for more liberal arts programmes in the IITs.

This has had some unintended consequences. Let me share two examples. A young philosophy professor in IIT Delhi has appeared on TV, both Indian and Western, to argue vehemently that the nation called India is a myth created by the British out of thin air. She either disregards or is ignorant of the truth that we are a civilizational state with diverse but interconnected cultures that have existed from time immemorial. The concept of Bharatavarsha that stretches from the Himalayas to the ocean is thousands of years old.

And this is not just a Hindu concept. The erudite Jaithirth “Jerry” Rao points out in his book The Indian Conservative that every major religion practised in India—Sikhism, Jainism, Buddhism and Islam—has a sacred geography that stretches across the country. He writes about a Muslim friend of the Sufi persuasion who, every few years, does a pilgrimage circuit, starting from Delhi, west to Ajmer in Rajasthan, then south through Ahmedabad, Mumbai and Kalaburagi (Gulbarga) down to Nagore in Tamil Nadu, then north through Kapada (Cudappah) in Andhra Pradesh, east to Patna and finally back to Delhi via Fatehpur Sikri.

During the recent G20 summit in Delhi, this IIT associate professor told a foreign news channel that she looks forward to an India without Hinduism. While her freedom of expression must be protected, unless she openly calls for violence, it is worrisome that this lady with such strange views is influencing young minds in IIT Delhi every day.

The second example. A few months ago, there was an uproar in IIT Bombay when three hostels, which share a common dining area, designated six tables out of nearly 200 for vegetarian students. But some students used ladles reserved for vegetarian food to serve themselves chicken and mutton and insisted on having their dinner at the vegetarian tables. Apparently, this was a protest against Brahminical patriarchy. Given that Jains, many Buddhists and millions of Hindus across all sects and castes, including Dalits, are vegetarian, it is astonishing that reserving a mere 3 percent of tables for them is seen as “illiberal”. This is no different from terming no-smoking zones “fascistic”.

A key fact that was not mentioned in the media coverage of the incident was that the non-vegetarian aggression was almost entirely limited to the liberal arts students. The average IIT engineering student, and I have known hundreds of them over four decades, is essentially liberal in the old sense of the word and is respectful of intelligently argued opinions even if he may disagree with them. That, in fact, is the core of what is known as the scientific temper.

I am not suggesting for a moment that a liberal arts education is a lesser education than a STEM one. I have an IIT electronics engineering degree, but have never held an engineering job and have spent most of my career in journalism, which is generally, though not entirely correctly, associated with the humanities. I have learnt more about the world from literature, from Saratchandra to Albert Camus, and the popular works of social scientists like Michael Sandel, Jonathan Haidt and Steven Pinker than from any textbook. I agree with the IITians I mentioned right at the beginning that all of us need a greater exposure to the humanities.

My point is that right now, the liberal arts disciplines have been captured and distorted by an illiberal cult and its fellow travellers. This does not bode well. We are seeing the consequences of this in the West and we need to remain alert and resolute about this potentially dangerous wave that will surely gather force in India. The signs are already all around us.