Redeeming the wayward Univesity : an observation
Reader comment on item: Redeeming the Wayward University

Submitted by Jaisingh Thakur (India), Jul 20, 2007 at 01:36

Dear Dr.Pipes,

Immediately following the Partition of the Indian sub continent, an acute need was felt by the Islamists and the Communists to white wash their black deeds and try as best as they could to wipe out the infamy they had earned in the eyes of the masses by supporting the Nazis and the Fascists, and the tragic vivisection of an essentially unified geographical entity by demanding a "homeland" for their co-religionists on spurious grounds of religion, and ,at various points of time betraying the freedom struggle then in progress throughout the country. When the then rulers decided to set up some Universities, these stooges of the imperialists and Nazis somehow managed to manouvre themselves into influential positions into these academic groves -with fatal consequences for the post independence generations. Textbooks of history came to be re-written with exclusive focus on such icons as Lenin, Stalin, Syed Ahmad, while the native heroes, who had helped liberate the masses firstly from islamic imperialism and intolerance and then from British colonialism, were relegated to the footnotes of history, if not downright ignored.In a typical gesture of "I'll scratch your back, you scratch mine," these islamists and communists got together to justify the unjustifiable, and some Universities in North India continue to propagate the same tradition even to-day.

The answer therefore, to your first question, "do outsiders have a legitimate role to inflencing academic personnel decisions?, must be in the affirmative.

to your second question, "how effective are outsiders to influence the process?", well, this can only be gauged after they have been allowed to exercise their "right" to demand impartial, objective, analytical and whole-time scholars to teach on the campuses, in the place of the ill-informed, half-baked, partisans who masquerade as professors and Ph.D'S on the campuses to-day.

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