What is the True Call of an Academic? ❤️

Teaching or Research?

Awakening Human Consciousness in Higher Education

#newspaperinlearning

I was so happy to read two insightful articles by two passionate literarians, in today’s The Hindu, Chennai Edition.

And that’s where The Hindu stands tall, I guess – wherein legendary academics of great repute find a space to air their thoughts and ideas in featured OpEd/Opinion Columns.

Now let’s go to the first article from The Opinion Page of The Hindu by Ms. Mini Krishnan.

Ms. Mini opines that, literature education is essential for building empathy and bridging deep societal divides across caste, class and gender.

Rather than simply lamenting the decline of the humanities, Mini argues that ignoring literature results in systemic inequality by shielding students from the lived realities of people! She also gives out a shocking statement that, educational institutions often sanitise their curriculums just to avoid local discomfort!

As a solution she suggests that, integrating translated regional works and culture studies into curriculums exposes students to uncomfortable local realities, such as gender oppression and caste-based slavery. 

Studying such diverse literature and translations can help in building the invisible bridges necessary for future generations to break all kinds of social barriers.

In this regard, she highlights on the importance of writers and translators who act as crucial bridge-builders, helping students connect across linguistic barriers to challenge ingrained prejudices that are still practised across generations.

The second article is by my very good friend Dr. Joseph Dorairaj, Professor Emeritus, Gandhigram University.

This article examines the long-standing conflict in higher education between classroom teaching and academic research, analysing how global rankings, career incentives, and institutional frameworks have always favoured research over teaching.

Dr. Joe questions whether higher education institutions (HEIs) can realistically balance both teaching and research mandates and elaborates on the reasons why research commands greater prestige than classroom teaching!

Tracing the modern research university back to Wilhelm von Humboldt, Dr. Joe observes that, senior professors in both Western and Indian universities frequently delegate undergraduate teaching to teaching assistants and junior faculty, thereby missing out on precious opportunities to mentor younger students.

Added, even institutional evaluation metrics - such as NAAC and NIRF in India, alongside global QS and THE rankings - heavily favour research output, publications, and citations over pedagogical quality, driving the academic trade-off firmly toward research.

And Dr. Joe concludes this article by stating that, while the tension between teaching and research will permanently persist, the institutional and global stakes now definitively favour research.

And that’s mainly because of the urgency in the field of innovation!

The urgency in academia is that, we need quality academic work that can push the frontiers of knowledge by generating new insights and theories. Furthermore, valuable research should constantly redefine our understanding of the world by developing and disseminating new concepts and paradigms to address unprecedented global challenges, he signs off.

On an aside, I wish to add that, for more than three decades now, Dr. Joseph Dorairaj has been writing consistently in journals and newspapers alike on the need and the importance of enhancing the standard and quality of research. You may want to read one such past article by Dr. Joe on our past blogpost from 13 years ago, HERE on our blog, when we had invited him to MCC to talk about Research in Higher Education.

So what then is the true call of the academic today?

To Dr. Joe, the true call of an academic is not just to merely transfer knowledge, but to awaken human consciousness!

I’m quite reminded of one of my most favourite lines from all of literature –

From Ulysses by Alfred Lord Tennyson –

To follow knowledge like a sinking star,

Beyond the utmost bound of human thought…

So beautifully penned, ain’t it? 😊

And therein lies the importance of these two articles from today’s The Hindu for academia!

PS: I would like to take a minute to acknowledge and to appreciate Prof. Sundhar from Theni Kammavar Sangam College of Arts and Science, for so consistently sharing from the Educational Supplement in the pages of The Hindu, for more than 80 days now. Today is the 88th sharing! By sharing what we read, we are growing indeed! And that is the noble call of an academic. Hats off to you Prof. Sundhar. We academics are so proud of you. Keep shining. Stop not! 

And even as I am writing this post, I receive the happiest news that our illustrious alumnus Mr. Hudson's research article on Blue Humanities has been published in the International Journal of Maritime History, a Q2 journal, indexed in Scopus and published by SAGE. We are so proud of you dear Mathew Hudson. Keep shining. Stop not!