Women in Academies:
A Problem or a Solution?

Asks Mrinal Kulkarni while tracing out the status of women faculties in the academic institutions in India. She culls out a few facts in order to emphasize that the debates on democratic equity will never take the women faculties anywhere but the concentration should be on ‘institution as a crisis’

‘Women in academia’ is an elusive subject in India as there are no researches done on this topic. When the word ‘woman’ is uttered vis-à-vis academies the democratic argument of equity comes up which results in the game of mere presence or absence of women faculties. And the departments which have more number of women faculties try to patronize the women in professional as well as academic fields. So instead of getting on to this issue of democratic equity, it would be more fruitful if we bring the institutions in ‘criticism’ (in Barthian sense of ‘calling in crisis’) regarding the intellectual silence they maintain on such issues.

The entry of women in academia has not changed the actual work or organisation of that but it has helped several women to gain access into the abstracted mode of university. This location provides them a privilege to articulate and ‘being enfranchised to speak’. But the mental/manual division of academic labour and the institutional hierarchies of authority and subordination abruptly cut this privilege. This issue of control governs the social structure of the academic culture where maintaining the rules establishes both the social and knowledge relations. From this perspective, women always reside in another's discourse, which, in turn, rationalizes the rules within which they are forced to operate. Women are caught by the academic culture.  They are expected to attain "mastery" in a system that does not welcome them.  To some degree, many women in academia become first the colonized and then the colonizer as they assimilate and adapt the requisite, fostered, and prized discourse.

So it is a need now to critique the ways of operating and thinking and the fundamental values that perpetuate the oppression of marginalized groups. There are two fundamental precepts on which universities are said to operate and whose impact on women and other under- and unrepresented groups are not mitigated by equity policies and harassment protection. These two values are "community" and "academic freedom”.

When you look at the motto or philosophy of any of the Indian universities you will find this ‘community’ value spelled in the ‘underlined vision of large home’ (introduction in JNU website) or ‘wealth of mind which is for all’ (Viswa Bharati University webiste). A special care is taken to support underprivileged groups to voice their own concerns. Thus the job in a university is not merely to enter a contractual relationship; it is to become part of the university, even part of the family. If someone bothered to disagree with the views are seen as a challenge to ‘the facts’ and termed as a threat to the harmonious academic culture. This is what seems to be a major reason for the silence on the issue of women in academia.

Most of the major universities in India have full-fledged Women Study Research Centers ( barring Viswa Bharati and JNU. In JNU it is only a programme under School of Social Sciences). Various dimensions of women’s lives, such as health and nutrition, economic status, education and training, environment, housing, energy and the law are the major objectives of these centers. Many of their research work are related to Gender sensitisation. In education system it is either restricted up to the school education and in university campus among the students. As if there is no gender crisis in faculties in the universities, no one wants to fail to be a team player. No one wants to call in crisis the basic rules of the game.

In India the philosophy of universities describes ‘academic freedom’ in terms of experimentation, diversities of opinions and quest for knowledge. Here these are considered to be politically neutral entities. That’s why knowledge is zealously guarded from the clutches of any political/personal readings. Thus it silences the privilege of speaking, empowerment and the critical reading of reflexive and pragmatic relation to the process of institutionalisation. There is a need to understand academic freedom beyond the right to teach what have been always taught, research what as individual want. With this academic freedom one needs to accept the responsibility to question the perspectives from which one speaks and to make other perspectives visible and consider them valuable. Thus women in academia have to make their personal a site for the critique in relation to the academia.