Will COVID 19 Turn Higher Education into Another Mode?

Alternative Economy

A team of social scientists have shown how survival struggles of the ordinary people of the USA, Europe and Australia had led to the rise of alternatives during the financial crisis of 2008 (Castells, 2017). Supports not forthcoming from their elitist governments, they resorted to spontaneously evolving community practices of reciprocity and cooperation as survival strategies. Resorting to barter networks, ethical banking, digital entrepreneurship and cryptographic virtual currencies they rendered another economy of new norms of exchange possible. Nonetheless, the market economy back to dominance could easily contain the alternative that the people are now reinventing during the COVID crisis.

As happened after the financial crisis of 2008, post-pandemic recovery measures of governments caught up in transnational trade-offs will normally give top priority to doing everything to restore the global economy of capital flows. A series of new exactions such as healthcare levy, salary cut, wage reduction, compensation lessening, and public expense cut and welfare measures withdrawal would follow. Naturally, there would be people’s movements desperately demanding their governments to ensure better health security, redistribute wealth, enhance consumption, boost investments and generate employment. Demands would certainly influence government policies a bit to provide for jobs, compensations and better public healthcare. But there could be no measures to regulate capital growth in order to ensure distributive justice.

India, one of the world’s largest democracies though, is going to be no exception. A developed financial set up of dynamic private sector under the free-market economy of macroeconomic stability, a huge domestic market, and a fairly diversified science-tech infrastructure, a commendable diaspora, valuable knowledge networks, and a developed IT sector of global software provider status; the country is largely crony-capitalist. Representing diverse groups, relations and interests in society, the nation plays apparently the role of overall co-ordination, but as desired by the middleclass that constitutes the government but as wanted by capitalists, who hold the strings of final control. Placed at the mercy of market, the people are integrated into hierarchies of caste-class convergence across religions and of bureaucracy under the state, semi-state and private enterprises. One-fourth of the population, illiterate and poor, mostly in the villages but largely moved by sentiments rather than political consciousness, it is hard for the country to achieve democratization. Survival struggles have been there but too subsumed and marginalized. Panchayati Raj Nagarpalika self-governance initiatives (1992–1993) helped the government accelerate market development rather than democratization, for it made little change in the local social power relations based on caste-class-community nexus.

Kerala’s Distinction

Nevertheless, the constitutionally ordained self-governance reform introduced in Kerala through People’s Plan Campaign (1996) made an exceptional difference under the Marxist Government of democratic centralism (Isaac, 2001; Tharakan, 2001). It did result in institutional development at the grassroots, especially people’s cooperatives providing the weaker section better access to local resources and power. People’s self-governing institutions with predictable share of plan fund for local-level development enterprises distinguished Kerala from the rest of the states. It enabled the state to become nationally No. 1 in sustainable social development.

Kerala’s COVID 19 crisis management has drawn global attention due to the chief minister’s outstanding leadership, the health minister’s intimate involvement and the functional competency of local bodies. What the developed world finds amazing is the running thread of political control across the widespread public healthcare institutions, local bodies of self-governance, multiple cooperatives, distributive channels, charitable societies, community service organizations and other agencies guaranteeing compassionate action on war-footing! It is coalescing different agencies of conflicting interests into a single task with absolute precedence of human values over economic gains. This distinct set up enables the state to effectively encounter the pandemic lockdown and its social consequences such as livelihood loss, workers without income, farmers with unsold products, unemployment, abject poverty and starvation. It helps the state facilitate voluntary redistribution of wealth and circulation of essential goods without profit motives ensuring social security. This is governmental restructuring of the economy without growth as a resilient and equitable alternative extending goods, services and credit for people to be redesigned in a new pattern of social existence of adaptability to stagnation as a new norm.

Indications of the alternative demonstrate that another economy is possible but only in times of crisis, irrespective of who renders it plausible. Diffused communities in the developed world made it possible through the spontaneously emerging institutions, groups, relations and practices as part of their survival struggle in 2008. A state like Kerala proves its feasibility by means of constitutionally ordained local self-governing bodies, cooperative institutions and political leadership. Crisis-driven alternative economy’s responses such as work sharing, food security measures and basic income scheme do reverse the capitalist redistributive functions. Kerala shows how the government should evolve policies of social care-nets, strengthen public health, provide economic stimulus to local enterprises and combine growth with equity. This hardly means that the feasibility of production, consumption and exchange not driven by motives of profit and consumerism is enough to make it last beyond the days of crisis. None of these can scale up to bring about a systemic change for a variety of reasons relating to the dynamic of development (Ruccio, 2010). Most important of all is the ascendancy of an already mutated form of capitalism driven by science and technology as source of accumulation, which subsequently acquired the name Techno-capitalism, popularly known as knowledge economy (Feenberg, 1991).

Techno-capitalism

COVID 19 pandemic, though much more devastating to the poor economy the world over, will have a course incomparable in the dominant economy of developed countries. Critical political economists think that COVID 19-induced downturn precludes recovery of conventional capitalist economy. Any major crisis lets philosophers spread the wings of their thoughts about the immediate future. Many reacted against the loss of individual freedom and identity in the wake the state dictating social behaviour under the emergency of pandemic. Humanists imagined the passage of what they hated and extrapolated indications in the current situation to their cherished alternative based on environmental justice, social cooperation and public trust transcending the centralized state power or global capitalism or barbarism (Slavoj Zizek, 2020). Some of them anticipated a post-capitalist phase of communities, not rigidly class divided, enjoying equal status at various levels in terms of livelihood practices and relations of exchange. It appears to me that the global economy will continue to expand its market by capitalizing the pandemic panic and fear of life-threatening viruses, not in its conventional form but in a new form heavily depended on commoditization of technology and science for turning knowledge into capital.

Unlike the past industrial system of manufacturing goods and services, the new type runs huge research establishments in science-tech hybrid fields for the production and exchange of intellectual property and patents—the most potential source of accumulation (Perelman, 2004). Organized into corporations, techno-capitalists have built up such experimentalist research establishments the world over engaging thousands of scientists and engineers good in high power computing and software designing for the purpose. It involves appropriation of science-tech creativity from the youth for the production of patentable intellectual property. Transacting patents and intellectual property they accumulate billions of dollars. Similarly, sales and purchases of multi-media software packages help accumulate amazingly huge sums of capital. This means owning and controlling knowledge not as the basis of commodity production but as commodity itself and as the source of intellectual property, also called the intangible asset. Intangible assets account for as much as four-fifths of the total value of current products and services (Suarez-villa, 2009, 2012).

Knowledge works as both commodity and capital in the economy. Commoditization of knowledge makes creativity an independent economic entity blinding the users of knowledge from seeing the author. This is commodity fetishism turned into capital fetishism. It operates in a very complex way under the global juridical system of Intellectual Property Rights (IPRs) and transnational imperialism rooted in technological sophistication and corporate militancy (Suarez-villa, 2012, 2015). Corporate laboratories are exploring the micro universe of proteins and their dynamics through X-ray crystallography, high-field NMR spectroscopy, microarray technologies and automated methods. Their researches are mostly in latest science-tech hybrid areas such as genomics, biopharmacology, biomedicine, synthetic bioengineering, bioinformatics, robotics, and nanotech sensors and transmitters. Tens of billions of dollars worth intellectual property in hand and patents in the pipeline, techno-capitalists will flourish. COVID 19 crisis will only boost the accumulation. They are the wealthiest and most powerful corporations that exert unprecedented influence on contemporary world (Suarez-villa, 2015).

Future Higher Education

Pandemic crisis causing massive human resource-loss had intensified the basic contradictions in the dominant economic relations in history accounting for radical systemic transformation. Needless to say that contemporary system of higher education was not immune to the process. Different kinds of plague that ravaged the peasants of Europe during 14th, 15th, 16th and 17th centuries dissolved feudal relations into capitalism through Renaissance, geographical discoveries, religious reformation and industrial revolution. Significantly restructured in the wake of the pandemic, universities and colleges gave rise to critical thinking and pioneering discoveries, of which the theory of Isaac Newton was epochal.

Capitalism distinguished as monopolistic, survived the crisis of economic loss during the smallpox pandemic in the late 19th century, through the development of medical education, medicinal inventions and pharmaceutical industry. Spanish influenza of 1918–1919 killed about 50 million people across the globe, which exceeded what the First World War had done during its four-year course. It deprived the dominant economy of its War booty and put the higher education into disarray for almost a decade. Nevertheless, science and technology advanced through researches leading to path-breaking discoveries and inventions all along the periods of crisis created by the great depression of 1930, the Second World War and pandemic of Measles, Ebola, SARC and MERC.

COVID 19 pandemic will not bring in any radical change in the higher education that has already been undergoing reforms to meet the requirements of the dominant economy. Pandemic lockdown has helped the world exhilarate the reforms, especially the mode of teaching and evaluation. It appears that the contingent situation will predictably divide the higher education institutions into two types:

One type covering humanities and social sciences taught informally through virtual mode involving less expense and meant for the general public and

Lockdown-induced closure of higher education institutions will compel teachers and students to resort to online mode, and along with other dictations, there would be a call for a de facto switching to the system of virtual learning. Hailed more effective, quick and less expensive, the online mode of teaching would allow all the Open and other universities to run UG and PG programmes in online mode pushing an unprecedentedly huge number of teachers into a mode unfamiliar to them. There would be a single online podcast of course material by way of texts and videos.

Online teaching and evaluation would be pushed as a new normal under the pretext of the pandemic crisis. Online delivery of lessons would not be feasible in the case of about 30 per cent of students at home under lockdown wanting net connectivity. It would upset objectives of access, equity and excellence in the higher education sector. Further, this massive shift to online mode would be tantamount to leaving one-third of the teaching faculty redundant. This would help crony capitalist governments to cut public expenditure on higher education by replacing a considerable portion of the teaching faculty.

It is true that the age-old in-face lecture mode followed in colleges and universities has democratized mediocrity. It is also true that smart teaching under electronic sophistication can render students the latest course material as well as lectures of high profile professors including Nobel Laureates through virtual classrooms. Administering of courses online would definitely have to compromise quality unless used as a complementary alternative. Various, online lessons provided by Coursera, EdX, Future Learn, Udacity, Canvas Network and many others in European languages are being used as complementary by students in great institutions famous for campus learning. Students’ knowledge supplemented through online instructions by world-renowned scholars would compel the ordinary teachers to be academically more challenging in their teaching. In short, virtual higher education would never match the campus-based real that is distinct for various critical aspects of rigorous learning.

Possible Transformation

Nevertheless, the COVID-induced virtual mode will bring about a series of transformations in the concept of higher education institutions, their clientele and practices. The concept of competence, outcome, teaching, learning, evaluation, quality, access, equity and excellence will be different. Competence will be e-competence, outcome will be computational, teaching will be ICT linked, evaluation will be online, quality will be e-competency related, access will be technology dependent, and equity will be a mere rhetoric.

Post-pandemic higher education, particularly research, will have special focus on the emerging knowledge universes, both the macro and micro, separately as well as in combination. Independently, the macro is being explored in terms of non-classical mechanics and impact physics through new means of measurement. Combination of the macro and micro has already been there for knowing the macro through extrapolation as in the case of geology and cosmology. A better combine can be exemplified through the case of plasma high-energy physics and shockwave hypersonic velocity in space technology. Many science-tech hybrid areas focusing on micro space and milliseconds instead of the macro space and infinite time will gain added significance in higher education curricula. Understanding the micro universe of functional and structural genomics, gene sequences of viruses, self-replicating particles, graphene, nanotech sensors and transmitters, brain-computer interfaces and umpteen other survival-related researches will engage higher education institutions.

Disciplines will increasingly draw closer to one another in the wake of the emergence of more and more cross-disciplinary areas of knowledge. Blurring of disciplinary borders in higher education will demand cross-disciplinary literacy among teachers and adaptability among students. Growth of sciences through narrow specialisations in their turn becoming sub-disciplines of added rigidity will be forced to break the disciplinary silos and allow flexibility of choice in specialization across disciplines. Specialization giving precedence of parts over the whole impeding holistic understanding will phase out. Higher education will become more and more personal and self-directed rather than general and institutionally administered through fixed requirements and procedures.

Corporates would need science-tech graduates of innovative faculty in plenty for them to choose the best to work at low cost in their research establishments. It would be increasingly recognized that the developing world of poor quality higher education is rich in students of innovativeness. Since picking and training them as such being costly, the developing countries would be more and more encouraged to uniformly redesign their higher education to serve the purpose. Such redesigning and homogenizing reforms have already been in progress everywhere including India.

Indian Context

What could be the post-COVID residual in the domain of higher education is an important question. In India, the higher education sector would largely remain the same but will be centralized under a single regulatory authority with the number of institutions highly reduced and made uniform through homogenization of curricula, academic programmes, and learning outcomes as construed by experts in the corporate knowledge industry. A centrally monitored single online podcast of course material will be nationally imposed. Institutions would be funded selectively through ‘challenge mode’ pressurising them to function as centrifuges sifting out best brains trained in high power computing to work in corporate institutions of science-tech hybrid areas.

Higher education institutions in the country will compete to provide teaching and learning environment appropriate for the production of enough graduates employable in knowledge industry. Indian higher education, not dependent on foreign students, will be least affected by the international supply chain disruption thereof. Demographically favourable from the demand side, Indian higher education institutions will not face scarcity of students and hence no revenue fall. Nevertheless, the institutional role redefined due to dependency on virtual classrooms and online transactions, the cost will be less, although the private establishments might charge heavily.