"Higher education is going to the dogs" is possibly the wittiest remark you can overhear, the cliché betraying the grooved thinking in which the academic mind is today stuck. The highest flights of knowledge rise no higher than an imprecise summary of journalistic reports on the crisis in education. The conversation meanders through the Indian economy, overruns the Taliban, circles around Kashmir and, at last, flounders and buries itself in vegetables and summer footwear. "The union must urgently raise the demand for super-selection grades," rasps an aging throat. "After all, we deserve a better deal."

But there are also apprehensions: the events unfolding all around speak of a different future. The increasing cuts in the budgetary outlay for higher education, with rumors of quietly prepared alternative plans to reorganize the university system, deepen the gloom. And yet, very few persons are willing to read the writing on the wall. While many happily keep their heads buried in the sand, quite a few do not even register any sign of the incapacity to look ahead. The future, before being visualized, is allowed with fatalistic inevitability.

However, they do somehow manage to eavesdrop on their guts, "Thank God that you are getting all this. What more do you expect? Can you justify even this?" When the intellect is not equipped to make out the shape of the future, where do you seek refuge if not in gut reaction? "I don't know but I feel deep down that a dreadful time is approaching." This remark from a melancholy middle-aged teacher shifts the conversation into the pseudo-intuitive gear, aborting any analysis at the very conception of ideation.

This may sound incredible but there really are people in education who have not written a page in a career spanning decades. And they have not read a book. Their parlours exhibit shelves and shelves of substandard help-books received as specimens "FOR FAVOUR OF RECOMMENDATION IN THE CLASSROOM". They have reduced education to the four B's: beggary, bribery, burglary and browbeating. But times do change, and the hidden sins of yesterday can erupt tomorrow to consume and extinguish you. Precisely that appears to be going to happen now. Tomorrow is almost here. And it throws shadows of amorphous fear in the minds that have not trained to reflect.

Unions are no longer able to do duty for cartels of organized self-interest. The protection they had historically afforded against exploitation came somehow to be abused to protect the exploitative and lazy lifestyles of the protected. Now that the principles of accountability and transparency threaten to rewrite the code of conduct in the academic workplace, the guilty conscience espies a global design against the rights of the masses and the integrity of teachers. A vague but ornamentally formulaic resistance, propped up on obsolete ideological insights, is voiced. You can read the press statements of the union leaders and notice how severely fatigued and bored they sound. There is neither vision, nor wit in them. The programmes of agitation aim at blocking any effort at change and focus on no more than a better financial deal for the agitators. No alternative sources of funding nor any plans to improve teaching are proposed. Nor is any comprehensive critique of the prevailing university system ever offered. All political investment is in the status quo; whatever change is desired is merely for greater consolidation of self-interest.

For so many years have I been doing the selfsame books with my students that the syllabi have begun to smell like the scriptures - above change, beyond time. Not that one's dialogue with the books does not change with the years. The question is: "How do the Boards of Studies justify their existence if they cannot even periodically reconsider the relevance and value of a syllabus?" If the teachers in colleges are indifferent or powerless, those in the universities appear to be power-drunk and sleeping. The enormous changes in the sociology and economy of knowledge in recent years have not even touched the teaching in colleges, particularly insofar as the conventional disciplines are concerned.

A distressing example is the state of the application of information technology. Outside the curricula of the technology-related courses, it has got simply no presence in higher education. Though the government in its wisdom can gift personal computers to politicians and bureaucrats, it sees no point in subsidizing these for educators. In an age when the best universities in the world are seeking reincarnation as brick-and-click universities, our institutions are waiting for a supernatural miracle of reincarnation to save them from extinction. The networks of those universities are proliferating beyond the national borders and wrapping up other continents, whereas the battered and shrinking territories of our institutions await the day they will pathetically preside over nothing better than ghost empires.

It is hard to understand why neither the government nor the teachers' unions notice the widespread fleecing of desperate students by the thousands of computer training and other institutes of dubious merit. A marginal increase in university fees raises the teachers' heckles, but they conveniently overlook the systematic robbery of those very students by the unregulated private institutes. The government too, on its part, shows no intention to regulate and standardize their operations. If these institutes are working as successful financial ventures, it is on account of the great vacuum in the university system. The intellectual sloth of the academy - an accumulation of criminal delinquency against the society - has finally corroded and knocked the bottom out of the university system and left a vacuum that gapes like a black hole to suck it in.

The vacuum I mention is no mere figure of speech. It is a world of opportunities, a part of which has been colonized by the para(sitic)-academic services mentioned above. The remaining, and far greater, territory waits to be conquered by the powers of big business. In the recent budgetary proposal to make generous loans available for higher studies, the government has, I think, dropped an unmistakable hint of what it intends to do with the vacuum. Since the existing university system in the country cannot justifiably absorb the demand for quality education that will be engendered by the easy availability of loans, the next step may be to permit the establishment of private universities. In a way, therefore, the proposal for loans is the inauguration of radical restructuring in higher education.

I don't think radical restructuring can be avoided, or even deferred, any longer, for the simple reason that education is not an isolated activity. The misfortune is that the restructuring will be authored not by the academy but by market forces. And market forces do not have human vision and commitment. If, in the process of restructuring, higher education collapses and turns into a bazaar (with all that it implies for civilization), the blame will be inscribed across the academic's forehead.

The academy faces its moment of choice, which is also its moment of truth. Will it intervene to guide the course of events? Or will the rush of events overrun it?