Anatomy of Research~II

Equality of right to vote for political parties in a democracy is now getting steadily extended into citizens‘ equality of right to a university degree. This trend is widely being hailed on two commonly revered counts. First, this reflects a growing stronghold of the cherished idea of ‘democratic equality‘. Second, this helps greatly to strengthen macro-economic health of a country by boosting private investment in educational enterprises and capitalistic growth. But its potentially adverse qualitative ramifications for the standard of academic research are certainly distortionary

- ARUP MAHARATNA

While the term, knowledge, and its commonly perceived notion has remained somewhat invariant historically over centuries, it was only in the post-war decades that the newly dominant section of the economics profession, which began running increasingly after analytical elegance and logical precision, dared to posit ‘knowledge’ merely as a set of information, eventually blurring the age-old distinction between their notions. This, in turn, led to a spree of diluting and codifying knowledge in all branches to express it in the shape of a set of information.

This process has, of course, been greatly facilitated at all levels of education by market-oriented innovations in word-processing software governed by digits and algorithms. Indeed, it is now a common practice for software engineers, like medical representatives, to come and tell school/college/university teachers how best or effectively the latter can teach a course in classrooms with the help of newly innovated software geared to populist digital and visual presentations of knowledge.

Consequently, educationists/educators/teachers are all effectively becoming ‘learners’ to these software and electronic gadgets engineers! And this is how knowledge has taken the overwhelming form of mere information or ‘know-how’ and an ‘age of information’ soon got to be elevated to a ‘knowledge society’. This has had dilutionary ramifications for the notion and purpose of education, university, research and indeed entire academe. In its wake a scholar or scientist who was traditionally considered to be distinguished in a society has become increasingly unexceptional or a commoner especially if she could not amass huge wealth either by selling patents or by commissioning highly remunerative innovative research from the market or industry.