The American university today, the writer Siddhartha Deb tells
Equator's Pankaj Mishra, is "a money-making, MBA- and lawyer-run hedge fund and real estate operation with a minor sideline in education." It's hard, he says, to tell the difference between "Columbia University and the New School on the one hand and X and Elon Musk on the other."
Siddhartha, an Indian writer and novelist, came to academia in the US in the belief that it was a citadel of free thought and open minds. But as he wrote in his
Equator essay
From Calcutta to Columbia, disenchantment set in quickly. He saw how students were loaded with debt, how his university was voraciously expanding across its pocket of Manhattan, and how the jargon of theory "allowed people to cultivate a moral distance from capital and empire".
Journalism has suffered in parallel as well, both in the US and India. Siddhartha, a former journalist, tells Pankaj that newspapers as much as universities have cravenly surrendered to the Trump administration and but also to previous presidents. "I grew up with this idea of writing being a noble vocation," says Pankaj. "One of the great disillusioning experiences really of the last two or three decades has been that very few people seem to think of it that way. Most people think of it as a pathway to the most hideously conventional forms of success."
Read Siddhartha's essay for
Equator,
From Calcutta to Columbia.