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It is in this context one is puzzled by the topic of the symposium which calls for a discussion on autonomy and social justice. A teacher of mathematics would be more concerned with keeping his/her knowledge up to date, getting text books for the teacher who teaches advanced courses (leave alone the students) and for finding a suitable typewriter for typing out articles accepted for publication abroad. A teacher of mathematics is seldom well-equipped to take up a topic such as the one suggested for this symposium outside his/her field of interest.

Having expressed my bewilderment at the title of our symposium let me try to raise a few questions. First,  "Are autonomous colleges vehicles of social justice?". This leads to the next question "Can college education lead to social justice?" This leads to the next question, "Can education at college level lead to social equality?" Answer to the last question is obvious and is in the negative. Unless and until the time when every adult Indian has a college education, college education will produce only inequality among the people. Only some among many get college education and this on average leads to an increase in the capacity to earn and this would lead to inequality between people in the capacity to earn.

The Kothari Commission Report defines one of the functions of a modern university is "to strive to promote equality and social justice and to reduce social and cultural differences through diffusion of education and to foster in the teachers and students, and through them in society, generally, the attitudes and values needed for developing the 'good life' in individuals and society." This sounds a little different from the earlier questions that I raised. In a university or college, equality and social justice must be promoted among its members. A student must be encouraged to achieve more in his subject irrespective of whether he comes from a poor family or otherwise. Students should be influenced in the college atmosphere to yearn for social justice. If this is what is to be achieved then it must be achieved in all colleges.

The Kothari Commission Report recommended that an autonomous college should be given the power to frame its own rules of admission, to prescribe its courses of study and to conduct examinations and so on". We now prescribe our courses of study and conduct our examinations but methods of admissions have to follow government regulations which does not permit us to have our own rules of admission.

The main purpose of granting autonomy to a limited number of colleges is to raise our academic standards so that these colleges would strive for academic excellence. The Kothari Commission has recommended that these colleges should be given "certain advantages such as salary bonuses for their teachers" and other grants. It is at this stage one should see the need for the formation of ATAC, the Association of Teachers of Autonomous Colleges since the AUT does not see the need for autonomous colleges. Formation of this new association is absolutely essential unless the AUT is willing to withdraw its stand against autonomy.

Some members may react by saying it is not fair and it is not justice. This leads me to other questions such as, "what is our idea of justice in our day to day matters?" I am not talking about text book definitions and classifications of different kinds of justice. We have been brought up in a context where pain, poverty and suffering is easily explained by the notion of reaping the rewards of one's acts in a previous birth. About one half of the adult population of Tamil Nadu believes in this. More women than men openly believe in this notion. Among those who have had a college education seventy percent disagreed with the statement, "People are born in a low position because of their misdeeds in their previous birth."  What is surprising is that 23 percent of the college educated say 'yes' and another seven percent 'can not say'. These people who view  poverty as a just punishment for a person's wrong-doing would find it difficult to believe that it is just to remove poverty and ignorance.

The concept of autonomy is not new to us at the Madras Christian College. We planned for autonomy since 1964 and Prof. J.P. Naik of the Kothari Commission was present with us when we planned out the future of the College at a meeting in Kodaikanal in 1964. Let me quote from our document entitled Developing a College in a Developing India. The anonymous writer is Dr Chandran Devanesen.

Today we are on an educational plateau consisting of nearly 2000 private colleges where hardly any peaks of excellence are discernible. We believe that such peaks leading to higher quality and endeavour will not become visible until some institutions determine to rise above the plateau. A principle of selectivity is, therefore, necessary in order to encourage some colleges to climb greater heights. The aim of such encouragement is not the creation of a form of elitism in education but part of an endeavour to level up, to enable all colleges to aim higher by seeing what is possible. It involves also a principle of autonomy because a college must dare to think and act with a courage and an independence which challenges it to climb up from the educational plateau (p.6)

What is clear to us is that we have been planning for over a decade so that our college will become a better college and that our academic standards could be raised, if possible to international standards. Judging from what has happened during the last twenty years the academic standards have certainly gone up in many departments including the departments of mathematics and statistics. Members of the faculty have won recognition at the international level. Members are able to publish their research findings in journals of international repute. (In this section I am mainly talking about the mathematical sciences.) Autonomy granted up to M.Phil. level has simply pushed up standards in areas of specialization. One should however be guarded against the danger of cutting down syllabi in the special subjects in order to make it easier for the students to pass. This is a potential danger and we must guard ourselves against such temptations. Our standards should not be lower than the standards (in terms of content of courses) of non-autonomous colleges in the university.

In some subjects like statistics field work is built into the syllabus at the M.Sc. level and students are able to take up problems of different types such as agricultural experiments in the farm, study of conservancy workers at Tiruchi, computer methods of inventory control in certain industries, recommendations for new routes for the Pallavan Transport on the basis of statistical data and so on. Students at the undergraduate level have been taking part in statewide sample surveys taking up specific problems of social relevance. One year it was on children's eye sight, another year it was on the availability of fuel, another year it was on child health and another year it was on drinking water supply. Our newspapers show greater interest in the public opinion polls on political leaders conducted by us than on subjects of social relevance. This year pre-election study was made at Periakulam by M.Sc. students in statistics and their results were published in the Tamil newspapers.

A new development in statistics is the taking up of funded research for the Government of India. Some of the problems are related to the development of the Tamil Script, Computer methods in Archaeology and Computer Recognition of Tamil and other Indian scripts.

We are fairly satisfied with the levels of achievement in the past and we must strive to maintain the standards if not improve them. One hopes our physical facilities and library facilities would improve so that we need not be thoroughly ashamed of the present situation.

At the beginning I raised a question, "Are autonomous colleges vehicles of social justice?" Some colleges, autonomous or other wise, have inspired students to work for "social justice" whatever it may mean to them. The freedom to choose the syllabus, or in other words, autonomous is not going to change the basic character of a college. The phrase social justice means quite different things to people of different colleges. (The nice thing is that every one is for justice whatever it may mean to them) . To E V Ramasamy Periar social justice was one thing and some colleges have been centers of EVR's thought and philosophy. Others with a Marxist temperament would talk about elitist colleges. Others could get overenthusiastic about shouting against colleges run by our Muslim brethren. Each one is convinced about the fact that they are fighting for "justice" of their kind if not social justice. In a poor country like ours, college teachers genuinely feel that they should be given higher pay and are willing to organize themselves ( even though it cannot be called social justice either in the EVR sense or the Marxist sense) . It is fair in the AUT sense (without meaning any offence to that organization of which I am a life member!) .

Since we have different ideas of justice (but we pretend that there is some thing in common) let me end up with the idea of an elitist college. I still do not understand clearly which colleges can be claimed to be elitist? This confusion is increased by my recent visit to W.Germany since even the best of our colleges look so poor and under-privileged from an international standard. There is no comparison with the other nations who have such good physical facilities -- including good library and laboratory facilities. Here we are a developing nation fighting about elitist colleges. I am ashamed of the fact that we live at a time when colleges are closed due to agitations and it is happening to colleges -- autonomous or otherwise.

Usually colleges in metropolitan cities could be called elitist since city students who have a better economic and educational background go there. Colleges where teaching is done primarily in Tamil are not called elitist colleges since most of the students would have gone to Tamil medium schools and would have come from poorer rural families. A college which does not attract good faculty and students is not usually called elitist. If you have a good college to which you would like to send your sons and daughters and later on if you do not like it (when your son does not get admission since the seat is given to a poorer student perhaps) then you can call it elitist and organize a campaign against it.

The need of the country is good colleges, colleges which are not closed by strikes (or water shortage), colleges where international standards are maintained by the hard work of staff and students. For the amount of money -- the citizen's money -- spent on higher education, it is social justice that there should be at least a few real colleges in our country, colleges which take up their role seriously. Are we one of these colleges ? Can we become one ?