Dowry text row: Bengaluru college professor hits out at 'irresponsible' citizen journalist

NEW DELHI: Professors of English at Bangalore's St Joseph's College have come out in solidarity with the Department of Sociology, which was at the center of a controversy on Saturday after it was reported that students were handed out reading material propounding the benefits of dowry. A page titled 'Advantages of Dowry' from an academic text listed shocking statements by the proponents of this reprehensible practice. These include, but are not limited to, the marriage of ugly girls; attracting good boys; increasing the status of women in family set-ups; among others. Needless to say, the page was circulated widely on social media after an engineering student from Vellore posted it on her Facebook profile. However, Professor Cheriyan Alexander, HoD English, points out that the author of the text has written disclaimers on the page, stating that these are "the views of a certain section of society" which "should not be left unquestioned". The English professor berated the person who shared the page on social media as an "overenthusiastic citizen journalist" who had irresponsibly assumed that the college was endorsing this viewpoint and then taken it upon herself to "damn" the institution. "The citizen journalist has not bothered to read the authorial disclaimers nor to ask for the book itself in order to examine what appears before or after the page that she is dissecting with such expertise... She has just assumed that this must represent the College's official ideology," he said in a statement issued on Facebook. The professor then cautions to stand guard against the growing tribe of people who seek to stifle academic freedom. Elaborating on his stand with an example, he said, "Let's say a teacher of political thought and of the various political ideologies circulates readings taken from across the whole spectrum of ideologies that have been articulated on the stage of history up to now. So there are selections from Kautilya, Manu, Cicero, Locke, Voltaire, Rousseau, Marx, Lenin, Hitler, Gandhi, Mussolini, Ambedkar, Mao, among others. The purpose of the educator is to expose the students to the entire range so as to enable them to compare, analyse, critique and then distinguish between that which is regressive and that which is progressive among them - in short helping the student to think for himself or herself. Now, let us say a page from these selections falls into the hands of the overenthusiastic citizen journalist of the kind under discussion. What is to prevent such a one from seizing a page from Hitler and say the college is indoctrinating its students in fascist ideology or a page from Mao and concluding the college is an incubating center for Naxalites. It can happen, my friends."