Lecturing in the rain

Today I went to give a guest lecture at Sophia College--they finally responded to my job query by asking me to give a talk on "imperial Russia and the Soviet Union" and I didn't have a reason to say no.

Sophia (strangely, same "i" as in sapphire) is an all-girls college in central Mumbai that was founded by the French Sacred Heart order in the 1930s. It has no admission policy and costs only $20 a year to attend! This is typical of the colleges here and the consequence is that professors aren't really paid either.

The resident European history lecturer and I walked around the red-brick building (dating back to the 18th century, it was an English residence and then a maharajah's palace before the nuns claimed it) in the warm, pouring rain that falls for several hours at a stretch these days. Then, over cups of sickly sweet tea (loads of sugar and milk; good for hunger pangs) she told me about all that's wrong with Indian schooling in the humanities.

First, there's the aforementioned terrible pay for professors--she actually got $10 when starting out! Which is why the overwhelming majority of college professors are women with moneymaking husbands. She does get paid something now but also teaches 19 hours a week--Indian, European and Chinese history as well as archeology--while trying to finish her dissertation.

Then, there's the fact that the course syllabi all come from the Ministry of Education and the professors have no freedom to teach what they want--all undergrads in the country take standardized exams, so they need to cover the same material.

The positive: because Sophia is an all girls' college, a lot of the Muslim women who attend it would otherwise not get a higher education since their families would not allow them to study at a co-ed institution. Yet, there is also a high attrition rate due to the number of women who get married off in the middle of their schooling and never come back.

Finally, we proceeded to the lecture hall where I was surprised to see a large audience, about 60 people, all well-behaved and ready to listen. During an embarrassingly flowery and formal introduction the lecturer mentioned that I got my M.A./M.Phil and Ph.D. from Yale and also got an M.A. from the Sorbonne, which caused everyone to suddenly erupt in enthusiastic applause.

This threw me in for a loop as I thought it was an inside joke. But no, Misha's Indian colleagues explained, that's the typical reaction to educational credentials here--they're seen as highly important and the process of getting into a good college (in India or in the West) is accompanied by intense and expensive course prep and a good deal of stress.

The rest of the lecture was fairly uneventful. The girls listened attentively but trying to draw them into a discussion about socialist realist art was almost impossible (the system here is rote learning, so students almost never speak in class). They did seem to get excited about the Moscow Metro though--that one never fails to impress. At the end, they took my picture and gave me a pencil case with Sophia's logo and nice chocolates, which made me feel like a minor celebrity in town for a slightly depressing college tour.