IRVINE, CALIFORNIA, February 22, 2016 (Inside Higher Ed): The University of California at Irvine is walking away from two gifts to establish endowed chairs in Hindu and India studies after faculty members and students raised concerns about the ideology of the donors and the influence they sought to exert in the search process. The gifts in question came from the Dharma Civilization Foundation, a California entity that seeks to fund the academic study and teaching of Indian religions as a corrective to what it describes as widespread misrepresentations of Hinduism by scholars who do not practice the religion.
The report by an ad hoc faculty committee charged with reviewing the DCF gifts to Irvine raised serious concerns about the implications of the university associating with the foundation in light of its various public statements on “what constitutes good or acceptable scholars.” The committee — which also documented flaws in the procedures for approving the chairs and problems in the language of the gift agreements — found association with the DCF to be “inconsistent with UCI’s core values as a public university that fosters diversity, inclusion, toleration and respect” and recommended rejecting the gifts, a recommendation endorsed by the university’s Humanities Executive Committee (HEC).
[HPI note: The agreements which created the chairs can be downloaded here: http://files.onset.freedom.com/ocregister/ocwatchdog/Humanities_Endowed_chair_agreements.compressed.pdf.
The specific provision which seemed to set off the protest for one chair was this language requirement: “The Scholar designated to fill the Chair in lndic Civilizational and Religious Studies will have the equivalent of native proficiency in Sanskrit and in at least one contemporary Indian language and deep familiarity with India, and Indian tradition.”]
The dean of Irvine’s School of Humanities, Georges Van Den Abbeele, accepted the faculty’s recommendation that two other gifts to Irvine to fund endowed chairs in Jainism and Sikhism — which come from donors who declare themselves independent of DCF but which by some accounts were catalyzed by the foundation — be returned to the dean’s office for further consideration and review.
Reached late on Friday, DCF’s executive vice president, Kalyan Viswanathan, said he would respond after reviewing the committee’s report. A statement previously authored by Viswanathan, however, describes the controversy over the chairs as a “tempest in a teapot” and rejects accusations of any “political motivations” underlying DCF’s activities. “DCF seeks to widen and diversify the study of these traditions and culture of Indic origin, from being predominantly focused on applying Western models on foreign phenomena, to being more culturally sensitive, in such a manner as to take seriously the self-understanding of these non-Western Indic cultures and religions as lived traditions of fellow Americans, and include dimensions such as philosophy and ethics from an insider’s (emic) perspective which barely exist today,” Viswanathan wrote.
Much more at “source” above