Mumbai: The death by suicide of IIT-B student Sahil Wakode has triggered more than just a debate over academic rules, student distress and institutional accountability. In conversations on campus and across social media, it has exposed what some see as a deeper faultline within the institute and on IIT campuses, between sections of the STEM community and voices from the humanities.Whether this is a genuine disciplinary divide or merely reflects two very different ways of reading the same contested episode is now becoming a question in itself. Are there, in some ways, two campuses within one, shaped by different academic cultures, different methods of questioning and perhaps even different ideas of what constitutes fairness?“I feel two different languages emerge in every such situation because of the way different people read an episode. It’s more like whether you see the glass as half-empty or half-full. In addition, the context of your personal experience decides how you react. That does not take away from the fact that students from STEM and humanities may be the best of friends,” said a senior academic, who is an engineer by training and has also headed a social sciences university.The difference, academics say, may lie less in ideology and more in the intellectual habits different disciplines cultivate.IIM Kozhikode director Prof Debashis Chatterjee described it as the difference between a “focused” and a more exploratory, “multi-focused” mindset. “If you look at an engineering mindset, two plus two has to equal four. That is what they would want,” he said. “A literature mindset may ask: why does two plus two necessarily add up to four? What if the two things being added are qualitatively different? How can you count apples and pineapples?”The distinction, he added, was not about one approach being superior to the other, but about the questions each is trained to ask. “One mind fixes itself on specific goals. The other is constantly exploring and wondering,” Chatterjee said. “The liberal mindset looks at consequences beyond cause and effect. The techie and the fuzzy use different lenses to interpret their universe,” he added.That difference can become more visible when campuses confront emotionally charged episodes. A student trained to look for procedure, evidence and institutional rules may approach an incident differently from another who instinctively examines questions of power, identity, social context and structural inequality. Neither approach necessarily excludes the other, academics said, but the starting points can be dramatically different.The differing interpretations are not confined to students. Wakode’s death and the protests that followed have also produced divergent responses among academics, alumni and those associated with higher education. While STEM students are back to class, a small number of 15-20 IITB students from the humanities department continued their protest on campus on Thursday.One IIT director, however, dismissed suggestions that this reflected any inherent STEM-humanities rift. “I feel everything on campuses is being politicised. Unfortunately, there is an attempt to create some kind of mistrust in the system,” the director said.For now, the debate remains unresolved. What the episode has perhaps made more clear is that the same event can be understood through different intellectual and lived experiences and a university may have to accommodate all of them within the same campus, said an IITB alumna, now a yoga teacher.
