Page:Calcutta Review (1925) Vol. 16.djvu/515

1925]

standards of examination that now obtain at Calcutta have poisoned the very springhead of Bengali’s intellectual and moral life”.

This is academic Billingsgate of an unsurpassed quality and we do not propose to open out these veins of pure gold to further public scrutiny. The educated opinion of Bengal, or for the matter of that, all India will not, we are sure, need any further enlightenment in a case where the lights are so glaring and so flashy.

Finally, the Professor-educationist of Bihar, earning a very niggardly salary of over a thousand as a college teacher (a salary, every pice of which, by the way, comes out of the people’s taxes), has made a fervent and eloquent appeal to the Bengal Legislature and the Bengalee nation to check the mad pursuits and “poisonous” methods of the Calcutta University which has, as the Professor tells us, “issued a defiant challenge to the public opinion of Bengal”. Prof. Sarkar has also made a frantic effort to impress upon the “Bengali tax-payer” the huge extravagance of the Post-Graduate Department. In the opinion of Prof. Sarkar, so solicitious for retrenchment in University finance and so wonderfully neutral in the matter of administrative extravagances elsewhere, a demand for three lacs is, no doubt, a huge and unnecessary demand. But will it take the Bengalee people long to realise that the sum demanded by the University of Calcutta constitutes but a very small fraction of the entire revenue of Bengal which comes up to 11 crores annually? We leave it to cultured Bengal to judge if higher education in this province should be starved out of existence by the policy recommended by Prof. Jadu Nath Sarkar, who has of late developed into an expert in academic jugglery and political free-lancing.