What Can Activist Scholars Learn from Rumi?

Abstract

The moment of inspiration for this essay was a university research committee meeting at which we were briefed about the next round of research assessment exercise by the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE), now renamed Research Excellence Framework. The proposed framework included the use of ‘bibliometrics,’ a system that, if adopted, will measure the worth of knowledge that scholars produce by using quantitative metrics. The rationale for the metric system was to develop transparent funding mechanisms by assessing the value of scholarly works — ‘output’ in the new higher education jargon — and turn them into yet another commodity in global education markets. I remembered a verse from Hazrat Mawlana Jalal al-Din Rumi…

Keywords: Activist scholarship, Theory and Practice, Rumi