Professor Vik Bahl at 60: Teaching from the margins

Where do I start this write-up if not by saying that I have been greatly inspired by the kind of career Professor Vik Bahl has had? He has always had a prototype of what education should and shouldn’t be like in this age. He strongly believes that it should not be limited to just the classroom because, for him education is not just limited to the everyday routine of classroom work and the monotonous toil of publishing and publishing alone, but it is also about community work and social movements and the ability to be part of and contribute to the struggle for justice and equality in society. To that extent, I can say for certain that Professor Bahl is an example of academic integrity and truthfulness for his lifelong devotion to and work for empowering those who have been historically deprived of accessing spaces of higher education.

To document his voyage as an intellectual activist crying out for reform not only in his immediate society but also around the world, his contributions in the field of “Ethnic and ‘Third World’ Studies” have produced a colossal impact on institutions and research. This creation has exceedingly unveiled the consequences of national identities and postcolonialism in structural marginalization, and this has ceaselessly been instrumental to his outspokenness and unpretentiousness as a visionary, dreamer, and advocate. If there is any one scholar that advocates the popularization of inclusive education in the twenty-first century, then it is Professor Bahl.

His appeal and his accessibility to students on the social margins are expressed in his efforts to diversify the curriculum at Green River College. We all know his class on “Critical Approaches to Popular Culture” is a well-intentioned exercise in sensitizing students to the most urgent social questions of the day and the nature of power in the contemporary world. In the long term, the goal of this project is to educate and instill in students a civic sense of responsibilities and awareness to prepare them for not only school exams but for the tests of real life.

Of all people, Professor Bahl has embodied the cause of diversity, equality, and inclusion (DEI) throughout his life. He has led the transformation of community college education and made the academic environment more inclusive with his pedagogy, leadership, scholarship, and activism. The good news is that this work extends beyond what our students are taught in American classrooms; it reverberates globally and sparks dialogues on decolonial education, postcolonialism, and indigenous studies.

Professor Bahl has also overseen so many DEI projects outside the classroom, testifying to his quality leadership. He conceptualized and directs the DEI Faculty Fellows Program at the State Board for Community and Technical Institutions (SBCTC). The vision for this fellowship is to expand Ethnic Studies and American Indian Studies at colleges and universities across Washington State. By so doing, his mission of making diversity and equity in recruiting and professional development (DEHP) a reality is becoming a reality, which speaks to his persistent politics of inclusiveness and more diversified hiring as the magic wand for school system transformation.

Reforms were already a worldwide trend after the popular Rhodes Must Fall campaign in South Africa and a protest for decolonizing curriculum reforms in the UK. Professor Bahl’s work on this discourse adds value by using the American community colleges as a case study. This is relevant as the colleges and universities are still adjusting to the legacy of colonialism and institutional inequality. His work in bridging indigenous studies and building partnerships between governments resembles this trend, which is also the American Indian nations in Canada’s desire to do: integrate indigenous knowledge into the school curriculum.

He was one of the very few who dared to oppose the relegation of humanities and social sciences to the margins. Humanities and social sciences departments have always played a major role in the life of the school as well as in the wider society, but as the name suggests, these departments have remained underappreciated and overshadowed by other disciplines, and this became the source of a major crisis in the academic community. Student body of these departments also suffered as they were provided fewer platforms to demonstrate their value to society. Professor Bahl’s book, Minorities and Mentoring in the Postcolonial Borderlands, is a kind of gospel that describes this heinous occurrence and how it affects the students, more importantly, those of the underrepresented groups and ethnicities.

He is eager to emphasize radical mentorship based on his experiences in India and the United States. On the other hand, it is very hard to argue against the fact that the students and teachers of color are the most marginalized groups in the US. Therefore, providing them with an opportunity to construct a small group of critical thinkers and analyzers, who will support each other in forming and expressing critical ideas on social, political, and economic issues, will enable students and researchers to be able to question the most popular and widespread phenomena. It also gives them a chance to voice their innovative and sometimes quite challenging ideas. It will ultimately prove to be a very useful strategy for the students who plan to get politically involved and want to fight for change. As it should be noted, the primary goal of radical mentorship is to achieve societal change.

Three things I have learnt from Professor Bahl’s propositions on radical mentorship are: First, students who fail to become independent in reasoning and help their communities after graduation do so because of a horrible education and a broken curriculum. Second, mentoring must help students realize and engage with social issues, concerns, and justice. They should also teach students to fight oppressive systems by understanding the nature of the threat they present to humanity. Third, mentorship transcends the four walls of the classroom. A mentor should train his mentees to apply the theories of their learning from school to practical challenges.

In fact, there are various ways in which academics make a difference, as can be gathered from Professor Bahl’s legacy. But then what else can society ask from a man who has sacrificed over 20 years of his life to the cause of upending the biased approaches to community college education in terms of academics as well as culture? Not only has he helped bring about inclusive and diverse education, but he has also been an undisputed frontrunner in creating an institutional change that has shown what education is meant to be and how it must confront the injustices within the system. Two things he is engaged in, primarily, to decolonize education around the world, are sponsoring research on indigenous populations and challenging the discrimination against local students.

He is the embodiment of a true scholar, driven to make a difference. His work over the past 25 years has not only been driven by his desire to be a good practitioner, but to be an agent for social change. This work is significant in terms of having an impact on the daily work of administrators, but in this case also for society at large. The institutional culture that Professor Bahl helped to shape in higher education, and the focus on faculty governance, helped to improve both access to and quality of education for many. We can extend the impact of his work by appealing to universities to develop and launch “centers for excellence” and “centers for applied research” in higher education. These centers should be tasked with developing research on education and with a minority focus.

Vik, may you live long!

In a room where chalk lingers on the floor with dust

and silence folds over forgotten names,

You named what was missing

and built a syllabus of remembrance.

You did not only teach with chalk,

You taught with patience

by turning the classroom into a campfire of history,

reworking the grammar of power.

In your classroom,

novels danced like masquerades

each word wearing its masks.

Your voice built a home,

where the exiled may find fire.

And in the quietude of their eyes, an epic dwells.

PS: This piece was written on July 23, 2025, in Pretoria, South Africa.

ALSO READ TOP STORIES FROM NIGERIAN TRIBUNE