DU’s incalculable losses

Delhi University (DU) re-opened to chaos and arbitrariness for the fourth year running. Thoughtlessness, neglect, the irregular and ad-hoc, the anti-academic, anti-democratic and anti-intellectual are, it seems, being normalised by the DU administration. University functioning, driven by diktats and fear of authority following the usurpation of powers by the Vice-Chancellor (VC), is being kept in a state of instability, ensuring a banalisation of concerns regarding education, freedom, equality, collective decision-making, workplace safety and other difficulties facing students, employees and pensioners.

One example may illustrate the rot that has taken hold. In letters issued June 16, 2014, onwards, the UGC declared, albeit belatedly, opportunistically, at times even invasively, that the Four-Year-Undergraduate-Programme (FYUP), including the associated ‘44 undergraduate courses’, thrust upon DU in 2013, were illegitimate. It was in violation of the 10+2+3 principle of the National Policy on Education. Worse, the DU administration had neither bothered to follow due process nor been mindful of ‘the adverse impact on the large students’ community of this country.’

It bears emphasising that the UGC was unambiguously critical of the DU administration and declared all ‘amendments’ associated with the FYUP – structure, courses, modes of study and evaluation— illegal. The rejection of the FYUP being absolute, the order to revert to the older Three-Year-Undergraduate-Programme (TYUP) from the academic year 2014-15 onwards – including for the students admitted to the FYUP — was unconditional, the UGC’s missives leaving no space for any course designed for, and part of the FYUP package, to be imported into the TYUP now mandated for the FYUP batch.

Let there be no mistake. The DU administration has been charged with introducing illegal changes in the structure and substance of education in a premier public institution of higher learning and gambling with the futures of the young. These charges are as serious as can ever be made against any university administration. Yet, judging by the reactions of the administration, the VC and his team remain, it appears, unperturbed by the gravity of the situation.

The first substantive response from the VC came as late as June 27, announcing the rollback of the FYUP. The cycle of admissions was delayed as a result, causing enormous difficulties, especially to outstation applicants and their families. A further, extended period of silence was broken by a letter from the assistant registrar, dated July 10, asking department heads to send in course outlines by July 12 so that the transition to the TYUP for the FYUP batch could be finalised! 

This 48 hour time-cruncher was a record breaker even for the DU administration which had already done the unthinkable in 2013 when a letter from the dean of colleges directed department heads to send in fresh courses, within 15 days, for the FYUP to be rolled out in July 2013. The ultimate shocker this time round, however, was the directive in the letter of July 10 that the courses recommended had to be selected from those passed in 2013, ie from the courses designed for the FYUP! 

In a fit of redoubled arbitrariness and irresponsibility, overruling the recommendations of some departmental Committees-of-Courses (COCs), that were in keeping with their own autonomy and with the letter and spirit of the UGC’s communications, the Academic and Executive Councils of DU, in meetings held in quick succession on July 19 – barely 36 hours before university reopened – passed the hurriedly cobbled and academically diluted FYUP courses for the students admitted last year and now transiting to the TYUP, a move expressly ruled out by the UGC.

The enormity of the arbitrariness practiced by the DU administration and it’s lack of seriousness regarding academic matters, really hit us, however, when such ‘illegalities’ come to be recognised as instances in a chain of continuing top-down actions that have wrought havoc on DU over the last few years.
The terms and conditions of work for instance, especially for ‘ad-hocs’, have been systematically undermined, places of work subjected to counter-productive and humiliating monitoring, intellectual work to senseless quantitative assessment. DU’s academic and intellectual core was hollowed out by — among other measures —arbitrarily exiling AK Ramanujan from the undergraduate syllabus, and ramming through the semester-FYUP package, reducing teachers to rubber stamps and teaching to narrowly defined communication-and-skill-development ‘instruction’, mauling disciplines and syllabi, causing widespread alienation.

Teachers, students and non-teaching employees were terrorised in the process. Rights, liberties, due process and the fearless exchange of ideas have been under siege, teachers forced to destroy in a moment what other scholars took lifetimes to build, and DU, systematically deformed and still a prison, has lost much more than a TYUP in the annual mode. The tragedy is compounded in that this counter-revolution in education has unfolded precisely when the need for educated citizens with open minds and empathetic imaginations, wedded to rights, freedoms and critical enquiry, could not have been greater.

Understood thus, the serious charge of committing FYUP-related illegalities becomes even graver. These illegalities appear to be part of a larger authoritarian project undertaken by the DU administration, custodian of the public good, for purposes of destroying affordable and worthwhile public higher education at the behest of Capital and State. Had similar processes, or a semesterisation-FYUP look-alike been discovered snooping around resources such as forests or minerals, they would have been rightly seen as threats posed by private interests to wealth held in common.

DU, it needs to be acknowledged perhaps, has witnessed no run-of-the-mill illegalities but exceptionally serious crimes against education. Justice demands more than rollbacks, resignations and marching orders to the VC. A multi-pronged inquiry needs to establish the truth, fix accountability and recommend suitable action against those responsible, including some at the UGC and the MHRD. The virtual ‘nakba’ at DU could hardly have happened without ‘nods and winks’ from the State, especially since ministers and bureaucrats were fully apprised of the questionable goings-on.

There is need simultaneously, for the DU teachers’ movement to encourage discussions regarding the crises plaguing higher education, re-imagine the University and its relations to society and State, and refresh the meaning of autonomy. Above all, students and employees must recover the courage to create a deep participatory democracy, ‘asking questions, walking to the left where the heart resides’, otherwise worse times under the present corporations-driven, institutions and democracy-devouring right-wing communalised polity, shall be unavoidable.

The author teaches history in Ramjas College