As an Associate Professor at an undergraduate college at New
Delhi, who has been around for a fairly
long time, I am constantly asked for advice about what course to join at college. Last year
when I was asked to offer an opinion, I told students that this was a
bad year, since the university was in a
spin of some sort, having introduced a semester system in the most haphazard
manner. The semester has split annual
courses wide open and hurries students through syllabi in insufficient time and pushes teachers neck deep into paperwork that is
quantitatively exhausting and serves little other purpose.
The newest measure we have is the monthly online entering of
student attendance as it no longer matters what we teach or how we teach
because all we are required to do is to clock it down as data. Why should you
complain, I hear the die-hard optimist ask, if you don’t cook up attendance
registers at the end of the year? The monthly system of uploading is actually the least of our problems. It epitomises the hallmark of the semester
system. Arguably, anyone who cooks up a register at the end of the year can now
be well trained in doing this ten times
a year, but surely there must be other obvious
benefits that semesterization
needs to provide?
In fact, in this
second year of semesterization, for every aspirant to the university who
wants my advice I can only tell them that this is the worst possible time to
join the university. The university administration
has come around to our way of thinking and has accepted that the semester
implementation was disastrous. Of course, this has not been said in so many
words. People wielding
power find it very difficult to
own up to errors of judgement. The university is now going in for a four year
course for undergraduates, offering many avenues for exit, turning the highway
to serious academic learning and specialization into a fun -filled fair, with
plenty of exit points. You can now drop out of the university system as and
when you please , with a diploma to boot.
So what if there are those who are marginal, dispossessed, poor, otherwise able, female or on the
fringes? In any case, our system never
had much need for such as them. We are now focusing on a masterclass, one
that will globe trot for an education across universities .
Where exactly does it
leave the poor unsuspecting undergraduates who joined the university last year
and this year? We are not likely to find out and frankly we are not expected to
care. When a behemoth of a university stirs itself up and rumbles and moves,
there will be collateral damage. And
yes, our Americans advisors on the
semester system briefed us on issues of collateral damage a long while ago. In enough time, in any case, collateral damage
would have been forgotten about. As for
the rest who might have noticed, they would have fallen by the wayside, anyway.
Now that these little issues have been sorted, let me
announce that the vice chancellor is
introducing a four year undergraduate programme,
that will get rid of the dismembered and rapidly disintegrating three year semester programme. The entire course is a secret guarded by the team
of 61 that the vice-chancellor has summoned. Maybe someone should tell him that
for something as banal as a cooking show, applications are invited and then a
shortlist is prepared and applications are carefully screened to ensure the quality of the performer on
the show. This arbitrary selection of a motley group to make academic
blueprints that will affect
fundamentally the futures of lakhs of students and change forever the
academic stature and nature of our central university which, I
would like to believe impacts lives nationally, seems to be an act of
short-sightedness and unprovoked
delusionary Neroism ( maybe,
considering the vice-chancellor’s truck with numbers, zeroism is more appropriate ?). All this is happening in a university that
has procedurally constituted constitutional bodies to plan and implement academic changes
in a holistic manner, democratically.
The far sighted vice-chancellor has short term measures in place to aid and
decondition traumatised teachers . This is through a scheme called the META
(Medically Exempted Terminal Activity) University
that is being planned. The actual location of this university is in virtual
space. Students will shuttle between universities and choose study options and
credit courses. This is the Vice chancellor’s version of Education without Boundaries.
The vice chancellor is also planning to run a local express service for
students as they shuffle on a daily basis from Jamia to Delhi University and
when possible to JNU as well. The other advantage of the express service is
that it will familiarize students with all corners of New Delhi on a daily
basis. This was yet another opportunity that the vice-chancellor could not
avail of in his student days.
So students will
travel ceaselessly for the promise of
an education sans boundaries and teachers.
We shall now have a shifting faculty and shifting demand as student
affiliations in a state of flux will ensure that more teachers are not
inducted. Departments will shrivel up and die. In effect there will be a
reduction in the number of traumatised teachers all around. The free press from
which we get our information has told us that the admissions to this course
have been postponed to December. If only this state of continued deferral could
be permanent!
We now have a new registrar on the campus, innovating
with newer tricks that she obviously pulls out of her bureaucratic
sleeves. Not satisfied with the
quadrupling of paperwork through demands of attendance uploads, and the increase in geometric proportions of computational errors each day,
she thinks up innovative means of
turning teachers on adhoc jobs into clerical staff and discommoding the
clerical staff altogether . Attendance is collected and collated on loose sheets of paper, and these are submitted to the office for uploading. Before depositing this data at the office all attendance sheets and students assignments and tests are
photocopied in anticipation of future RTIs. Should institutions be inundated with RTIs
then all the tomes of photocopying we are collecting term by term will reamfully come to
our rescue! Somebody needs to tell the registrar that we are dealing with students who are eighteen years old or more. Monthly bulletins are required only for calibrating the first year in the life of a baby.
Meanwhile trees are being shred and invaluable time is being quantified. College grounds
these days simmer and froth with discontent and badwill. This unfortunately
only detracts from academic activity and is an unhealthy space. When biometric attendance comes in for
teachers, and we will be required to clock in our thumb impressions, we will finally
be free to leave our minds, ideas and our thinking at home. For clearly then
the makers of this new system will have
nothing more to lose, having been divested of working brains at the time of their induction to university
posts. The death knell of Delhi University now sounds clearly through the attendant
cacophony.
