Obliterating Reason and Dismembering Learning 

 It is a truth universally acknowledged that newspapers are not the bearers of good news, especially in these days of dismantling, wherein ideas  and speech are under threat,  people are being pulped and  places,  things and institutions are being pried open, torn apart  and reduced to rubble.  At Delhi University, we celebrated our 100th year pretty much in mourning, because intent is afoot to levy even more damage upon this venerable institution, after what has been almost two decades of ill planned expansion that had little thought for the students being inducted into the system. There was  simply  was no attempt to ramp up infrastructure, physical, material or human,  in terms of  level playing fields, classrooms, libraries, laboratories and  an adequate body of well-cared for  teachers. 

 To add insult to injury, or (drawing out an appropriate metaphor from our ancient past), to add  ghee to the sacrificial fires in which the university's ethos  has been flung, Departments at  Delhi University whose powers have shrunk and  have being continually muffled decided to adopt  the national mode of dissemination which operates on the following algorithm. 

1,  Decide upon something

2. Never bring it up for discussion or debate

3. Implement it with the greatest urgency and secrecy  as  work  that must commence immediately, come hell or highwater.

 The   3 step  algorithm  above reveals how decisions are  taken by one power-centre  with utter disregard of  due process, and the rights of others,. Such decisions when taken, clamp down upon  ideas and  put both  human beings and  the institutions  they inhabit in grave danger. At the end of Step 3, invariably disconnected hell is allowed to  break loose, and this is pretty much what has been happening at Delhi University.

 I  cannot pinpoint the exact  moment when  this happened. I can only provide  approximates because now for some time I have been living in a silo, brought on by Covid, death,  loss and ill health and have kept at my job pretty much like a blinkered horse in harness,  lumbering through hours of internet teaching.  Meanwhile  the university has been beleaguered for well over a  decade now and its woes have increased in arithmetic and geometric proportions.

  Perhaps the  credit for the maximum damage  in arithmetic progression done to the university rests with the DU VC, who, in hindsight one realizes,  was probably given the mandate to introduce the semester system.  When the VC asked colleges for their opinion on the semester system, a majority of colleges voiced their misgivings about the unsuitability of the semester system for DUs and gave detailed reasons for the same, including the fact that such change  could not be brought in overnight, without protracted deliberation. Nevertheless the VC persuaded  Departments of Science to implement semesters forthwith. Heads of Science Departments turned cartwheels and obeyed. Science Departments in undergraduate colleges once served as as proxy waiting-grounds for students with ambitions in the realms of medicine and engineering. The semester system with all its modular data churning worked effectively for the  science departments and  now the dropout rate is much much lower ever since the semester system was put in place. Once roped in, students who enroll in the sciences are ambushed by the time crunching of the semester system. The  flourishing Humanities  which faced no enrollment problems on the other hand were arm twisted into semesterisation, a year after,  the  Science Departments.

We managed to avert the ill planned four year program then. Relentlessly hemmed in by the semester system that provided no academic break from modular teaching,  zero review of the academic schedules, no   analysis nor discussion that could lead to any academic evaluation of pedagogies across disciplines and its impact upon students; colleagues across departments struggled with the new curriculum and programs that were pushed in by the state and across disciplines tried to beat in method and meaning into  truncated and ill-designed courses.

 The semester system  also cut  short vacations for students and teachers alike. We were all on the great wheel of progression where we dealt with ideas. The system decided that  therefore teachers and students did not require  any kind of break. So for ten plus years now, Delhi University follows a punishing calendar, with a minimal autumn break  that is barely for a week, followed by a    week long winter break that starts with Christmas and has teachers reporting to work on the Second of January.  Covid has further exacerbated the schedule where the university now  follow different academic calendars for all five undergraduate and post graduate years. Long summer vacations are now unheard of. In fact this year again there has been no summer vacation.

 The rise of regulatory bodies such as NAAC, and HERA and  the introduction of the NEP2020, in the interim , not merely reduced and diminished the UGC but also gave short shrift to any balance or reasoning.  The Covid pandemic's disruption of   every day life at the university also allowed for the implementation of  all kinds of regulatory mechanisms and systems to be set up, without  any discussion with general bodies of teachers, academic associations and disciplines, and resulted in the formulation and  implementation of  policies injurious to students and university and intellectual life in the short and long term.

   Czar Jagadish is at UGC, fresh from his JNU rampage. After , shredding  academic life at JNU altogether,  he is now in hot pursuit of Delhi University, since this is an older and  larger university, and will take more time than JNU to be disbanded. Meanwhile syllabus framing of university curriculum, semester by semester, in all the disciplines is afoot. The plagarized proposals, copied and  pasted from foreign university schedules, and pointed out by concerned academics  from Delhi university has not sent shock waves or even shame waves through the corridors of control and power brokering. Such syllabus making, semester by semester, without any inputs from the teaching community  is unheard of. No university in the world has ever  dared to carry out such an absurd project.

 Facelessly Department Heads carry out orders that are issued and work to implement them. The adhoc  teacher's work force that  the university has nurtured again for well over a decade has been pushed to the brink, because it is an unfortunate narrative about innumerable young people, who battle for job security despite the years spent in education and training.. In most instances, these young citizens have put their personal, academic and professional lives on the slow burner for no fault of their own. In innumerable college departments, across disciplines , including my own,  the number of permanent teachers has shrunk.  Most Adhoc teachers are a harried lot, constantly subject to intimidation by a system that grows feudal and regressive by the day and refuses to speak to them and address their pain. 

 Meanwhile, the university continues  to experiment with academics. The mantra it flirts with is perhaps one of the many  reportedly mouthed by the premier, namely, "Hard work is better than Harvard."   There is also the issue of  young students whose 12 plus years of schooling is to be  soon rendered irrelevant because now a CUET test will declare their suitability for university education. These youngsters are going to enroll in a university where their  teachers are clueless about the curriculum. Not only were the teachers  not consulted , the plan has been to turn them all into unthinking  functioning units, implementing orders, and obediently drafting syllabi.  In any case, how does  replacing one central examination with a competitive examination level the playing field? It only makes everything  far more arbitrary and also sets up the process for the teetering and tottering of the schooling system. This is not reform or repair, which is always welcome but a large scale unconstitutional demolition of education through the length and breadth of India.

A few years ago there was a plan  to project Delhi as a UNESCO Heritage City. This was shelved and  Ahmedabad was projected in its stead. Today, English, one of India's many  modern languages and the language that houses innumerable disciplines  and allows us to have global connectivity in every discipline is being driven out  by the new syllabi. Students are not to be taught or trained in the English language at any college in Delhi University, because of the new orders that have been issued. This is a far cry from a scenario in which literature and language has been taught by English teachers to every student  at the university. Generations of students from other disciplines have been enriched and improved by the exchange that the English syllabi provided and have been thankful for their empowerment.

  Colleagues in the English Departments in colleges  continue to express their anguish, but we need everyone from every other discipline and every walk of life : colleague, parent and student to grasp the enormity of this fundamentally flawed premise. We  need to allow the fatal  implications of such arbitrarily imposed dictats to sink in. In a multilingual nation, instead of ensuring proficiency in English, this attempt  to erase it from the curriculum, deeming it  the language of the colonizers  is an illiberal and ignorant attempt to put the clock back, and  will only jeopardize our local, regional, national and international strengths. Such erasure and renaming, is much much more pernicious than the changing of names of roads, places, and cities.

Into that abyss of atrophy, dear citizen, let not our country be pushed.  We must awaken to the crisis that has befallen us!

 Footnote: How is it that newspapers report that   the teaching of English  is to be implemented  in primary schools in Gujarat under the NEP? why does an ill wind   continue to blow through the portals of  Delhi University?