With its image already sullied by the cash-for-college-seats controversy raging in other parts of the State, the Mamata Banerjee Government had more eggs on its face on Thursday when fresh trouble erupted this time in country’s premier Jadavpur University over alleged “needless Government interference in admission process.”
Vice Chancellor Suranjan Das remained gheraoed for the past more than 24 hours by students agitating against the Executive Council decision to scrap admission tests for the undergraduate classes.
The University allegedly under pressure from the Trinamool Congress Government had on Wednesday announced that admissions to English, Comparative literature, Bengali, Political Science and Philosophy would be held only on marks basis and not based on admission tests a practice that had been followed unchallenged for the past several decades.
The EC dominated by the Government representatives had acted to further the TMC agenda and turn the JU into its personal fief like Calcutta University which has over the past a few years become a poor shadow of its glorious past, members of the students’ union agitating at the campus said demanding immediate restoration of the written test system.
JU a highly NAC rated institution has managed to thwart repeated attempts by the Trinamool Congress to penetrate its campus “simply because intellectually our students are at different level and only comparable to their JNU counterparts.”
Having failed to take over the campus intellectually, Mamata Banerjee was trying to introduce mediocrity before taking it over politically, insiders complained adding the changed admission rules were a part of that process.
Sandwiched between the two sides and forced to speak the Government version the Vice Chancellor “fail to understand the reasons behind this protest.” He added “I along with other officials have been confined in our offices for the past 24 hours by the students who fail to understand that the decision to scrap the entrance test was taken by the EC. I as the VC will only have to abide by the decision.”
He however refused to call the police saying “I will never do that and wait instead for the students to see reasons.”
What made his position even more precarious was the blatant refusal by the professors of the English and some other Departments to take part in the new admission process. “We fail to understand the need of the new process when the older one was producing results which can be seen by the JU’s NAC standings,” a senior professor of the English Department said.
Meanwhile, admission controversy in other colleges of the State continued as thousands of students complained that they were denied admission as they could not grease the palm of TMC-run college unions. The cash-for-seat rates varied from Rs 5,000 for political science to Rs 60,000 for Geography and English to Rs 80,000 for Mathematics honours.