A Delhi University committee has found that St Stephen’s College violated the University’s approved shortlisting criteria while recruiting Assistant Professors in 2025-26. The lapse has left hundreds of applicants waiting months without knowing how they were screened.
The committee, constituted following deliberations at the university’s Executive Council meeting on April 29, 2026, concluded that the college had made appointments in violation of the shortlisting criteria approved by the university’s statutory bodies, according to its report.
At its meeting on April 29, 2026, the University’s Executive Council noted that the shortlisting criteria St Stephen’s College adopted for Assistant Professor appointments violated the criteria approved by the Academic Council and Executive Council. The Registrar subsequently wrote to the Principal, advising the college to refrain from issuing appointment letters, and constituted a committee headed by Prof Inder Mohan Kapahy to examine the matter. The committee also included Dr Monica Arora, Dr LS Chaudhary, Shri Aman Kumar and the Joint Registrar (Colleges) as Secretary; Arora later stepped down for personal reasons and was replaced by Prof Sushma Yadav.
According to the committee’s findings, recruitment for the Assistant Professor posts was advertised on July 19, 2025, with the application deadline extended from August 2 to August 9, 2025. The advertisement did not disclose the shortlisting criteria, distribution of marks, or evaluation methodology, even though applicants, as a constituent college of Delhi University, would reasonably expect the college to follow the University’s prescribed recruitment procedure.
Screening notices uploaded on August 11, 2025 still did not disclose criteria for the Essay, Presentation and Interview stages. The college’s screening notice awarded marks for research publications in any peer-reviewed or UGC-listed journal, contrary to the University’s own procedure, which restricts eligible publications to the UGC-CARE list, SCOPUS-indexed journals, or sources specifically prescribed by the University.
It was only on February 5, 2026, more than six months after the advertisement, that the college published a shortlist for the Philosophy department: 234 candidates for three unreserved vacancies and 11 for one PwBD vacancy, without disclosing the actual shortlisting criteria.
An undated notice appearing afterward revealed, for the first time, that 70 candidates would be shortlisted per unreserved vacancy with a department cutoff of 50 for Philosophy, a figure with no disclosed objective basis, and notably lower than the University-prescribed minimum cutoff of 55.
The committee’s comparison table shows multiple deviations: where University regulations prescribe 40 candidates shortlisted for the first vacancy and 20 for each additional vacancy based on marks, St Stephen’s shortlisted 70 per vacancy, subject to a 50-mark cutoff. One University subject expert declined to sign the final Physics interview score sheet, citing concerns that non-expert committee members had awarded marks to serve their own interests.
Despite the Executive Council’s directions, the college declared results on its website on the night of May 9, 2026, and allowed selected candidates to join from May 11, without waiting for the committee’s report. On May 13, 2026, the Delhi High Court directed that the Selection Committee’s recommendations not be implemented without the Court’s leave. The college nonetheless continued the joining process and assigned the newly joined candidates invigilation duties during college examinations, actions the committee said appeared to disregard the Court’s directions and raised concerns of possible contempt.
The committee concluded that St Stephen’s College had made appointments in violation of University-approved shortlisting criteria, effectively accommodating candidates who would otherwise have been ineligible to appear before the Selection Committee, and reiterated that as a constituent college under the Delhi University Act, 1922, St Stephen’s is required to follow the University’s recruitment rules and regulations.