After an e-mail sent by Delhi University’s prestigious St Stephen’s College to all heads of departments, 41 out of 53 permanent teachers of the institution have submitted a letter demanding to “honour the assurances given to the staff council” regarding the autonomy issue.
A governing body meeting of the DU college decided to go ahead with the proposal seeking autonomy for the institution, last month. The recent letter sent by the teachers pertains to the meeting that the college principal had on the March 6 with some heads of departments and a subsequent e-mail to them.
The teachers in the letter said that the meeting was held on March 6 with “grossly inadequate notice, even no notice in the case of some heads. As a result of that heads of some departments were unable to attend the meeting.”
“We wish to object strongly to your decision to ask individual faculty members to give in their feedback on the question of autonomy before March 10, 2017, in the form of responses to a questionnaire with questions that are either irrelevant or un-answerable on the basis of the almost non-existent information available to us,” said the letter.
According to the teachers, during the March 3 meeting, the Chair decided to carry the concerns of the teachers to the governing body. “These concerns of the Staff Council, a statutory body of DU, must be first conveyed to the governing body before they were asked to give any feedback or to proceed further in any manner with respect to the proposal for autonomous status,” they said. The teachers requested the principal to convene a meeting of the governing body and place before it the ratified minutes of the proceedings of the Staff Council meeting held on March 3, 2017.