The four-year degree programme (FYUP) that the vice-chancellor of the Delhi University (DU) has sought to push through from the current academic session has elicited adverse reactions from many.
The most vociferous reaction has come, predictably, from within the teaching community of the university. Sundry public intellectuals have also cut through the shoddiness of the proposal. Students have been agitated by the prospect of having to spend an extra year in college, without concomitant benefits.
As many as 36 MPs have represented to the Prime Minister to look into the matter since it concerns the premier university of India, and is likely to affect students from all over the country who travel to Delhi to be a part of the university. The learned High Court of Delhi, while hearing a petition by the visually challenged against the four-year programme wondered what was the tearing hurry to push the programme through. The UGC too, especially members like Yogendra Yadav, have sought to look into the details of the proposal, not quite convinced it has undergone due diligence. Even President Pranab Mukherjee has put up queries as visitor to the university. Despite all of the above the authorities at DU have decided to brazen it out. WhyIJ
The vice-chancellor is on record having stated that he can’t delay the programme because he needs to see through the successful implementation of the programme. The argument is weak. Systems are not dependent of individuals. He himself is carrying on the agenda set by his predecessor, Professor Deepak Pentel, who brought in the semester system, a precursor to the FYUP. One wonders whether the hurry is more on account of the general elections due next yearIJ With the type of endorsement Professor Pentel received from the then HRD Minister Kapil Sibal, and the thumbs up given to the present vice-chancellor by Ministers Pallam, a Temple University (US) alumnus, and Shashi Tharoor, an ex-UN bureaucrat, it is quite clear that the Congress party is on board the ‘reforms’ being pushed in the higher education space.
Taken together with the various Bills waiting to be passed that will facilitate the entry of foreign universities in India, the FYUP is, prima facie, part of a larger agenda. That the delay in passing these Bills is apparently frustrating potential investors has been widely reported. Is FYUP a short-term sop thereforeIJ After all, it clearly recognises the need to integrate India’s higher education structure with that of the US (a fact admitted by Tharoor, indeed proffered as justification for FYUP). The business side of what has prompted the urgency, or why the Government needs to inaugurate these changes before it gives up power next year (a fair supposition that it will), remains under cover.
Academics can at best build academic arguments against FYUP. My personal experience tells me a huge number of politically unaligned teachers are deeply, and fundamentally, opposed to these reforms. These are the same people who have, in the past, emphasised academic accountability and welcomes specific reforms that have improved the pedagogic environment in DU (like the introduction of internal assessment, which has demanded extra classroom work by teachers, besides much clerical drudgery involved in having to maintain records, and so on). The opposition to FYUP must now be taken up politically, and immediately.
While there have been solid opposition to attempts to sell out to foreign entities in areas of business, airwaves, press, defence, agricultural produce and so on, what should give real cause for concern is intellectual sell out. If you sell out your mind, you lose your soul. The argument is not jingoistic. It extrapolates from problems centred on the type of education being envisioned. Modularised, stacked and bar coded courses will produce workers suited to the lowest rung of the global economy that the present dispensation is so fond of genuflecting before. There will be no epistemological counter to market driven knowledge systems. Indeed, it is worrying that the incumbent vice chancellor has been, without any sense of irony, propagating just such a system, in fact basing the fulcrum of the FYUP design on it. Something very big and dangerous is happening in DU. The wider polity needs to take note. Else, the consequences will haunt us all.