Tag: compulsory attendance

‘Deteriorating Situation’ in JNU Prompts Science Profs to Seek Refuge in IIT

As some faculty members at JNU consider quitting because of issues with the VC, IIT Delhi’s director has written to department heads asking them to try and recruit “senior faculty with a distinguished track record”.

Bangalore: In a major vote of no-confidence in the leadership of Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) vice chancellor M. Jagadesh Kumar, a number of top faculty members in the sciences have sent feelers to the Indian Institute of Technology across the road in Delhi and other top institutions seeking a quick cross-over.

On December 19, IIT Delhi director V. Ramgopal Rao emailed his colleagues in different departments encouraging them to recruit the faculty members leaving JNU, especially if their work has been noteworthy.

His full email reads:

I am receiving many feelers from senior JNU faculty showing a willingness to move to IIT Delhi, considering the deterioting (sic) situation in JNU. I am told that some of them are also applying to other institutions given the impression that IIT Delhi doesn’t encourage lateral movement into higher positions. It will be a pity if we lose out on such good people because of any of these reasons/perception. I leave it to your judgement how you wish to deal with this. Institute will be very open to recruitment of senior faculty who have a distinguished track record.

Ironically, JNU VC Kumar is an ‘import’ from IIT Delhi.

The Ministry of Human Resource Development (MHRD) made IIT Delhi an ‘institute of eminence’ in 2018, paving the way for the institute to receive Rs 1,000 crore in additional funds over the next five years.

Rao’s email was sent two weeks before suspected members of the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP) brutally assaulted students on the JNU campus but well after the first protests against the fee-hike and the Citizenship (Amendment) Act, 2019 began.

Even today, nearly a week after the January 5 beatings, the situation on campus remains tense, partly due to the prevailing sense that ABVP activists and supporters couldn’t have perpetrated their attack without the backing of campus security and, by extension, the VC,  as they were able to enter, leave and move around the campus despite being masked and armed but without being stopped by the security guards. Teachers have suspended classes en masse, and students, protesting the week-old violence as well as the hostel fee hike from earlier, have boycotted exams and refused to register for the next semester.

IIT faculty members wary

According to one person familiar with the matter, the response to Rao’s email from within IIT Delhi has been neither uniform nor enthusiastic. For example, some have expressed the fear that the out-of-JNU transfers could become a conduit for Jagadesh Kumar to send right-wing allies into IIT Delhi.

However, this is at odds with the impression in JNU that right-leaning faculty members are all happy with the VC’s governance and have no reason to want to leave the university, especially given the MHRD’s refusal to suspend Kumar despite mounting demands from various quarters.

Then again, per a different account (which The Wire has been able to verify), at least one faculty member is mulling leaving JNU primarily because of animosity towards Kumar.

Also read: How JNU VC Lost His Own Institution’s Trust

Even before promulgating the hostel fee-hike, Kumar had developed a controversial reputation on campus as an autocrat. Among other things, he hasn’t investigated key faculty members accused of academic plagiarism, arbitrarily kept students from submitting their PhD theses, imposed attendance rules less to improve productivity and more to get protestors indoors (so to speak), and tried to prevent a distinguished art historian from collecting a prestigious award by denying her leave.

In a referendum in August 2019, 93% of the members of the JNU Teachers’ Association said they had no confidence in Kumar’s leadership and 96% objected to his plan to borrow Rs 515 crore from the government to develop the schools of engineering and management.

While IIT Delhi has its share of student politics, it is not nearly as bristling as its counterpart in JNU. But unlike Kumar’s pliant attitude towards the BJP government, IIT Delhi’s Rao has been more independent, at least outwardly.

But IIT Delhi’s willingness – or the willingness of other institutes, for that matter – to recruit some faculty members may not suffice by itself to invite any disgruntled members of JNU’s schools of humanities, social sciences and economics away. These faculties are considered to be the best of their kind in India. Similarly, IIT Delhi’s faculties of engineering and physical sciences are stronger, on average, thus limiting the number of JNU people on the recruiters’ shortlist.

Considering both factors together, one senior academic who recently retired from JNU speculated that the number of faculty members that will eventually move out is likely to be low.

Also read: Scientists Who Signed Anti-CAA Letter Come Under Government Scanner

The bigger issue, everyone agrees, is Jagadesh Kumar’s policies, more broadly the extent to which he has been willing to let his political inclinations interfere with the way he runs the university. The consensus is that if JNU becomes hostile towards its own teachers, the future of the university is in trouble.

The IIT director did not acknowledge The Wire‘s request for comment; this article will be updated if and when he responds.

Teachers, Be Aware, Biometric is Here 

The act of teaching and research needs creativity. It needs freedom; it has no ‘fixed’ time.

No, as the ‘system’ asserts, as teachers we can no longer escape from work. Gone are the days of being ‘lazy’, ‘inefficient’ and ‘irresponsible’ because here is the biometric system of attendance – yet another gift of the surveillance machinery – that will compel us to work, and generate what the university as a ‘product’ needs: the cult of ‘efficiency’, the measurement of ‘performance’, and the meticulously designed social engineering of what the MBA graduates are fond of regarding as ‘time management’. 

The other day a student of mine teaching at a leading private university in Bengaluru told me: “Sir, you people are horrified because at JNU it is finally coming, but we are already experiencing it; we are used to it.” Yes, she is right. The system wants us to be used to everything it demands; and possibly, it is not far away when as teachers (even in this ‘radical’ university) we would begin to say that we are essentially immoral and irresponsible, and the biometric system is good because it forces us to work. This is the way the hegemony operates.

In this article I do not wish to be obsessed with my own university or its moment of darkness. Instead, with reflexivity enriched by criticality, I concentrate on two issues:

(a) Why is it that academic bureaucrats, policy-makers, techno-managers and even the larger society suspect us, and assume that we earn our salary without doing anything?;

(b) Is it really true that we give our best only when we are under surveillance? Or is it possible to unite creative freedom and engaged responsibility?

Genesis: negative stereotypes and wounded identities

You need not be a profound field worker to know, that as a society, we have already developed a set of stereotypes about teachers. First, we attach a negative gendered meaning to the vocation of school teaching; it is seen to be a ‘soft’ job which doesn’t require much talent, and it is good for women because men, in order to retain the patriarchal authority, have to enter the ‘hard’ domain of ‘true’ professionalism: techno-science and management, and bureaucracy and army.

Second, college/university teachers – particularly, those who are teaching liberal arts and social sciences, as the opinion goes, are not sufficiently talented; and unlike the professional faculty in the pampered IITS/IIMS, they are mere talkers, and do nothing substantial and relevant. No wonder, as the aspiring class laments, we have not yet produced our own Oxford or Harvard.

I know that the stereotypes are not absolutely unreal; possibly, living experiences, too, help to create these stereotypes. Yes, we have schools which, because of a faulty pattern of examination and evaluation, promote only rote learning; and creative experimentation is not supposed to characterise a teacher.

Also read: Rethinking the Idea of a Nation Requires New Sensibilities, Not Bookish Knowledge

She only does an 8 to 3 pm job, disseminates the ‘facts’ derived  from the badly written textbooks, retains ‘order’ in the classroom, exist primarily as a passive employee, and even takes part in the census work or the polio vaccination programme. With a routinised B.Ed degree, an average intelligence, and some sort of efficiency in ‘spoken English’, anyone, as society thinks, can become a teacher!

This is a vicious cycle. The more society degrades its teachers, the more they become crippled. It discourages bright, young minds to join the vocation. Eventually, they become what society feels they are. Hence, all sorts of NGOs and techno-managers have the inherent right to ‘educate’ these teachers, ‘discipline’ them, and make them ‘productive’. These days, ‘workshops’ or ‘skill development’ programmes at schools is good business. 

As we see the arrival of the techno-managerial elite guided by the neoliberal logic of corporatisation of education, the discourse of ‘efficiency’ becomes irresistible.

Likewise, many of our colleges and universities, are acting like factories for mass distribution of degrees and diplomas. At a time when nepotism, political interference and networking severely affect the recruitment of teachers (what else can you expect when see the VC of a university in Andhra Pradesh speaking of the prevalence of ‘test tube babies’ in the age of Mahabharata in the Indian Science Congress), corruption is normalised, and teachers, barring exceptions, do not necessarily generate positive vibrations. 

Furthermore, as we see the arrival of the techno-managerial elite guided by the neoliberal logic of corporatisation of education, the discourse of ‘efficiency’ becomes irresistible. It suspects ‘inefficient’ teachers; it dislikes ’empty ideas’; it wants tangible, solid, efficient ‘products’; and it needs to measure everything –the number of hours spent teaching, papers published in the journals with the high ‘impact factor’,  ‘skills’ teachers disseminates in the allotted time, and the ‘ranking’ they assure.

In other words, the administrative/managerial logic is like this: Be harsh. Discipline these teachers. Make them work. Demand constant performance from them. Establish absolute visibility over everything they do!

Surveillance and the celebration of mediocrity 

Is it, therefore, surprising that the biometric system of attendance becomes the natural choice: the logical consequence of a culture filled with what Michel Foucault would have regarded as the ‘micro physics of power’ assuring constant observation, hierarchisation and normalisation? Yes, it is smooth, technologically convenient and efficient.

If private universities have already introduced it, why should ‘politically disturbed’ public universities remain free from it? Don’t bother even if the leading universities in the world do not have it. As the UGC officials would argue, we are Indians; we are irresponsible; and hence, as some of our loyal vice-chancellors insist, we must be subject to surveillance. 

However, let us ask the question: Does it necessarily assure good performance by teachers? This requires a deep understanding of the act of teaching and research. It needs creativity. It needs freedom. And it has no ‘fixed’ time. Even though you attend the 9 am class, deliver a lecture, it is not merely about one hour. Beneath a good lecture lies background research and reading which often take place at odd hours.

Furthermore, even if you are instructed to sit in your chamber from 9 am to 5 pm, it does, by no means, indicate that you are really growing, thinking and evolving. Perhaps, had you been able to attend a conference, visit a library or just watch a Mrinal Sen film (do all these registrars and vice-chancellors manage to watch good films, and read enchanting books?), you have enriched yourself as a teacher/thinker/researcher. 

Also read: Amid Political Interference and Obsession With Ranking, Our Academic Culture is in Serious Trouble

No, techno-managers and stubborn, non-reflexive vice-chancellors are incapable of understanding this nuanced art of teaching. Hence, there are moments when I fear that the consequences of the biometric system of attendance would be disastrous. Yes, like factory workers ,we would enter the campus at 9 am; and then, after mechanically completing the teaching process, we would order samosa and pakoda, look at some official files, wait for the lunch break; we would gossip, and see the rise and fall of the sharemarket.

Or, if the vice-chancellor wants, we would love to reduce ourselves into the role of data-providers: the attendance registrar of students, the projects applied for, the selfies taken at the moment of attending the surgical day celebration, and the bills for the money we have sent in zeroxing the course outline and the reading list. Yes, we would become ‘punctual’ and ‘efficient’. Let creativity diminish, and mediocrity prevail.

But, is it possible to resist this notorious practice of surveillance: a conspiracy against emancipatory education? My feeling is that most of us have already lost it. There could be two reasons:

First, we do not want to protest because the experience of an act of resistance is not like reading a paper at an ‘international’ conference; it means ‘risks’; and, as the deeply internalised middle class self-whispers, it is not a good idea.

Second, we are not very sure about our own moral and pedagogic strength – whether we are truly capable of living with creative freedom, and giving our best to our universities. We are not sure, whether through the art of self-discipline, we can unite responsibility and freedom. 

With chronic self-doubt, how can we resist a system that is against the creative spirit of teaching and research?

Avijit Pathak is a professor of sociology at JNU.

Mandatory Attendance Will Establish ‘Regime of Surveillance’: JNUTA Report

The teachers’ association surveyed 75 premier global institutions, finding the regulation to be “antithetical to the idea of a University”.

A report released by the Jawaharlal Nehru University Teachers’ Association (JNUTA) found that the administration’s directive for faculty members to mark their attendance daily will restrict academic freedom and will “lead to the destruction of research”.

The JNUTA, released a report on January 4, 2019, attacked the administration’s decision. It revealed that except for one university in Malaysia, such a rule does not exist in 75 premier and highly ranked universities abroad. It stated that university professors from different countries unequivocally “expressed shock and outrage at the new attendance policy instituted by the JNU administration.”

Also Read: Delegation of MPs to Meet With HRD, Demand Removal of JNU’s Vice Chancellor

The administration made it mandatory for the faculty to mark daily attendance on July 13, 2018 at the 146th Academic Council meeting. The JNUTA said that it was forcefully imposed “without any consultation in the statutory bodies of the University”.

The JNUTA wrote several letters to the administration seeking why the decision was taken, but got no response. On December 2, 2018, the JNUTA observed a day-long hunger strike against the move, but the administration declined their request and instead decided to link the faculty’s attendance with the disbursal of their salary.

After several failed attempts, the teachers’ association decided to conduct a survey of 75 universities in 21 countries, only to find that it is not a global practice and is “antithetical to the idea of a University”.

The survey covered 32 European universities, 27 from the USA and Canada and 16 from other countries. Out of these, only the University of Malay, Kuala Lumpur (Malaysia) has compulsory daily attendance for its faculty. The JNUTA spoke with professors from different universities abroad, who called the new attendance policy a means to “establish a regime of surveillance” which will eventually lead to “total destruction of research”.

The announcement that JNU would be launching a School of Engineering was controversial in itself. Credit: Wikimedia Commons

The JNUTA claimed the directive will lead to the destruction of research. Credit: Wikimedia Commons

Means of surveillance

The introduction of daily attendance has been dubbed as a method to improve academic accountability in the unviersity, but the survey found it as a mechanism to exercise surveillance in the university and “further degrade the quality of research and teaching”.

The report quoted Barbara Harriss-White (formerly at Oxford University) as saying, “The academic has a professional vocation. My understanding of the definition of a profession is the self-governing practice of complex skills. To be under such surveillance is anathema to the academic profession.”

Also Read: I Was Forced to Quit JNU After Being Denied Salary for Ten Months

Similarly, professor John Harriss at Simon Fraser University, Canada said, “What counts is that faculty members teach their classes and do their research, and most academicians monitor themselves in relation to high professional standards. What counts for students is that they should do their work – complete their assignments/experiments/other assessed activities – satisfactorily. Absolutely no need for recording attendance except for purposes of surveillance.”

Prof Ha-Joon Chang, from the University of Canada, also decried the policy, saying South Korean universities, even under military dictatorship, did not have such laws. She added, “India’s certainly leapfrogging ahead of the technologically more advanced countries in building a surveillance society.”

Destruction of research

However, many scholars and professors have supported the new attendance policy. Amita Singh of Centre for Study of Law and Governance told the Times of India, “The decision would bring greater accountability on part of the teachers as many of them do not attend offices and are busy with other work.”

The JNUTA’s report, on the contrary, states that academic work is not restricted to university spaces and entails field visits, surveys and international exposure.

Professor Javed Majeed, from King’s College, told the survey, “Since research and teaching are the core activities in academe and the work for these are done to a very large extent in libraries and elsewhere, marking daily attendance at an institution actually undermines these key activities. It will impact negatively on the quality of research and teaching, and therefore also negatively on students.”

Jens Lerche, from SOAS, London, told the JNUTA that the attendance policy is “a grave attack on academic freedom; and an appalling and counterproductive move. Unless, of course, the idea is to dispense with academic freedom and ultimately with the academics.”

Furthermore, professor Mukulika Banerjee from the London School of Economics said, “Marking attendance may satisfy marking the physical presence of faculty members, but it doesn’t ensure high quality teaching or esteem of the university. In my university (LSE) it is routine for faculty members to be present on campus only about 3 days in a week and only during teaching terms. And even this is entirely flexible, as long as all teaching duties are fulfilled.”

Prof. Kavita Singh speaks at JNUTA’s Aakrosh Dharna Credit: Samim Asgor Ali

Misuse of biometric system

The JNU administration plans to introduce a biometric system for marking daily attendance. it claims the system is only to ensure security, not to limit academic freedom.

The JNUTA report says in the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa, the biometric system is used “due to fact of rising violence of campus” and “not to limit academic freedom”.

Michelle Williams, a professor from the university, said the system is not for academic purposes. She states, “The justification for the security upgrade [biometrics] was a rise in crime on campus despite our access control system. Many people criticised the installation of biometric and argued that it could be used to monitor and control academics, but it has not been used for this purpose and we’ve been assured it will not be.”

Also Read: JNU Faculty Members Criticise ‘Extreme Penalties’ Recommended Against PhD Scholar

Furthermore, the biometric system entails monitoring costs and other associated finances. This, the JNUTA claims, explains the administration’s alleged cutting down on academic expenditure.

Highlighting the expenses, Robert Jenkins from the City University of New York says, “Enforcing daily attendance at university is likely to create perverse incentives, increase costs of monitoring, and reduce overall positive impacts.”

The JNU administration’s decision to impose daily attendance through a biometric system will likely restrict the faculty members to the university spaces, having an adverse effect on the students and the overall stature of one of India’s highly-ranked universities.

HC asks JNU Not to Enforce Undertaking Taken From Students on Attendance

The high court is deciding on the pending issue of 75% mandatory attendance at Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU).

New Delhi: The Delhi high court yesterday asked the Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) not to enforce an undertaking taken from the students that they would abide by university rules on attendance or face consequences, till it decides the pending issue of 75% mandatory attendance.

Justice Siddharth Mridul asked the university as to what was the need to take the undertaking from students when the issue was already pending in the court and added if the regulation of 75% mandatory attendance for students was upheld, it would be automatically enforced.

JNU’s counsel told the court that they were not taking any coercive action against the students.

The court was hearing a contempt petition filed by several JNU students alleging that by taking an undertaking from the students at the time of registration or re-registration into a course, the university authorities were in a willful and deliberate disobedience of the July 16 order of the high court.

On July 16, the court had directed the JNU not to take coercive steps against the students with regard to any matter under its policy on mandatory attendance, till further orders.

Despite the HC order, JNU administration took an undertaking from students. Credit: special arrangement

The students claimed that in the registration or re-registration form, the authorities asked them to give an undertaking that they shall abide by the attendance rules of the university and if they do not fulfil the attendance requirements, the university will take actions as per rules. The admission process had commenced on July 16 and had to go on till July 23.

The contempt plea claimed that by committing these acts, “it was apparent that the alleged contemnors (JNU, vice chancellor and registrar) have taken coercive steps against the students which is a willful, deliberate disobedience of the order dated July 16 of this court, and as a result, contempt proceedings ought to be initiated against them.”

The court’s July 16 interim order had come while hearing a petition by five professors of JNU’s different disciplines challenging the December 12, 2017 decision of the varsity’s academic council (AC), making 75 per cent attendance mandatory for students.

(PTI)

JNU Considering Action Against Deans, Chairpersons Who Spoke Out Against Compulsory Attendance

A three-member inquiry committee has been set up, and it is possible that the VC will decide to remove these heads of departments from their posts.

New Delhi: While protests continue at Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) over the issue of compulsory attendance, the university’s Executive Council has reportedly decided to initiate inquiries against the deans and chairpersons who wrote to the administration against mandatory attendance.

According to a report in the Indian Express, these deans and chairpersons could face disciplinary action, including removal from their post. “Chairpersons and deans are supposed to be part of the administrative structure. Teachers and students have every right to democratically protest any issue but if chairpersons and deans begin to oppose in writing, it goes against the grain of administration. Therefore, it was decided in the EC that the best way was to institute an inquiry committee to find out why such writings are coming from a handful of chairpersons and deans so that steps can be taken,” a senior official from the administration told the newspaper.

“If somebody says they cannot implement a rule, they are defying authority. The EC had decided compulsory attendance will be implemented, so not implementing it is problematic… If I was the chair, I better quit rather than say that I will not implement it,” the official added.

The number of deans and chairpersons who have written against the move is “not more than seven”, sourced told the Indian Express. In total, JNU has 13 deans and 38 chairpersons, plus five chairpersons of special centres.

According to the Indian Express, the three-member inquiry committee comprises dean of the School of Biotechnology Pawan K. Dhar, dean of the School of Sanskrit and Indic Studies Girish Nath Jha and dean of the School of Social Sciences Pradipta K. Chaudhury. Five EC members had dissented against the decision to initiate inquiries.

“The ground reality is such that the VC might act on it (removal) very soon. He was convincing the EC to use his discretionary power to remove the deans and chairpersons to appoint his own people wherever there is non-compliance. We have followed the seniority principle for the appointment of deans, but he said the statutes don’t mention anything like that, which means he can appoint whoever he likes,” an EC member told the newspaper.

The JNU teachers’ association has reportedly protested the decision to initiate inquiries.

The matter of compulsory attendance has been boiling over on the campus since mid-February, with a large number of students and teachers protesting it and holding classes in the open. Both the students’ and teachers’ unions have also charged the administration of making various ham-handed decisions that will not benefit the university, from faculty hiring to cutting the intake of research students.

As JNU professor Kavita Singh wrote in The Wire, “…what is portrayed in the press as a fight between Left and Right is actually a battle between a well-functioning university and an incompetent administration that is hiding its inexperience behind ill-conceived ideas backed up with aggression and bluster. … The new mandatory attendance rules are symptomatic of much that is wrong in JNU’s administration today. The rules are unnecessary; they do nothing to improve academic performance but are very likely to harm it; they are clumsily framed and they are part of an increasingly authoritarian atmosphere that wants to control, surveille and contain students and faculty because the administration is not able to govern the institution.”

All the More Reason for JNU to Scrap Its New Attendance Policy

The JNU administration needs to understand that the compulsory attendance policy in its current form is deeply flawed and scrap it.

The JNU administration needs to understand that the compulsory attendance policy in its current form is deeply flawed and scrap it.

On the JNU campus. Source: JNU

On the JNU campus. Source: JNU

The Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) administration recently took the bold step of making 75% attendance compulsory for students. Students and teachers have vehemently opposed the decision. They have written against compulsory attendance, protested in large numbers and taken to social media to vent their frustration and anger. And finally, students decided to vote on the issue. On March 8, 4,456 students had their say: 4,388 (98.7%) against, 41 (0.92%) in favour.

While student/teacher protests or votes should not determine policy, it is time to take a step back on the compulsory attendance issue at JNU to ask some basic questions.

Is the decision of the JNU administration to introduce compulsory attendance a wise decision? Will it help improve the university’s academic performance? Could the objective of imposing compulsory attendance at an institution primarily devoted to postgraduate studies and research be something other than academic?

JNU is one of the best universities in the country – but it also suffers from major limitations. A of major problem that has persisted for a long time is that of scores of students remain on campus for far too long. Many are those who prioritise politics over academics. Many other students spend many years on campus to prepare for competitive exams or to look for jobs. A smaller number simply make JNU their home while working full-time outside the campus. They are sometimes able to spend nearly a decade on campus either by remaining registered as PhD students pretending to be busy with research or by getting admitted to a new programme after completing the current one.

The JNU administration believes that most students who stay on campus for many years are politically active and left-wing. The truth is that they are a mixed lot. What is obvious is that these students – whose priority is clearly not academics – benefit from generous subsidies, whether low student fees or hostel space, at the expense of other potential students. The compulsory attendance policy is targeted at such ‘lingerers’.

Most of the better universities in the world – whether or not subsidised by the government – do not require compulsory attendance at the postgraduate level (and often at the undergraduate level, too) because students are expected to know that poor attendance or absenteeism impacts adversely on academic performance. This is not true for postgraduate studies at most Indian universities, including many schools and departments at JNU. It is possible for students to perform reasonably well without attending lectures even when postgraduate taught in about the same way as institutions abroad because faculty members, administration and students prefer to go through the motions of following existing rules and regulations.

According to a JNU professor, “In a worst-case scenario, a student can get a degree without attending a single class or draw scholarships worth tens of thousands of rupees a month without doing any work or even coming to the university, except occasionally, to have some papers signed by the supervisor.” But this observation begs the question: how is it possible for a student to get a degree at a reputed institution without attending a sufficient number of classes?

The problem seems to be more about how our universities – including JNU – function than about making attendance mandatory. Compulsory attendance avoids the harder task of making departments at JNU more accountable in terms of how easily they grant degrees or allow PhD students several years of extension while they do things other than research.

The problem with the attendance policy is that it goes against the ethos of research-focused institutions like JNU. It has also been badly designed and could hurt students who are genuinely engaged in research.

The compulsory attendance rule is also for students who have completed their coursework and are engaged in research and writing towards their MPhil or PhD. While those in the sciences stream must come to the department to work in their laboratories, those in the social sciences and humanities often need to do field research, which involves working in other libraries or carrying out research – around the country. On paper, however, department heads may give permission to students to be away on field research but the idea of securing permission to do so is problematic.

Compulsory attendance for students at the research and writing stage takes away students’ freedom to carry out research and writing at any time of their choosing. For example, a student may wish to work in the laboratory or in their hostel room until late at night – but with the new rules, she must wake up on time to go to the department only to sign a register and then return to catch up on sleep. This is silly.

The kind of attendance regimen JNU has come up with for postgraduate students – particularly those who are in the research/writing stage – is unheard of and will be detrimental to research performance. Ideally, the attendance requirement should be scrapped for postgraduate students. Instead, a strict time-frame for MPhil and PhD programmes, determined in a sensible way for different disciplines, needs to be enforced, particularly for subsidised stay on campus. Beyond the five- or six-year period, the PhD student should not be permitted subsidised stay on campus.

The JNU administration needs to understand that the compulsory attendance policy in its current form is deeply flawed and scrap it.

Pushkar is Director, The International Centre Goa (ICG), Dona Paula. The views expressed here are personal.

The Many Reasons Behind the Anger in JNU

The JNU community’s list of grievances are based on objective facts, ones that are made visible by the data that the university administration itself generates.

The JNU community’s list of grievances are based on objective facts, ones that are made visible by the data that the university administration itself generates.

Credit: PTI

Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) is in the news again, for the protests that are roiling the university following the compulsory attendance farmans (as they have been christened by the students’ union) unilaterally issued on the authority of its vice-chancellor, M. Jagadesh Kumar. In what has become a familiar pattern to the university community, every instrument that can be invoked to repress students’ and teachers’ dissent, immediately has – students have been threatened with the withdrawal of meagre fellowships, hostel and medical facilities, police complaints and FIRs, and disciplinary action has been initiated against the students and the students’ union.

Even a place for the ‘nation’ has also been found in this discourse by Kumar, on the slightly bizarre thesis that the performance of a daily obeisance to JNU VC’s diktats is sufficient to reassure the nation’s indigent and working peoples that their tax rupees are being well and responsibly spent.

What has been heartening, and by now expected, is the JNU community’s and a section of the public’s response to this attempt to misrepresent its protest as one in favour of absenteeism. While JNU protests are incomplete without slogans and human chains, teachers and students have fought with their minds and their pens most of all. The sheer volume of perspectives presented in the opinion pieces that this issue has brought forth could easily be published into a manual on how to think about university-level pedagogy; but it would be a mistake to see the resistance holding out so determinedly as merely just about a single pedagogical issue or arising from the left-liberal inclinations of the people who speak out the most regularly. In fact, the JNU community’s list of grievances is based on objective facts, ones that are made visible by the data that the JNU administration itself generates.

Faculty appointments and promotions

In October 2016, the VC of JNU arrogated to himself the power not only to nominate experts (from a pre-approved database) for selection committees for faculty recruitment and promotion but also to name individuals as experts in the first place. That this move is in transgression of the UGC Regulations 2010 as well as the JNU Act has not stopped him in his tracks, nor has the argument that the VC cannot have expertise in every subject taught/researched in the university made an impression. In fact, the JNU administration has flatly refused to show the minutes of selection committees to the members of the executive council — appointments/promotions in JNU are, therefore, now made with information being withheld from the appointing authority. The media has already reported widely what this policy has reduced JNU selection interviews to.

The table below shows how widespread this tampering is, with 47% of the selection committees in 2017 comprising experts whose name had not been proposed by the schools/centres involved. In many selection committees, all three of the required experts so chosen by the VC are not from the approved panels.

 

School/Special Centre

 Selection committees held Appointments made Positions left vacant Selection committees tampered
Life Sciences 4 3 1 1
Computer and Systems Sciences 7 4 3 1
Environmental Sciences 3 3 0 2
Arts and Aesthetics 2 1 1 2
Nanosciences 2 0 2 0
Molecular Medicine 2 1 1 0
Study of Law and Governance 1 1 0 1
Language, Literature & Culture Studies 15 12 3 6
International Studies 5 4 1 4
Social Sciences 10 9 1 7
Total 51 38 13 24

(Information source: Academic and executive council minutes, which euphemistically record the VC’s addition of experts to the database as his having ‘finalised’ it.)

Currently, the number of advertised positions that have yet to be interviewed stands at 274, and if these are filled in the manner that has been followed since January 2017, the academic quality of the university is set to be compromised for a very long time indeed.

To make matters worse, promotions have all but stalled, even though scores of JNU faculty are eligible for promotion, and many have applied. In all of 2017, only 17 selection committees have been held for promotions, and of these four colleagues have been denied promotions on extremely flimsy grounds, as reported in the press earlier. Even though one of these colleagues has obtained an order from the Delhi high court for a reconvening of the selection committee, the court-mandated deadline for this has long since expired and no interview has been held.

This is particularly demoralising for faculty at the level of assistant professors, whom UGC regulations doom to a 12-year stagnation. This period is punctuated by several intermediate stages that have to be cleared, and a delay in jumping through the hoops means an unconscionable delay in promotions. But far from attending to this basic responsibility, in the JNU of today, there are attempts to undo the promotions already made.

School/Special Centre Promotions applied for Promotions denied
Biotechnology 2 1
Computer & Systems Sciences 2 0
Language, Literature & Culture Studies 6 3
International Studies 1 0
Social Sciences 2 0
 Total 13 4

Violence to the university’s research character

JNU has always been a very small university, primarily dedicated to research. Its student intake underwent a 54% increase by 2012 in keeping with the requirements of Central Educational Institutions Reservation Act of 2006, but the seats for research students (henceforth, intake) – to integrated M.Phil./PhD and M.Tech./PhD and the standalone Direct PhD programmes – have never crossed 1,000.

In March 2017, the VC unilaterally cut the intake to JNU’s research programme by 83%, citing that the supervisor-student ratio had been exceeded as prescribed by the UGC in 2016. What was purposely ignored was that the relatively high number of research students per teacher by 2012 was because of the mandated 54% increase in seats over the 2006 figures, by the Central Education Institutions Act. This increase was accomplished in a phased manner in JNU by the academic year 2012-13, and since then, had never been reversed because it was required by a national level reservation policy. Until 2017, that is.

The seat-cut in JNU was a form of cruel punishment in lieu of accolades because even as JNU teachers responsibly bore the brunt of the expansion of reservation without a concomitant faculty expansion, most other universities did not even implement the CEI Act for research degree admissions. A rise in the percentage share of SC/ST/OBC students in total students from 19.7% in 2005 to 51.2% has correlated with a rise in the supervisory load per faculty from 7.3 to 9.2 students.

Faculty Strength Research Students Total Students SC ST OBC
2005-06 396 2882 5264 669 370 NA
2006-07 449 3061 5506 703 425 288
2007-08 469 3241 5454 742 410 290
2008-09 491 3699 6025 837 461 772
2009-10 497 3668 6153 837 495 1029
2010-11 470 3864 6665 913 558 1214
2011-12 452 4359 7304 988 598 1468
2012-13 478 4609 7677 1058 632 1948
2013-14 522 4846 7677 1058 632 1948
2014-15 565 4990 8308 1201 643 2434
2015-16 565 5219 8432 1118 632 2568

In the 2017-18 admissions, not only were the seats cut but even of the 290 seats for which 4,289 people wrote the examination, 131 were not even offered for admission. Of these, 100 were reserved category seats, even though there were enough applicants to fill all of them. This colossal failure of admissions was effected by the JNU VC’s unilateral implementation of an admission policy that removed the award of deprivation points for research programmes and set highly unrealistic cut-off marks for the written examination at a blanket 50% across open and reserved categories.

The outcome of all these measures is that the 2017-18 admissions have changed the university’s student composition drastically. Where once an average classroom of 50 students in a research programme had a roughly 50-50 distribution of reserved vs open seats, for the 2017-18 batch, the number of reserved category students has fallen to just under six. This is because in the final seats offered for admission, the reservation for SCs is at 1.3% rather than the mandated 15%, for STs at 0.689% rather than 7.5%, for OBCs at 8.27% rather than 27.5% and the physically challenged at 0.34% rather than 3%.

The withdrawal of the JNU special policy of deprivation points (the award of up to 12 grace marks given to ameliorate regional, economic, educational and gender disadvantage) from research degrees has resulted in the loss of an all India-character of JNU, with only students from 15 states/union territories joining JNU, as compared to an average of 34 states/UTs over the preceding three years.

The 2017-18 admissions show a sharp reduction in the percentage of rural students and economically disadvantaged students. The university is more decisively urban than rural in 2017-18, and the share of students coming from poor and economically weaker backgrounds has declined drastically.

Rural Urban Not Specified
2014-15 42.70% 57.29% 0
2015-16 38.41% 44.04% 17.53%
2016-17 48.30% 51.58% 0.11%
2017-18 28.24% 71.75% 0

 

Income < Rs 6,000 Income < Rs 12,000 Income > Rs 12,001 Unspecified
2014-15 24.18% 20.02% 55.78% 0
2015-16 23.37% 19.37% 50.32% 6.92%
2016-17 25.50% 20.54% 53.38% 8.91%
2017-18 7.63% 12.21% 58.01% 22.13%


Why does the JNU community care so deeply about the change in the nature of its student population? First, a pro-poor, all-India character of the student and teacher populace is one of the main objectives that the university must meet, one clearly defined in the first schedule of the JNU Act.

Second, there is a concern for the maintaining the intellectual legacy of the institution built up over five decades. If today the university is regarded highly for the contribution its students and teachers make in studying a great range and variety of research questions, this is primarily because its research students come from communities and region and with experiences that makes them salient questions.

Third, being primarily a research university, JNU is conscious of the fact that it trains not only researchers but teachers in higher education for the country as a whole, and the violence that is being committed through this change in admission policy has a direct national impact.

But most of all, the universal concern is for the university’s legacy that another vision of higher education is possible – where the sets defined by social factors like the ‘poorest of the poor’ and intellectual parameters of ‘ablest of the ablest’ are not rendered mutually disjoint by a competitive admission process.

Rampant authoritarianism and wilful ineptitude

Since virtually the first day that Kumar has taken over, students union representatives have borne the brunt of a punitive administration. In 2017, JNU students protesting the university’s callousness in addressing the disappearance of Najeeb Ahmad and the very many illegal changes to the admission and other policies of the university have been made to pay fines ranging from Rs 5,000 to 20,000, totally a figure close to Rs 5 lakh.

Most if not all of these offences relate to activities like students wishing to meet the VC and/or members of his team, after repeated requests for appointments have failed and all democratic expression in meetings like the academic council and the standing committee on admissions has been muzzled. In none of the alleged actions has there been any physical violence or damage to property the charge. In fact, the only incident that has been visibly demonstrated as a violence targeting JNU property has been led by the ABVP, but no inquiry has been initiated into it.

The university’s much celebrated Gender Sensitisation Committee Against Sexual Harassment was illegally dissolved on September 18 last year and replaced by a committee packed with the VC’s nominees that inspires no trust amongst the very persons whose grievances it is supposed to redress. The net result of these efforts has been that JNU has become officially sanitised of sexual harassment – the newly constituted Internal Complaints Committee does no gender sensitisation activities, no disciplinary action for sexual harassment has been publicised yet, and there are disturbing reports of violations of confidentiality, with public notices being pasted on doors of women students issuing them peremptory instructions to make them appear before the committee.

Also read

But the punishment being meted out to students is not the only thing that is rotten in JNU, as the violence being done to its democratic institutions is nothing short of cruel and unusual. The manner in which the academic council is run has been the subject of much protest since mid-2016 – professor Kavita Singh’s description of proceedings of the 144th AC captures the general atmosphere for all meetings held now. An entirely new power has been invented to ram through decisions that have no takers — the power of the VC “in his capacity as the Chairperson of the Academic Council”. Whatever strikes the mind of the VC is now an academic council decision, and overwhelming dissent is represented in the minutes as the disagreement of a “few” unnamed members.

As a consequence, there is utter mayhem in the management of the academic affairs of the university. Seats for intake are based on a complex and long drawn out bargaining interaction with one or the other henchman of the VC, as the VC has determined a policy that is based on soothsaying rather than principle – for example, a teacher is to be denied any M.Phil. students, because once the students complete that degree, they may choose to do a PhD and the teacher may end up supervising more than the UGC-mandated maximum number of students.

That students frequently leave after M.Phil. degrees, or that PhD students may deregister or discontinue, is not in the realm of possibility. To top it all, each decision is given retrospective effect at the very beginning. This illegality – accompanied by rampant ungrammaticality that only confounds the message further – characterises the (il)logic of every single circular on admissions, M.Phil./PhD ordinances, and most recently, attendance and Skype vivas. A good example of this retrospective mayhem can be found in the university’s two recent losses in the courts, including on the delinking of the MPhil and PhD degrees.

Most of the chaos in JNU is wilful because the intent here is to publicly present that the outrage that follows every such decision as just the screams of agony of Left-liberal privilege brought to a just end by a saffron wrecking ball. All potential challenges to critique within decision-making bodies are quickly being eliminated, with the principle of rotation by seniority being abandoned at both ends – neither is seniority being respected nor is rotation, as not only are certain favoured individuals being appointed deans/chairpersons, bypassing one more eligible colleagues, others are being re-appointed.

No. of faculty affected by centre
Principle SIS SLLCS SSS SES SPS SCNS
Seniority – dean 2 5 1 1 1
Seniority – chairperson 3
Rotation – chairperson 1 1 1

This restriction of all important administrative posts is a university-wide plan, with a handpicked few being entrusted with more than one major administrative post. A hostel warden is also the head of the university cell responsible for the recruitment and promotion of faculty and the head of the UGC human resource development cell; one chairperson of a Centre is also concurrently the finance officer, while another chairperson simultaneously heads the university’s advanced studies fellowship Centre; a professor appointed a couple of months ago is also nominated to the JNU’s Executive Council as an external member and is also a hostel warden, while still on probation.

In this last feat, he is not alone, as some other appointees on probation have also garnered university positions within very short periods of time of their appointments. The band of friendly followers is quite small and decidedly gender-imbalanced – the chief proctor had to resign on the afternoon of September 18, 2017 to take over as the chairperson of the Internal Complaints Committee that abruptly and illegally replaced the GSCASH, but efforts to grow it are ongoing. Although terms of wardenship are specified by the rules as two years, a total of 18 wardens have been renewed for second terms ranging from six months to a year, presumably to make way for housing for preferential allotment to a select few.

A great deal has been invested in packaging the attack on JNU as primarily an ideological one, reflected in the VC’s requests for installations of army tanks and play-acting at military marches through the JNU campus. Whether or not the Indian public has been persuaded by this nationalist pageantry is not easy to determine, but no one who has been in JNU these past two years knows that the hatchet that is being taken to the university has any other ideological motivation than the destruction of the institution itself. It is for this reason alone that the resistance in JNU remains loud and vibrant, and in being so, it is an important defender of the idea of the Indian public university.

Ayesha Kidwai teaches linguistics at Jawaharlal Nehru University.

The Fuss About Attendance: A View from JNU

The enemies of the nation at JNU are not the students who organise meetings to discuss contentious issues; it is the administrators who want to rob India of one more good institution by grinding it into the dust.

The enemies of the nation at JNU are not the students who organise meetings to discuss contentious issues; it is the administrators who want to rob India of one more good institution by grinding it into the dust.

File photo of Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) Vice-Chancellor M. Jagadesh Kumar. Credit:  PTI

Why is Jawaharlal Nehru University in an uproar about the new attendance rules? Shouldn’t students study, and shouldn’t those who receive fellowships from the government, and who live in hostel rooms subsidised by public funds, be accountable to the public? Where is the harm in having students mark their presence, when they are supposed to be working on their degrees full time?

As JNU students take to the street in protest and a large number of teachers join them to demand that the administration roll back its new rules on mandatory attendance, many who read news of more events in the perpetually-troubled campus are going to roll their eyes at what seems like a trivial fuss; others will feel anger at what seems like a new storm in a very privileged teacup.

Yet what is portrayed in the press as a fight between Left and Right is actually a battle between a well-functioning university and an incompetent administration that is hiding its inexperience behind ill-conceived ideas backed up with aggression and bluster. It’s important for us as members of the JNU community to explain why we see the administration’s new rules as one more in a long list of missteps.

Plight of students

Let’s keep in mind that JNU is primarily a post-graduate university and the majority of its students are engaged in research. Here, the imposition of mandatory attendance leads to Kafkaesque absurdities such as these:

  • One of our PhD students is a lecturer in Delhi University. DU rules encourage her to get a PhD early in her career; JNU rules allow her to keep her job while she works on her thesis. She lives far from JNU, and is seven months pregnant. Under the new rules, she needs to come to JNU every day to sign in a register before she can go to teach in DU or take rest as advised by her doctor; if she does not do this, come August she will not be allowed to re-register as a student and the work she has done over the past one and a half years on her thesis will go to waste.
  • In the M Phil programme students do course-work in the first year and research and write a dissertation in the second year. Each semester, the students have to do two courses which require them to come twice a week. The rest of the week is spent reading and writing essays for the weekly class meetings. According to the new rules, students will need 75% attendance in the first year so MPhil students would have to mark their attendance 46 times in the coursework year. But in the second year, when they have no courses and work exclusively on their dissertations, when they should be doing field work, gathering data, interviewing subjects, visiting libraries and archives, they will have to come to the department to mark attendance about 155 times if the attendance rule applies to the weeks when the semester is on; but if, as the administration’s circulars imply, these students can take only 30 days off per annum, they would have to come to mark attendance 335 times in their research year, as opposed to 46 times during coursework.

The new mandatory attendance rules are symptomatic of much that is wrong in JNU’s administration today. The rules are unnecessary; they do nothing to improve academic performance but are very likely to harm it; they are clumsily framed and they are part of an increasingly authoritarian atmosphere that wants to control, surveille and contain students and faculty because the administration is not able to govern the institution.

The manner in which the rules were imposed reflects an abuse of power and barefaced misrepresentations on the part of the administration that claims the rules were approved in a meeting that was not even held; and every objection raised by teachers or students is being met with the harshest punishment – where a letter expressing disagreement invokes the threat of expulsion or dismissal.

Also read

It is odd that attendance has turned into an issue in JNU where non-attendance has not historically been a problem. While many universities have a compulsory attendance policy, JNU experimented with treating students like adults who would come to class by choice, not compulsion. This has worked for the most part; when a student loses interest in studies and stops coming to class or participating in the courses, usually her grades drop to the point where she has to leave the programme. This has the same effect as denying re-registration to students who don’t come to class, but is based on academic performance and not on mere physical presence.

Unlike many universities all over the country whose performance has declined over the years, JNU continues to function with professionalism. It has fulfilled its mandate as an institution of higher learning; the achievements of its teachers and students in research and publications ensure that it is ranked 2nd in the country just after the Indian Institute of Science. All of this should suggest that the existing system in the university is a good one.

Stymying research

Of course, the lack of mandatory attendance is not the only reason for the university’s good performance – the competitive selection procedure, the high quality of the faculty, the relatively well-endowed library and digital resources, and good teaching and mentoring methods all deserve credit. But the autonomy given to the students – who are, after all, adults, and as researchers are not students but are better seen as academics in the first stage of their careers – is part of what has made JNU work well.

Research in the humanities or social sciences is different from research in the sciences, where students need to work on-site in labs. Here, students alternate between phases of intense involvement with their supervisor and phases of independent work. Generally supervisors are most needed towards the start of the project (when students are giving shape to their project) and its close (when they are writing their chapters). At these times, a record of attendance will not reflect the degree of contact between students and professors, which includes but goes beyond physically meeting in the same building. It takes the form of reading, editing and exchanging drafts of chapters and communicating over email or phone conversations.

Between these phases, it is equally crucial for researchers to have phases of independent work, when they are in the field, gathering data, reading and reflecting. By the end of the project, I expect my student’s understanding of her topic to far outstrip my own; the roles are reversed and I learn from every meeting with her. But if I never grant her the freedom to explore and develop her own ideas, she will never outgrow my own.

Statements put out by the administration that the attendance policy was approved at the meetings of the academic council (AC) and the executive council (EC) are simply not true. The issue was not discussed at the AC, and the EC meeting that was to follow was cancelled at the last minute and has not been held at all.

When AC members found that the meeting’s minutes did not reflect the actual proceedings, they wrote letters of dissent to the administration but these have not brought any acknowledgement or response. As a result, many faculty members – sometimes entire departments – have refused to take attendance and if attendance sheets are passed around, almost all the students have refused to sign.

An example of an attendance sheet protest at JNU. Credit: Facebook

A furious administration has begun punishing students by holding back fellowships for those who cannot provide attendance sheets. But attendance is not a condition in the UGC regulations governing M Phil and PhD degrees or the UGC rules  governing the fellowships that are given to M Phil and PhD students, whether the relatively generous junior/senior research fellowships that give about Rs 20,000 a month, or the non-JRF fellowships of Rs 5,000 per month. The MPhil and PhD regulations only specify the academic standards that must be met by the student; the Fellowship Rules say the fellowships will be renewed on the basis of an annual report. There is nothing about daily attendance in either of these, so withholding fellowships on that account cannot be legally or procedurally correct.

The denial of even the modest Rs 5000-fellowship is a cataclysm for the many JNU students who come from families with an income of less than Rs 12,000 per month, but this has not stopped the administration from threatening to throw them out of their hostels and stop the mess from serving them food.

Early in the semester, the Foreign Students Association wrote an open letter to the Vice Chancellor, saying “the attendance policy favours bureaucratic process over ensuring the actual conditions required to produce excellent scholarship.” Students who signed this letter now report that the administration has held up their registration forms, claiming these need to be considered by a committee. The threat is clear: toe the line or leave. Ironically this has come just weeks after the administration enthusiastically filled the application for a newly announced “University of Eminence” scheme for a special grant from the government to become a globally competitive university with 25% foreign students and faculty. Can such an administration be trusted to guide an institution into the future?

We should be ashamed that 70 years after independence, this country has such terrible government schools and such few well-functioning public universities. Contrary to the picture painted by some sections of the media, the enemies of the nation who live on the JNU campus are not the students who organise meetings to discuss contentious issues; it is the powerful administrators who want to rob the country of one more good institution by grinding it into the dust.

Kavita Singh is Professor and Dean, School of Arts and Aesthetics, JNU