SPECIAL REPORT: IS DELHI UNIVERSITY 'REALLY' DYING?

By Harish Trivedi / Delhi

Delhi University (DU) has been so constantly in the news in recent weeks as to have become a spectacle. Some of the finest minds in our public life have issued alarmed and alarming statements about its future direction. Day after day the media has carried extensive reports on the critical state of DU’s health, as if it were a hapless victim of brutal violation about to die. In turn, the vice-chancellor of DU has been accorded the kind of space in media which could be the envy of ministers and film stars. 
    
So what’s all the hullabaloo about? On the face of it, it’s only a syllabus and a new degree structure, so when did these dry academic matters become so newsworthy?
In a competing narrative, the battle really is between the David of CPM and the Goliath of American imperialism – but what’s new in that? In yet another version, it’s not what’s happening in DU but the headlong pace at which it’s happening that needs to be checked. Just postpone the whole thing by a year, some say, and all will be well. 
    

Academic reforms are notoriously long in the making. When i took over as the head of the English department in DU, i inherited a syllabus reform that had already been going on for nine years. And according to recently published archival research, it took DU “almost two decades of discussion” to change from a two-year BA to a three-year BA. In this sempiternal perspective, a vice-chancellor in a hurry must seem a contradiction in terms. 
    
Given the seeming haste, it was widely suspected within DU that these reforms will be enforced through a last-minute diktat, bypassing the sacrosanct Academic Council (AC). But the meeting of the AC that passed the reforms in December 2012 was near-unanimous in its support for the reforms. There is in the AC a block of 26 elected college teachers who are all highly politicised activists and eloquent champions of the interests of the teaching community. They always sit together, speak as one and vote as one. But at this meeting, only six of them voted against the reforms. 
    
DU has always had a healthy tradition of radical dissent, rather more among its teachers than among its students. Now, teachers (unlike students or vice-chancellors) have a tenure of about four decades, and in some cases dissent hardens into an attitude. Many DU teachers who oppose the reforms now are precisely those who had opposed the semester system a couple of years ago, but now they are working with it. 
    
It is immensely flattering to DU, of course, that when it sneezes the whole education system catches a cold. It is the one bright beacon of liberal education in the country, and the public outcry now should be regarded primarily as a wellmeaning token of widespread goodwill for DU. But it hardly follows that DU’s business should be rendered everyone’s business. One can’t ask for external intervention one day and for autonomy the next. 
    
In all the controversy over pace and process, the substance of the reforms has been eclipsed. The new system achieves three major breakthroughs. First, all students will now start on the level, with no segregation between Pass and Honours initially. Secondly, some students will do an extra year if they choose, but some will do one year less and still get a university qualification. 
    
And thirdly, in the extra fourth year, teachers in each college will get to frame and teach their own courses and supervise research according to their academic strengths. Numerous college teachers in DU are better qualified and better published than professors and deans in many other universities; they will finally get some job satisfaction if not professional justice. There’s hardly been a more exciting time to be a college teacher in DU – or a college student. 
    
But this whole crisis would be wasted if DU does not learn from it some vital lessons. First, it should learn to communicate better, within itself and with the wider world. The new syllabus promotes e-learning; let DU learn to e-talk. The vicechancellor recently sent an email to all teachers; let him send out one every month. Let everyone be in the loop and feel constantly consulted. The DU website gets up to two lakh visits on some days; let it be a buzzing and interactive community site on all days. 
    
Let DU also assure all stakeholders that if a whole new syllabus can be brought in so briskly, any emendations that may arise when it is implemented in the classrooms will be processed with even greater speed and alacrity. This pioneering syllabus must remain a work in progress. 
    
The three-year BA was first brought in 70 years ago in DU in 1943, and numerous universities promptly followed its example. DU has now again shown the way. The elephant that is the emblem of DU has not gone berserk, nor is it marching off into an academic wilderness to lie down and die. It is forging a new path through the thickets of higher education, and where it goes today the country will follow tomorrow.