#dnaEdit: DU fails its students

It’s their first steps into the bigger world, a time of uncertainties but also excitement at the challenges ahead. After 12 years of school life, millions of students across the country are readying for college, applying frenetically in the hope of getting a good course and a good institution for that firm bedrock on which to build their future. India’s higher education system, despite its many flaws, has mostly backed this ambition but it sometimes — like Delhi University now — has confounded them with confusion. 

Are they applying for a three year course, as it used to be, or for a four year undergraduate programme (FYUP), pushed through last year? The three lakh and more students hoping to become part of India’s premier university just don’t know. And those who had entered the university last year and are well into the FYUP curriculum don’t know either. Carefully calibrated calculations of finances, postgraduate studies, diplomas and the careers thereafter have gone awry. A new government and a new minister at the helm of the human resource ministry (HRD) have added heft to the many voices of protest by teachers, intellectuals and students. 

In the latest, the University Grants Commission (UGC) has asked the university to reconsider and review the programme. In what is a shocking lapse, it turns out that the university didn’t take the president’s permission before introducing the four-year degree course. The university is indeed an autonomous institution but it is nonetheless bound by certain dos, and the UGC has concluded that FYUP was illegal.

The ill-conceived and poorly thought out FYUP was part of former HRD minister Kapil Sibal’s educational reform agenda. Vice Chancellor Dinesh Singh had muscled through the many misgivings by teachers, who said the community was not consulted, and gotten his way with his plan to rehaul the system. Of course, there is nothing wrong with a four-year programme with a multi-disciplinary approach. The US does so with great effect. The problem is when not enough thought has been given to critical issues such as the foundation course and the decision is rushed through in a matter of days instead of years.

One year on, DU surveys claim 80 percent students are happy with FYUP. But those conducted by teachers and students reportedly paint quite another picture with one saying that 91 percent were against the programme.

The reality could well lie somewhere in between. But that is of little consequence to students, who have battled the pressures of Class 12 examinations and face sky high cut offs with competing state boards to get to where they are. Their first vision of the world beyond the cocoon of their schools is likely to be protests by both right wing and left leaning student unions shouting slogans outside colleges as they queue up to fill in their applications.

It’s an unseemly sight anywhere, and particularly so because this is no mofussil town or the badlands. This is the Indian capital, the much sought after Delhi University, where cut-offs are so high that many students opt for foreign universities after they don’t make the grade here. 

That the university authorities, and indeed the previous government, could have slipped up on the basics and that the very legality of a decision that affects so many thousands is up for questioning is a sorry reflection on our systems. The ball, it seems, is in new HRD minister Smriti Irani’s court.