[The below text by Prof Arun Kumar appeared as a chapter in a 2023 book edited by RR Sharma]
JNU Potential and Performance: Need to Introspect
Retd. Professor CESP, SSS, JNU.
In R R Sharma (Ed.) 2023. `Nehru’s Luminous Legacy, The Jawaharlal Nehru University: Fifty Years and Thereafter’. With a Foreword by Prof. Y K Alagh. Delhi: 2024.
JNU is where my thought processes evolved over 31 years as a faculty member and prior to that four and a half years as a Ph.D. student. Naturally, I have the fondest memories about my time spent in the institution and the biggest disappointment at what it has become since 2016. In this article, rather than simply being nostalgic about its past glory, I have tried to be objective about JNU’s highs and lows. I have situated my experiences in the changing context of JNU and higher education in India since the 1970s.
The question arises how JNU could change so rapidly after 2016? It bears little resemblance to what it was even a year earlier. Were the seeds of this change sown much earlier? A Rector, in 2008, asked how JNU could be different from `Munirka’? That is, how different can a university be from the nation’s prevailing ethos?
Is nostalgia making us believe that our time was better than the present one? What yardstick can be used to judge whether changes have been for the better or worse? Can the university’s rating by NAAC, an accreditation agency, or its rank in the world rankings of universities be used?
JNU has done reasonably well in them. But, these measures focus on quantitative rather than the crucial qualitative aspects which are hard to capture.
The objective measures should be the quality, socially relevant knowledge generation and learning. All this requires inter-disciplinarity, and is that happening? Quality depends on the teacher and taught relationship and the academic environment in the departments and in the hostels. The relationship between the administration and the academic community is another crucial factor. All these need to be considered to objectively assess an institution.
JNU was modelled on the pattern of a liberal British university since in the 1960s Cambridge and Oxford were considered ideal universities. It was even said that JNU should aim to be like these universities. Since there were few world class institutions of higher learning then, the country’s leadership wanted to create one such institution.
The idea was to set up a research university to produce socially relevant knowledge for a poor country. This required a long-term independent vision of society and freedom to the faculty to pursue this goal. So, promising young faculty were recruited and provided autonomy to pursue their research interests. Inter-disciplinarity was built into the institution’s structure so that a critique of existing knowledge could be developed. The university was set up to do basic research with a strong focus on social sciences.
Greater autonomy also implied a different approach to learning and relationship with the students. A residential university was part of the design. Hostels and faculty residences were interspersed to promote informal interaction among faculty and students.
More importantly, students had to be treated as mature people and given greater freedom to take decisions. So, the design included a self-governing student body. This worked well and became a model for other universities. Students are a part of the academic bodies such as, the Academic Council. This has acted as an early warning and feedback mechanism so that the situation does not go out of hand due to emerging problems. In brief, there has been a less paternalistic attitude towards students. The Lyngdoh Committee report in 2006 and the Supreme Court’s intervention dented this arrangement. But, the JNU model is still a unique one.
Greater autonomy to faculty and treating students as mature has required less bureaucratic administration of the University. It also required more resources. Initially there was no shortage of resources. A large piece of land was given to JNU for its campus. But when the Janata government came to power in 1977, it thought of JNU as a bastion of the Left and cut back its funding and for long JNU functioned from what was called the down campus.
JNU quickly learnt that a public university is at the mercy of the state for resources and its autonomy can be truncated if the state so desires.
Many institutions of higher learning came up in the 1960s and 1970s but few reached the heights which JNU managed to achieve in the 1980s and 90s. This was largely the result of the initial vision of the university. JNU did not try to become Oxford or Harvard and just as well - that would have been a contradiction in terms since originality cannot be copied. It also needs to be remembered that the milieu in which JNU exists is vastly different from that of the top Western universities. So, JNU can never be like them. In fact, JNU’s achievements are a result of its being its own unique self.
The 35 years spent in JNU have been personally productive and that built the base for me to continue being productive in the years since retirement. My research has been highly relevant for the critical recent issues. For instance, demonetization and the black economy, GST and public finance, challenges of higher education and globalization and marginalization which has got highlighted due to the spread of Coronavirus.
As a student, I was impressed with the atmosphere of learning and engagement in JNU when I compared it with Delhi University where I had done my Masters in Physics. The degree of maturity of students was much higher and the trust and responsibility reposed on them was orders of magnitude greater. There was no ragging and no goondagardi during elections which was the norm in most Indian universities in the 1970s. Politics was clean and the level of debate among candidates was high.
I joined JNU in 1977 soon after the Emergency had been lifted, a new government had taken over, and the students were demanding the resignation of the `guilty 4’ who had collaborated
with the authorities during the Emergency. Classes began but soon there was a long strike. The students captured the library and ran it for months so that studies could continue.
The functioning of the Student Faculty Committee (SFC) was an eye opener – students could actually participate in the admission process by keeping track of what was going on, etc. In CESP, we created a student discussion group which met once a month and discussed pre assigned topics. Prof Krishna Bharadwaj offered her residence for us to get together. Later this became a formal group in the Centre.
As faculty, one had the autonomy to teach courses the way one wanted to, within a broad rubric. So, the courses based on one’s understanding were unique. There was autonomy in conducting examinations. I not only gave term papers as a part of the internal evaluation but also asked the students to present their written work to the entire class to test their understanding of the topic. The students greatly appreciated it and other faculty members also followed this practice.
I gave open book examinations to test the understanding of the subject. The students found it difficult to cope with, since they said they were not used to thinking in an exam. I sympathized with them because their entire training was to learn by rote and mechanically reproduce it in exams. Knowing this, I was liberal with grades and also marked the students using a normal curve. Every semester, I took a written feedback from students and it was a real help.
I started a coffee club in the Centre where at 11 am the faculty and the Ph.D. students could come for a cup of coffee and informal interaction. After a couple of years it became a faculty- only coffee club twice a day. This promoted much interaction among faculty. But, in the 1990s when everyone got a computer in their room, colleagues wanted the coffee in their rooms and interaction declined. The first computer in the Centre arrived in 1987 and a 24x7 computer center became operational in the 1990s.
As Chairperson of the Centre, I initiated major changes. One of them was the regular preparation of minutes of the faculty meetings and their circulation via email to faculty, including those on leave. This not only brought about greater transparency and accountability but everyone felt more included. This was adopted in other Centres where this was not a practice.
I constantly pressed the administration to simplify processes like, the cumbersome registration process which required students to run around various offices. This was eventually done in my second term as Chairperson. I pressed for digitization of work and official communication. I also pressed for modification of Ph.D. ordinances so that a category of minor revision could be introduced and this was accepted later.
I proposed in the various bodies of the University since 2002, the setting up of a JNU Archives but to little avail. The issue is important for documenting JNU’s evolution and its contributions. For instance, JNU’s role during the various social movements in the country or the documenting of important decisions taken in JNU. As faculty members retire, much of this knowledge which was individual is getting lost to the wider community and JNU itself.
Traffic in JNU exploded in the 2000s with more and more vehicles on the roads as well as in the parking outside buildings and hostels. I was appointed the Chairperson of The Traffic Planning Committee to make suggestions. We quickly realized that a holistic view regarding traffic was necessary. So, based on widespread consultations our Report made recommendations on various
aspects, such as, equity, the special problems of the challenged and the elderly, environmental aspects and encouraging of non-motorized transportation. Much later, cycle banks were introduced on campus.
I was associated actively with the JNU Teachers Association (JNUTA) since the mid-1990s as a member of its EC several times and as its President in 2014. It gave us the opportunity to not only fight for our rights but also strengthen the intellectual environment of JNU by organizing seminars and talks. Like, on the Ministry’s and UGC’s proposals on education, university’s proposals for the various Plans, lessons of the Bhuj earthquake and Nobel Prizes.
In 2014 on the eve of the national elections we organised a debate among the leaders of different national parties. In 2003, we organized a seminar to discuss the Challenges faced by Indian Universities. The proceedings were brought out as an edited volume – the first publication of JNUTA. In the summer of 2014, when a large number of teachers’ associations were under siege, we organized a national seminar on Higher Education attended by teachers’ leaders from across the country. It was decided to form a coordination committee of teacher’s associations in Delhi (CCTAD).
I became the founding President of CCTAD and we revived FEDCUTA which had become defunct for the past many years so that all the Central Universities could come together on issues. All these steps helped strengthen the teachers’ movements but the challenge had increased with the new government coming to power in 2014.
In 1997, I chaired a committee set up by JNUTA to look into alternative structures of Higher Education. Our report proposed greater democratization of the structures of the universities and greater autonomy to faculty. Our suggestion of a cess on corporate profits to raise funds for education was implemented by the government. That year we also suggested raising the faculty retirement age to 65 and if possible to 70 years. The first part was accepted.
It is JNU’s liberal ethos and the autonomy afforded to faculty that enabled me to research esoteric topics such as, black economy, alternative development paradigm and Alternative Budgets as vehicles of alternative policies. I could therefore make original contribution on these topics and these became important issues decades later.
JNU’s liberal ethos enabled me to get direct admission to the Ph.D. programme in 1977 even though I did not have a masters in the subject. I only needed to pass a written exam and give an interview. Crucially, JNU was supposed to be inter-disciplinary and admitting students from other streams was a part of this mandate.
It was recognized that new socially relevant knowledge would emerge out of inter-disciplinarity. Schools and departments were named accordingly so that they could focus on a broader theme rather than the narrow traditional disciplines.
With few exceptions, the experiment was not a success. Most faculty worked in their area of specialization. In the 1970s, there was some experimentation with this idea but it declined as the pressures to publish or perish grew. In the 1970s and the early 1980s the atmosphere in the university was also more relaxed and faculty had the time to experiment, but slowly all this declined in the 1990s as pressures for immediate results grew.
Knowledge has been exploding leading to greater specialization and narrower focus. In Economics, there is often little conversation between faculty members belonging to different specializations within the discipline. With people working in silos, interaction with faculty members in say History or Political Science became even more difficult.
A view that militated against inter-disciplinarity was that one has to be good in one’s own area of specialization before foraying across disciplines. No doubt one has to be good at what one is doing, but this is a slippery slope. Once on it, it is difficult to get off it and start interacting with those from other specializations.
Focus on international rankings and accreditation has worsened the situation by forcing academics to indulge in paper chase. The luxury to experiment with broader ideas is gone - for the sake of the career one has to quickly do what one can. After practicing this for more than a decade to become a Professor, there is only a slim chance that someone will change course. The career path takes over and the luxury to experiment recedes.
The New Economic Polices launched in 1991 aggravated these tendencies. Marketization took hold and commercialization grew (Kumar, 2013). Resources for pure research decreased.
Universities were told to generate resources and become more market oriented. This forced on them accreditation and ranking, which truncated the autonomy of academics.
This set off a vicious cycle of decline in academia and to check that, more bureaucratic solutions based on greater control over academics and their research emerged. The academic bureaucracy took it upon itself to discipline the academics. It was propagated that teachers play truant and do not teach or do research. Regulations introduced to check these tendencies could be mechanically fulfilled. The bureaucratized academics who have been members of various Pay Commissions since 1986 have created and pushed such proposals believing that in higher education, `standards can be achieved by standardization’.
So, the `lazy’ faculty was required to attend orientation courses for getting promotions. They had to pass a NET or SLET exam to be able to get a teaching job. Next came the requirement of an M.Phil. and after that the Ph.D. degree. Finally, there came the Annual Performance Index (API). All these requirements can be mechanically fulfilled without improving quality or the teacher- taught relationship (which actually deteriorated).
These measures have proved counter-productive and led to a deterioration in standards. Academics can beat the system since higher education is about quality and not just quantity. The former cannot be judged bureaucratically and mechanically. To beat the system, fake and sub- standard journals and books, meaningless conferences, etc., have proliferated. M.Phil. and Ph.D.
dissertation have been mass produced with little originality and often plagiarized despite the software available to check it. All this collects points for API. When only points need to be collected, why challenge authorities and step on the toes of the powers that be and create difficulties in promotions?
Dissent is the essence of higher education where knowledge, as it exists, has to be challenged to advance it. It spills over from academia to the way in which the institution is run and this is not linked by the bureaucratized systems which then marginalize the dissenters. Of late, they are labeled as anti-nationals and their attention is diverted from academic activities to defending themselves. Autonomy to devise courses and do research has been circumscribed. This is the surest way to kill originality in higher education and make it vacuous and static.
The need is to recreate the academic ethos which has been dented by growing bureaucratization and commercialization, which serve the system’s short run interest but not society’s long term interest. JNU has also been increasingly afflicted by these twin problems. As JNUTA President in 2014, we tried to counter these tendencies in JNU by proposing a `Citizens’ Charter’ to make administration accountable and release the faculty from its tightening grip. The administration cleverly stalled this and it was not followed up subsequently.
Autonomy all down the line is key to excellence of a university (Kumar, 1987). It has to extend all the way down to individual faculty members. Those opposed to it argue that it will result in academics taking it easy. But, can a faculty member who is not motivated to teach or do research be coerced to change? Lectures can be mechanically delivered which kills the interest of the students and research can be perfunctory, lacking originality.
Unfortunately, the bureaucracy does not recognize that bureaucratization damages the education system more than it benefits it. Motivation of the faculty is key to good teaching and research and this is promoted by grant of autonomy to faculty. How a course is taught and what should its content be is best left to the faculty member. Teaching a standard course (like, in schools) which goes against the understanding of the faculty members, based on their research, will only lead to mechanical teaching.
Autonomy has been flagged by all Committees on Higher Education but it is like a slogan. How to operationalize it has hardly been spelt out. What is proposed often militates against it. At best, autonomy has been used to give the VC and the university bureaucracy greater control over the faculty to discipline them. If some faculty are shirkers, it is the appointments to blame, especially, when they are based on considerations other than academic.
Academics have different ways of working since there is no one route to creativity. Some may be good teachers but poor researchers and vice versa. Some may like to write a research paper every 3 months while there may be others who produce a seminal work in 10 years. So, academics the freedom to follow the approach that best suits them and this is what autonomy is. Forcing faculty to indulge in paper chase will only result in their gaming the system but not improving it.
A corollary of autonomy is democratic functioning so that the voice of individual faculty is heard in all the fora of the university. It also requires democratic decision making on most aspects of
university’s functioning, like, admissions, examinations and leave (See Kumar, 2021). So, in the universities, dissent is to be celebrated as the essence, not a malaise to be eliminated – it is a critical input for academic functioning. This slows decision making but yields results.
JNU had largely followed this template of autonomy. Decision making and functioning of various bodies of the university was democratic. Its vision, small size and research orientation helped in this process.
JNU consists of Centres and they are parts of Schools. When Centres excel, the university is said to excel and this has been the case in its first three decades of JNU’s existence. It has been at the forefront of public debate on policies and became a recognizable name not just nationally but even internationally.
Of late, there has been a decline for several reasons. One of them is the change sweeping the world and Indian society. This can be illustrated by the experience of the Economics Centre (CESP) of JNU which has been acknowledged as one of the more renowned Centres of JNU. Its courses and syllabus have been copied by other Centers in other universities. Its students have become faculty members in various universities in India and the world and one was awarded a Nobel Prize. Generally they have done well in media, government, banks, etc.
The Centre’s strength lay in its diversity – perhaps greater than that of any other department of economics. Its courses covered various schools of thought from the Left to the Right. The idea was that students should get an exposure to various streams of thinking in Economics and be able to choose for themselves. That required a vast diversity in the faculty.
But this led to the Centre falling between two stools. Either it could be good like a standard economics department anywhere in the world or it could develop a different understanding of society which could influence wider social thinking and policy.
Over time, the Centre got deeply divided between these two ideas. Some wanted it to be like other good economics departments – teaching and researching mainstream economics. At the other pole were the critics of establishment, largely from the left of center and Marxist persuasion – they saw standard economics as status quoist. The peaceful coexistence between the two groups in the beginning slowly dissipated in the 1990s.
1991 saw the launch of the New Economic Policies and that set into motion powerful nationwide forces. The demise of the Soviet Union and the earlier 180 degree turn taken by China in the
mid-1970s had a deep ideological impact on society and the Left. The pendulum swung towards the idea of a good standard economics department.
From the late 1980s it was clear that the economic policies being pursued in the country needed to be reviewed since they were resulting in a growing crisis. The Centre could have made a concerted attempt to devise an alternative but did not. That left the ground open for the adoption
of the New Economic Policies (NEP) as devised by the Washington Consensus. The World Bank had an entire blueprint ready for India, which it had communicated to the then Prime Minister.
This got implemented in 1991 and it was said that there was no alternative (TINA).
My work on the black economy since 1980 and on alternatives to the policies being implemented in the 1980s made me realize that there is no time to be lost. But my colleagues did not see it that way. I had been arguing that the black economy leads to policy failure. But, this was not picked up as a central idea by others.
Post 1991, I prepared the Alternative Budgets as a vehicle for alternative policies. Some of us also produced the Alternative Economic Survey as a way of presenting an alternative understanding of the economy based on a reinterpretation of the official data. In 1994, a
Citizen’s Parliament was organised and I presented the alternative budget. We had the top leaders from political parties, trade unions, academia and NGOs. But in the absence of unity of purpose, the effort did not succeed. I argued then that for at least the next two decades it would be difficult to reverse the direction of policies. But, they would lead to a growing crisis in society. This has happened; crisis is deepening but there is no alternative.
CESP has had great individual teachers and researchers but as a whole it has not made the difference it should have. It did not contribute to a building of a different understanding of society which could have influenced society and policy making – the potential was not realized.
Leadership in JNU should have understood the twin attack of bureaucratization and commercialization and resisted it. Instead the leadership accepted them as inevitable and did not provide the leadership to other universities to resist these changes. Perhaps this was inevitable given their reduced public standing and their waning capacity to resist dictates due to their desire to please those in power.
Many of the VCs have lacked the intellectual ability to give lead to the academic community. Inevitably, to push their agenda, they needed a coterie of supporters and this led to formation of cliques, sycophancy and sectarianism. This impacted appointments which were made with a view to strengthening their faction. This did not become too one-sided due to the alertness of faculty. Cliques also got further strengthened when faculty members realized that being a part of a group speeded their upward mobility.
Groupism is inevitable since society and institutions are bound to have a diversity of interests that are pushed by different groups. Universities cannot be an exception. Ideological diversity and differences in perception are bound to be present. But, these should not be based on narrow individual interests and should rather be an expression of wider societal differences. The senior most colleague of our department used to often complain in the 1980s that faculty members get together over a drink in the evening and make decisions – she felt marginalized even though she was the senior most in the Centre.
The narrowing vision of JNU’s leadership is an important reason for the weakening of the initial JNU ethos and vision. For instance, JNUTA Presidents increasingly operated on the basis of
personal negotiations with the administration and thereby not only weakened institutional
functioning but played into the administration’s hands. In 2014 we tried to change this way of functioning but there was no follow up after our term.
JNU was set up in the 1960s perhaps with the view to give a platform to the left of center in national politics. Leading young academics from that stream of thinking were appointed and given a fairly free hand to make appointments. Some have seen this as a cooption of the critics.
The Emergency intervened and JNU’s independence was seen as problematic. The Janata government that followed was anti-Left and pressures built up on JNU. Funds dried up and JNU’s development stalled. The library was to be a repository of all Indian publications but due to lack of storage space that had to be given up. Construction of its own campus got delayed.
It became clear that autonomy of the university is relative to the ruling establishment and is not absolute. This has been a recurring theme for JNU and more so in the period after 2016. As
already argued, NEP not only eroded JNU’s autonomy but also intensified cliquishness and
aggravated divisions. All this further dented JNU’s leadership position and reinforced the feeling that the university cannot be a leader in society and therefore cannot be `different from Munirka’. The door for intrusion from outside opened wider and the erosion of autonomy accelerated.
The Rector who argued that JNU could not be different from Munirka was being practical and reflected the evolving mind set in the university. The statement was made in the context of student activism. A student group teaching the children of construction workers on campus found that the contractors were fudging muster rolls and paying the workers about half of the minimum wage. They demanded action. Instead of applauding the students, they were advised to focus on their studies and not be involved in such activities. This is a status quoist argument and misses the point that universities need to be leaders in thought and harbingers of change.
JNU students have had a tradition of activism since the 1970s and the 1980s. It has persisted till now even if it has weakened due to societal changes and the changing structures in JNU.
Unlike elsewhere in India, students hold their own elections to the Student’s Union by appointing an Election Commission. In the Centres, there are Student Faculty Committees (SFC) to take care of issues faced by students in the Centre. Elected students are members of academic bodies, like the Academic Council (AC). This enables students to place their concerns on various matters in the decision making bodies of the university. In this respect, JNU has been unique.
To promote inter-disciplinarity, students are allowed to attend classes in other Centres. Formally, one eighth of their credits in the Master’s programme can be from other Centres. With few exceptions this did not quite deliver.
In CESP, due to market related pressures, students wanted to have Econometrics on their transcript to improve their job prospects. So, even students weak in statistics took the course and did poorly. To improve their grades they took courses in other Centres in which grading was
liberal. Some, of the interesting courses that used to be popular in the 1970s and 1980s were not even taught in the 1990s since students did not want to show them on their transcript.
The market orientation of students increased after 1991 as corporate salaries soared. I remember some of our students teaching in prime colleges of Delhi telling us that their students thought of them to be fools to be in the teaching profession. They were told by the students that their starting salary would be higher than what the teacher would retire at. Such a milieu dissuaded many of the young from doing research and teaching.
As the Chairperson of the Centre, at the start of the semester, I used to talk to each student for a few minutes to ask about how they had done and whether they were facing difficulties. Each student was allotted an Advisor not just for research but also for the MA course. Unfortunately, this arrangement did not work since most students felt intimidated and faculty members were indifferent. Most students came from institutions where teachers were unapproachable and this was ingrained in them.
The student-teacher relationship weakened over time as faculty became increasingly busy collecting points for promotion. Interaction with the students earned them no points. The contact hours fixed for students to resolve their difficulties were hardly used and especially by the weaker students, who needed them the most.
JNU’s admission policy was designed to promote diversity by allotting points for different kinds of deprivations. This policy was diluted after the 1983 fiasco. Anyhow, the student body consisted of many from rural and backward areas who found it tough to adjust to JNU. But the student body was helpful from the beginning. The new students were wooed by the various student fronts through provision of all manner of assistance.
JNU was seen by many students as a place that prepared them for the competitive examinations. This was in sharp contrast with x d the situation in the 1970s when students did not reveal that they were preparing for the civil services. The number of students aspiring to join the civil services grew rapidly. This dented the research degree programmes and the atmosphere for learning. For instance, at the dining table in the hostels, often the discussion was limited to the questions that may be asked in the examinations. This milieu on campus diluted the research orientation.
The result was that progress on the dissertation was slow, especially in the first two years of the Ph.D. programme and the first six months of the M.Phil. programme. Many students expected to write their M.Phil. dissertation in a few months’ time. This necessitated short cuts and led to plagiarism. Those teachers who did not accept such short cuts were seen as the difficult ones.
Consequently, there were supervisors who had 15 to 20 active students enrolled under them while the more demanding ones had hardly 3 or 4 students. This damaged the Ph.D. programme no end. However, it must be said that many external examiners complemented us saying that usually an M.Phil. dissertation from JNU was better than the Ph.D. dissertation from most other universities. One was happy to be `Andhon mein kana raja'.
I met my research students regularly but often I repeated what I had said earlier because the students had made little progress. Some students who had taken up teaching jobs came during their vacations, once every 4 months and had lost momentum on the thesis. So, I used to tape the conversation with the students and email the file to them so that they could come prepared. But even this met with only partial success.
Taking a research student seriously meant a lot of time away from one’s own work. Ideas had to be generated, drafts corrected repeatedly and so on. Most of the students lacked proficiency in English and therefore struggled with research and writing. Even after all this effort very few of my students continued to do research on their own after they got their degree. Perhaps, most of them enrolled for Ph.D. because it was required for their promotions. A consequence of trying to achieve standards via standardization.
As argued earlier, New Economic Policies (NEP) launched in 1991 had a deep impact on education in India and on JNU in particular. Universities were required to become market oriented and raise own resources through projects and by starting paying courses.
JNU resisted that. Many new standalone programmes were started in the 2000s which later became Centres. Several Science Centres also came up. There was a gradual shift in the balance in the university towards the Science Schools. All this led to a diversion of new posts and resources to the new Centres at the expense of the existing Centres.
The OBC reservations and expansion by 57% further impacted the teaching programmes with class size becoming unmanageable and inadequate classroom capacity to accommodate the additional students. The number of students in the research programmes also increased. But, the faculty positions that were meant for the main teaching programmes were diverted to the new Centres. That dented teaching and research in the older Centres.
There was a lack of an overall vision of where the university was headed. Each new VC came up with her/his vision document. How can the vision change every three to four years? The result was ad-hocism and these documents had little connect with what happened in the university.
NEP set into motion the truncation of autonomy everywhere and also in JNU. This led to further decline in standards in the universities in the 1990s and a response to that was to go for standardization. For instance, UGC set up committees to design syllabi for each of the disciplines. These were sought to be imposed on the university departments. This was followed by the imposition of the disastrous API system for assessing faculty which ended up promoting mediocrity. The result was that `Munirka’ became the norm in universities.
Instead of standing up to the dictates of the UGC, VCs enforced them in spite of opposition from the faculty. I was a member of a committee to review UGC’s proposals in 2008 since there was strong opposition from the faculty. The Report presented a critique of the proposals as well as made suggestions for alternatives. But this report was not acted upon.
The result was that junior faculty was forced to scrounge around for points for their promotion. This greatly undermined their autonomy and weakened the teacher-taught relationship. All this also weakened the Associations of students and teachers. The administration could deal with individual teachers and bestow favours and did not have to deal with the Teachers Association as a whole. There was a toughening of the approach towards the student’s demands and they were viewed as trouble makers rather than partners in the development of the university.
It is in this background of a weakening of the democratic spirit and curtailment of the autonomy of faculty that the post-2016 events need to be situated. The dissipation of the initial vision of JNU had started at least since 1991. What was gradual became a phase change.
JNU’s reputation was sought to be destroyed. The unfortunate incident of February 2016, deliberately created or otherwise, came in handy to brand JNU as anti-national. JNUites were labelled as `tukde tukde’ gang and anti-nationals. Cases were launched against JNU students but for years these have gotten nowhere for lack of evidence.
The democratic practices and norms of JNU have been overturned to promote favourites. Dialogue between students and faculty and the administration has declined. A coterie of supporters has been created and it dominates the academic bodies. This became possible because of complete support from the powers that be. For much less protest, the earlier JNU VCs would have set matters right.
Dissenters have been harassed – for instance, leave was denied for attending conferences and pension of retiring faculty was held up till the courts intervened. Some old files were dusted and investigation launched against dissenters. Discussion in academic bodies became perfunctory.
Dissent was not recorded. The result is that Court cases against JNU have grown exponentially.
There is long term damage to JNU due to the kind of appointments being made and denial of promotion to deserving faculty. Selection committees often consist of experts from outside the list of experts approved by the faculty and where experts have dissented, they have been overruled. The damage is incalculable and will be visible over time.
Consequently, JNU of 2016 is the polar opposite of what it was in the 1970s and 1980s and which brought it recognition for all the right reasons.
The article traces the ups and downs of JNU since the 1970s. Personally, it has been a satisfying journey for me since it enabled me to develop many new research ideas and afforded the freedom to teach courses the way I wanted to. Autonomy was a hallmark of JNU functioning even though it started to erode after 1991.
JNU could not make a bigger mark in the world of ideas due to its inability to fulfill its mandate of inter-disciplinarity. JNU leadership has to accept much of the blame for this since it could not set the agenda. Over time the leadership weakened and accepted the dictates from MHRD and UGC which eroded the autonomy so necessary to achieve the larger goal.
The various phases of evolution of JNU and the weakening of leadership are spelt out. The first change came in 1977 when the Janata government came to power with its right of center agenda and JNU did not fit into that. Then came the incident of 1983 which led to the curtailment of the students’ rights and changes in admission policy. The biggest setback, the launch of the New Economic Po licies (NEP) in 1991 had a deep impact on education in India and JNU could not escape its adverse effects. The Pay Commissions in 1996 and 2007 further accentuated these effects through setting into motion major changes in the structures of higher education and leading to grater bureaucratization of the universities. The final phase started in 2016 which largely demolished autonomy and damaged JNU’s ethos irreversibly.
All this demonstrates the power of the state in matters relating to the public universities. If the state lacks the wider and long term vision of nurturing universities as centres of new knowledge generation, it can destroy them quickly. For universities to flourish, the state has to be liberal and accept their role of holding the mirror to those in power. Only then will dissent be celebrated rather than be treated as a malaise to be eliminated which is what is happening now.
This is a challenge to the entire higher education community in India. Universities need to reach out to the public and convince them of their role as guardians of society’s long term interest.
Neither the corporates nor the politicians nor other institutions can play this role. Lacking such a vision, society has allowed one of its premier institutions to rapidly slide into a morass from which it would be difficult to pull it up. Clearly, JNU illustrates that it is difficult to create great institutions but easy to demolish them if the powers that be are bent on doing so.
References
Kumar, A. (1987). “Accountability and Autonomy in Higher Education Needed Internal Democracy”. Economic and Political Weekly. October 31.
Kumar, A. (2013). Indian Economy since Independence: Persisting Colonial Disruption. N Delhi: Vision Books.
Kumar, A. (2021). “Academic Autonomy: Needed a Holistic Societal Perspective”. Mainstream, Vol. LIX, No 18. 16 April. http://mainstreamweekly.net/article10753.html. Accessed 17 April 2021.
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