Semester System2

8/7/2019 Semester System2

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Ever since the debate over the conversion to a semester system began in 2008, the

question that has remained fundamentally unanswered is Why? Why do we need

to shift to a semester system? Why has a thorough critique of the annual system

which is by no means perfect not been publicly circulated for discussion, before

proposing an alternative? Should not such a critical process constitute the first step

in any reform? Why has there been a repeated refusal to engage with the queriesand concerns of the teaching community regarding the semester system the very

community that is expected to actually implement the reforms? Why did the

former Vice Chancellor contemptuously dismiss these queries and concerns, even

when they came, not from the so-called political factions, but from reputed and

committed academics, on very considered and rigorously argued academic,

logistical and administrative grounds? (One may not agree with this distinction as I

do not between political and committed academics, but it is important to

remember that such a distinction exists in public perception; and if those who are

considered committed academics are themselves becoming politicized on this

issue as demonstrated by the phenomenal turnout at the rally of teachers to the

MHRD on 28 October 2010 then there is clearly cause for concern.) Why did the

VC choose repeatedly and with baffling insistence patently irregular, even illegal,

actions to push this reform through? And most significantly, why was he willing to

go to the extent of employing unprecedentedly coercive measures to ensure the

implementation of this reform, through a patent abuse of his emergency powers,

thereby precipitating a headlong confrontation with the teaching community on this

issue?

It is sometimes forgotten that the overwhelming majority of college staff

associations and staff councils had turned in a categorical rejection of the semester

system as early as in mid-2009. I will offer here a very brief recap of some verydetailed and considered arguments that were submitted then. Firstly, the semester

system cannot be implemented without substantial dilution of Course content in the

honours courses, necessitated by the inevitable time crunch that the semester

schedule will entail: exam time alone about a month and a half will be doubled,

with exams happening twice a year. Secondly, the proposal is to compensate for

this inevitable dilution, by changing from an Honours system to a system of Major

and Minor courses, thereby apparently offering students greater interdisciplinary

options from a variety of courses and disciplines. But in actuality this will only

exacerbate the dilution of quality, since through this system, students will have no

time to engage fully with the major or the minor discipline, but will gain only a

sketchy and dangerously incomplete understanding of the subject. Further, the

ostensible advantage of promoting interdisciplinarity is actually no more than the

making available of multiple disciplines to students (with no extended exposure and

therefore little actual foundation in any); the actual interdisciplinarity, introduced

only recently through carefully designed interdisciplinary courses actively drawing

from multiple disciplines, will be jettisoned. Thirdly, precisely because of the

inability to engage in requisite detail with a particular discipline, the sound

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knowledge base essential for further research will simply not be available, leading

to the gradual collapse of quality research. Research will also be hit by the fact that

faculty will have little or no time left over from continuous teaching and evaluation

to pursue research. Fourthly, while on the one hand, governments of every hue

have promoted reservation in higher education for the weaker sections of society,

on the other, by insisting mindlessly on the semester system, the space and timerequired for these sections to catch up and compete on even terms with the

dominant sections, is taken away: what the reservation system makes possible, the

semester system effectively undercuts and defeats. Fifthly, the current teacher-

student ratio in colleges already stands in the way of individual attention to

students, and a Major-Minor combination threatens to aggravate this further, thus

seriously affecting the quality of higher education (Concerns of English Teachers,

document circulated by the General Body of the English departments of the

University).

These are just samples of the many very genuine concerns raised by the teaching

community, from as far back mid-2009. It is clear from even this brief list, that the

concerns are overwhelmingly about the quality of higher education under the

semester system, and not about how it will affect the teachers working conditions

as has been maliciously spread by the University authorities. Prof. Pental chose to

ignore these concerns and instead strong-armed the matter through the Academic

and Executive Councils of the university. This led only exacerbated the situation to

the point where, more than a year later, the teaching community had no choice but

to resort to striking work, in order to be heard. Contrary to popular perception, the

university teachers have been far from truculent in this matter: if anything, they

have shown remarkable patience and tolerance in dealing with the Vice Chancellor

in this period. It was he who repeatedly behaved with inexplicable haste andunpardonable disrespect towards the entire teaching community. The disrespect lay

not only in the coercive measures he sought to employ against the teachers, but in

his inflexible refusal to listen to them, and in the despicable canards that he

launched in the public sphere: about how teachers were fundamentally anti-change,

about their apparent unwillingness to work, that they were afraid of the

accountability that the semester system would bring in and so on. Through these

and other very unsavory means, the former VC had sought to discredit the teachers

genuine concerns, to sow doubt and disunity in the community, and to instill a

regime of fear, apprehension and submissiveness in the university. The sheer

vehemence, insistence and unseemly haste if not the unabashed resorting to

procedural violations, illegalities and slandering with which the VC has acted,

should alone be cause for alarm. There is evidently much more at stake in the

conversion of the university to a semester system than meets the eye.

So far, we have had little by way of justification: one such has been that, this is the

system followed by universities internationally, and therefore it is necessary to

implement it in Delhi University too, in order to bring it up to global standards.

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Even if it is accepted that there is such a set of universally applicable global

standards which, in the absence of any credible arguments for it, remains suspect

it is unclear either why those standards cannot be met without the radical

overhauling implied by a semester system, or conversely, whether those standards

will be met by simply switching to the semester system. Further, there have been

reports from around the world indeed, from other parts of India, where thesemester system has been similarly enforced that it simply does not work in many

universities, as a schedule of education. In other words, different universities have

different requirements, determined by (among many other things) factors like their

size, organizational structures, research and pedagogic profiles, disciplinary

orientations and emphases, objectives, infrastructural and financial bases, and their

social constituencies. It is plain lunacy to believe that if the semester system works

in one such university, it will work in all. By way of illustrating this point: one of the

biggest questions about implementing the semester system in Delhi University is

that it will require university-wide examinations to be held twice a year. Given that

Delhi University has nearly eighty affiliated colleges offering undergraduate

courses, with over two hundred thousand students, and that it struggles to meet the

demands of conducting one exam every year, it is baffling that without even

seeking to address the existing difficulties in conducting one annual exam there is

such a blind insistence on a system that will demand that this huge enterprise be

carried out twice every year. If this insane programme is implemented, it does not

require divine insight to foretell the complete chaos that will ensue, affecting the

careers and lives of hundreds of thousands of students. It is obvious then that it is

first necessary to examine what ground conditions are prerequisite in a given

university, for the semester system to work. None of this has been given any

cognizance by those pushing this agenda. The sole, highly irresponsible response

has been that, any teething problems arising from the implementation, will betackled when they ensue.

So, what then is at stake here? One of the recommendations of the Knowledge

Commission a super council on educational matters, whose term is over but whose

reports and recommendations are still being implemented is that the semester

system replace the annual mode. No arguments are offered in favor of the one or

against the other, no analyses, no justifications just a blanket recommendation for

all state funded universities. The sole explanation that appears is that a uniform

semester system will facilitate the mobility of students from one university to

another. Given that the number of such mobile students is probably less than a

fraction of a fraction of one percent of the total number of university-going students

in the country at any given time, this eagerness to facilitate their mobility, at

extreme cost to the other non-mobile students, is incomprehensible, to say the

least. Another similar explanation albeit not offered by the Knowledge Commission

is that the semester system will facilitate greater mobility internationally, allowing

both Indian and foreign students to move back and forth between countries without

disrupting their studies. The simple response to this is: since when did the primary

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objective of our state funded universities become the catering to the requirements

of our globe-trotting and jet-setting elite? For, it is clear that it is an even smaller

fraction of very wealthy students, aiming at very specific professions and careers,

that place a premium on this kind of international mobility, who would be able to

avail of such an opportunity. The semester system will enable this ruling elite and

its jet-setting progeny to avail of precious state funding that in fact, they donteven need to further their own ambitions and careers. The inflexibility with which

the semester system is being introduced is just another instance of the innumerable

ways in which this elite is with increasing blatancy and insouciance appropriating

to its own desires and ends, the valuable state resources and subsidies meant for

the vast number of aspiring students from the struggling middle and lower classes.

And by the time this becomes evident to all, it will be too late for the thousands

upon thousands who would have paid with their own failed aspirations and careers.

Another explanation, along similar lines to the one above, is that the introduction of

a semester system will facilitate international collaboration, with universities

following a similar system abroad. There are already plans afoot to float what we

might call a new kind of SEZ Special Educational Zones which would essentially

constitute self-contained university townships hosting collaborative enterprises

between Indian and foreign universities. The latter will invest massively in setting

up infrastructure and facilities in these SEZs (which would of course be world

class). These investments will then be recouped many times over, through

exorbitant fees, in the name of transfer of knowledge. The transfer of knowledge

involved here will be highly specific, focusing on disciplines that have direct and

immediate applicability in commerce and industry, and that will therefore ensure

that students have an employment-friendly market to walk into, after their studies.

This of course would be further incentive to students, to invest heavily in the hopesof getting lucrative jobs with prestigious companies. In turn, the very character

and substance of higher education in the country will inevitably change towards

greater and greater specialization, especially in those disciplines with proven

marketability. (In fact, with or without collaboration, private universities and

colleges already increasingly reflect this change, as they compete in the new

educational marketplace.) This will necessarily be at the expense of those fields of

knowledge (like philosophy, literature, fine arts, history, sociology and political

science) so essential to analyzing and understanding our world in all its variety, but

that may not have immediate value in the market. As the students for these

disciplines become fewer and fewer, research in these areas too will gradually lose

interest and funding, and will dry up. These discipline will however, continue to

remain well-funded abroad, and in the not too distant future we will find

ourselves turning to the locations of these disciplines abroad as the main sources

of our knowledge of our world; alternatively, these disciplines will come more and

more under state control, and precisely because they will be numerically and

substantially thoroughly attenuated, what the state presents as the contents of

these disciplines will become the basis of our understanding of our world. It would

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not be excessive to say then, that this will presage the dawn of either a new kind of

Orientalism or of a new kind of Oriental despotism or worse, some horror born

from the marriage of the two.

Now, generally speaking, such collaborative enterprises are hard to manage with

state-run universities, primarily because of the extensive bureaucracies that have tobe dealt with in them: the main beneficiaries, to begin with, would be the private

universities. This means that the majority of universities and colleges in the

country, which remain state-funded, would not be usable for such collaborations.

More unappealingly, they would continue to foster those disciplines that do not

have much immediate marketability, and consequently remain outside the direct

political control of the ruling elite indeed, they would continue to be the source of

critical voice and mobilization against such control. The solution, of course, is to

grant them autonomy and/or to privatize them forcing them to turn to the market

to survive, but also allowing them to justify clamping down on anything that might

discourage market interest. (Incidentally, both privatization and autonomization are

existing recommendations of the Knowledge Commission.) But privatization and

autonomization are not easy to bring about: the political fallout of directly doing so

would be too dangerous for the ruling elite to take on. It is necessary for these to

appear as necessities, organically evolved options that will arise from specific

critical circumstances and appear to be inevitable solutions to those crises. One

needs to bring about conditions that appear to make privatization or at least

autonomization (or the granting of autonomy) an inevitable option.

The semester system comes in here as a handy tool to bring about these critical

circumstances. Not only will it facilitate collaborations, as we have already noted;

but in order to make this a truly successful venture for the ruling elite, it will

substantially facilitate the dismantling of existing university and college structures

of affiliation and organization. Firstly, as we have noted earlier, it will tame both, the

student and teaching communities, as well as the enormous non-teaching workforce

of the university system: they will simply have no time to engage politically with

any issue confronting them. Secondly, in large universities like Delhi University, the

system will fail and this is part of the larger plan. The failure will be blamed not on

the system, but on the size of the university, and there will be an immediate reason

to downsize it by carving it up into smaller universities and by dispensing with

select colleges through autonomization. (Here again, the Knowledge Commissions

recommendations are direct and specific, and these actions would be exactly to this

end.) Not only will this destroy the teachers associations of these universities perceived, as now, to be the main obstacle to the implementation of these

programmes it will also produce autonomous colleges that will be free (as in free

market) to adopt their own curricula and course options, provided they follow the

uniform schedule of the semester system. Thirdly, as these colleges and perhaps

the universities too begin to move towards financial autonomy (through seeking

private investments as well as through restructuring fees), which will be encouraged

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by the state (again, following on specific recommendations by the Knowledge

Commission) their administrative hold on their constituencies will also gradually

tighten.

These institutions will thus be perfectly transformed, from black-holes into which

huge government subsidies disappear, into efficient profit-making commercialenterprises that will survive or triumph through competition in the new educational

market. They will churn out ambitious and career-minded professionals, automatons

trained through the semester system to focus only on working and achieving

targets set for them, intent solely on getting ahead in the world of commerce,

finance and industry, and completely without the intellectual or political resources

to question or challenge the lives that have been planned for them. The higher

educational system that had for decades served to whatever small extent, and

however imperfectly as a vehicle for upward mobility for the vast masses of the

poor of the country, will finally become the almost sole domain of those sections

that will be able to afford it. No doubt, as the Knowledge Commission recommends,

there will continue to be affirmative action policies, by way of competitive

scholarships and quotas in clearly demarcated areas of knowledge (and not in

crucial fields like medicine, biotechnology or nuclear science). But these will be

designed as must already be evident to generate competition in the aspirants to

higher learning from amongst these sections of society; it will cull out the best, the

most productive and talented, the ones most likely to serve this political economic

dispensation well, and leave the rest to their own fates. The classic condition of all

forms of capitalism the creation of a trained, surplus labour force at the mercy of

the demands of the market which in so many ways has already taken root in the

country, will inexorably set in, becoming near impossible to dislodge, and definitely

impossible to rectify from positions within it. And given that the right to strike work,as a legitimate mechanism for collective bargaining, is itself coming under attack

yet another sign of the new tendencies of the ruling dispensations there is little

hope for either avoiding or resisting this future that is almost upon us. It is clearly in

this direction, of the (so to speak) mannequin-ization of our children, that the

implementation of the semester system is taking us.

It is no ones case that the current system is perfect, or that its flaws do not need to

be urgently remedied. In fact, a considered critique of the existing system must be

undertaken, and the analyses brought to bear on any proposals to change it. But

any proposal that involves the creation of mindless automatons, slaves to the

(global) market and to the tyrannies of governance, must be strongly andrelentlessly resisted. One of the greatest advantages of the annual mode is that it

permits students the leeway to grow wholly, in all their dimensions as individuals

and many generations have benefitted from it, and many generations of excellent

scholars, writers, journalists, artists, scientists, innovators, administrators, and

intellectuals of every hue, have been produced by it. They would not be produced in

the bleak future of higher education that I have painted above. The crucial time

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required to engage with and think through the many complex dimensions of the

world around her, that the student meets for the first time as an adult, when she

enters the college/university system, is one of the biggest gifts of the annual mode,

whatever else its flaws. Whatever educational reform comes in, this time, and this

opportunity to prepare the self to meet the world wholly, must not be lost. The

implementation of the semester system is guaranteed to do precisely that. Thebattle against that implementation is therefore not just that of the teachers, but of

all who have benefitted from this system, and who wish their children and future

generations to grow up and into a world that will not be a mind-control collar around

their necks. It is not just a battle for the teachers, students and other constituencies

of the university system to engage in, but for all of civil society. The vicious canards

against the teaching community that have been generated and spread by the

former Vice Chancellor, are aimed precisely at misinforming and prejudicing the lay

citizen, who then wonders why it is that the teaching community is up in arms

against such apparently progressive reforms. The fact is, these are notprogressive

reforms. They are the first steps to a very sad future for our children. And the

sooner civil society at large grasps this, and joins hands with the teachers in their

struggle, the quicker we may move towards a genuine debate on higher education,

and towards educational reforms that actually seek to address the objectives of

producing quality while maintaining social justice.

PK Vijayan

Asst. Prof., Dept. of English,

Hindu College

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Documents

Semester System2