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| Need of the hour or programme of chaos? | | | Ratna Raman | 5/23/2013 1:04:20 AM |
| The Four-Year-Undergraduate Programme (FYUP), recently announced by the VC, Delhi University, has stirred a hornet’s nest. There are fears that this may destroy DU’s federal structure and break up academic interconnectivity between innumerable affiliated colleges
IT is a definitive moment for young adults who come from schools, good, middling or ill-equipped, to enrol in various disciplines of interest at great universities in Indian cities. A majority of Indian lives are lived in the crosshairs of stretched resources and amenities, unequal access to infrastructure, disparities in income and living standards, and disturbing socio-political formations. Today, we are witness to changes introduced by an elite administrative order that attempts to deflect fundamental problems at the grassroots level. The impending changes in higher education fall in this category and refuse cognisance of the burgeoning needs of Indian students.
Until recently, Indian university education extended parity to a very diverse student population. State-funded Central universities provided level playing fields for students from very diverse economic and cultural groups all over India. Despite the influx of students, over the past 80 years, university education has been accessible and empowering for every academically inclined young person. In fact, the inability of our schooling systems to provide a free and equal education has been somewhat mitigated by the performance of our liberal arts universities.
Salvaging dreams of cost-effective and quality-education, our central universities enabled student enrichment and empowerment and outstanding results, despite great odds. Graduates from India’s liberal universities have made their mark in every field, excelling in their chosen fields of specialisation all over the world. All this is set to change irrevocably. Under the earlier cost-effective programme at Delhi University, students graduated with honours in a chosen subject alongside rigorous interdisciplinary credit courses. Students could also opt out of specialisation, learn around a cluster of linked disciplines and receive a Bachelor’s degree in commerce, humanities and the sciences. Both honours and non-honours degrees were awarded at the end of three years.
Currently, the Vice-Chancellor of Delhi University has unleashed a Four-Year-Undergraduate Programme (FYUP). This is poised to destroy DU’s federal structure, break up academic interconnectivity between innumerable affiliated colleges and eventually push the University towards sustaining itself as a self-financing institution. The protocol of the self-financing university powered by student loans has come to us from American shores. Inspired by the statistics of lifelong student debt stockpiling throughout America, the ruling party has possibly collaborated with DU’s administrative head to create generations of unthinking young Indians, crushed by educational debt.
The syllabi for FYUP, cobbled in haste and secrecy is now on various websites. It disproves at first glance mendacious ministerial pronouncements in Parliament claiming FYUP’s commitment to knowledge development. Across disciplines, syllabi have been truncated. Under FYUP, students must do 11 Foundation Courses, 6 Discipline II Courses and 20 Discipline I Courses which are the mainstay for specialisation. The 11 compulsory foundation courses are to be taught to a disparate spectrum of learners. They will, perforce, need to be pitched at rudimentary levels. Discipline I has 20 courses and all courses are compulsory. Course content across disciplines reveals a truncation, reshuffling and inexplicable gutting of texts. Academic rigour in all specialisations has been curtailed, yet students will need four years in order to learn far less. Teaching time has been halved and the teaching units that are to be taught per paper have increased as a result of cut-and-paste methodologies. Students will be doing a larger number of watered-down courses per semester over four years. These are clear indicators of a major reduction in knowledge dissemination and assimilation, contrary to the minister’s claim.
The increase in duration and costs has been compounded by the prioritisation of quantity over quality. The recent induction of OBC students to DU’s three-year programme has put a great strain on the university’s existing resources and infrastructure. Classrooms are ill equipped and overcrowded, and violate UGC recommendations of optimal class strength. Laboratories, auditoriums, tutorial rooms, sports grounds and libraries are either non-existent or in a state of abysmal repair. Permanent appointments have not been made for many years.
The semester system was devised and introduced at Delhi University to deflect attention from the infrastructural problems plaguing the university. It has effectively highlighted the shortfalls between projected teaching, learning and assessment targets and actual teaching and learning and evaluation in real time. The recent July 2012 and January 2013 semesters fell apart at the end of eight weeks, with festivals and ill-conceived mid-term breaks. The mad scramble after the mid-term break last semester sent thousands of ill-equipped students to the examinations. This also holds true for the current semester in progress.
Examination results generated through a quasi-mechanical assembly-line technique of evaluation (one answer paper is evaluated sectionally by three teachers) has reduced examiners into jugglers of reductive statistics. Answer sheets, no longer bound by the secrecy code, sport individual college code numbers on the cover page. For reasons so far unknown, secret moderation committees award and subtract marks for internal assessment submitted by individual colleges, challenging the very credibility of marks awarded in the university examinations.
The High Court judgement on the DUTA writ, challenging the introduction of the semester system for undergraduates at DU has been kept in abeyance since December 2011. Queries from the honourable judges asking the university administration why no reviews were in place for the semester system were never placed before the academic and executive councils. The university administration however moved on to FYUP.
Currently, students in their first semester are required to opt for three courses. Shortage of time hampers student ability to conceptualise and internalise teaching inputs. Under FYUP, students will have to juggle with five or more courses over eight semesters. Down-sized course content is being rationalised as enabling students to manage an increased number of courses per semester. In which case, providing exit points at the end of two and three years under false assumptions that thirty per cent or more of undergraduate students are unable to complete three years at the university because of marriage, ill-health and mishaps within families, seems altogether erroneous. However, the dilution of academic rigour in its entirety in undergraduate programmes and the provision of multiple exit points simultaneously is strategic to the dismantling of the very bulwark of higher education
Students exiting the university at the end of two or three years will be poorly equipped with critical, analytical or comprehensive understanding of courses of study. Application skills imparted to them will not turn them into entrepreneurs, in the absence of cold cash. Oddly enough, we don’t have resources or space to nurture cultural activity or sports, let alone courses allotted to the advancement of “mind, body and heart”.
However, continuity with schooling systems will be established by the reduction of course content. It is common knowledge that CBSE and ICSC prescribe textbooks and then edit them by demarcating sections of the text book as outside of the prescribed syllabi each academic year. FYUP’s follow up in this direction is admirable. For example, the Discipline I course in English requires that teachers teach only Books III and IV of Gulliver’s Travels. Books I and II, seminal to any understanding of Jonathan Swift’s oeuvre, are to be consigned to the dustbins of oblivion.
As inheritors of an anomaly-ridden academic programme with truncated course content, students in their fourth year will have insufficient grounding and will be poorer by many readings in their chosen specialisations. Their punishment for staying on will involve the rustling up of research papers. It is a strange pedagogical logic that waters down academic rigour, restricts reading and expects original thought and writing from young people who have been assessed on the basis of multiple-choice questions through most of their school years.
Fringe benefits will accrue to beleaguered photocopying kiosks that no longer need to fear the intimidating, bullying ire of publishing houses. They will not need to reproduce materials from books any more. Instead, they can concentrate entirely on recycling projects and research papers and assignments that will generate new commerce, semester after semester in the years to come. The photocopier’s kiosk will be the new nerve centre of the university, imbuing fresh meaning to “Hole- In-The-Wall-Education.” In the years to come, this will be replicated in each and every Indian city as FYUPs will be mandatory, for the uniform progression of the nation. Space crunch and resource crunch will then be blasts from the past.
This again will be largely unproblematic because private foreign equity will swing by to provide expensive quality education for the few that our current establishment really cares about. Already, protocols in health, industry, technology and agriculture come to us from beyond the seas. It is only befitting that we allow ourselves to be schooled in order to manage these huge inputs and FDIs. Nation building, level-playing fields, access and equal opportunity are old-fashioned ideas from a bygone century. The need of the hour is the membership of the few in a bold, new, globalised, club.
The writer is associate professor, English, at Sri Venkateswara College, Delhi University
WHAT IS THE FOUR-YEAR PROGRAMME?
The Four-year Undergraduate Programme is divided into eight semesters.
There are 20 Discipline I Courses (DSC I -major credits) over eight semesters for an honours degree. Of these, two courses each are in I and II semesters, two each in III and IV semesters, three each in V and VI semesters and two courses and one research paper in each of the last two semesters, that is in VII and VIII semesters.
There are 11 compulsory Foundation Courses on science and life, mathematical ability, IT, language and literature, geographic and socio-economic diversity etc over the I-IV semesters.
Six Discipline II (DSC II-minor credit) courses that the student can opt for alongside Discipline I from the III to VIII semesters.
There are five Application Courses to be completed between II and VI semesters.
Integrated Mind Body Heart: One course each in semesters I and II
Curricular Activity : One course on sports, cultural activities NSS, MCC in semesters III-VIII
Multiple exit points: Diploma at the end of two years, Degree at the end of three years. Graduation with honours at the end of four years. — R.R
THE AMERICAN SYSTEM
University education in the US is not a universal good. It is for the few and of the few.
American universities have great infrastructure and huge funding.
Student strength at a single American university is less than or equal to a single college at Delhi university.
The academic standards of American undergraduate is usually at par. The four-year interdisciplinary graduate programs allows them choice of over a hundred subject options that are rigorously academic.
Real choice of specialisation exists. First and second semester courses are not elementary or remedial in nature.
Community colleges are public institutions offering a two-year program catering to the needs of school students from diverse backgrounds and of different ages
Two years at a community college enables students to join a liberal arts college or the workforce |
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