The Government College Teachers Manram (GCTM) has appealed to the Chief Minister to rescind the transfer of E. Mohammed Ibrahim, principal of Presidency College.
The principal was transferred to Vellore on Friday, for his alleged inaction in preventing violence on the college premises on September 9.
At that time, Dr. Ibrahim was reportedly in a high-level meeting that discussed the curbing of student violence and indiscipline.
GCTM president P. Sivaraman said Dr. Ibrahim is a proactive administrative head, who got the college a special, one-time grant of Rs. 155 crore from the University Grants Commission; a sanction of Rs. 82.5 lakh from the department of science and technology for the college’s science departments, and raised Rs. 1 crore from private philanthropists.
The college’s infrastructure had improved during his tenure, and in the past two years, peaceful student union elections had been conducted, said Prof. Sivaraman.
A release from GCTM said the principal had rushed to the college on being informed of the incident. “The principal of a college is helpless when college students indulge in hooliganism outside the campus. Dr. Ibrahim has been urging the city police, at numerous official meetings, to take stern action against students who are a menace to the public,” GCTM’s statement said.
The transfer order had been ‘triggered by erroneous and baseless information fed by the city police’, said the statement, adding, student violence involving boys from Presidency, Nandanam Arts, Pachaiyappa’s and New College had been going on for the past two years ‘with the police playing mute spectators even as rooftops of running buses and arterial roads turned into battle fields’.
CorrectionThe report, ‘Post clashes, Presidency principal shifted’, published in these columns on September 14, erroneously stated that Dr. Ibrahim had been ‘dismissed’.
He has merely been shifted to another government arts college. The error is regretted.
