Assistant professors attending an orientation programme at University Grants Commission-Human Resource Development Centre (UGC-HRDC) in Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) have accused the course organisers of “sacrificing critical scholarship and spirit of scientific inquiry at the altar of the ideologies of the ruling party”.
The participants also expressed dissatisfaction over the quality of the speakers invited for the programme and accused a few of them of “unethical” behaviour.
The orientation programme, as mandated by the UGC and now made compulsory under the Career Advancement Scheme for the promotion of teachers, was conducted from October 8 to November 2 on JNU campus.
A woman assistant professor from Gurugram, on condition of anonymity, said that the speakers on foreign policy said that Prime Minister Narendra Modi had a 56-inch chest and he had been instrumental in improving relations with our neighbours.
“The speakers criticised (former Prime Minister) Manmohan Singh for his silence and said that Mr. Modi was not scared of anyone. They even said that India never had a foreign policy before Mr. Modi,” she said. But none of them had answers for India's worsening relations with Nepal, added the assistant professor.
‘Selective speakers’
The participants, in a letter to HRDC Director Madhav Govind, said that they collectively felt that “the course co-ordinators for the programme had no structure in mind for organising lectures, or living up to the professed goals of such courses... there was no academic rationale behind the way the course was framed and it was instead patched up in an ad hoc fashion on the basis of availability of selective speakers”.
The letter, written at the culmination of the course, further read that “on a number of occasions over the past weeks...we have had our colleagues insulted and ill-treated for asking questions to the speaker — or, at times even for their pronunciation or lack of English language competence”.
The letter, signed by around 30 of the total 50 participants, said that despite protest by the members present, there was no institutional effort made to extract an apology from the culpable party.
The participants also alleged that they drew up a list of 66 possible speakers with proven intellectual credentials, but their suggestions were largely ignored and not more than a couple of them were actually called through the entire length of the course. The participants said that they chose JNU as their preferred option with the hope of getting a glimpse of the institution’s sustained legacy of academic excellence, but they learnt little.
‘Ample scope for debates’
When contacted, Mr. Govind said that the letter was written with “pre-decided frame of mind”.
“The speakers were invited from different disciplinary and institutional backgrounds to provide a holistic understanding of an issue. There was ample scope for debates and discussion in the classroom and indeed participants were very happy in engaging all speakers in fruitful academic discourse. All speakers were well-known scholars in their respective fields... were invited to deliver lectures and engage our participants from different disciplinary backgrounds (and) not to speak the language of power”.
