Delhi University’s four-year undergraduate programme might just reduce the School of Open Learning from an institute that admits about 1,500 correspondence students for honours degrees every year to a centre offering just diploma, certificate and vocational courses.
This is according to a University Grants Commission letter that was reported to have ordered the university to either bring down all its degrees on an equal footing or else stop offering dual degrees on different conditions.
“We have it on good authority that the UGC sent a letter to the university stating that according to their regulations, a university cannot be offering two types of degrees or dual degrees. It asked the university to either convert the correspondence courses to four-year or else maintain the three-year programme. It was obviously unthinkable for the university to go back on the four-year programme. Therefore, it is seeking to take away all the degrees it is currently offering and plans to call an academic council meeting soon to get this course of action approved,” said Janmejoy Khuntia, a member of the SOL staff association, which plans to stage a protest in front of the director and executive director’s office on the SOL premises.
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However, it is not just in this front that the SOL seems to be in the news. The Students’ Union of the SOL has alleged that the university has been trying to divert funds from the school to be used by the university for making regional study centres in Delhi University’s other colleges.
“The colleges are heavily funded by the UGC and DU, too, has ample funds for many of its activities, but they want to use the money deposited by students in the SOL to create study centres in colleges. This is wrong. There is talk that land in East Delhi and some other areas will be used to build centres out of the fees collected by students. Whereas the infrastructure and building funds have to be used out of the UGC funds that the university has.
There is also talk that college principals will be paid Rs.25,000 a month to let out their premises to be used as centres,” said Mohammad Shahnawaz, the union president.
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The union, too, was concerned about the university converting all its academic courses to vocational courses. “If our concerns are not met, we will be starting a struggle,” added Shahnawaz.
Incidentally, the SOL is all set to make it to the 2014 edition of the Limca Book of Records for admitting a record number of students in one day — 4,800 to be exact — in the last admission season according to a communication it received many months ago.