A prominent teachers’ body associated with the University of Calcutta has called for the appointment of a full-time Vice-Chancellor, saying an institution with over 150 colleges under its umbrella cannot remain headless for long, that too when it is set to adopt the new education policy.
Prof. Sonali Chakravarti Banerjee was the last full-time V-C of the university. She first served from August 2017 to August 2021, and when she was reappointed again for another four years, the then Governor (and also the Chancellor) Jagdeep Dhankhar had refused to sign the file, saying the reappointment should be recommended, as per norms, by a selection committee.
Mr. Dhankhar returned the file thrice, following which the State government issued a notification that dispensed with the need for the Chancellor’s approval in the appointment, reappointment and extension of service of Vice-Chancellors. In September 2022, the Calcutta High Court set aside her reappointment, saying only the Chancellor had the authority to appoint/reappoint a V-C.
Ever since then, Prof. Ashish Chatterjee has been holding the three most important posts of the acting Vice-Chancellor, pro-VC (academic) and pro-VC (finance). His tenure as acting V-C — which cannot exceed six months — ended in April.
“After a long delay, the Governor has finally consented to the ordinance promulgating the formation of a search committee for Vice-Chancellors. We have also witnessed the Chancellor demanding the weekly report from the acting Vice-Chancellor. This tussle between the Governor and the government of West Bengal has only resulted in a systematic anarchy at the University,” Calcutta University Teachers’ Association (CUTA) president Prof. Mahalaya Chatterjee and secretary Prof. Sanatan Chattopadhyay said in a statement.
“Autonomy of the university in all spheres of administration and delivery of education has been taken away by the West Bengal University Laws (Amendment) Act of 2011 and the West Bengal Universities and Colleges (Administration and Regulation) Act of 2017. No formal appointment of deans in different faculties are taking place and the current deans are working on ‘acting’ basis and their terms are arbitrarily either extended or terminated,” they said.
“The highest decision-making body of the university, the Syndicate, does not even have the required number of members to constitute a minimum quorum in a meeting. But it is still churning out its resolutions in an ad hoc manner. We have also observed an increasing tendency to appoint faculty members to non-teaching posts…while there has been no recruitment of teachers in the university for the last five years,” they said.
They appealed to the State government and the Governor “to leave CU out of their differences” and urged “every stakeholder in education and the general public to come together and raise the demand to resolve this longstanding impasse at the earliest.”
