The recent Draft Guidelines circulated by the University Grants Commission are a blatant attempt by the Central government to take control of universities across the country. These Guidelines not only violate the basic tenets of federalism but would also destroy whatever remains of our universities as centres of independent, critical, academic thought. They also entail the UGC unilaterally and arbitrarily extending its own jurisdiction.
The UGC was for long considered essentially a funding body, not a watchdog over universities, let alone a body dictating to them how they should be functioning. Universities (I am talking here of public universities) were set up through legislation passed by Parliament or by state assemblies and functioned in accordance with their own statutes and ordinances. True, the UGC Act of 1956 had enjoined upon the Commission the task of promoting and coordinating university education, and determining and maintaining standards of teaching, examinations and research, but the steps it would take were not supposed to be unilateral; they had to be “in consultation with the universities and other bodies concerned”.
The universities therefore had a good deal of autonomy. When Triguna Sen was the vice-chancellor of Jadavpur University, he had invited a young Amartya Sen from Cambridge to become a professor there and start the Economics department, which Sen duly did. When Jawaharlal Nehru University was started, several distinguished academics, like Romila Thapar, were invited to join as professors and set up teaching centres. This was not just an emergency measure necessitated by the inception of a new university; even in the late Nineties when the university was well established, Amiya Bagchi was invited by the Executive Council to join as a professor (which he could not do). Universities, in short, had plenty of leeway and the UGC did not intrude. Since then, however, the UGC has become proactive to the point of going well beyond its jurisdiction.
The UGC’s overreach, culminating in the current Guidelines, has been in three directions: first, its mandatory consultations with universities before laying down selection criteria for faculty have been given the go-by. Draft proposals are circulated at best, and no matter what the response from universities, the UGC takes a unilateral decision on the matter. Second, its dictating criteria for appointments has extended even to state universities, in violation of the federal principle and in spite of the fact that nearly 80% of their funding comes these days from the state governments. The argument typically advanced for this overreach is without any substance, namely that in matters like education belonging to the concurrent list of the Constitution, Central legislation must have priority over state legislation, and hence the regulations of a body set up by the Centre can dictate the procedure to be followed in institutions set up by state legislatures. The fact that Central legislation has priority over state legislation does not mean that the regulations of a Central body can override the provisions of state legislations; otherwise, there will be a dangerous precedent where any Central authority can dictate terms to the states, with state legislatures being reduced to ciphers. Third, the UGC is now intervening in new areas. For instance, it is now laying down guidelines for the selection even of vice-chancellors, an area where it has never interfered in the past and which falls outside its domain, no matter how liberally we interpret the UGC Act of 1956.
It is, however, not just a matter of overreach. The Draft Guidelines fail even by the criterion of reasonableness. I shall give only three instances. First, the UGC now stipulates that vice-chancellorship should be open to industrialists, bureaucrats and public sector managers. It adds that such persons should have “a proven track record of significant academic contributions”, but that is only a face-saver. The point is: what free breathing space, so essential for academic work, can there be in an institution whose executive head is an industrialist or a pliant bureaucrat?
Second, among the minimum eligibility conditions for professors and associate professors are not only academic achievements, but notable contributions in at least four out of nine areas, which include consultancy, teaching contributions in Indian languages, project supervision, teaching-learning and research in Indian knowledge system, and such like. These could, of course, be considered useful qualifications, so that among two equally proficient academics, one having such extra qualifications is to be preferred. But to make them minimum essential qualifications would rule out many first-rate academics and encourage academic entrepreneurs instead; indeed many distinguished academics who had been invited by JNU as professors to set up teaching centres and had done so most creditably would now be ruled out even for associate professorships!
Third, the three-member search committee for vice-chancellors which earlier had two nominees of the Executive Council and one of the chancellor (who was the state governor in a state university acting on the advice of the state government), would now have one nominee each of the EC, the UGC, and the chancellor. Since the governors appointed by the Central government have now become confrontationist vis-à-vis the elected state governments formed by parties other than the Bharatiya Janata Party, and would generally toe the Central government’s line, and since the nominee of the UGC would also indirectly be a Central government appointee, this means in effect that the Central government would now be appointing vice-chancellors of all universities, including state universities. This is a process of centralization, and hence saffronization, with a vengeance. The corporate-Hindutva alliance that rules the country now wants to directly rule the country’s universities too.
Prabhat Patnaik is Professor Emeritus, Centre for Economic Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi