The Calcutta University syndicate will meet on Thursday to initiate the long-stalled teacher recruitment process at a time when nearly 60 per cent of its teaching posts are vacant.
CU has a sanctioned faculty strength of 835.
This will be the first meeting of the university’s highest decision-making body since the new full-term vice-chancellor assumed charge in October.
“A staggering number of teaching positions are vacant. This is seriously affecting our teaching and learning process. The vacancy figure will be taken up at the syndicate meeting. Following a discussion at the syndicate, we will advertise the posts to fill them at the earliest,” VC Ashutosh Ghosh told Metro.
As the university did not have a full-term VC over the past three years, the state government did not allow any teacher appointment. The vacancy figure kept swelling. Recruitment was on hold in some departments even before.
A CU official said the absence of teachers in some of the engineering departments was so acute that the university was not able to apply for an accreditation from the National Board of Accreditation (NBA), which assesses whether the BTech programmes are being run in keeping with the standards set by the All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE).
“The ratio of teachers to students in a department has to be mentioned in the application for accreditation. But as the departments do not have the required number of teachers, the university has not been able to apply. If an engineering institution does not get its BTech programmes accredited by the NBA, students are unlikely to take them seriously. The course could even be deaffiliated by the UGC,” a professor said.
The university’s secretary of science and technology had earlier told this newspaper that one of the conditions for applying for the accreditation was that each department must have a faculty-student ratio of 1:15.
In seven out of 10 departments, the ratio is more, said Amit Roy, the secretary.
A CU official said that of the 10 sanctioned posts in instrumentation engineering (nine regular and one chair professor), six were vacant and, by November 2026, another professor will retire.
Out of the 33 sanctioned posts in the Botany department, 21 are allegedly vacant.
After the new VC took charge, he listed teacher recruitment as a priority.
This newspaper reported on November 18 that when the VC told the teachers’ association to analyse the reasons for the university’s decline in an annual ranking exercise by the education ministry, they urged him to fill the vacant posts.
“The teaching-learning process is a key component in the central assessment,” said Sanatan Chattopadhyay, the president of the Calcutta University Teachers’ Association.
A professor from an engineering department said that there was a time when there were 12 teachers for50 students across his departments in BTech and MTech.
“Now, the student count has risen to 110, but the teacher count has remained 12,” said the professor.
The vice-chancellor said they were keen to fill non-teaching staff posts as well.
The syndicate is also likely to decide on the convocation in February.
The university held its last convocation in January 2020 at Nazrul Mancha.
“This time, we want to hold our convocation in February next year at the Centenary Auditorium of the College Street campus,” vice-chancellor Ghosh said.