Gaya: The appointment of Colonel Kamal Kishore Mishra, a retired army officer, has drawn flak from the academic community that by and large continues to prefer teachers as registrars. The notification appointing Colonel Mishra as MU registrar was issued by Brajesh Mehrotra, principal secretary to the governor-cum-chancellor on April 2, 2018.

The appointment, apparently aimed at ending rampant campus indiscipline and clerk rule in the university headquarters and colleges, comes close on the heels of appointment of a retired officer of the Indian Audit and Accounts Service as financial adviser of the university. The varsity finances, too, are in a mess for quite sometime.

Criticising the appointment of army officers as registrars of the university, Kanhaiya Bahadur Sinha, president of the Federation of University Teachers Associations of Bihar, said the appointments are an assault on the democratic structure of the university system. "It smacks of 'regimentation' of the centres of higher learning," said Sinha.

Nageshwar Sharma, former director, higher education, Government of Bihar, called it "an unwise decision".

Sharma said: "The university administration was much different from the pyramid structure of the armed forces. It was different even from the general administration. More than administration, the registrar was required to do the coordination work between the government, the university and colleges." Sharma recalled that earlier the then chief minister Kedar Pandey appointed IAS officers in top university positions. "The experiment failed. This one (army officer appointment) too may meet a similar fate," he said.

However, Sita Ram Singh, president, Post Graduate Teachers' Association, Magadh University, hoped that campus discipline would now be restored. "The new arrangement must be given a try," said Singh.