A second-year English Honours student was in for a rude shock when a new teacher took over the History elective classes mid-semester at Delhi University’s Ramjas College.
“In a tutorial class on ‘Delhi History’, where students get their doubts cleared and seek suggestions for the exams, the professor recited couplets from Ramcharitmanas and indulged in Ghalib shayari even as some students cheered him on,” said Ankit. The professor wasn’t reciting Ghalib as part of the course.
Another student, who attended lectures for the elective ‘Inequality and Difference’ offered by the same department, told ThePrint that a newly appointed teacher talked about food and the lifestyle families enjoy in his home town. And this went on for three consecutive classes. Nothing to do with the topic at hand. “The course module, which had units on caste, tribes, gender and slavery among others, was not taught,” the student alleged.
Over 10 students—from first-year and senior batches—enrolled in Ramjas’ history department, who spoke to ThePrint, alleged that the classroom teaching by the new teachers has been reduced to personal anecdotes irrelevant to the course subject and merely basic textbook readings.
ThePrint reached out to four of the new professors of the department. They vehemently denied the allegations against them, calling it propaganda and said they are not authorised to talk to the media.
For over a decade, DU colleges had filled its teaching positions with ad hoc faculty. Now, the replacement of these ad hoc teachers with permanent faculty has had DU campuses simmering with tension. Students and a few teacher organisations are out on the campus streets sloganeering against the move. And they allege new teachers are handpicked by the University to fill the colleges with candidates who subscribe to the ideology of the political Right. In doing so, they say, teachers with less experience and a slim research background are being preferred over meritorious ones. In the middle of this churning, it’s the students who seem to be the bigger losers.
August 2022 onwards, the university started filling over 5,200 teaching vacancies on a mission mode, forcing ad hoc teachers to make way for the permanent ones.
“A lot of mediocre teachers have been hired in the process of filling vacancies in the DU. Most of them are incapable of teaching,” said a senior professor, who is also part of the University administration, requesting anonymity.
ThePrint reached out to four of the new professors of the department. They vehemently denied the allegations against them, calling it propaganda and said they are not authorised to talk to the media.
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Legacy at stake
The History department of Ramjas College was one of the first that welcomed seven permanent faculty in January. But the change hasn’t gone down well with students.
Critical thinking and intense academic engagement in classrooms, which gave space to different schools of thought, have ended, the students ThePrint spoke to said.
“The previous History teachers would come prepared for the lecture where they would break down complex topics for us and ask us questions which would challenge our underlying assumptions,” said a third-year History student.
These academic debates would provoke the students to look at historical events from a new perspective.
The new teachers allegedly state events from History from their notes and ask students if they have any questions.
“In a unit on labour, slavery in the context of US history, the new professor taking the class asked the students why they are reading Marxist historian scholar Howard Zinn. He said focus on something else. He has a staunch dislike for Marxist history and Marxist historians,” said the student.
On the website of Ramjas, detailed profiles listing the educational qualifications, published work and teaching experience of the history faculty are missing, which is against the university’s rules, a former professor and administrator of DU pointed out.
Meanwhile, DU campuses are abuzz with allegations of the university administration using the new hirings as an alibi to build ideologically-driven cadre.
But the worry among the students is not only ideology or cadre-building. It is the alleged lack of rigour and competence among the new teachers that is causing them anxiety because they are used to a higher level of scholarly engagement.
The implication of the changing academic engagement in classrooms will lead to long-term damage of the DU, said the former DU professor and administrator quoted above.
“DU will become just another odd-ball university where students go to for sheer lack of any other opportunities,” he added.
DU campuses are abuzz with allegations of the university administration using the new hirings as an alibi to build ideologically-driven cadre.
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In defence of new hiring
Dismissing the allegations against the new teachers, administrative officer at Ramjas College, Dilbag Singh, said that the teaching in college has, in fact, improved.
“There is no problem. Teaching at Ramjas is going very well.”
But not all agree.
The history department at Ramjas is a microcosm of how the teaching is changing across DU, claim several permanent and former ad hoc teachers at Ramjas and other colleges. And this change that’s intended to benefit the students isn’t finding acceptance among them.
“The quality in colleges is compromised. Teachers with no teaching experience have been selected and (ad hoc) teachers with over a decade of experience have been thrown out. Many students have stopped attending classes,” said a permanent professor at DU who did not want to be named.
The University administration, on the other hand, has said that the hiring have been done as per the procedure laid down by the UGC. The vacancies in each college were announced and candidates selected based on their interview performance.
“It was a fair competition. We have tried to absorb as many ad hoc teachers as possible. The selection committee members gave enough time to each candidate in the interview,” said Rajni Abbi, Proctor and Associate Professor of law at the Faculty of Law, DU.
Abbi, who was a member of over a dozen selection committees, including Ramjas’ history department interviews, also claimed new teachers are deserving of permanent teaching positions.
“The competition was very tough. And we fought a lot to absorb and keep meritorious teachers. But if we are getting good, fresh talent, how can we ignore that? Grudges against the system will happen,” said Abbi, referring to no specific department’s interview.
To hire permanent faculty, the university forms a selection committee which includes the college principal, teacher-in-charge of the department, and subject experts among others.
For the history department interviews at Ramjas college, besides then Ramjas principal Manoj Kumar and then teacher-in-charge of Ramjas history department Vikas Kumar Verma, the selection committee included Abbi, Umesh Kadam, professor of medieval Indian history at JNU and Sanjoy Roy, professor at the department of social work at DU. It also had two external members, Digvijay Bhatnagar, head of History department, Mohanlal Sukhadia University, Udaipur and Narayan Rao, History professor, Central University of Himachal Pradesh.
While Abbi is a former mayor of Delhi and a member of the BJP. In JNU, Kadam has been in a conflict with the Left-wing student unions in the past.
ThePrint reached out to all the members for comments. Kadam and Roy refused to comment and Bhatnagar and Rao did not respond to emails and texts.
Justifying the permanent appointments in the DU, another member of the selection committee who did not want to be named, said that the selection of ad hoc teachers was not based on a fair system of interviews. And once a poor teacher started teaching, they remained in the system for years.
“My experience says that 90 per cent ad hoc teachers were teaching poorly and do not deserve to be in the system. How can ad hoc teachers be entitled to permanent positions? It was a charity to them that continued for 10-15 years in a college. Now you are saying make this gandagi permanent,” said the member.
Resolution has costs: teachers to students
Disgruntled by the newer teachers, Ramjas students are now taking the self-taught route. Many of them have formed independent discreet study groups to prepare for exams, they told ThePrint.
They have not filed any formal complaint to the college or the university administration fearing reprisals by the teachers in the form of poor internal assessment marks.
The terminated ad hoc teachers, both at Ramjas’ History department and from other colleges, spoke to ThePrint on the condition of anonymity. Some of the permanent teachers refused to be named citing the reason that the new teachers are their colleagues.
The teaching and administrative staff at Ramjas College acknowledged, on the condition of anonymity, that the “college atmosphere is changing” and the students are suffering. However, in the absence of any written complaints, the college administration said it cannot initiate action.
ThePrint reached out to the office of the Vice Chancellor, but was directed to the Ramjas College principal’s office. Neither the Dean of Colleges nor the Registrar of DU responded to repeated requests for a meeting.
‘Google it, it’s all there’
Room 007, the History department room of Ramjas college, was always open. For decades, it was a storehouse of knowledge and students and teachers had equal access to it to read, debate, discuss and argue. But starting January, students found their access to the room limited. The space is now mostly used by teachers for tea breaks, said students.
How the student-teacher engagement has changed becomes visible in the experiences of the older Ramjas alumni.
The former teachers, students said, condensed the readings, which ran into thousands of pages, into systematic talking points. Debates around the readings encouraged students to read beyond what the course syllabus offered, which expanded their world view and linked historical events to current developments globally.
The new batch of students, which was not taught by the older teachers, is equally dismayed. They enrolled at Ramjas’ History department expecting rigour and discipline. But when these first-year students asked some of the new professors to suggest reading material, they were told to search for it online.
Two students, a third-year history student and a second-year English (Hons) student mentioned earlier, said the teachers encouraged them to make field visits to historical sites in Delhi so that they have visual experience of what they are learning in classrooms.
All that, they said, is now history.
In a class on ‘18th Century India’, a new professor kept asking the students what they wanted to know about the subject. At one point, one of the students suggested the professor give a lecture first.
The professor tried giving a lecture, but reportedly couldn’t hold forth for more than 15 minutes. “He then started teaching about the 1857 mutiny, which is part of the last module of the course, from a textbook,” said the student.
The professor was putting up a facade of an interaction, said a third-year student who was part of this class.
The teacher allegedly could not suggest any additional readings.
The student quoted above said that the teachers usually proceed with the course teaching with the first unit and eventually move to the last module. The new teacher, claimed students, skipped the units before the 1857 Mutiny.
“The teacher was giving school-level information on the historical events. There was no breaking down or questioning of narratives, or debating other schools of interpretation of the event. This active academic engagement is missing in classes today,” said the third-year History student.
The new batch of students, which was not taught by the older teachers, is equally dismayed. They enrolled at Ramjas’ History department expecting rigour and discipline. But when these first-year students asked some of the new professors to suggest reading material, they were told to search for it online.
“A standard answer of a lot of these teachers is, ‘You have the internet. We didn’t have the internet when we were studying. So, you might as well look it up’,” said a second-year student.
The poor teaching in the classroom, however, is not a recent phenomenon, said the former DU professor and administrator who served at the university for over three decades. Though he added “that in spite of deficiencies that may have existed, there were still a fair number of worthy individuals being selected.”
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Teachers missing from classrooms…
According to students at the Ramjas History department, new teachers are disinterested in teaching; they either skip lectures or call students to attend seminars that are not directly related to their course.
The seminars organised by the History department in the last few months include a speech by S Somnath, chairman of ISRO on a historical perspective of India’s space odyssey and lectures on the 1857 Mutiny and Tulsi in Indian historical consciousness.
“For an hour-long class, the professors would show up 15 minutes late. They will take another 10-15 minutes for attendance. The rest of the time they would just stumble and fumble and leave the class 10 minutes early,” said the third-year student.
WhatsApp chats, which ThePrint saw, show messages from professors cancelling classes on multiple occasions without citing reasons. In some cases, teachers have cited film screenings on campus or health issues as reasons for not coming to the classroom.
Though cancelling classes is not unusual, students alleged it is more frequent with the new teachers.
Fed up with the absenteeism in class despite being present on campus, history students once told a professor to take sick leave, consult a better doctor, and return to class when he is fit again, said an ad hoc professor at Ramjas.
Repeated attempts to meet Ramjas college Principals [Prof Manoj Kumar Khanna (former) and Prof Hardeep Kaur (acting)], failed. ThePrint sent them questions by email and visited their office multiple times.
The teacher-in-charge of the history department, Ranjana Das, refused to comment.
Fed up with the absenteeism in class despite being present on campus, history students once told a professor to take sick leave, consult a better doctor, and return to class when he is fit again, said an ad hoc professor at Ramjas.
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…and the missing accountability
The grapevine has it that the debate on “declining” teaching standards did reach the teachers’ association of Ramjas College. Secretary of the Ramjas Teachers’ Association, Prof. Dhani Ram, said he has tried many times to streamline the processes within the college to ensure that there is a written record of teachers attending lectures and what they are teaching. But his proposal has had no takers.
“DU has no system of assessing whether a teacher is coming to college or not. The teachers must maintain on a weekly basis what course they have covered in the class and what were the different sources of teaching,” said Ram.
In the association’s meetings, his proposal is rudely dismissed.
“Some of the new professors are even aggressive and uncivil. They lack teaching planning and they don’t know how much time they must devote to the college,” he added.
Ram said that as per the university’s ordinance, teachers must spend 40 hours a week in the college and out of this, 14 to 16 hours should be devoted to classroom teaching. He proposes that if professors miss classes, their salary should be deducted and students should be rewarded for reporting the absenteeism of teachers.
But no one is ready to bell the cat, he said.
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‘Systematic infiltration of DU’
On 18 December last year, the students of Ramjas College gave a teary farewell to the ad hoc teachers of the History department. It was exam time, yet the students poured in large numbers. As the crowd swelled, the students and the ad hoc teachers whose contracts were not renewed moved to the sports field on the campus where the students sang songs.
“The principal took out an official notice and called the police saying that there is a law-and-order problem, just because the students had gathered to say goodbye to their teachers,” recalled a former ad hoc teacher.
Students had been witnessing growing hostility on campus. Last year, cultural events organised in the college had an undertone of sectarianism, they told ThePrint.
The ‘Jai Shri Ram’ chants filled the campus on the college’s foundation day and during a cultural event on various dance forms in India, said students.
Dismissing the allegations of the appointments being politically motivated and aligned towards an ideology, Rajni Abbi, Proctor and Associate Professor of law at the Faculty of Law, said that those opposing the appointments are disgruntled teachers who were beaten in interviews by better candidates.
The undercurrents of this impending change on campus were evident after the 2017 violent clashes in Ramjas when students, allegedly from BJP’s student political wing Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP), vandalised a seminar on ‘Cultures of Protest’ organised by the college’s English department. They were objecting the invitation to Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) student Umar Khalid, who had to present a paper.
The “reappropriation” of spaces in the DU happened in a very systematic manner after that, said the teachers. And the modified UGC regulations in 2018 for appointment of teachers provided the base for it.
Dismissing the allegations of the appointments being politically motivated and aligned towards an ideology, Abbi said that those opposing the appointments are disgruntled teachers who were beaten in interviews by better candidates.
As per the amended rules, 100 per cent weightage is given to the interviews, after a screening step, and the allotment of these marks is solely in the hands of the selection committee. In the earlier 2010 regulation, weightage was given to candidates on their academic qualifications, teaching experience and interview performance. Based on these, the candidates were given a score and the highest scorers would get the job.
“In every University of the country, especially where recruitment happens through the Public Service Commission, interviews are given the lowest weightage. The academic qualification, teaching experience and everything else is objective. Interview performance is the only one which is subjective where manipulation may take place,” says Rudrashish Chakraborti, associate professor of English at Kirori Mal College who is also a member of Democratic Teachers’ Front, an association of DU teachers.
The former DU professor and administrator said it is easy to influence the committee members to select people the administration wants.
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Dissipating protests
In September 2021, the education ministry instructed all central universities to fill all vacant posts within a year. The University has filled close to 3,500 seats till date, as per the data from the University.
DU students and professors claim that Ramjas College was especially “targeted”.
“Out of 240 total teaching posts in Ramjas college, 160 were filled with ad hoc teachers. Between October 2022 and June 2023, in every department 90 per cent ad hoc teachers were fired. Mathematics, statistics, physics, political science, economics and history departments were the worst affected,” said the permanent professor at DU who did not wish to be named.
By August-September 2022, Ramjas was one of the first colleges where the first round of interview started, in the Zoology department.
“At that time, all teaching and non-teaching staff had come together to support the demands of the staff association for ad hoc teachers. It was a peaceful, sit-down protest, but the principal called the police,” said the former ad hoc teacher mentioned above.
But the night before interviews could start for the next department, statistics, the principal got an injunction order from the court barring any protests within 100 meters of his office.
“Everything dissipated after that. For the statistics department interview, only 10-12 people gathered in solidarity in the staff room. It was becoming clearer to all of us (ad hocs) that we are on our own,” the former ad hoc teacher added. By the time the History department interviews commenced, there was no show of support from other teachers.
But some ad hoc professors are putting up a brave fight. A few of them have approached the Delhi High Court, calling the allotment of 100 per cent marks for the interview under the revised UGC rules as arbitrary.
“The 2018 UGC norms say that there should be a criterion to allot 100 per cent marks in the interview. But there is none. There is no merit list. Only the names of selected candidates appear in a final list,” said Vishal Pandey, ad hoc teacher at Ramjas commerce department, who filed a case against the interview process in February.
In the court, the university said that the revised interview process is based on an expert committee report, but the report has not been submitted in the court.
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History department in history
The history department of Ramjas was established as an island of free thinking for the students and it took years of efforts by the teachers and several batches of students to make it a truly democratic space, recount several Ramjas history department alumni.
One of the alumni from the class of ’80, Sudhanva Deshpande, recalled how the learning in the classroom was not limited to core subjects and opened a worldview to students.
Ram Janmabhoomi issue became a subject of discussion during Deshpande’s student days. Another former history student Gagan Kumar, who studied at Ramjas between 1998 and 2001, recalled that India’s nuclear test was a predominant topic. Students could ask questions and disagree with the professors. And debates often spilled over to the department room (Room 007).
The big picture
The chatter on the campus about how the overhaul of the university is the beginning of its end fails to deter the university administration, which is on a war-path to clean DU of “adhocism”, said current and former professors.
“Ad hoc business in DU is a disease,” said the former professor and administrator quoted above. “And the lobby of the ad hoc teachers is very strong, which, for years, prevented the university from hiring permanent faculty.”
For the current and former students of Ramjas and professors of DU, the writing is on the wall. The fast dissolution of the values, fundamentals and teachings of Ramjas’ history department, according to them, shows what is in store for the rest of the university.
“It’s an agenda-driven Right-wing appropriation of spaces,” said Deshpande. “This is not a single case of Ramjas history department. It’s happening all across.”
(Edited by Anurag Chaubey)