DU Four Year Undergraduate Programme

Teachers and students in Delhi University are fiercely engaged in a wide ranging debate over the rationale of the proposed four year undergraduate course, to be introduced from the next academic session. The decision has ignited an intense national controversy by bringing the debate into public sphere. Many teachers are vehemently opposed to the FYUP, charging the VC that the university has been brought low by the very forces which modern universities came into being that is, to oppose-ignorance, irrationality and most of all intimidation. Their resentment is that the VC has not considered it fit to circulate any white paper explaining the academic rationale of the new course because he is promoting the politically ascendant agenda of the moment. Shashi Tharoor, minister of state for the HRD, ruled out ministrys intervention and observed that the American norm of 12+4 had become popular. Then came the Freudian slip to set the record straight : Indian students with 10+2+3 were made to do an extra year in the US. It was frustrating for many. The VC has highlighted the dismal condition of the drop out rate which is as high as 30 per cent in the very first year itself. The new course structure which would enable these drop outs to earn a degree, albeit of a lesser value, a better option to find a job in the market- what a consolation. The VC laments that these kids drop out in such large numbers because they are not up-to the mark. But that is an evasion, a sweet concept to cover the systems failure. The kids dont actually leave, they are expelled. We fail them but never, never talk about our failings. Most of the drop outs are from the disadvantaged sections of the society. It is not enough to fix quota for the reserved categories as a constitutional requirement. It is imperative that these students be given all the support to catch up with the academic level of the general category students. The UGC has stipulated that all efforts in this direction are mandatory. They provide necessary funding for the extra efforts like organising remedial classes and such other support systems to remove their infirmities: surround every student with so much of care that he can overcome his handicap. Instead, the VC is not only abdicating his social and academic responsibility but pushing reforms by re-engineering the undergraduate course which seeks to institutionalise failure by legitimising segmenting the students into the "cognitive elites", separated from those, ostensibly, of average and below-average intelligence a la, the racist Bell Curve hypothesis. Any structure which does not ensure hundred per cent success for all the students is, to say the least, sub optimal and if bulldozed, a sham V P Jain Associate Professor(Retd) School of Open Learning, University of Delhi.