Why the Semester System should be Resisted by

All of Civil Society

P. K. Vijayan

A few days ago, the former Vice Chancellor of Delhi University, Prof. Deepak Pental,
remarked to a newspaper that “in the semester system there is no room for strikes
as there is a definite schedule. Teachers’ associations are not supposed to strike
and the DUTA strike is certainly not for the welfare of the students.” (The Hindu, 26
October 2010; p.3) This remarkable little nugget from the VC (he was still holding
office at the time) is profoundly revealing of some of the political issues that
underlie the implementation of a semester system in Delhi University. Not only did
the ex-VC deny the profession the right to use its labour as collective bargaining for
a legitimate cause – a right, we may add, that has been fought for and won over
decades of trade union struggles; he also seeks to use this very strike to ‘sell’ the
idea of the semester system even harder to the public at large, by noting –
diabolically – that the semester system will put paid to any possibility of strikes,
because there simply won’t be any time for strikes. The result he envisions is an
administrator’s utopia – an enslaved and docile workforce, defanged and declawed,
focused only on somehow completing the teaching of the syllabus to an equally
docile student community, itself completely preoccupied with somehow meeting the
demands of a grueling course. In this utopia, it is easy to imagine how policies and
programmes will be formulated and passed: with no discussion or debate – since
there will be no time for that – and no possibility of opposition – since there will
neither be the time for that nor the legitimacy – any policy, no matter how
retrograde, damaging or destructive, can be passed and implemented with
absolutely no resistance.

This is not wild speculation based on a few lines of speech reported in a newspaper.
Indeed, given that the DUTA called off its strike on 29 October 2010, after a division
bench of the Delhi High Court asked it to, this point may even appear an academic
one now. But the express intervention of the High Court on a PIL – whose demands
incidentally are an almost verbatim echo of Prof. Pental’s order to colleges that the
DUTA strike be declared illegal, that the principle of no-work-no-pay be
implemented immediately, and that the teachers be forced to teach in the semester
system – is itself remarkable, given that, normally, hearings on PILs are notoriously
difficult to get in quick time. It is a sign of the seriousness with which the issue of
the implementation of the semester system is being taken well outside the
academic domains of the university, in all three domains of administration and
governance: the legislature, the executive and the judiciary. To understand this
sudden and overweening concern and attention, it is necessary to follow suit and
look beyond the mere academic domain of the university. And to do that, we need
to ask some very basic, even fundamental questions.

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Ever since the debate over the conversion to a semester system began in 2008, the
question that has remained fundamentally unanswered is ‘Why?’ Why do we need
to shift to a semester system? Why has a thorough critique of the annual system –
which is by no means perfect – not been publicly circulated for discussion, before
proposing an alternative? Should not such a critical process constitute the first step
in any reform? Why has there been a repeated refusal to engage with the queries
and concerns of the teaching community regarding the semester system – the very
community that is expected to actually implement the ‘reforms’? Why did the
former Vice Chancellor contemptuously dismiss these queries and concerns, even
when they came, not from the so-called ‘political’ factions, but from reputed and
committed academics, on very considered and rigorously argued academic,
logistical and administrative grounds? (One may not agree with this distinction – as I
do not – between ‘political’ and ‘committed’ academics, but it is important to
remember that such a distinction exists in public perception; and if those who are
considered ‘committed’ academics are themselves becoming politicized on this
issue – as demonstrated by the phenomenal turnout at the rally of teachers to the
MHRD on 28 October 2010 – then there is clearly cause for concern.) Why did the
VC choose – repeatedly and with baffling insistence – patently irregular, even illegal,
actions to push this ‘reform’ through? And most significantly, why was he willing to
go to the extent of employing unprecedentedly coercive measures to ensure the
implementation of this ‘reform’, through a patent abuse of his ‘emergency powers’,
thereby precipitating a headlong confrontation with the teaching community on this
issue?

It is sometimes forgotten that the overwhelming majority of college staff

associations and staff councils had turned in a categorical rejection of the semester
system as early as in mid-2009. I will offer here a very brief recap of some very
detailed and considered arguments that were submitted then. Firstly, the semester
system cannot be implemented without substantial dilution of Course content in the
honours courses, necessitated by the inevitable time crunch that the semester
schedule will entail: exam time alone – about a month and a half – will be doubled,
with exams happening twice a year. Secondly, the proposal is to compensate for
this inevitable dilution, by changing from an Honours system to a system of Major
and Minor courses, thereby apparently offering students greater ‘interdisciplinary’
options from a variety of courses and disciplines. But in actuality this will only
exacerbate the dilution of quality, since through this system, students will have no
time to engage fully with the major or the minor discipline, but will gain only a
sketchy and dangerously incomplete understanding of the subject. Further, the
ostensible advantage of promoting interdisciplinarity is actually no more than the
making available of multiple disciplines to students (with no extended exposure and
therefore little actual foundation in any); the actual interdisciplinarity, introduced
only recently through carefully designed interdisciplinary courses actively drawing
from multiple disciplines, will be jettisoned. Thirdly, precisely because of the
inability to engage in requisite detail with a particular discipline, the sound
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knowledge base essential for further research will simply not be available, leading
to the gradual collapse of quality research. Research will also be hit by the fact that
faculty will have little or no time left over from continuous teaching and evaluation
to pursue research. Fourthly, while on the one hand, governments of every hue
have promoted reservation in higher education for the weaker sections of society,
on the other, by insisting mindlessly on the semester system, the space and time
required for these sections to catch up and compete on even terms with the
dominant sections, is taken away: what the reservation system makes possible, the
semester system effectively undercuts and defeats. Fifthly, “the current teacher-
student ratio in colleges already stands in the way of individual attention to
students, and a Major-Minor combination threatens to aggravate this further, thus
seriously affecting the quality of higher education” (‘Concerns of English Teachers’,
document circulated by the General Body of the English departments of the
University).

These are just samples of the many very genuine concerns raised by the teaching
community, from as far back mid-2009. It is clear from even this brief list, that the
concerns are overwhelmingly about the quality of higher education under the
semester system, and not about how it will affect the teachers’ working conditions –
as has been maliciously spread by the University authorities. Prof. Pental chose to
ignore these concerns and instead strong-armed the matter through the Academic
and Executive Councils of the university. This led only exacerbated the situation to
the point where, more than a year later, the teaching community had no choice but
to resort to striking work, in order to be heard. Contrary to popular perception, the
university teachers have been far from truculent in this matter: if anything, they
have shown remarkable patience and tolerance in dealing with the Vice Chancellor
in this period. It was he who repeatedly behaved with inexplicable haste and
unpardonable disrespect towards the entire teaching community. The disrespect lay
not only in the coercive measures he sought to employ against the teachers, but in
his inflexible refusal to listen to them, and in the despicable canards that he
launched in the public sphere: about how teachers were fundamentally anti-change,
about their apparent unwillingness to work, that they were afraid of the
accountability that the semester system would bring in – and so on. Through these
and other very unsavory means, the former VC had sought to discredit the teachers’
genuine concerns, to sow doubt and disunity in the community, and to instill a
regime of fear, apprehension and submissiveness in the university. The sheer
vehemence, insistence and unseemly haste – if not the unabashed resorting to
procedural violations, illegalities and slandering – with which the VC has acted,
should alone be cause for alarm. There is evidently much more at stake in the
conversion of the university to a semester system than meets the eye.

So far, we have had little by way of justification: one such has been that, this is the
system followed by universities internationally, and therefore it is necessary to
implement it in Delhi University too, in order to bring it up to ‘global standards’.

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Even if it is accepted that there is such a set of universally applicable ‘global
standards’ – which, in the absence of any credible arguments for it, remains suspect
– it is unclear either why those standards cannot be met without the radical
overhauling implied by a semester system, or conversely, whether those standards
will be met by simply switching to the semester system. Further, there have been
reports from around the world – indeed, from other parts of India, where the
semester system has been similarly enforced – that it simply does not work in many
universities, as a schedule of education. In other words, different universities have
different requirements, determined by (among many other things) factors like their
size, organizational structures, research and pedagogic profiles, disciplinary
orientations and emphases, objectives, infrastructural and financial bases, and their
social constituencies. It is plain lunacy to believe that if the semester system works
in one such university, it will work in all. By way of illustrating this point: one of the
biggest questions about implementing the semester system in Delhi University is
that it will require university-wide examinations to be held twice a year. Given that
Delhi University has nearly eighty affiliated colleges offering undergraduate
courses, with over two hundred thousand students, and that it struggles to meet the
demands of conducting one exam every year, it is baffling that – without even
seeking to address the existing difficulties in conducting one annual exam – there is
such a blind insistence on a system that will demand that this huge enterprise be
carried out twice every year. If this insane programme is implemented, it does not
require divine insight to foretell the complete chaos that will ensue, affecting the
careers and lives of hundreds of thousands of students. It is obvious then that it is
first necessary to examine what ground conditions are prerequisite in a given
university, for the semester system to work. None of this has been given any
cognizance by those pushing this agenda. The sole, highly irresponsible response
has been that, any “teething problems” arising from the implementation, will be
tackled when they ensue.

So, what then is at stake here? One of the recommendations of the Knowledge
Commission – a super council on educational matters, whose term is over but whose
reports and recommendations are still being implemented – is that the semester
system replace the annual mode. No arguments are offered in favor of the one or
against the other, no analyses, no justifications – just a blanket recommendation for
all state funded universities. The sole ‘explanation’ that appears is that a uniform
semester system will facilitate the mobility of students from one university to
another. Given that the number of such ‘mobile’ students is probably less than a
fraction of a fraction of one percent of the total number of university-going students
in the country at any given time, this eagerness to facilitate their mobility, at
extreme cost to the other non-mobile students, is incomprehensible, to say the
least. Another similar explanation – albeit not offered by the Knowledge Commission
– is that the semester system will facilitate greater mobility internationally, allowing
both Indian and foreign students to move back and forth between countries without
disrupting their studies. The simple response to this is: since when did the primary
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objective of our state funded universities become the catering to the requirements
of our globe-trotting and jet-setting elite? For, it is clear that it is an even smaller
fraction of very wealthy students, aiming at very specific professions and careers,
that place a premium on this kind of international mobility, who would be able to
avail of such an opportunity. The semester system will enable this ruling elite and
its jet-setting progeny to avail of precious state funding – that in fact, they don’t
even need – to further their own ambitions and careers. The inflexibility with which
the semester system is being introduced is just another instance of the innumerable
ways in which this elite is – with increasing blatancy and insouciance – appropriating
to its own desires and ends, the valuable state resources and subsidies meant for
the vast number of aspiring students from the struggling middle and lower classes.
And by the time this becomes evident to all, it will be too late for the thousands
upon thousands who would have paid with their own failed aspirations and careers.

Another explanation, along similar lines to the one above, is that the introduction of
a semester system will facilitate international collaboration, with universities
following a similar system abroad. There are already plans afoot to float what we
might call a new kind of SEZ – Special Educational Zones – which would essentially
constitute self-contained university townships hosting collaborative enterprises
between Indian and foreign universities. The latter will invest massively in setting
up infrastructure and facilities in these ‘SEZ’s (which would of course be ‘world
class’). These investments will then be recouped many times over, through
exorbitant fees, in the name of ‘transfer of knowledge’. The ‘transfer of knowledge’
involved here will be highly specific, focusing on disciplines that have direct and
immediate applicability in commerce and industry, and that will therefore ensure
that students have an employment-friendly market to walk into, after their studies.
This of course would be further incentive to students, to invest heavily in the hopes
of getting lucrative jobs with ‘prestigious’ companies. In turn, the very character
and substance of higher education in the country will inevitably change towards
greater and greater specialization, especially in those disciplines with proven
marketability. (In fact, with or without collaboration, private universities and
colleges already increasingly reflect this change, as they compete in the new
educational marketplace.) This will necessarily be at the expense of those fields of
knowledge (like philosophy, literature, fine arts, history, sociology and political
science) so essential to analyzing and understanding our world in all its variety, but
that may not have immediate value in the market. As the students for these
disciplines become fewer and fewer, research in these areas too will gradually lose
interest and funding, and will dry up. These discipline will however, continue to
remain well-funded ‘abroad’, and – in the not too distant future – we will find
ourselves turning to the locations of these disciplines ‘abroad’ as the main sources
of our knowledge of our world; alternatively, these disciplines will come more and
more under state control, and precisely because they will be numerically and
substantially thoroughly attenuated, what the state presents as the contents of
these disciplines will become the basis of our understanding of our world. It would
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not be excessive to say then, that this will presage the dawn of either a new kind of
‘Orientalism’ or of a new kind of ‘Oriental despotism’ – or worse, some horror born
from the marriage of the two.

Now, generally speaking, such collaborative enterprises are hard to manage with
state-run universities, primarily because of the extensive bureaucracies that have to
be dealt with in them: the main beneficiaries, to begin with, would be the private
universities. This means that the majority of universities and colleges in the
country, which remain state-funded, would not be usable for such collaborations.
More unappealingly, they would continue to foster those disciplines that do not
have much immediate marketability, and consequently remain outside the direct
political control of the ruling elite – indeed, they would continue to be the source of
critical voice and mobilization against such control. The solution, of course, is to
grant them autonomy and/or to privatize them – forcing them to turn to the market
to survive, but also allowing them to justify clamping down on anything that might
discourage market interest. (Incidentally, both privatization and autonomization are
existing recommendations of the Knowledge Commission.) But privatization and
autonomization are not easy to bring about: the political fallout of directly doing so
would be too dangerous for the ruling elite to take on. It is necessary for these to
appear as necessities, ‘organically’ evolved options that will arise from specific
critical circumstances and appear to be inevitable solutions to those crises. One
needs to bring about conditions that appear to make privatization – or at least
autonomization (or the granting of autonomy) – an inevitable option.

The semester system comes in here as a handy tool to bring about these critical
circumstances. Not only will it facilitate collaborations, as we have already noted;
but in order to make this a truly successful venture for the ruling elite, it will
substantially facilitate the dismantling of existing university and college structures
of affiliation and organization. Firstly, as we have noted earlier, it will tame both, the
student and teaching communities, as well as the enormous non-teaching workforce
of the university system: they will simply have no time to engage politically with
any issue confronting them. Secondly, in large universities like Delhi University, the
system will fail – and this is part of the larger plan. The failure will be blamed not on
the system, but on the size of the university, and there will be an immediate reason
to downsize it by carving it up into smaller universities and by dispensing with
select colleges through autonomization. (Here again, the Knowledge Commission’s
recommendations are direct and specific, and these actions would be exactly to this
end.) Not only will this destroy the teachers’ associations of these universities –
perceived, as now, to be the main obstacle to the implementation of these
programmes – it will also produce autonomous colleges that will be ‘free’ (as in ‘free
market’) to adopt their own curricula and course options, provided they follow the
uniform schedule of the semester system. Thirdly, as these colleges – and perhaps
the universities too – begin to move towards financial autonomy (through seeking
private investments as well as through restructuring fees), which will be encouraged

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by the state (again, following on specific recommendations by the Knowledge
Commission) their administrative hold on their constituencies will also gradually
tighten.

These institutions will thus be perfectly transformed, from ‘black-holes’ into which
huge government subsidies disappear, into efficient profit-making commercial
enterprises that will survive or triumph through competition in the new educational
market. They will churn out ambitious and career-minded professionals, automatons
trained through the semester system to focus only on working and achieving
targets set for them, intent solely on getting ahead in the world of commerce,
finance and industry, and completely without the intellectual or political resources
to question or challenge the lives that have been planned for them. The higher
educational system that had for decades served – to whatever small extent, and
however imperfectly – as a vehicle for upward mobility for the vast masses of the
poor of the country, will finally become the almost sole domain of those sections
that will be able to afford it. No doubt, as the Knowledge Commission recommends,
there will continue to be affirmative action policies, by way of competitive
scholarships and quotas in clearly demarcated areas of knowledge (and not in
‘crucial’ fields like medicine, biotechnology or nuclear science). But these will be
designed – as must already be evident – to generate competition in the aspirants to
higher learning from amongst these sections of society; it will cull out the best, the
most productive and talented, the ones most likely to serve this political economic
dispensation well, and leave the rest to their own fates. The classic condition of all
forms of capitalism – the creation of a trained, surplus labour force at the mercy of
the demands of the market – which in so many ways has already taken root in the
country, will inexorably set in, becoming near impossible to dislodge, and definitely
impossible to rectify from positions within it. And given that the right to strike work,
as a legitimate mechanism for collective bargaining, is itself coming under attack –
yet another sign of the new tendencies of the ruling dispensations – there is little
hope for either avoiding or resisting this future that is almost upon us. It is clearly in
this direction, of the (so to speak) mannequin-ization of our children, that the
implementation of the semester system is taking us.

It is no one’s case that the current system is perfect, or that its flaws do not need to
be urgently remedied. In fact, a considered critique of the existing system must be
undertaken, and the analyses brought to bear on any proposals to change it. But
any proposal that involves the creation of mindless automatons, slaves to the
(global) market and to the tyrannies of governance, must be strongly and
relentlessly resisted. One of the greatest advantages of the annual mode is that it
permits students the leeway to grow wholly, in all their dimensions as individuals –
and many generations have benefitted from it, and many generations of excellent
scholars, writers, journalists, artists, scientists, innovators, administrators, and
intellectuals of every hue, have been produced by it. They would not be produced in
the bleak future of higher education that I have painted above. The crucial time

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required to engage with and think through the many complex dimensions of the
world around her, that the student meets for the first time as an adult, when she
enters the college/university system, is one of the biggest gifts of the annual mode,
whatever else its flaws. Whatever educational reform comes in, this time, and this
opportunity to prepare the self to meet the world wholly, must not be lost. The
implementation of the semester system is guaranteed to do precisely that. The
battle against that implementation is therefore not just that of the teachers, but of
all who have benefitted from this system, and who wish their children and future
generations to grow up and into a world that will not be a mind-control collar around
their necks. It is not just a battle for the teachers, students and other constituencies
of the university system to engage in, but for all of civil society. The vicious canards
against the teaching community that have been generated and spread by the
former Vice Chancellor, are aimed precisely at misinforming and prejudicing the lay
citizen, who then wonders why it is that the teaching community is up in arms
against such apparently progressive reforms. The fact is, these are not progressive
reforms. They are the first steps to a very sad future for our children. And the
sooner civil society at large grasps this, and joins hands with the teachers in their
struggle, the quicker we may move towards a genuine debate on higher education,
and towards educational reforms that actually seek to address the objectives of
producing quality while maintaining social justice.

PK Vijayan

Asst. Prof., Dept. of English,

Hindu College