Making a case against autonomy for St Stephens is misguided

Only a few days ago I surmised that the apparent calm on the campus of St Stephen’s was due only to nothing significant being contemplated by the administration.

I was wrong. I stumbled upon, real time, a photograph uploaded on the internet.

It shows a faculty member addressing the students on Allnutt lawns. On inquiring into the provocation for this resurrection of the familiar spirit, I came to understand that the governing body is considering a proposal to upgrade the college to an autonomous institution.

This is true to form. In 2008, when I replaced decades-old blackboards and chalk with white boards and marker pens, the same set of teachers got immoderately agitated.

Of course, they did not know why they had to be agitated. Habit being involuntary, they got agitated all the same. A scene was precipitated. An emergent staff council meeting was requisitioned and held.

At the meeting, the aggrieved "teachers" beat a hasty retreat when I asked them to spell out the rational basis for their protest.

Silence followed. White boards became the norm. The then protestors are happily using them.

Come now to the immediate provocation: the spectre of autonomy.

I have heard the proponent of the present turmoil argue vehemently in favour of autonomy. Every progressive move by the university was damned as an assault on the "autonomy" of the institution or of education. Now the same phalanx damns autonomy.

It is scary that to teachers autonomy means no more than license and the unfettered right to do (or not do) as they please!

What does autonomy to colleges entail? First, academic freedom. Freedom is such a bad thing?

Really? That should make us think. The problem with freedom, as Dostoevsky said along ago, is that it entails responsibility.

Academic freedom – the freedom to design your own courses and conduct your own examinations — is hated by teachers who fear that this could increase their “work load”.

You can trust them to fight this every nanometre. Principled resistance, in academia, now means no more than the sledgehammer of laziness and inertia.

The semester system was resisted tooth and nail for the very same reason. FYUP, likewise.

The agitated teachers, who have no qualms in exposing themselves to public ridicule, seem to be ignorant that there are nearly 500 autonomous institutions in India already.

I know at least a dozen autonomous colleges in Kerala alone.

St Stephen’s is far ahead of them. Wherever I go, people are surprised, some shocked, that St Stephen’s is still an affiliated undergraduate college. Many colleges in Kerala have post graduate, M. Phil and doctoral programmes.

St Stephen’s remains in strangulation and stuck at the level of a kindergarten compared to its awesome potential.

The teachers are to blame for this. In 1981, when the college completed 100 years of distinguished service to the nation, autonomy was offered to it as a special case. Then too the teachers stood in the way. It is an absolute disgrace.

Each time examinations are conducted, evaluations done and results announced, I used to hear my erstwhile colleagues in St Stephen’s College complain bitterly against the shoddy arbitrariness inherent in the university system.

Statistical studies have been conducted to prove that the interests of our examinee students suffer in the university system. Complaints about the substandard syllabi formulated and imposed by the university on the college have been heard far too often.

Now, an opportunity to emerge from the woods has come calling. But teachers protest.

Not everyone, mind you. About 90 per cent of the faculty members in St Stephen’s do not have any opinion of their own on anything. They simply lap up whatever is dished out to them by one or two expert agent provocateurs.

They parrot tutored lines. If any one of them is called separately and quizzed on the grounds for their informed and principled opposition, you can see the fun!

Autonomy is not the invention of a private management! Nor is it a conspiracy hatched by an administration. Studies commissioned by the government of India came to the conclusion that standards of education will improve only if educational institutions are liberated from the stranglehold of — surprise of surprises — “regulatory bodies”.

Regulatory authorities were established to standardise and upgrade the quality of education. They have become, instead, huge hindrances! Sounds familiar, no?

Should teachers be aggrieved at the quality of education improving?

By the way, having been a teacher for four decades, let me testify that my tribe has a rare talent. They will speak for hours and days about an issue, but never tell you where in the story they really stand.

Watch in this instance. You will hear reasons, a dozen a dime, why autonomy is sheer damnation.

But you will hear none of the agitators say, “Damn it, it will add to our work.”

Let me state the teachers’ case against autonomy:

1. They have to design courses. This has two dangers. (a) More work (b) expose their shallowness and incompetence vis-à-vis their domain of expertise.
2. Examinations, so far conducted by the university, will be, post autonomy, conducted by the respective colleges. This too means more work.
3. Accountability will increase. Since all aspects of teaching and examining are done in-house, no one else can be blamed.
4. The management will become autocratic, which is sheer bunkum. Autonomy will not change service conditions. Teachers and non-teaching staff will have the same extent of security and protection that they enjoy now. 

What is possible is that accountability and transparency could increase and I cannot deny that this could prove a problem to many. It is amazing how teachers can hit the public space with such uneducated arguments!

At any rate, do teachers — who are employees — have the right to decide if the institution should go forward of stay stuck; if it should look left or right?

Are they morally and professionally right in instigating students and using them as tools? Should they protest at the stage of an idea being considered by the Governing Body?

The governing body of St Stephen’s has four teacher representatives. In every other college in Delhi, there are only two teacher representatives.

Shouldn’t they argue the case, if they have one, against autonomy in the meeting of the general body itself? (But if coercion, not reason, is the only merit, that will not be an option.)

Should teachers endorse the anarchic principle of extra-constitutional centres of power working at cross-purposes with the interests of the college?

Even before a decision is taken by the general body on autonomy or otherwise, a few teachers have, most lamentably, exposed themselves in public eye and maligned their calling.

I cannot think of employees in any other sector behaving with a comparable degree of irresponsibility and callousness.

It is disastrous for the profession as a whole that teachers pretend to be so thick-skinned and dull-headed.