Absence of St Stephen's from HRD ministry's top colleges' list is no shocker
St Stephen’s College does not figure in the list of top colleges released by the ministry of human resource development (MHRD). The college did not even participate in the HRD ministry's ranking process. Am I surprised? Not really.
Why? Well, for two absolutely mutually contradictory reasons.
First, I don’t trust the MHRD’s understanding of excellence in education. The pundits there need to come out and tell us what they mean by it and by what instrument, and to what end, they have ranked institutions.
Second, I know, better than most others, that St Stephen’s is today a poor shadow of what it was, say, a few decades ago. From the proverbial "hot-seat" I kept repeating the truth: St Stephen’s is a highly exaggerated institution. Its gloss is largely borrowed from the social elite it served. It was, for long, deficient in intellectual elitism.
Throughout my tenure as the 12th principal of St Stephen’s College, I kept alerting my colleagues, not just by oblique hints but by forthright statement of facts, that we were living, camel-like, off the hump of past glory. That it could not go on forever. They needed to wake up and move on.
Even so, it is not inferior, not yet, to Atma Ram Sanatan Dharm College, Dyal Singh College or Deen Dayal Upadhyay College. I wish them well, but they have a while yet to go before they look over their shoulders and say to St Stephen’s, “See you in the next lap.”
What disappoints me is not the ranking of the college. It is its dithering. I have to say, with unspeakable agony, that it is today an institution sick in its inner life. It is a house divided against itself. More specifically, it is an institution held to ransom by the teachers.
I know institutions by their hundreds. St Stephen’s is the only one I know in which progressive decisions of the Governing Body are check-mated by the teachers in tandem with students, who are brainwashed and used for such anarchic purposes.
As a parent I would worry if my child were to be exposed to such influences. Education, pardon me, is not merely learning a few things, or many things, in a subject. It is, as Swami Vivekananda said, man-making. It is character-building and value-formation.
What value-formation? Training in defiance? Encouragement in character assassination?
I saw a short film posted, apparently, under the patronage of the teachers, in which baseless allegations against the principal are made by a teacher to the students who shout, “Shame, shame, shame.”
Well, let that be. The real issue is this.
What are the contributions of these teachers to the academic oeuvre of the college? How many of them are intellectually alive? How many contribute to the larger context? How many continue to grow in their respective fields?
 |
| St Stephen’s is the only college I know in which progressive decisions of the Governing Body are check-mated by teachers in tandem with students, who are brainwashed and used for such anarchic purposes. |
Even now I get invitations from various Delhi University colleges to attend their national seminars. I tried my best to motivate all departments to organise similar events. A handful resulted over eight years.
I urged all departments to plan their annual calendar of activities and take on one new academic goal or project for the entire year. Not a single department could do it.
I pleaded with each department to offer two popular lectures per year on areas of their expertise which can be offered to the college community as a whole so that we learn from each other and grow into each other’s domain of expertise. Not one department would do it.
I started the St Stephen’s special lecture series envisaged to be open to the public of Delhi, to be delivered once in three months by a faculty member, so that St Stephen’s becomes a catalyst of cultural renaissance for the city of Delhi. Not one would come forward. I gave the first two lectures, after which the series has been, to the best of my knowledge, discontinued.
That is not all. Most faculty members would not attend academic programmes and opportunities made available to them. I have battled in vain against the hardened unwillingness of many teachers to learn and to keep themselves intellectually alive.
The colleges affiliated to Delhi University that are struggling to do well deserve to be generously congratulated. The system is hard-set against their empowerment. I do not know how it helps the country to keep over 70 colleges frozen at the under-graduate level for decades. Most colleges I know in other universities offer post-graduate courses. Some have M.Phil and research facilities. Delhi University treats its affiliated colleges like vassals confined to convenient boundaries.
I appeal earnestly to the MHRD to reform this university radically. It needs to be an empowering, not constricting, agent of higher education.
One of the reasons why teachers in colleges affiliated to Delhi University either relapse into intellectual inertia or launch out into full-scale politics is that under-graduate teaching is not demanding enough to engage their time or energies. There is far too little to do, so long as a teacher limits herself to "covering the syllabus" which is what nearly all teachers do.
Colleges need to be allowed to grow. There is so much talk about "ease of doing business". Why is it that we do not talk at all about the "ease of doing education"? Why are institutions kept in mortuaries of status quoist regulation?
MHRD has no moral right to rank institutions so long it does not tell us what its vision for education is. I wonder if anyone knows what it is. I don’t.
It needs to tell the country what it proposes to do to promote quality of education.
How it proposes to control teacher truancy which is reportedly as high as 30 per cent, even in Delhi University.
How it proposes to eradicate weeds of mediocrity over-growing the turf of higher education in the country as a whole.
Annual ranking of institutions is a joke, if it is not complemented with a sturdy and meaningful commitment to promote quality of education nation-wide.