The Delhi University Academic Council has approved over 100 courses under the University Grants Commission’s Choice Based Credit System on Monday, even as dissenting members tried to stall the proceedings.
The council cleared the CBCS courses with only 22 dissents against 101 opinions. DU also claimed that it was prepared for roll out of the contentious programme. This is despite the fact that staff associations of many colleges have rejected CBCS, and teacher groups have been up in arms against the “cafeteria” approach that the programme offers.
Alleging that courses were passed without deliberation, an Academic Council member told Deccan Herald that dissenting members sat on a dharna inside the council hall after the meeting on Monday.
“Earlier, the elected members jumped into the well and the meeting had to be temporarily stalled,” the member said.
DU called the move “pre-mediated”. “Keeping the ensuing Delhi University Teachers’ Association (DUTA) elections in mind, a small but vocal group of teachers, after cooperating and making constructive suggestions during the proceedings for more than seven hours, suddenly chose to indulge in disruptive and non-cooperative behaviour apparently upon instigation by an outside source on the pretext of a remark made by a member of the Academic Council in the context of the Mathematics syllabus,” DU said in a statement.
DUTA had earlier instructed elected Academic Council members to do a sit-in for at least 48 hours. “The letter from S N Mohanty, Secretary HRD, on introduction of CBCS in all the central universities of the country, is in direct conflict with the powers of the universities. This letter directs universities to comply with the orders of the UGC vis-a-vis CBCS. In one stroke, CBCS does away with the right to frame syllabus by academics and universities,” Rajesh Jha, member of Academics for Action and Development, said.
If implemented this year, DU will run three different programmes for three levels of undergraduate students – third-year students studying under the erstwhile FYUP, second-year students studying under the system the varsity reverted to post-FYUP, and the coming batch that will study under CBCS.
The DU Academic Council is one of the statutory bodies of DU. Getting the syllabus for the proposed courses approved in this council and then in the Executive Council is one of the biggest legal hurdles for DU in the way of implementing CBCS.