Student opposition to JNU enforcing compulsory attendance requirement is baffling

In keeping with the tradition to protest against anything and everything, a section of students in Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) has decided to launch an agitation. The JNU Students' Union (JNUSU) has called its customary strike and electoral outfits in the university have rehashed old slogans to register "dissent".

They have once again covered the walls of the university with another charter of demands. Commies have called vice-chancellor M Jagadesh Kumar "sanghi" for the nth time. The non-issue which has attracted students' wrath this time is the compulsory requirement of 75 per cent attendance. This despite the fact that students with restrictive medical conditions have to attend just 60 per cent classes.

The opposition to the university enforcing a compulsory attendance requirement is baffling.

Protest posters that have been put up across JNU call for

(a) Gate blockade

(b) University lockdown

(c) Phase-wise lockdown of university

(d) Gherao of the vice-chancellor's residence.

What the attendance rule demands

Each semester in JNU is four-and-a-half months long. Every year has two semesters. So students start with a cumulative three-month break. New rules allow students 25 per cent days off, which translates into roughly one-month leave for each semester. Students are literally required to attend university for only a little over half the year. But this too is not the final number. Weekends and public holidays over the two semesters give away another 60 days.

One must also discount the 15 days on offer if one is forced into sick leave or opts for it. So technically, JNUSU and political parties are against a four-and-a-half month attendance requirement out of one whole year.

Reasons that explain such unashamed headstrongness are:

(a) Opposition for the sake of opposition

(b) Adherence to a convenient idea of academic liberty minus accountability

JNU is yet to be freed from the reductive formulations of the Left. Simple binaries such as thesis-antithesis, base-superstructure, bourgeois-proletariat, capitalism-communism (of late, dalit-non-dalit) are a staple in canteens and classrooms. They are popular because they provide an easy grid to pigeonhole every ideological contest into opposites of twos.

Cadres find multiple possibilities not only electorally inconvenient but also intellectually challenging. So minds trained to binaries cannot see any good in the four-and-a-half-month attendance requirement. Their black and white world does not question the why and how of it, it just jumps to conclusion and launches protests.

The administration, part of the bourgeois superstructure in the formulaic world of Karl Marx, has introduced the attendance requirement. This is enough cause for the protest interns in JNU.

Fallout

What such hostility has achieved over the last two years is complete breakdown of trust between the administration and the students. Organisational bridges between the two stand burnt. This is hardly an enabling situation at a time when JNU is in the race for a place in the top-20 list of Institutes of Eminence (IOE).

JNU has produced a solid batch of social scientists over the years. However, their achievement has been restricted to publication of data that confirms those Anglophone ideas that do not move the grave of the German.

It is not surprising then that not one social scientist from India, who is globally recognised and whose works are cited across disciplines, including Ashis Nandy, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Amartya Sen, MN Srinivas, Sudhir Kakar, Partha Chatterjee, has found JNU attractive. Yet the question of academic liberty is an important one.

Academic liberty

So how does the demand to sign the attendance register for a total of 135 days out of 365 days threaten liberty?

Like you, I too am in search of an answer. Perhaps Mao Tsetung has it.

Among the anti-intellectual posters in JNU is one that quotes him thus, "Practice is higher than (theoretical) knowledge for it has not only the dignity of universality but also of immediate actuality."

In effect, knowledge is inferior to action. But classrooms are not designated for action. It is the site that mulls over "action". The refusal to privilege thought in a university is sign of intellectual poverty.

In JNU, it hides behind unscientific, hence utopian, assertions of revolutionary action. Ideal society, whether in the past or the present, has no evidence of existence because humans are not boring beings devoid of ambition and competitiveness.

The compulsory attendance system is sure to reduce the time being dedicated to unending sloganeering. This is from where the resistance to the rule on attendance stems.

The Lyngdoh Committee report clearly states that 75 per cent attendance is a minimum requirement for any student to contest elections. The purpose is to signal that universities have an esoteric goal no matter what junior politicians of different hues think.

Take the case of Z, drafter of an anti-attendance signature campaign and someone I tutored last semester. Z was repeating the course and yet submitted the assignment three months after the deadline. Z provided an undocumented medical explanation. I refused to accept it because like others, I had seen Z campaigning during university elections.

Compulsory attendance is an obvious threat to antics that violate academic rigour on the pretext of academic liberty. The rule may make hundreds of serious students feel like suspects. They are hard workers who contribute to the academic prestige of JNU. But they also know that there are large numbers who piggyback on their achievements and share the JNU sun.

To aspire for a place in the IOE is to prepare for a top spot in university rankings across the world. Asian neighbours such as China, Hong Kong, Japan and Singapore have already broken into the top 25. Announcement of 75 per cent compulsory attendance is a signal that JNU too means business.

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