JNU professor writes an anonymous piece on why compulsory attendance doesn't make sense
Among the many issues that the Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) as an institution is confronting on a daily basis, the one that makes attendance mandatory calls for greater critical reflection and wider engagement.
The teaching community, individually and as a collective, are of the position that JNU had never had a problem with absenteeism and that making attendance mandatory will be against the basic tenets of independent thinking and vibrant academic culture with which the institution was raised and excelled close to half a century. It is true that JNU remained a unique experiment in the history of higher education in India and has lived up to the expectations, with all the limitations, without the mandatory marking system that has been prevalent elsewhere.
Having said so, to argue that mandatory enforcement of attendance is not part of the JNU’s tradition, may subject the institution to greater vilification as it is this tradition that has been at stake in the ongoing controversies.
The problems inherent in the higher education system of the country where students are seen as just consumers of knowledge, lacking in creativity, aptitude and efficiency has been a matter of concern for educationalists and the systems of the state.
In response to a question raised in Rajya Sabha on the experiment of choice-based credit and semester system (CBCS), the then HRD minister Smriti Irani gave a written reply:
“The CBCS will enable students to take courses of their choice, learn at their own pace, undergo additional courses and acquire more than the required credits, and adopt an interdisciplinary approach to learning. The CBCS guidelines also provide for standardised letter grades, corresponding grade points, uniform method for calculation of semester grade point average (SGPA) and cumulative grade point average (CGPA) and a consolidated transcript format to indicate a student’s performance in each semester. The grading system is considered to be better than the conventional marks system and hence it has been followed in the top institutions in India and abroad. Adoption of grading system will facilitate seamless mobility of students across the institutions within and across countries and also enable employers to assess the performance of students.”
The first objective "to allow students to take courses of their choice, learn at their own pace and adopt an interdisciplinary approach to learning was based on the realisation that it was possible only by reversing the conventional method and introduce a system where the student is at the Centre, of the learning exercise, and not the teacher. The attempt to introduce the choice based credit and semester system (CBCS), therefore emerged in response to the conventional system of education, where the system was heavily weighted in favour of the teacher and the institution.
Such a system gave little space for the student for critical enquiry and dialogue within the system. The new method started off from the basic premise of "choice" which the student exercised in accordance to her academic tastes and aptitude.
The teacher is no longer the one who dictates, rather the teacher is bound to listen to what the student has to say. In discussions, the student often initiates the dialogue from what he/she has read or understood, on things that the student is able to make sense of the complexity of an issue that she is confronting. In such a situation, the CBCS was aimed at redrawing the character of the student-teacher relationship and to challenge the marked hierarchies that existed in the higher education system.
The new system can therefore exist only in a situation of mutual respect and trust both in terms of individual autonomies and knowledge acquisitions. If a student has to engage in a critical dialogue in her intellectual pursuits, it is possible only with internal freedom and confidence. The confidence to say "no, I disagree", with what she engages and to the teacher is the basic premise from which new form of knowledge accumulation and production becomes possible.
The second objective of "grading" is a continuation of the first, "the idea of choice". A student cannot be marked on the basis of "a single answer, which is necessarily the correct one", rather what is desired is how the student is able to make a free expression of what she thinks is correct based on the broad outline, which the teacher provides as well as on the basis of her broad engagement with the knowledge that she acquires from outside the class.
The third objective is of mobility, is not just about the movement of people, but about ideas and it can be realised only by autonomy at various levels of the institutional structure, possible only through freedom of the individual.
As Irani rightly said, the replication of the system practiced in most and best universities across the world and in a hand full of institutions in India, including JNU, was the need of the hour.
Innovations in education in India primarily meant that such successful models are replicated across the country. The introduction of the CBCS at a pan-Indian level was a failure, primarily because it was routed through and by the strengthening of the existing institutional mechanism.
The failure was primarily because the philosophy of freedom and critical thinking inherent in the CBCS was accompanied by an increasing bureaucratisation of the higher education. In the UGC regulations issued in 2010 and subsequent ones including the draft regulation of 2018, currently under discussion, stipulated regular higher loads of teaching hours for teachers.
Accompanied with this was the drastic cuts on public spending for higher education, which made the onus of spending on higher education largely as a responsibility of the state governments, which are often reeling under heavy fiscal deficit. This often resulted in lack of timely recruitment and therefore teachers had to run from one class to another, giving any time for dialogue and discussion, as envisaged in the CBCS.
The bureaucratisation also meant that universities and colleges are treated as any other government institution where students were to be present in the class rooms all through the day and copy down lecture notes, leaving no time for library visit, thereby defeating the very purpose with which the CBCS was introduced. In most colleges and universities, the CBCS, therefore, effectively meant the translation of the old examination system and converting percentage marks into grading pattern. As students were tied to their classrooms for the entire day, the libraries maintained in each colleges/universities hardly ever served the objective with which it was raised.
The attempt to make compulsory attendance for researchers, whether in JNU or elsewhere, will have serious implication on the very objective of research. The reason primarily is that a student who is introduced into a research programme has had their courses in methodology and the overall understanding of the subject during the post-graduation course and that it hardly makes any sense to have a general class for a batch of students who have decided to do their research on subjects that are diverse and are not interconnected to one another.
The methods of engaging with one topic of research will in most instances differ from one another and methodological consistency is achieved not just within the classroom, but often by engaging with the secondary literature of a given topic as well as undertaking field based research, which are in most instances, located geographically far away from the institution in which the student has registered for research.
To demand that the student has to report personally to the office as a mark of his/her commitment to the institution and to the research he/she is pursuing serve no useful purpose. The researchers in regional universities are already reeling under the pressure of this short-sighted and centrally dictated UGC reform. To replicate the same in other well-functioning institutions will in the end destroy the institution itself.
Imagine a researcher who has to travel 20km to come to the university and then travel another 20km to the archive/library for research, in a place like Delhi, particularly at peak hours, which is heavily congested is not practically viable.
Similarly, one need to factor in the personal problems, emotional, psychological and financial, which a young woman in her mid-20s faces while she ventures into research in a country like India, which has by the complex social system imposed restrictions on their mobility. Their research pursuits are often conducted against a variety of odds imposed on them by their families and society. Their trauma’s and emotional constrains at times restricts them from engaging in arduous field based research or creative thinking and research.
In such situations they need a break, they need to come out of their personal turmoil and later confidently return to research. At such situations, it is the supervisor or the faculty collective of the department in which the student is registered can use their collective wisdom and decide on the matter. No larger mechanical-institutional structure, which took to itself the responsibility of monitoring and control would work.
We often mistakenly believe that a higher education institution should function in the same manner in which an administrative bureaucratic structure functions. They are in fact two different structures organised around different ideological thinking and patterns. While the bureaucracy is in the words of Max Weber is an established apparatus of the state, the university on the contrary, is not connected to the established systems of state or its power mechanisms.
Here things do not spiral down from the centre to the periphery, rather it is in the periphery that knowledge production occurs. Unfortunately, as a colonial legacy, we created bureaucratic institutions which extends its arms into every sector of our life, and planted mechanisms that is fundamentally driven by the theory of mistrust - a necessary justification for institutional control and regulation as means of creating an "ordered life". There is an underlying belief that greater institutional controls lead to excellence in higher education.
The solution lies in the problem confronting higher education and is, therefore, not about the introduction of CBCS, but about the failure to recognise the ideological concerns that led to its introduction.
The issue that JNU is currently confronting is the problem of compatibility of incorporating the failed method of rote-learning into the principles and practices of choice-based credit and semester system. Firstly, the idea of CBCS successfully practiced in JNU for half a century was replicated across the country, through an old institutional mechanism that was not just subjected to reform, but was made structurally more static.
Secondly, the failed institutional mechanism of monitoring and control prevalent elsewhere is replicated in JNU with a question: “Why should JNU be any different?"
(The author of the piece wishes to remain anonymous.)