Fear Over Delhi University: Freedom and Education Besieged

The Delhi University (DU), with its 70+ constituent colleges, 400,000 students and 8000+ teachers, is in the throes of an unprecedented crisis. The DU Administration, after having adamantly refused meaningful dialogue with teachers and students regarding its unilateral drive to hurriedly and thoughtlessly semesterise undergraduate teaching, has been vandalizing all conventions and clearly laid-down procedures governing democratic and participatory functioning at the DU.

Since June 2010 the Administration has also been cracking down with increasing intensity on a burgeoning teachers’ movement that has been SAYING NO TO NO SAY, demanding that democratic norms, practices and values be upheld, and insisting on a rigorous debate around the complex and serious matter and substance of academic reforms. The DUTA, our union, has been under sustained attack even as individual teachers continue being threatened, harassed and intimidated in an unrelenting bid to frighten us into silence. The aim has been to instill fear in the minds of teachers, force us to be quiet so that the University administration can go ahead and do exactly as it pleases, now and later, no matter how toxic the consequences for the very idea and meaning of a University.

The teachers of DU have been questioning semesterisation, because we are convinced that there is nothing academic about this particular process at our University. Our fear is that a recklessly imposed structural change, a proposal presented as a conclusion, far from enriching the quality of University life will lead to an academically, intellectually and culturally impoverishing chaos. It may even lead to the break-up and end of the DU as a public University, leaving the field wide open for the large-scale commodification of Higher Education by Capital, at the DU and elsewhere in the country. Our struggle over semesterisation at the DU is at heart a battle to uphold reason, debate, creativity, discussion, intellectual persuasion, freedom and notions of social justice, in a word, democracy and democratic values in the world of higher education in our land.
‘Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere’, said Martin Luther King Jr. The weakening of democracy at the DU, or anywhere else for that matter, will be a threat to the landscape and soul of higher education and democracy everywhere. This is why no matter how heavily the scales may be weighted against us, and even as we do all we can to firm up our cases in court, we need to continuously strengthen our resolve that

‘We shall not be moved!
 Just like a tree that’s standing by the wa-ater,
 we shall not be moved.
 We’re fighting for education,
 we shall not be moved.
 We’re fighting for democracy,
 we shall not be moved.
 We’re fighting for our University,
 we shall not be moved.
 Just like a tree that’s standing by the wa-ater,
 we shall not be moved.

There simply is no other option. Far from becoming even marginally complicit in a process that is as yet undecided and clearly grossly wrong, we need to keep up the fight, keep up our spirits and never forget that we must keep speaking, keep telling truth to power, this being the only way to keep our University’s heart beating in the face of its imminent destruction in the name of ‘restructuring’:

‘Bol ke lab aazaad hain tere,
 bol zubaan ab tak teri hai,
 tera sutvaan jism hai tera,
 bol ke jaan ab tak teri hai…
 bol yeh thoda waqt bahut hai,
 jism-o-zubaan ki mauut se pehle,
 bol ke sacch zinda hai ab tak,
 bol jo kucch kehna hai keh le (Faiz).

Jamhuriat ke sabhi deewaanon, join us on Friday, May 6, 2011, 5.30pm onwards. Let’s hope that together we can once again muster up the courage to say with passion and conviction,

‘Bakshi hain ishq ne humko woh jurratein Majaaz
 Darte nahin siyasat-e-ahle jahaan se hum,

and compel power more forcefully than now, to be answerable to truth,

‘jo ho sake to hamein paamaal karke aage barh
 jo na ho sake to mera jawaab paida kar’
 (Majaaz).

Joint Action Body and concerned students, University of Delhi

May Day, 2011

DU teachers appeal (PDF)

(PDF Version)

Protest gala at Delhi University 6 May 2011 A-4 Poster

poster by Harsh Kapoor