[Reader-list] Fwd: Mukul Mangalik: Sacking 'ad-hoc' teachers and destroying Education at DU

[The Sarai Programme]

| Tuesday , July 23 , 2013 |


THE TELEGRAPH


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UNIVERSITY’S SUMMER OF SHAME

Sacking ad hoc teachers is one symptom of the way the future of education
at Delhi University is being endangered, writes Mukul Mangalik
“People are people through other people” — Xhosa proverb
“We all want to help one another. Human beings are like that. We want to
live by each other’s happiness, not by each other’s misery” — Charlie
Chaplin in The Great Dictator
Colleges of the Delhi University are in the grip of frenzy. With the
university administration breaking promises about appointing permanent
teachers against existing and newly sanctioned posts since 2009-10, large
numbers of ‘ad hoc’ appointees are being shown the door as new ad hocs are
poised to replace them. This has been happening systematically since 2012,
but the scale on which it is being pursued this summer appears to be
unprecedented.
This is being done through the unfair practice of holding repeat interviews
for the same jobs. Serving ad hoc teachers, it must be emphasized, have
been selected at different times through due process for these jobs. This
renders the repeat interviews nothing but forms for the exercise of power
over ad hocs, and instruments for deepening the presence and footprint of
malleable labour at Delhi University. The large-scale sacking, or threat of
removal, of teachers currently under way needs to be brought to an
immediate halt and dignity and secure employment guaranteed for all
colleagues.
‘Ad hoc’ appointees become teachers after going through merit-based
interviews. They are appointed for durations of up to four months. Within
this period — in the event that the vacancy in question may be longer than
four months — selection committees are supposed to be constituted, fresh
interviews advertised, and appointments made against temporary or permanent
posts. University ordinances are clear on this issue.
If, for whatever reason, this does not happen, the fairest practice has
been that the previously appointed ad hoc teachers, who are not responsible
for delays in interviews, continue until such time in the near future that
this process is completed.
All of this has been informed by the understanding that ‘ad hoc’ conditions
must remain, at most, a transient moment in teachers’ lives, and that too
only if absolutely necessary. The regular work of teaching demands regular
forms of employment. Anything else would have a negative impact on
teachers’ work apart from constituting unfair labour practice. There is
also adequate evidence regarding the long-term mental and physical
destruction caused when people are faced with job insecurity or
unemployment. Yet, all across the colleges of Delhi University,
undergraduates are being taught by thousands of teachers struggling to
offer the best they can in the face of indignities, terrible economic
insecurity, and the increasing threat of stress-related illnesses.
In spite of the provision in Ordinance XVIII (7) of the University of
Delhi, that “Not more than one-third of the total number of the teaching
staff shall be on a temporary or contractual basis at the same time”, 4,500
of 9,000 plus teachers at the university are teaching as ‘ad hocs’, with
many continuing in this capacity for years. This number, together with the
few hundred guest lecturers, paid per lecture delivered, makes it clear
that Delhi University is being run largely on the exploited backs of casual
labour, and has been witnessing the rapid normalization of ad hoc
employment practices.
This is unfair enough. The widespread compulsion now, that ad hoc
appointees sit for repeat interviews for another set of ad hoc appointments
at the same department of the very college where they are already
employees, instead of appearing in a fresh round of interviews for a new
category of posts, is massively compounding injustice. It is rendering the
already precarious and unequal employment conditions for ad hocemployees,
those in harness as well as those who begin afresh, much more vulnerable.
It is transforming a rapidly growing number of teachers into a floating
pool of low-cost migrant labour, men and women who will remain scared and
easy to control and programme for the deadening ‘instruction’ and
indoctrination of students that is set to take hold of Delhi University
through the imposition of the four-year undergraduate programme at the
behest of capital and the State.
Rampant democracy-devouring practices unleashed fairly successfully by the
Delhi University administration over the last three years to bring in the
semester system and the FYUP have set the stage for creating this situation
which bodes ill for ad hoc teachers in other ways too. It jeopardizes their
work of reading, writing and contemplation and the integrity of departments
and institutions of which they are members. It jeopardizes their freedom to
think critically, speak and teach without fear and live and breathe
equality and independence instead of sycophancy and obsequiousness. It
threatens the already besieged culture of rights and liberties without
which the pursuit of higher education becomes a joke.
It is worth bearing in mind that 75 per cent of all professors in American
universities today are adjunct faculty. This has contributed, in no small
measure, to the decline witnessed by the American academia in recent years.
It is alarming that Delhi University is rapidly and uncritically travelling
the road taken by American universities, not the least with regard to
employment practices.
If ‘ad hocism’ goes unchallenged and comes to definitively determine
employment relations at Delhi University, if the ground cannot remain
beneath the feet of university employees, we are well on the way — as is
increasingly the case at workplaces around the world — to allowing
informality, arbitrariness, personal whims, prejudices, vendettas and a
myriad deeply entrenched hierarchies to inform all practices of college and
university functioning. We are then close to allowing power unbridled sway.
Such a condition can only spell devastation for higher education and
demands immediate redress.
“In all people I see myself… I do not ask the wounded person how he feels,
I myself become the wounded person,” wrote Walt Whitman in his poem, “Song
of Myself”, the words resonating with Xhosa sensibility and Chaplin’s
speech towards the end of the film, The Great Dictator. The humiliation
being visited on ad hoc colleagues at Delhi University colleges and the
havoc, fear and insecurities being wrought in their lives as they are
robbed of their livelihoods and sense of self-worth, robbed of the
possibilities for creating meaning through sustained work, and of
experiencing the sweat-drenching, all-consuming passion, anxieties and joys
of teaching freely inside the classroom and outside, all of this is not
happening to ‘others’. It is happening to each one of us. Let us not forget
that freedom, a sense of well-being and the possibilities for living out
the potential of becoming fully human are indivisible and can only be fully
experienced when they accrue to all.
“You don’t know who we are, we don’t know who you are, but if you tremble
with indignation at every injustice, then we are comrades.” That was Che
Guevara at another time, another place, but we too, at different colleges
of the Delhi University and elsewhere, largely unknown to one another, need
to come together today, in solidarity, and to uphold nothing less than our
rights, our common humanity and our abiding commitment to higher education.
“Let us fight,” in Chaplin’s words, “for a... decent world that will give
(wo)men a chance to work, youth a future and old age a security.”

The author is Associate Professor of History, Ramjas College,
Delhi University


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