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INSISTING THAT he was convinced the erstwhile Four-Year Undergraduate Programme (FYUP) would have been “good” not only for Delhi University but also for the education system, DU Vice-Chancellor Prof Dinesh Singh said Monday he was yet to hear an academic argument against the initiative.
Asked during The Indian Express Idea Exchange why he thought the FYUP was rolled back, Singh said: “I honestly don’t know. I cannot find… if you followed the debates, the discussions…have you come across a single academic argument which says this is a faulty system? At least I could not.”
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He said the programme was a “well thought-out experiment”, one that he and his team was convinced would be good “not just to the university, but to the larger context of education”.
Asked if, in hindsight, he would have tweaked any aspect of the FYUP, Singh said: “Not at all. Nothing at this point. Remember, it wasn’t that at that point it was an imperfect system, it’s just that the ideal situation is something just ideal… and you have an approximation… and over time you get better at approximations… and that was all there was to it.”
Singh clarified that due process was followed in securing clearances for its implementation and that there was no procedural lapse on his behalf. The HRD ministry had served a show-cause notice early this year to the V-C for introducing the programme allegedly without due clearances from the Visitor.
Singh had positioned the FYUP as the switch to a modern higher education format that was in tune with global higher education formats, and facilitated greater reform through student mobility, inter-varsity credit transfers and a semester system. But he faced strong resistance from the teaching community.
“I can tell you with complete assurance there was not a single procedural lapse… look, we are not nitwits. We are all fairly reasonable people and it wasn’t a one person driving a diktat. We followed a process over a large period of time. And I can assure you, there is not a single lapse. That is the way I answered in the show-cause notice also,” said Singh, who completes his term on October 28.
Dismissing reports that he had resigned during the days of the agitation against FYUP, Singh said that while resignation was certainly one of the options, he didn’t do so. However, he added that he was pretty sure he must have said he would do so “in his emotional moments”.
The FYUP, which was implemented in 2013, was rolled back in 2014 after opposition and in accordance with UGC’s directive.
Asked about the decision of DU’s Academic Council to drop A K Ramanujan’s essay “300 Ramayanas” from the BA syllabus, Singh said he did not think there was much scholarship in it.
“We were directed by the Supreme Court to place it before the academic council. It wasn’t my decision. The SC told us to take it to the academic council and we took it… They deliberated on it for eight-nine hours. And then by an overwhelming vote, they disapproved it. There was enormous deliberation. So it isn’t that it was my decision or my whim of fancy, not at all.”
“Have I read the essay? Yeah, I have read the essay. It’s an entertaining essay but there isn’t much scholarship in it. And I say this with a great deal of thought, there isn’t much scholarship. I have checked many parts of the essay and I don’t find… he was a great scholar, but he didn’t write this in any great scholarship,” he added.