DU adopts new policy for recruitment and promotion of teachers; the newly proposed system reduces the previous emphasis on interview performance.
On 31st December 2016, the Executive Council of Delhi University adopted the University Grants Commission’s policies that will regulate the recruitment process and promotion of teachers, which will consequently impact the University in its entirety. In the emergent meeting of the Executive Council, the varsity adopted the fourth amendment of the UGC which will govern the regular recruitment process that will fill roughly half the posts in DU.
According to the new recruitment policy, 50% weightage will be given to academic record and research performance, 30% to assessment of domain knowledge and teaching skills, and the remaining 20% to performance in the interview. The newly proposed system departs from the previous policy which placed more emphasis on the interview performance.
Abha Dev Habib, a member of the Executive Council, says that the new process, still far from perfect, does introduce some measure of “transparency” to the process. In the previous system, a selection committee would select anyone practically for any reason, no questions asked. “Now they’ll have to create a table and fill scores. 4,000 teachers, comprising half the University’s teaching staff, will be recruited through this process and they will be in service for 30 years.” On the other hand, Academics for Action and Development opined that this distribution of weightage will mean that “a majority of the long-serving ad hoc teachers will not be regularised.”
The new system, however, only partially undercuts the arbitrariness for which the previous system was scrutinized. Abha Dev Habib points out that 50% weightage to “academic record and research performance” without proper guidelines of how they are to be assessed means, “it will yet again depend on the selection committee.” She argued that different departments should be allowed to lay down their own parameters, judging the quality of research, making the exercise more objective. Academic Council member Nachiketa Singh, also opined that, “If the qualifications criteria is not spelled out, there’s no difference between the old process and the new.”
While efforts are being made to improve certain aspects of the recruitment process, the issue of the reservation roster remains unresolved. Dev Habib points out that the varsity continues to use “a faulty reservation roster imposed through the emergency powers of the Vice Chancellor in September 2013,” and said that the roster must be corrected so that the posts can be advertised.
Image credits: catchnews.com
Aditya Narang
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