While the Delhi University's Standing Committee on Academic Matters on Wednesday, June 29, passed the draft syllabi for the first semester of the 19 four-year undergraduate courses, four members dissented against the decision.
The university has approved the implementation of the National Education Policy (NEP) and the four-year undergraduate programmes (FYUP) from the 2022-23 academic session, as stated in a report by PTI. In February, the Executive Council (EC) of the university passed the draft Undergraduate Curriculum Framework (UGCF), formulated according to the NEP, for the 2022-23 academic session, the report said.
Four members of the committee — Rajesh Kumar, Biswajit Mohanty, Kumar Shantanu and Nidhi Kapoor — protested against the resolution. They issued a dissent notice that pointed out the reasons for their opposition. Members pointed out the “procedural lapse of providing insufficient time for minute observation of the syllabi of 19 subjects to be passed today.” They said that, “Since many departments had not made the syllabi available on the public domain for wider consultation of stakeholders, an informed deliberations on the content of the syllabi and qualitative suggestions would be impossible to make in a very short notice.”
Additionally the members also said, in the note, that they feel that deliberating only on the content of the first semester syllabi would be a futile task. “Unless we examine the papers of all four years, it would be impossible to give comments on the disjunctions, overlapping, continuity or discontinuity of papers in the subsequent semesters,” they said in the note.
The members noted a third objection with regards to the non-availability of the GE, AECC, SEC and VAC syllabi. “As it is an integral part of the four-year structure, it must be evaluated keeping the contents of other papers in mind. It is here that that major overlapping of the contents may happen,” they noted. The fourth dissent they mentioned was regarding “a general apprehension of loss of rigour and dilution of content” that was felt among the representatives and was not satisfactorily addressed by the authorities.
One of the members, Biswajit Mohanty told EdexLive that their main demand is that the content for all four years should be made available to them because of all the reasons they mentioned in the dissent note. “Giving us piecemeal doesn't work because there are so many overlappings and discontinuities. How will the students choose from this?” he asked.
