The Jawaharlal Nehru University Teachers' Association (JNUTA) has lashed out at the University Grants Commission and the National Testing Agency for the delay in conducting the Common University Entrance Exam (CUET) for Undergraduate and Postgraduate programmes. The JNUTA has called for the withdrawal of JNU from the CUET for all programmes.
Claiming that since the CUET PG exam was conducted between September 1 and 11, it would mean that the varsity would be unable to admit students in the 1,500 seats for its MTech, MA, MCA and MPH programmes this calendar year. "JNU thus stares at the loss of at least 4 to 6 months of teaching for all of its programmes (as the first semester for new students in JNU would normally run from July to December)," JNUTA said in a statement.
Calling the National Education Policy-mandated CUET an "unthinking, chaotic and irresponsible" wastage of educational resources, the JNUTA noted that the problem of a delayed academic year wasn't unique to JNU and is plaguing all universities that signed up for the CUET. Stating that the CUET had wrecked the academic year, the JNUTA pointed out that with the fresh academic year delayed, new entrants into the MA in Foreign Languages programme, who usually take a course in the seventh semester of the five-year integrated programme will be affected. The faculty will be left with no option but to repeat the seventh semester for these students, they said in the statement.
"With unsynchronised semesters, students in two intersecting semesters cannot opt for the entire range of courses being offered in the university at the time! For programmes whose curriculum/syllabi crucially relies on the cross-listing of courses, this has proved disastrous," said the JNUTA's statement.
Apart from disrupting the academic calendar, the JNUTA contested that the CUET challenges the autonomy of universities, under its "one nation one exam" module. "The very idea of a one-size-fits-all entrance examination entails the erosion of university autonomy and an evisceration of the University Acts under which public institutions like JNU were set up by the Indian Parliament," reads the statement. The faculty says that this "erosion of institutional autonomy" has been underway for the last six years due to the UGC's regulations. They add that the unique nature of the PhD programmes offered by JNU will be diluted due to the Multiple Choice Questions (MCQ) only module of the CUET. The faculty also state they conducted a survey that revealed that no other country across the world requires all its universities to admit all PhD students based on an MCQ-only test.
Moreover, with the NTA announcing only in August that PhD-CUET will not be conducted this year, the varsity has been left with very little time to organise its own entrance exam. This could lead to a situation where no PhD candidate joins the varsity this calendar year. "None of the 83 PhD programmes in JNU will have students this year. Eleven schools/special centres, which only have a PhD programme, will not teach this year at all!" the statement said.
