Image for representation. File
| Photo Credit: PTI
The academic year of 2022-23 was marked by unprecedented delays in admissions to all university programmes because of the introduction of the National Testing Agency (NTA)-run Common University Entrance Test (CUET) regime for both undergraduate and postgraduate degrees. Initially, a CUET for PhD admissions had also been envisaged by the NTA for 2022-23, but that plan was summarily dropped in mid-September 2022. University administrations that had disregarded the serious internal critique by teachers and students of the blind ceding of this core aspect of university autonomy were left in the lurch.
One such university was Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) whose tryst with the NTA is indicative of all that Central universities have suffered in this NTA regime. JNU, India’s second-ranked university that produces an average of 650 PhDs a year, had conducted its own all-India pen and paper entrance examination (for all its programmes of study) for nearly 50 years before 2017, which never had to be cancelled because of the use of unfair means or paper leaks, and which ensured the completion of all admissions by August 14, year upon year. There were widespread demands within the university for a return to the JNU entrance exam tradition for all levels of enrolment, given the presence of capacity, experience, and expertise in the university. In some public posturing, the Vice Chancellor critiqued the NTA’s multiple choice question format. Yet, the exam was not brought back home to JNU and remained in the format imposed by the NTA.
The NTA’s diktat
PhD admissions for the academic year 2022-2023 were only completed by mid-March 2023, after a full eight months’ delay. Meanwhile, in November 2022, the Gazette of India had notified the University Grants Commission (UGC) Regulations, 2022, as the rules by which universities in the country could admit students for PhD courses of study. These regulations returned to universities the right to conduct their own entrance exams. Faculty in several Central universities who had their own admission test had anticipated that because of these new regulations at least for the PhD admissions, they could revert to their own tried and tested entrance exams. However, this hope was belied, this time by the executive fiat of the NTA-friendly heads of their institutions. Riding roughshod over the Academic Council and the objections of students and teachers, the NTA was once again entrusted with the PhD entrance exam for JNU as part of a consortium of three other universities, including Delhi University and Jamia Millia Islamia.
In a meeting with the JNU Teachers’ Association on April 8, 2024, the JNU Vice Chancellor, Santishree D. Pandit, stated that this fealty to the NTA was demanded by the fact that the Ministry of Education has handed over all entrance exams to the NTA, and JNU was funded by them. This is a position that the Central government has itself denied in both the UGC Regulations, 2022, as well as its response to a Public Interest Litigation in the Delhi High Court on August 28, 2023. Right to Information queries have failed to turn up any contract that JNU may have signed with the NTA. It is not clear then why the JNU Vice Chancellor was one of the first Vice Chancellors to warmly embrace the UGC’s non-binding notice of March 28, 2024 (that stands in stark contravention to its own Regulations) that only the scores of the 2024 June UGC-NET exam would count for admission to this year’s PhD programmes, a decision for which no explanation has been recorded in the Commission’s minutes uploaded on the UGC website. In fact, even this decision is not explicitly recorded in the minutes. Such was the haste that without even the pretence of a mandate from its Academic Council, the JNU administration decided on April 26, 2024, to accept the scores of only the June 2024 UGC-NET exam as the basis for admissions to its PhD programmes.
Universities taken prisoner
In the last three years, the NTA has ensured that it has run the academic calendar of all the universities. The universities have been taken its prisoner via the particularly vigorous promotion of the NTA by the UGC, and particularly its Chairperson. No less complicit have been the Vice-Chancellors of many, if not all, Central universities, who have actively colluded with the suppression of scepticism regarding mode, format, and the concerns for exam security internal to their institutions, to ensure that the extra-legal diktats issued by the UGC Chairperson and the Commission are implemented in their universities. Any probe that examines the NTA must also examine this nexus between the UGC, the Vice-Chancellors of ‘prisoner’ universities, and the assault on university autonomy that the NTA regime represents. In particular, the UGC’s inexplicable insistence that only the June 2024 dates of its own UGC-NET exam will count, and its Chairperson’s announcement of the successful conduct of the exam hours before it was cancelled by the Ministry of Education, must be explained, if the full rot that has set in to the country’s higher education system is to be corrected. And if student confidence in the system is to be restored, the government must instruct university Vice-Chancellors to immediately convene their statutory bodies to initiate steps to ensure that PhD admissions are completed within the shortest time, in accordance with the processes laid out in their own Acts and Statutes and the UGC Regulations, 2022.
Ayesha Kidwai is Professor of Linguistics at Jawaharlal Nehru University and a Fellow of the British Academy since 2024.
