Guest post by PRATIKSHA BAXI and UMESH O

Is it really surprising that Jawaharlal Nehru University has implemented the controversial UGC guidelines on the Career Advancement Scheme (CAS) with effect from its date of announcement in 2008 (rather than date of notification in 2010, thereby benefiting Associate Professors rather than Assistant Professors? Is it really shocking that JNU did not register protest with the UGC about the case of CAS, dubbed by some as the Comic and Sad Guidelines? Perhaps not?

This scheme does not merely impact all academics already hired, especially at the rank of lecturers/assistant professors, but will also impact all those who will apply for the many vacancies now advertised, especially senior doctoral students, now looking for teaching jobs.

However there has been little concern about how does a scheme, which prolongs promotions for Assistant Professors from 5 years to 12 years (9 odd years in JNU), impact junior academics?

Approximately 117 academics are assistant professors,approximately 24% of the JNU faculty. It is a University, which is shaped by the traditions and opinions of the Professors and Associate Professors, be it in their disavowal of academic hierarchies or acceptance of new academic hierarchies espoused by the UGC’s CAS guidelines.

This numerical narrative plots the lack of dissent to the CAS and its point system as a story of these interest groups. But perhaps, this would be a narrow viewpoint, even though such interest groups have dominated most of the committees, teachers unions or representations to the administration on this issue.

Perhaps this is a University that forgets to look at the future: the rank of the younger must grow, for a University to grow: what do we, as students, as future teachers, look forward to?

It forgets to ask what is the sociological impact of increasing the number of years (rather than enhancing number of publications) it takes an assistant professor to be promoted to associate professor especially in a research based post graduate University?

Why did JNU not wish for Assistant Professors to research and publish more to become Associate Professors, rather than mechanically dictate that they must serve the University for a decade before they become eligible for the position of Associate Professor?

Are there any further implications for women academics?

Let us look at how many women academics are hired in JNU. Of the total 472number of academics hired in JNU, 145 are women, as per figures available on the JNU website.

So if we calculate the percentage of women who are at the lowest level of the academic hierarchy, in relation to the number of women academics in the University, we see that approximately 32%women are Assistant Professors. In contrast, approximately 21% male Assistant Professors (in relation to the total number of male faculty) have been hired in JNU.

While the hiring of women academics in JNU, a mere 30%, is frankly abysmal, it is even more shocking that an impact assessment on women at the lowest level of academic hierarchy has not been conducted by the University, before bringing in a radically new set of guidelines on promotions which clearly disadvantage all Assistant Professors. Unlike Delhi University, which has a higher percentage of women teachers at approximately 38%, JNU has not conducted a gender audit for us to further complicate this picture.

Hence, women rather than men are more likely to crowd the lower rungs of the academic hierarchy and feel the impact of these guidelines far more. But then women are generally thought of supplementing a family income rather than treating them as household heads.

The UGC does not think this would be a serious problem in an academia where fewer women find careers than men as the JNU figures reveal.

It is hard to imagine such an impact in the absence of information on age and marital status of Assistant Professors but it would not be inaccurate to assume that an assistant professor with a PhD would possibly get a job in his or her late 20s or 30s. And be up for promotion in his or her late 30s or early 40s. This means that these Assistant Professors must depend on their families, spouses or partners to support or raise a family. A single mother, for instance, would find it impossible to raise a child on the salary of an Assistant Professor without promotion in sight for 9-12 years. Nor would a single person be able to adopt a child without sufficient income.

Perhaps our University administrationdoes not imagine promotions have different implications for men and women; and whetherby disallowing faster promotions based on meritthey harm women academicians, single people in alternate relationships or those supporting other dependents?

Compounding this is the scenario where Assistant Professors are supposed to work the maximum in the academic hierarchy–a mandatory 16 hours–as compared to the 10 hours to be clocked by the Professors. We all know that we carry work home, during weekends and work through over vacations too: and it is, of course, the “customary right” of Assistant Professors to build institutions.

Like all academics, at all rungs, Assistant Professors too now must fetch points by organising and attending conferences, of course international conferences fetch more points!

However, only Assistant Professors are expected to do refresher and orientation courses, again offered by the UGC, at each level of promotion. There are no exemptions to such courses, which is another grim story.

In JNU, for instance, approximately 92% teachers have a PhD Degree. Yet we are expected to get certification from UGC that we know what we teach, even if we invent new fields of research and teaching in our everyday lives as academics in JNU. It does not matter if the UGC remains blissfully ignorant of all the new interdisciplinary innovations we have inaugurated in our Universities.

There are three such levels of promotion with corresponding refresher/orientation courses at each level. It is assumed that Assistant Professors have the least domain knowledge. They are not expected to do much research, since they should have a minimum of three publications in 12 years! Any additional publications would of course fetch points – more points if academics publish in international journals rather than national journals.

Our professorial rank did not accept the view that the point system is a catalogue of systemic decimation of the meaning of academic work. It values quantity, instead of quality. It no longer distinguishes between a perishable publication and a perennial publication. It counts and accounts. The more international, the more points – it does not matter how ethnocentric such a viewpoint is.

If this were not all, all academics must also count their scientific temper, secular spirit,commitment to the small family norm or national integration, as per the UGC dictates.

We no longer mind offering our personal and political lives to certifying that we contribute to the small family norm by not bearing children or that we are committed to a scientific temper when we publish our research.

We no longer mind making lists of journals and grading them – it doesn’t matter if there is no criteria for such ranking – as long as we can get the process of promotions and appointments moving. It does not matter if no University abroad compiles such lists or that there is research to show that such a cataloguing kills interdisciplinary research by re-entrenching the canon.

It is no longer an issue that academic autonomy is sacrificed to the state’s imposition of funding conditionalities (stated or unstated) – nor is it an issue that we, as academics, allow a funding body to determine the modalities of assessing our academic work. Our Universities have written obituaries to the very idea of a university as autonomous, and to academics, as critics of state power.

Instead of insisting on creatively devising methods of self-regulation that improve academic standards and yet are equitable, we have adopted a system, which is not implementable in any sensible way. Few want to talk about the principle of such audit cultures, now presented as a fait accompli.

(Pratiksha Baxi is  Assistant Professor, Centre for the Study of Law and  Governance, Jawaharlal Nehru University. Umesh O is a Doctoral Student at Centre for the Study of Law and Governance, Jawaharlal Nehru University.)