Semester System at University Level: Exploring The Future Dynamics1

- Anupam Hazra 2
The higher education industry in India is under a dynamic change. University Grants Commission - the apex body for higher education is making various efforts beginning from Semester System to Revision of Old curriculum for the benefit of students and to provide world class education matching the global curriculum format. The UGC guidelines have been dispatched to all universities saying that the traditional format of examination at the end of the session suffers from several limitations while the Western semester-system encourages and supports faster learning opportunities. Further, it has the ability to accommodate diverse choices that students may like to have, the guidelines explain. For long, educational institutions have had the format of academic session, spread over 10 to 12 months. The semester system goes far beyond a time format. It enlarges curricular space and encourages and supports accelerated learning opportunities for all concerned. Further, it has the ability to accommodate diverse choices that dynamic and motivated students may like to have. By and large, semester system is perceived to be better than the annual system in institutions of higher learning since the students could be kept busy all through the year. The advantage of the semester system over the end-of-the-year examination method is that it is rigorous. Assignments have to be completed within a stipulated time frame, which helps. In the end-of-the-year examination module, students tend to take their courses a little lightly. There are several professional and technical institutions which have adopted semester system. There are working satisfactorily and producing quality students of international stature and competitiveness. For example, the IITs have been experimenting with the semester since 1953 with the inception of IIT Kharagpur. The IIT has implemented the semester and credit system well. It works well, there is no fixed syllabus and the teacher decides on the syllabus. It is an internal system and there are no external examiners. All students pass as they have to get pass about 180 credits out of 200 in 4 years of B Tech. Given this, it was felt that semester system is made mandatory for all the institutions of higher education in India, and all the universities were asked to switch over to the semester system. Along with the semester system an option of choice-based credit system has been launched for providing a range of opportunities to the students in the country. At the same time, It was also realised that the semester system affords more flexibility to the student. One can take courses across the board and can take twice as many courses over an entire year compared to the more traditional system. Then if one is seriously interested in something one can take additional courses in the area. Where the credit system is concerned, again one can take credits by combining unique combinations. For example, if a student is studying music, she can also take a class in business for general credit. In other words it makes education more broad-based. On the other hand, the introduction of a semester system will facilitate international collaboration, with universities following a similar system abroad. There are already plans afoot to float what we might call a new kind of Special Educational Zones (SEZs), which would essentially constitute self-contained university townships hosting collaborative enterprises between Indian and foreign universities. The latter will invest massively in setting up infrastructure and facilities in these SEZs - which would of course be World Class. These investments will then be recouped many times over, through exorbitant fees, in the name of transfer of knowledge. The transfer involved here will be highly specific, focussing on disciplines that have direct and immediate applicability in commerce and industry, and that will therefore ensure that students have an employment-friendly market to walk into, after their studies. This, of course, would be further incentive to students, to invest heavily in the hopes of getting lucrative jobs with prestigious companies. In turn, the very character and substance of higher education in the country will inevitably change towards greater and greater specialisation, especially in those disciplines with proven marketability. (In fact, with or without collaboration, private universities and colleges already increasingly reflect this change, as they compete in the new educational marketplace.) This will necessarily be at the expense of those fields of knowledge (like philosophy, literature, fine arts, history, sociology and political science) so essential to analysing and understanding our world in all its variety, but that may not have immediate value in the market. As the students for these disciplines become fewer and fewer, research in these areas too will gradually lose interest and funding, and will dry up. These discipline will however, continue to remain well-funded abroad, and in the not too distant future we will find ourselves turning to the locations of these disciplines abroad as the main sources of our knowledge of our world; alternatively, these disciplines will come more and more under state control, and precisely because they will be numerically and substantially thoroughly attenuated, what the state presents as the contents of these disciplines will become the basis of our understanding of our world. It would not be excessive to say then, that this will presage the dawn of either a new kind of Orientalism or of a new kind of Oriental despotism or worse, some horror born from the marriage of the two. Now, generally speaking, such collaborative enterprises are hard to manage with state-run universities, primarily because of the extensive bureaucracies that have to be dealt with in them: the main beneficiaries, to begin with, would be the private universities. This means that the majority of universities and colleges in the country, which remain state-funded, would not be usable for such collaborations. More unappealingly, they would continue to foster those disciplines that do not have much immediate marketability, and consequently remain outside the direct political control of the ruling elite indeed, they would
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This Article has been published as lead article in University News Vol. 49 (22). pp.1. [ISSN:0566-2257] The Author is Assistant Professor in Department of Social Work at Assam (Central) University, Silchar, Assam; E-mail: anupam688@yahoo.co.in

continue to be the source of critical voice and mobilisation against such control. The solution, of course, is to grant them autonomy and/or to privatise them forcing them to turn to the market to survive, but also allowing them to justify clamping down on anything that might discourage market interest. Incidentally, both privatisation and autonomisation are existing recommendations of the Knowledge Commission (KC). But they are not easy to bring about: the political fallout of directly doing so would be too dangerous for the ruling elite to take on. It is necessary for these to appear as necessities, organically evolved options that will arise from specific critical circumstances and appear to be inevitable solutions to those crises. One needs to bring about conditions that appear to make privatisation or at least autonomisation (or the granting of autonomy) an inevitable option. The semester system comes in here as a handy tool to bring about these critical circumstances. Not only will it facilitate collaborations, as we have already noted; but in order to make this a truly successful venture for the ruling elite, it will substantially facilitate the dismantling of existing university and college structures of affiliation and organisation. Firstly, as we have noted earlier, it will tame both, the student and teaching communities, as well as the enormous non-teaching workforce of the university system: they will simply have no time to engage politically with any issue confronting them. Secondly, in large universities like DU, the system will fail and this is part of the larger plan. The failure will be blamed not on the system, but on the size of the university, and there will be an immediate reason to downsize it by carving it up into smaller universities and by dispensing with select colleges through autonomisation. (Here again, the KCs recommendations are direct and specific, and these actions would be exactly to this end.) Not only will this destroy the teachers associations of these universities perceived, as now, to be the main obstacle to the implementation of these programmes it will also produce autonomous colleges that will be free (as in free market) to adopt their own curricula and course options, provided they follow the uniform schedule of the semester system. Thirdly, as these colleges and perhaps the universities too begin to move towards financial autonomy (through seeking private investments as well as through restructuring fees), which will be encouraged by the State (again, following on specific recommendations by the KC) their administrative hold on their constituencies will also gradually tighten. These institutions will thus be perfectly transformed, from black-holes into which huge government subsidies disappear, into efficient profit-making commercial enterprises that will survive or triumph through competition in the new educational market. They will churn out ambitious and career-minded professionals, automatons trained through the semester system to focus only on working and achieving targets set for them, intent solely on getting ahead in the world of commerce, finance and industry, and completely without the intellectual or political resources to question or challenge the lives that have been planned for them. The higher educational system that had for decades served to whatever small extent, and however imperfectly as a vehicle for upward mobility for the vast masses of the poor of the country, will finally become the almost sole domain of those sections that will be able to afford it. No doubt, as the KC recommends, there will continue to be affirmative action policies, by way of competitive scholarships and quotas in clearly demarcated areas of knowledge (and not in crucial fields like medicine, biotechnology or nuclear science). But these will be designed as must already be evident to generate competition in the aspirants to higher learning from among these sections of society; it will cull out the best, the most productive and talented, the ones most likely to serve this political economic dispensation well, and leave the rest to their own fates. The classic condition of all forms of capitalism the creation of a trained, surplus labour force at the mercy of the demands of the market which in so many ways has already taken root in the country, will inexorably set in, becoming near impossible to dislodge, and definitel y impossible to rectify from positions within it. And given that the right to strike work, as a legitimate mechanism for collective bargaining, is itself coming under attack yet another sign of the new tendencies of the ruling dispensations there is little hope for either avoiding or resisting this future that is almost upon the present generation. It is no ones case that the current system is perfect, or that its flaws do not need to be urgently remedied. In fact, a considered critique of the existing system must be undertaken, and the analyses brought to bear on any proposals to change it. But any proposal that involves the creation of mindless automatons, slaves to the (global) market and to the tyrannies of governance, must be strongly and relentlessly resisted. One of the greatest advantages of the annual mode is that it permits students the leeway to grow wholly, in all their dimensions as individuals and many generations have benefited from it, and many generations of excellent scholars, writers, journalists, artists, scientists, innovators, administrators, and intellectuals of every hue, have been produced by it. The crucial time required to engage with and think through the many complex dimensions of the world around him/her, that the student meets for the first time as an adult, when he/she enters the college/university system, is one of the biggest gifts of the annual mode, whatever else its flaws. Whatever educational reform comes in, this time, and this opportunity to prepare the self to meet the world wholly, must not be lost. The implementation of the semester system is guaranteed to do precisely that. The battle against that implementation is therefore not just that of the teachers, but of all who have benefited from this system, and who wish their children and future generations to grow up and into a world that will not be a mind-control collar around their necks. It is not just a battle for the teachers, students and other constituencies of the university system to engage in, but for all of civil society.