“Much credit goes to its first Vice Chancellor, G Parthasarathi, a quintessential intellectual and diplomat, whose vision is reflected in JNU’s basic intellectual structure and all its academic programmes. He encouraged its culture of interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary studies”
The Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) was established with the mandate that it should not be ‘just another university’ with conventional academic streams, but be a font of new thought, constantly bring in new areas of study and research, unbridled by segmentation, and be accessible to students from all strata of society. The University has fulfilled the mandate through its seamless approach to academics, the pursuit of excellence—it is graded among the topmost universities by both NAAC and India Today—and has come to be known for its openness of thought and attitude—even bordering on the radical, among both students and faculty. Long associated with the University, its present Vice Chancellor Prof. Sudhir K Sopory traces the path of the JNU through the years, underpinned by the unique philosophy of its working, as he takes it forward
The National Assessment and Accreditation Council awarded Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) 3.9 out of 4, the highest grade. India Today ranked it second among the central universities. Located over 1000 acres of a rocky part of South Delhi, its lush green campus touches the northernmost reaches of the Aravalli Hills. JNU, an example of the new red-brick universities built in the mid-20th century, is known for its great collection of books in its nine-storey library.
The home page of the JNU website quotes Jawaharlal Nehru thus: “A University stands for humanism. For tolerance, for reason, for the adventure of ideas and for the search of truth. It stands for the onward march of the human race towards ever higher objectives. If the Universities discharge their duties adequately, then it is well with the Nation and the People.”
The Bill for the establishment of Jawaharlal Nehru University was placed in the Rajya Sabha on September 1, 1965 by the then Education Minister, Mr M.C. Chagla. During the discussion that followed, MP Bhupesh Gupta voiced the opinion that this should not be yet another university. New faculties should be created, including scientific socialism, and that this university should foster noble ideas and provide accessibility to students from the weaker sections of society. The JNU Bill was passed in the Lok Sabha on 16th November 1966 and the JNU Act came into force on April 22,1969.
The University has been located, since 1976 on a campus that is spread over approximately 1000 acres on the Aravalli range in New Delhi, which is now a green and open area, dotted by academic buildings, hostels, and residences for faculty and staff. The University has over 7,300 students who come from all parts of the country and abroad, and from all sections of society. There are over 500 faculty members in addition to administrative staff who, along with the students, live on the campus and interact and mingle with each other, irrespective of social or professional status.
The living ambience and social milieu of the campus is also reflected in an integrated, interdisciplinary approach in teaching and research. There is freedom to define and design course content or start new courses. Research themes evolve with new developments in the area and the interface between different areas of study. Everyone at the university competes with himself/herself to excel in his/her own field of research. JNU is academically and socially a vibrant place where all have space to express their views.
The ten schools and four special centres of the university produce high-quality research publications, books, working papers and M.Phil and PhD theses. JNU alumni occupy important positions in academics, government, the private sector. Recently, JNU was ranked top university in the country by the NAAC.
‘The collegiality and interdisciplinarity,along with semester system, which was developed here, made it a unique institution’
JNU has produced many distinguished leaders in various fields. Some prominent personalities include Ali Zeidan (Prime Minister of Libya), P Sainath (journalist), Muzaffar Alam (George V. Bobrinsky Professor of History, University of Chicago, US), Abhijit Banerjee (Ford Foundation Professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, US), Baburam Bhattarai (former PM of Nepal), Prakash Karat (former General Secretary, CPI-M politburo), Lalit Mansingh (Dean of Foreign Service Institute, Delhi); Digvijay Singh (former Minister of State for Foreign Affairs), DP Tripathi (NCP’s Member of Rajya Sabha), Nirmala Sitharaman (Minister of State - Independent Charge for Commerce & Industry and Minister of State for Finance & Corporate Affairs and Rajya Sabha member), Sitaram Yechuri (General Secretary, CPI-M), Yogendra Yadav (ex-leader of Aam Aadmi Party), Ajit Seth (former Cabinet Secretary), S Jaishankar (Foreign Secretary), to name just a few.
Its Vice-Chancellor Professor Sudhir K Sopory does not need any introduction. He has been associated with JNU for over the last four decades and has contributed to its well-being at different levels. A distinguished scientist, he is recognised the world over as an authority on plant molecular biology with over 220 research publications, 13 edited books and over 50 chapters in books.
Winner of several awards including the Padma Shri, the CSIR Bhatnagar Award, Chakravarty Award, Birbal Sahni Award and Godnev Award Lecture of Belarus Academy of Sciences, to mention just a few, Prof. Sopory has travelled widely and participated in numerous national and international conferences. An avid researcher and acclaimed teacher, he has a visionary approach and clear understanding of JNU’s open culture,which has often turned controversial. He will retire soon, but his tenure will be remembered as an eventful one. In a candid interview with Corporate Citizen, the Vice Chancellor speaks on a wide range of issues. Excerpts:
When JNU was started, one key component of its Act was that it doesn’t have to be like any other university. That was the idea with which it began. The second aim was that it will meet the social demands of the society, giving fair representation to people from different backgrounds, have enough space for students from lower-in-come backgrounds and mechanisms to support them in every possible way. The next element was its interdisciplinary approach. For instance, its founders didn’t believe in classical segregation of departments such as botany/zoology/physics/ chemistry/economics, and so on.
Much credit for this goes to its first Vice Chancellor, G Parthasarathi, a quintessential intellectual and diplomat, whose vision is reflected in JNU’s basic intellectual structure and all its academic programmes. He encouraged its culture of interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary studies. Taking advantage of certain provisions of its Act, he picked up the best minds of the country for faculty, something that is not possible today because you’ve to go through a specific system. That’s how we had stalwarts from different areas: in history we had Prof. Sarvepalli Gopal, son of former President Radhakrishnan, and Prof. Bipin Chandra; in economics, Prof. Amit Bhaduri and such other notable scholars. They created the School of Social Sciences, Centre for Economic Policy and Centre for Social Systems. Mind you, it’s not the Sociology department. The same is the case with the Centre of Political Studies. As for the School of International Studies (SIS), it owes its lasting debt only to Mr. Parthasarathi.
Yes, it is JNU’s oldest school. It was created in 1955, and merged with the JNU in 1970 after dropping the prefix “Indian” from its name.It was actually a think tank of the government at that time. It attracts the best minds from all over for its MA Politics (International Studies) course. Its M.Phil/PhD programme is also very competitive as it offers the best faculty for understanding the changing dynamics of international relations. They look at global politics in totality and there are different centres—European, South Asian, American and so on—which offer area/region specific studies from different perspectives. I’ve asked them to start another MA programme and they will be starting it from the next session.
We believe it clears all confusion as your creativity often requires interdisciplinary knowledge and we’ve been able to sustain this thinking quite successfully’
The basic thought behind each one of them was to follow an interdisciplinary approach. With the School of Life Sciences (SLS), established in 1970, India’s first, the idea was not to have separate departments of botany/zoology/biochemistry/micro-biology but to have an integrated school to look at things in totality and accordingly select people with that perspective. The same was true for the School of Physical Sciences where you’re taught interdisciplinary areas interfacing physics, chemistry and mathematics. All such boundaries were broken for the first time in this country. That intellect — that new line of thinking — really brought research to a different level.
On the contrary, we believe it clears all confusion as your creativity often requires interdisciplinary knowledge and we’ve been able to sustain this thinking quite successfully. But the University of Hyderabad that was created immediately after JNU, and which also had its SLS, failed to sustain this methodology. Over the years, they had to separate it into individual departments of plant sciences, zoology, botany and the rest. Incidentally, we also have a unique sharing concept by which if we’ve some equipment, we keep it at one place so that we share it with everybody. So, the collegiality and interdisciplinarity, along with semester system, which was developed here, made it a unique institution. Many of these things like internal examination system and trusting the faculty were revolutionary concepts at that time.The architect of all this thinking was, of course, our first VC, Mr. Parthasarathi. When SLS started,I was among the first few faculty members then,and when new ideas like neurobiology came up, we said, we should start neurobiology. So, thanks to him, freedom to start new areas, new syllabi,and even new teaching programmes was there for all—be it the School of Biotechnology/School of Computer and Systems Sciences/School of Environmental Sciences/School of Languages/School of Arts & Aesthetics or the rest.
That’s correct. It’s a very important component of JNU’s culture because here you also learn outside the classrooms. We don’t restrict learning to one -hour classes. Students are encouraged to have free interaction with the faculty and then there is also a tradition of after-dinner talks in hostels, where they invite somebody for a talk. So students of science will listen to what is happening in political science or other social sciences and vice versa. The idea is to have an overall development of the mind. After I joined, I encouraged dialogue within transdisciplinary clusters. So, this interaction is not just interdisciplinary or within the social sciences but now social science people talk to pure science people. I’ve also created a forum for mutual learning where students from across different fields sit in the library every Saturday and discuss a topic. I try to attend them as VC, because that way I can encourage them.
In JNU, we’ve been able to fill up more than 200 faculty members in the last three years. Many of them came from abroad with good degrees from the best institutions like Caltech and MIT. Some also joined from Japan and Germany while others came from within the country but with valuable experience. So, I would say, most of our faculty is of a very high level.
At the School of Arts and Aesthetics, which has come up recently, we’ve started three new MA courses in the theoretical and critical study of cinematic, visual and performing arts. It’s probably the only school in the country where these disciplines are offered in one integrated programme that allows students to understand the individual arts in the broader context of history, sociology,politics, semiotics, gender and cultural studies, apart from being able to integrate the study of one art form with others. The three streams of study offered at the school are Visual Studies, Theatre & Performance Studies and Cinema Studies.
Our courses are research-based but we don’t make films, whereas FTII gives practical training in film making. Here students study film appreciation from a critical angle with history and other issues on a global scale.
This is the only school that offers undergraduate courses at several centres. It is unique because it offers studies of different languages, right from the undergraduate to PhD level. Besides offering language courses in Arabic, Chinese, French, German, Russian, Spanish, Japanese, Korean, Persian and other such languages, it also helps SIS because if you want to be an expert on the politics of an area, you must know its language and culture. In fact, we have recently started teaching many other languages too like Pushto, Hebrew, Latin, Bahasa Indonesia, Italian, Portuguese, Mongolian and such others. I also brought faculty members to teach one of the African languages. So we’re expanding on this base— Greek is being taught as an additional language. So is Turkish. Most of our students get jobs in MNCs where they need language experts. Only a few days back we started a Centre for Indian Languages too. Though at present, it offers programmes in English, Hindi, Urdu, Tamil and Bangla, very soon we’re going to start the Kannada Chair. The Government of Karnataka has given the money for it. Other languages are in the pipeline.
After I returned to JNU, modernisation was a major challenge. It became my first priority. We started with online admissions. We made student registration of students a one-window clearance. The selection procedure for admissions too has gone online. We conduct entrance exams in 70 places in the country. More than 1,00,000 students apply and we take only 1,500 to 1,800 students, incorporating the government’s reservation policy. We have gone paperless with e-office functioning, so there is a lot of transparency in the system. If a faculty is on leave, the information comes to me on my mobile. If there is an urgent file to be attended to, it’ll come on my mobile immediately, everything is linked.
JNU has now made it to the top 100 in Asia and BRICS countries but we’re struggling when it comes to Europe and America. However, some of our departments have made it to the top 100 in their list as well. This year, it was our Centre for the Study of Social Systems. Last year the Geography and English departments made it. Every year one or two departments and centres have been coming in the top 100 rankings but yes, in the totality of things, we are still struggling. Maybe not having an undergraduate programme goes against us, and that we don’t have many foreign faculty and students. Our industry linkages and the generation of money from industrial resources is also very weak. Different rankings have different parameters and for each parameter, they give certain marks. They also have a column for perception. We don’t get marks for certain things because we don’t have them. However, we can beat all American universities if they consider parameters of input and output costs — how much money is invested in our Indian universities and how much our output — probably we’ll show a better performance than any American university. Their spending and per capita cost per student is much, much higher. Also, our policy of social inclusion is not counted at all. We take students from all social and regional backgrounds. It takes great effort to bring them on a par with others. Many top universities do not have such policies. We have physically challenged students doing PhD. Recently, I handed over a doctorate degree to one such student whose lower limbs were of no use and his speech was slurred. Despite that, he completed his doctorate at JNU. We don’t get any marks on these social components, yet we compete with the best in the world.
Research work that come out of science schools get published in some of the big international journals. Based on the H-index, the Department of Science & Technology has increased our funding — on the basis of our citations and publications. In the arts stream, if someone works on cinema studies, there are very few journals of that nature. In economics, there are good journals but for the kind of research done here on subjects like the caste system, or inclusion-exclusion, there are no journals of that rank. Plus, the kind of books we publish don’t attract any citation. There is no mechanism by which you can rate whether a book has made an impact or not. Most of our social science international study groups publish a lot of books but they’re not counted. Articles do appear in some of the best journals but compared to science journals they are not codified in terms of impact and other such parameters.
At individual laboratory level, our facilities are at par. The research work done even in JNU or the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) or many of the CSIR labs is of a very high quality. But it’s also a question of numbers. A small place like New York may have 90 different places where research in an area happens, whereas we may not have it at 90 places throughout India. Moreover, the efficiency with which they work at the front end of research is admirable. Some of the laboratories here are catching up but we have to think of novel ways to make the best contribution possible. Our students who go from our institutions are the real contributors even in the US, Germany, etc. So, the difference lies in the environment, the support system and the funding they get there. Although the government has increased funding in Science & Technology, considering the size of our country, it’s still very, very low.
Infrastructure requires money but our budget has remained as it was in the 11th Plan. There has been no increase. A lot of money goes on requirements for electricity, water and general maintenance, but despite that we have been able to get a ‘university of potential excellence’ ranking from the UGC which gave us around Rs 60 crore for research work for four years. We have a very advanced instrumentation facility on the campus which is not only used by JNU faculty and students but even by students from outside institutes. That’s functional 24 hours. From that perspective, our facilities are good. We have put in a lot of effort into our library which is probably the best, with all the resources available to anybody, anywhere, any time. Search data and everything else is available. Our researches are digitized. About 22,000 theses that JNU publishes are digitised and on our website. As for other instruments and equipment, we have the best,and procure more from our research grants, not UGC grants.
Every faculty has his own research grants which come from various sources like the Department of Biotechnology, Department of Science & Technology, Department of Atomic Energy and the Council for Scientific & Industrial Research. We also get some international grants. We also have recognition for most of our departments from the UGC, from the Department of Advanced Recognition of Centres for Excellence. With government funding, we’ve also started a disaster research programme recently for the Ministry of Home Affairs. We get money from all these sources, but infrastructure is lacking in terms of maintenance of buildings and hostels, the creation of new housing for faculty, new hostels for students. We don’t get funds for this. In fact, under this Plan, I thought about building a hostel with the funding, but we are awaiting permission from the Ministry of Environment.
Industry linkages with our university systems are very weak. The industry doesn’t know what’s happening in our educational institutions and we do not have any idea about what the industry wants.
We need to organise joint workshops. Also, we can put up a website at the UGC where we can post what we have. The industry can look at this site and show their interest. We need mentors who support originality, new thinking and who can tell us where we can link with the industry. Otherwise most of our research would remain in publications and at the laboratory level.
This is being tested. President Pranab Mukherjee is very keen on this idea. Many seminars have been held, but unless industry leaders have a stake in our research, things won’t move and investments won’t come.The government has started the Department of Biotechnology where industry-academia joint research projects are now being supported even if it’s a concept they want to test. The government gives incentives to the industry by which they get loans at very low interest rates. Research grants will also be given to universities. So the government will fund both partners. These are also supported by the CSIR.
Earlier, there used to be placement cells in different schools, not at the university level. Our School of Computer Sciences has a placement cell where people would come and students would get jobs. The same is true for the School of Languages. My broader idea is that we must empower our students with all the knowledge and skills, and I’m sure they can compete. When I came, I found many students who came from different backgrounds having problems with language. So, we started a Language Empowerment Cell where people could learn how to speak and write and the right way of academic writing. It helped them with softskills like English-speaking. Then there was a demand from some North-East students that they wanted to learn Hindi, so we started that. Some students wanted help in Sanskrit, because they wanted to go to East Asian countries to study scriptures there. We have a Centre for Philosophy where we started a master’s programme.There were 600 applications for ten places. Th is year we started the Sanskrit programme. Twenty students joined, to get a working knowledge of the language and get a peep into Sanskrit literature. We started the Mathematics Computation Empowerment cell so that students can develop analytical ability. I feel if you give them the best access and empower them with knowledge in their own and other domains, they ought to be able to compete. We need not ensure jobs for everybody. They should compete in the world outside.
One is to sustain our academic excellence in each field. Second, all faculty members and students to give their best. It’s not that the university can’t be run by the excellence of 70 percent while 30 percent don’t function. It has to be 100 percent. That’s a challenge. Every faculty, every student must perform to the best of his/her ability. The purpose for which you are here—to get the best teaching and best research—nothing short of that should be your goal. Third, I want sustained and continued effort to upgrade our infrastructure in terms of facilities for all students and faculty: personal facilities like good housing and other amenities, and academic facilities so there is no cause for excuse that I couldn’t give my best because of this or that. We love to live on excuses but those bottlenecks need to be removed from the system.
‘The difference lies in the environment, the support system and the funding they get there. Although the government has increased funding in Science & Technology, considering the size of our country, it’s still very low’
Not many. We have a trend that quite a few of them, especially those in the master’s programme or early M.Phil programme, want to go for IAS, etc., because here the atmosphere is such that they get exposed to discussions in different areas. But then these people come into our national sys- tem, so nothing wrong with that. After all, people who have to get into the IAS, IPS, IFS, etc. must come from our universities. You can’t pick them up from the streets. If some JNU-ites go into IAS every year, it’s good for the country. The best part of JNU is that our library is open 24 hours. So, you can see students sitting and reading till late night. But for those who do extra reading, like the IAS-wallas, we have an extra hall, called Dholpur House, where they come and sit and through mutual discussions learn how to crack the civil service exams.
JNU students land up in different places. Some of them go into the bureaucracy—the IAS, etc. Many from the language department get jobs in MNCs for their foreign language expertise. Some join educational institutions. Many form their own NGOs and go to villages to help in critical areas. Some opt for government organisations. A few also join politics. Many from the science stream go abroad for post-doctoral fellowship. But they also come back.
If there are some leads, then we can take them forward, but IITs are much better equipped for this task than us as they have great industry link-ages. Our potential is of a different kind. JNU is more involved with research in social sciences than with high-end scientific and technical research.
Skill development is the buzzword these days because our industry says the products of our education system are non-employable. But those jobs are meant for polytechnics/ITIs who provide low-level skill development. Higher education institutions like JNU have been created to bring out leaders in their own fields. So, for us, it means providing intellectual capital to the country.
In terms of academic programmes, it provides opportunity for students for their overall development in their own field. They get the best exposure to the subject through the best faculty in the best courses. What we sometimes call aberrations in the university, are but realities outside. Also, JNU is a place where people come even from the lowest strata of society; we support these economically weaker students. Of course, they will have to live with the image of the university— perceived by some as anti-national—which is to-tally baseless because a JNU-ite looks from both angles. I was recently told by a Vice Chancellor that many people appear for their interviews, but they end up taking students only from JNU. In the bureaucracy, they say with pride that this person is from JNU. But in other circles, it may not be the same. They will have to live with this fact. This university has a lot to offer for nation building, producing leaders in different areas. I hope we will be able to sustain this culture of JNU.
BY PRADEEP MATHUR
