On November 4, the Left Front government-appointed governing body of Presidency College (estb. 1817) surprised West Bengal’s academic community by unanimously adopting a resolution requesting the state government to immediately upgrade the college to the status of a full-fledged university. The proposal isn’t new. It was first mooted in 1972 — before the Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPM) dominated Left Front was voted to power in West Bengal in 1977. Re-elected five times subsequently, the Left Front has ruled in Writers Building, Kolkata uninterrup-tedly for 32 years since.
Throughout this period, the Left Front has consistently vetoed every proposal to upgrade the status of this showpiece college of the University of Calcutta. Any attempt to loosen government control of Presidency has been rejected by the commissars of the CPM in particular. Hence the buzz in academia over the CPM-packed governing board raising the status upgradation issue at this time when the CPM and Left Front government are under pressure from the Mamata Banerjee-led Trinamool Congress to set a date for early assembly elections.
Specifically, the governing body wants the college to be upgraded to the status of a ‘Unitary University’, i.e a university which doesn’t affiliate other colleges or institutions. Two major examples of unitary universities are Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi and Jadavpur, Kolkata. However affiliating and non-affiliating universities enjoy equal academic and financial freedom, provided the state assembly or Parliament has enacted legislation conferring necessary legal authority.
Quite obviously the Presidency upgradation demand has received the prior clearance of the CPM politbureau. Because suddenly the state government seems to be lending the proposal a sympathetic ear. Comments the state’s higher education minister Sudarshan Roy Chowdhury: “Let the proposal come to us. We will do anything for the betterment of Presidency.” Reports emanating from within his ministry indicate that a Bill will be tabled in the state legislature in its 2009-10 winter session beginning November 30.
Yet politically neutral academics in Kolkata wonder whether grant of university status to Presidency College at this late stage might do more harm than good. They fear that during the past three decades too many CPM party faithfuls have infiltrated the Presidency faculty. Consequently, teaching standards have fallen so drastically that the college is not qualified to run credible postgrad and Ph D progra-mmes. “There’s no point in granting autonomous or university status to Presidency because a large number within the 204 strong faculty isn’t fit to teach in a university,” says an alumnus and teacher.
Available data highlight the grim reality of Presidency’s falling academic standards. This year 15 students from the college failed the BA/B.Sc (Honours) final examination. In 2008, ten students had failed the undergraduate examination, while in 2007 the number of failures was seven.
Against this backdrop the political interpretation of the Left Front’s unexpected decision to upgrade Presidency College is that this is part of its strategy to recover “political ground” recently lost to Mamata Banerjee’s Trinamool Congress. But it’s a complicated scenario. Presidency’s 204 teachers and 195 non-teaching staff, recruited as state government employees, are unlikely to agree to losing this status which will happen if Presidency is upgraded to a university, while the CPM politiburo in Alimuddin Street has always wanted to control Presidency. Moreover Calcutta University’s power lobby has always been dead against giving up control over its most respected affiliated college.
On the other hand West Bengal’s ‘chief minister-in-waiting’ Mamata Bannerjee also wants more “space” in the education sector where the CPM controls teachers and non-teaching unions, both solid vote banks. At The Telegraph-Calcutta Club National Debate on November 7, she questioned why Presidency had not been granted autonomy all these years.
Mamata’s comments have raised hopes among those batting for Presidency that if the winds of change blowing in Bengal propel her to power, she will unshackle this fallen-from-grace college from the clutches of the state government.
Sujoy Gupta (Kolkata)