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
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 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.
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 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.
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.
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