Post-Apocalyptic Fatigue or Intimations of Impending Doom? A Professor on DU's State of Affairs

Two of the texts I had to teach in recent years as a teacher of English in Delhi University – excerpts from the Mahabharata in Indian Classical Literature and Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot in the Twentieth Century British Poetry and Drama course – seemed to present the pendulum-like predicament of an undergraduate teacher most strikingly.

Beckett’s Waiting for Godot is the most ‘barbaric’ of plays: written in the aftermath of the second World War, the play captures Europe’s struggle with language like the struggle of the 5th century CE Romans with the “ba ba ba” language (hence ‘barbaric’) of those who made their empire fall.

Fatigue, boredom, cluelessness and the taxing need to start over knowing that all considered civilisational assets were actually terrible liabilities – all rhyme pretty well with the condition of a teacher in the post-Covid, generative AI, generational-communication-rupture givens.

Just as the two year-long Covid institutional closure fast-forwarded technological integration, perhaps by a decade or so, it also allowed a break in the received wisdom of middle class households: that you have got to go to college. Instead of redefining themselves, universities went in directions that would eventually support a move away from universities to institutes: of MBAisation, bureaucratisation and vocationalisation.

If there was a philosophy era (natural philosophy/human philosophy) and a sciences phase (human, social and natural sciences) in suffixing university departments, today we seem to go through a  managerial turn – an MBAisation of all disciplines in their presentation: key takeaways, USPs, sales pitches, bullet points, SWOT analyses and so on. This process reformulated the student as a consumer who needs to be made happy, and thus their choice became central in the National Educational Policy (NEP).

There is no gainsaying the need to get jobs after studying a course, but learning is a bit like the healing of a broken bone: time does the work. You can’t just press the accelerator and get in the skills, the perspective and the growth. Addressing the crisis of depleting student interest through advocacy for short vocational, certificate courses has got a good deal of acceptability.

The regulatory agencies decided to go further down their path of bad faith: every college activity has to be documented (geo-tagged photos, attendance lists of participants and detailed reports to be uploaded by teachers!). Why can’t teachers teach more hours, publish more, bring in more research grants and implement reforms as dictated without asking the why of these exercises? You could almost hear the question blowing in the wind.

Also read: A University That Punishes Dissent

The ongoing generational conflict where the value systems of the teachers and students don’t align is the next part of this situation. They don’t watch the same movies, connect with the same reels, laugh at the same jokes or use the same terms. Students' dreams of going abroad also has to do with the distress they feel in a space whose social values make them claustrophobic.

The internet and AI have made a lot of things, previously taken for granted, defunct: a teacher with accumulated information becomes superfluous given that students can Google anything, even while the class is on; take-home assignments have the easy tendency to become ChatGPT prompts; and memorising and writing skills might be replaced by editing and curating skills, but our system is yet to get its head around that.

Well, none of this is new. Pandemics, generational conflicts and technological leaps aren’t inventions of our century. As clueless and tired as we might feel, there are ways to engage in this phase if we are ready to acknowledge the new changed givens, listen to each other in earnest and find ways for AI technology to collaborate with us rather than fall prey to it. Universities can continue to house the dreams of a tomorrow that hands haven’t started building…

But thoughts on the future swing me off to the second book I mentioned in the beginning: the Mahabharata.

Though the Kurukshetra war starts only in the sixth parva of the Mahabharata, from the second parva, the Sabhaparva onwards, the text carries a sense of impending doom: the sense that whatever you do, the war and its ultimate annihilation cannot be stopped comes around over and over again. The teaching around those gloomy predictions in the post-NEP Delhi University and its four-year undergraduate programme (FYUP)-related promises felt eerily self-referential.

Under the programme, the traditional three-year undergraduate course has been extended to four years, while students are given the option to exit after one year (with a certificate), after two years (with a diploma), after three years (with a degree) and after four years (a degree with a research specialisation).

The increase in the number of courses, the decrease in the number of teaching hours available, the doubling of tutorial size and the addition of another layer of internal assessment have all weakened the quality of education, but nothing will beat fourth year students coming in  – on August 1st, 2025 – to colleges that have had no new classrooms built and no extra teachers hired. It is like Delhi University's leadership is organising a huge feast inviting tens of thousands of students; it is just that there are no arrangements made!

The United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government was saved by Smriti Irani of the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) in 2014 when she revoked Delhi University’s FYUP (otherwise this crisis would have been a UPA legacy!). But there's no such luck for the NDA this time around as there is no government change, ensuring our slide into the nightmarish reality of the programme. The only way to make this work was to allot more funds to education for building rooms and hiring teachers.

Working in shifts is a way of making the FYUP work without building more classrooms, and if teachers are made to teach more hours, then these become the only options for disaster management. What happens to students who come from faraway places, how do students spend time with their seniors and juniors and improve their interpersonal and social skills, and how good can teacher engagement be are all questions that would remain.

One single agency that needs to be credited with ruining students' college lives and inventing a no-vacation system in education is the National Testing Agency (NTA), which is now in charge of administering the Central University Entrance Test (CUET). Alongside exhausting all possible ways of malfunctioning in conducting exams such as the NEET, the NTA not publishing the CUET result in time has caused semesters to be staggered, timetables to be messy and college life to be disorienting.

We, the central university faculty community, don't have the courage that Alakh Pandey of ‘Physics Wallah’ does to challenge the NTA, and (also teaching without much of a break and grappling with all this!) we are a tired lot.

Also read: The Quiet Dismantling of Liberal Education at Delhi University

In addition, Delhi University also got rid of one of the stronger systems it had: ad hoc teachers who were paid at par with entry-level permanent staff, given vacation salary and had their experience counted. The guest faculty system that has come in now has teachers who are paid by the hour – half of what permanents get paid – don’t get vacation salary (effectively they are paid for eight months) and their teaching experience doesn’t count.

This means that all the checking of internal assessments the guest faculty do, all the meetings they attend and all the conversations they have outside the teaching hour is unpaid labour. Some excellent process of incubation this must be! At the same time, they are made to live precarious lives: they cannot open their mouths against any administration lest they lose their jobs. This cancelling of basic human rights and governance by way of threats is deeply unethical and terrible for academic ambiance.

There were two main things all parties were careful to avoid in the 2025 assembly election campaign: Delhi's pollution and the state that Delhi University and thus Delhi’s higher education has been driven into.

I don’t want to blame anyone. It is just a lot of work, and who has the energy for all of this in the middle of trying to survive? Studying/working in a languishing university, like living in a polluted city, can become a bad habit and we do get used to it.

Perhaps the endgame is to get rid of the centralising presence of a university and set colleges “free”, and the NEP already points towards that. But that process can’t be induced by making affiliated colleges fed up, inventing pointless rituals and initiating impractical reforms for their own sake.

Teachers feel drained out and atomised; academic councils and executive councils seem callous and cynically complicit; students are at the receiving end of this mishap (though one must add that students in their earnest search and sincere approach, often bail us teachers out and continue to make sense of the classroom not because but in spite of the system); parents don’t know because there seems to be no public conversation on this.

If it took 40 years for us to truly understand the potential of starting an institute like IIT Kharagpur, witnessing its vital role in the formation of a knowledge economy, it will take a couple of decades by the time we realise the hollowness we are now in the process of evacuating ourselves into.

We have two options: till such time we are able to, we can operate in the remnants of a dead star's light; or hold honest, ethically oriented, inclusive conversations that seek to rebuild universities in our new paradigms. If we choose the latter path, it has to start by acknowledging that we do have a problem at hand.

N.P. Ashley teaches English at St Stephen’s College, Delhi.

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