We have been witness to a decade-long deliberate programme of interventions intended to overhaul and corporatise the University. Under the new policy regime, Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) are no longer spaces that offer education as a necessary public good. Instead, they are increasingly used instrumentally and transactionally – where the public is now asked to hand over greater amounts of money for greater numbers of courses with no substantive course content.
Why give the actual and entire content in one go when you can monetise each part, hand it out in bits and pieces, and spread it out so thin that it barely has any nutritional value left?
This is what we have been given with the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 first, and now the new UGC Draft Regulations 2025. Along with other wholesale changes such as the gradual withdrawal of the UGC as a grant giving body, and the simultaneous introduction of the loan-giving Higher Education Funding Agency (HEFA), the education sector is now on the verge of a very sharp precipice, and poised for a steep fall.
We are now in the tenth year of these structural ‘reforms’, with the introduction of the long contested semester system, four year undergraduate programme (FYUP), choice based credit system (CBCS), and now, the NEP as its current iteration and apotheosis.
Each of these interventions have hacked away at our academic freedoms, our time for research and discussion, our rights as primary stakeholders, and has introduced increasingly diluted and vacuous courses through the perverted logic and logistics of administrative-corporate-digitised functioning, turning teaching into routine cranking for AI/digital assembly lines.
On January 6, 2025, UGC declared the 2025 Draft Regulations, which amount to a fresh assault on academic freedoms within Delhi University.
First, the post of the Vice Chancellor is now open to candidates from outside academia, and what has been vaguely termed ‘industry’, and thus stands immediately compromised. There is already much alarm over the dilution of qualifications for the post of the Vice Chancellor, where anyone with little educational qualifications can be brought in from the ‘industry’, which can translate to anyone being considered for the position regardless of their academic backgrounds.
Opening the path to further privatisation of the University
This also opens up the path to further privatisation of the University, which needs to be read along with clause 3.8 outlining ‘notable contributions’ as well.
Secondly, the fixing of a uniform composition of the search-cum-selection committee takes away from the letter and spirit of the founding Acts/Statutes of universities, plus also disregards the historical circumstances under which universities have been imagined and instituted.
In a three-member committee chaired by visitor/chancellor, veto power will always lie with the gubernatorial office – which is not an academic office. Plus it goes against the principle of institutional autonomy which VC recruitments are aimed to uphold.
Thirdly, under the pretence of making promotions easier and more flexible by removing the mandate of CARE-listed journal publications, what is being done is actually more arbitrary. Most teachers from humanities/social sciences will be adversely impacted and subjected to arbitrary scrutiny. Humanities teachers are now expected to develop teaching labs, startup businesses, or funded consultancy skills, while science and Mmthematics faculty are expected to link all their courses to ‘Indian knowledge systems’, rendering both farcical.
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Fourthly, faculty promotions at the assistant professor level are currently determined by a screening-cum- evaluation committee, which makes the process easier, more efficient and timely. The draft regulations make all stages of promotions incumbent on the convening of selection committees. This will further create backlogs and delay due promotions of early-career teaching staff.
Fifth, the bifurcation of service conditions into regulations and guidelines – which do not have equal legal validity or binding effect on institutions – will again create opportunities for arbitrary manipulation of service conditions by institutional admins.
Sixth, the most important questions around service conditions – like direct teaching workload – have been relegated to the guidelines. In fact, workload calculations have been left to the discretion of institutional management, which will again create all kinds of disparities across grades of teaching staff as well as institutions. Alongside this non-fixing of workload norms, it has however been maintained that teachers must clock eight-hour workdays and be physically present in the institution through all working hours.
How does research time for teaching staff feature within this mandate? If teachers have no fixed workload norms and must yet be present eight hours in a day, it seems neither teaching nor research is on the agenda of the UGC. This mandate must be entirely withdrawn, and direct teaching workload norms reinstated as before. None of this can be left to the will and whim of institutions – in which case, what does UGC even mean by ‘maintenance of standards’?
Making traditional classroom teaching completely irrelevant
Seventh, and the most appalling clause in the document, that of Section 3.8, under the “General conditions for recruitment and promotions” makes traditional classroom teaching completely irrelevant as a condition for all levels of recruitment and promotions.
At least four out of these nine “notable contributions” have been made mandatory for any kind of direct recruitment or promotion – none of which factors in the actual work of classroom teaching which keeps the institution alive and running.
Until now promotions have proceeded as a time bound process at the University, and any teacher would be eligible to be considered for promotions on completion of the requisite time in a particular post; and would be able to apply directly to particular posts with the requisite qualifications.
With the 2025 Draft Regulations however, teachers will be deprived of this right, and instead of being automatically considered for promotions shall now have to fulfil certain obligatory criteria – what is denoted as the nine ‘notable contributions’ required of teachers – as the mandatory condition for recruitment and promotions, with external fund raising, lab development, online content creation, community service, linking with startup businesses as primary criteria.
Not only does this take away the democratic structure of promotions, but also centralises power in one board to decide if these criteria have been satisfactorily fulfilled – in other words it makes the decision entirely interpretative and subjective.
Additionally, none of these is essential to the primary responsibilities of a teacher – so why must these be the “general condition” for recruitment or promotion? Clause 3.8 skews the entire recruitment/promotion process in favour of entrepreneurs and not teachers.
That Categories I and II of API/APAR templates have been scrapped in toto is further indication that teaching-learning-evaluation are being made completely irrelevant to recruitments and promotions.
A draconian move intended to suppress all democratic functioning within the University
Eighth, Clause 3.8 also has to be read along with Clause 11.0, which threatens punitive action against the teachers and the institution, in the event of “violations” of the UGC Provisions. These violations are generally stated, making them entirely subjective, open to interpretation, and especially coercive.
The clause states the following:
“ *11.0 Consequences of Violation of UGC Regulations*
If any HEI violates the provisions of these regulations, the Commission shall constitute an enquiry committee to look into the violations. If the violations are established by the enquiry committee set up by the Commission, the HEI shall be:—
(a) Debarred from participating in UGC schemes.
(b) Debarred from offering degree programmes.
(c) Debarred from offering ODL and online mode programmes.
(d) Removed from the list of HEIs maintained under Sections 2(f) and 12B of UGC Act 1956.
The HEI shall be subjected to one or more of the above actions.
Further, UGC may take additional punitive actions as per the decision of the Commission on a case-to-case basis. This is a radical departure from all previously existing norms, and claims to collegiality within HEIs.
Clause 12.0 concretises this further by stating that, “In the event of any conflict or inconsistency with respect to these regulations, the interpretation given by the Commission shall be final and binding”, thereby giving no opportunity to any aggrieved entities to submit their case for appeal.
As is evident, this is an extremely draconian and feudal move intended to suppress all democratic functioning within the University, and to grant absolute powers to a small minority of people. We have to remain collectively vigilant and resistant to these kinds of manoeuvres that intend to turn the University to personal fiefdoms and set us back in time to feudal mechanisms.
The UGC Draft Regulations must be resisted collectively, and in toto, in order to not only reclaim the democratic functioning of the University, but to proclaim that the first rights of the University belong to its primary stakeholders – its students and the teachers.
Sandhya Devesan is Assistant Professor, Department of English, and Convenor, Women’s Studies Centre, Jesus and Mary College, University of Delhi.
