Delhi University’s Standing Committee for Academic Affairs will reconvene on May 6 to review curriculum for the seventh and eighth semesters for undergraduate courses, university officials said on Saturday.
The panel will review the proposed curriculum of at least 20 departments, which could not table their proposals during Friday’s meeting which went on till late in the night.
“The meeting went on till 11pm on Friday and was inconclusive. There will be another meeting on May 6 where syllabus of 20 or more departments will be reviewed. After that, it will depend upon the Academic Council to bring up larger debates about the syllabus,” the official added, asking not to be named.
Friday’s meeting was held to review draft syllabi for the seventh and eighth semesters of various undergraduate departments, marking a critical stage in finalising coursework for the university’s first four-year undergraduate batch under the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020, scheduled to begin in August. The syllabi for psychology and biochemistry, committee members said, were sent back for revision.
At least two committee officials confirmed that syllabi of departments of psychology, biochemistry, English, philosophy, Persian and Urdu were sent back to their respective departments for revision.
Several objections had been raised by the chair of the committee regarding the syllabus of psychology, which included topics like Israel-Palestine conflict, Kashmir and India’s North-East. Other units focusing on “minority stress theory,” “psychology of diversity,” and “dating apps” were also objected to by chair professor Shri Prakash Singh, who stressed that the course included “too much Western thought.” It was instead suggested that students study the Mahabharata and the Bhagavad Gita to better understand the “psychology of peace”.
Following this, Mamta Chaudary and Ramkishore Yadav, members of the Standing Committee and the Academic Council, submitted a note of action, alleging that the NEP is “causing dilution of academic standards”.
“Now that we have done three years of implementation of NEP, we strongly feel that despite the best of efforts of the teachers and the departments in preparing these high-quality syllabi, the delivery and pedagogy under the NEP framework is causing the dilution of our academic standards to the extent of undermining the image of our UG courses,” the note of action mentioned.
They further demanded to revive five lectures and one tutorial class with smaller tutorial groups, instead of three periods per week and one tutorial with larger group size per week. “Similar thing must be done with the lab periods and they should be of four hours in place of two hours,” the note added.
Rajesh Jha, former member of the Executive Council and professor at Rajdhani College, said “it concerning that questions were raised about the syllabi even after they were passed by the statutory bodies of each department.”
“The UG panel is asking to make syllabus of all departments uniform to fit the NEP framework. Each department has its own requirements and the faculty knows what is best,” he said.
To be sure, the standing committee can only make recommendations. The final approval rests with the academic council, which is set to meet on May 10.