The recently concluded year marked the bicentenary of the Hindoo College, Kolkata, which was renamed Presidency College in 1855. The college, affiliated with the University of Calcutta, was accorded the status of an independent university in 2010. The sesquicentennial celebrations of Presidency University (PU), which started on January 5, 2017, with a lecture by Prof. Jean Tirole, chairperson, board of the Jean-Jacques Laffont Foundation at the Toulouse School of Economics, and winner of the Nobel Prize in economic sciences, 2014, ended on January 20 this year, the day PU celebrates its Founders Day. On the same day, the Presidency Mentor Group (PMG) chairperson Prof. Sugata Bose requested West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee to dissolve the group as it has served its purpose.

The mentor group, comprising eminent academics including Prof. Amartya Sen, Isher Judge Ahluwalia, D. Balasubramanian, Abhijit Banerjee, Sabyasachi Bhattacharya, Swapan Chakravorty, Sukanta Chaudhuri, Nayanjot Lahiri, Rahul Mukerjee, Himadri Pakrasi, and Ashoke Sen, was constituted by the chief minister in 2011 to provide recommendations and a roadmap to re-establish Presidency University as a pre-eminent institution of undergrad and postgraduate learning. In its sixth report presented to the chief minister on January 20, the PMG proposed its own dissolution.

Now that the governing board and other statutory bodies of the university are functioning well, our work is done. The governing board is the highest decision making body of the varsity and the mentor group can only advise and recommend. We have handed over detailed reports to the chief minister in which we have provided a long-term path of progress for Presidency University, said Bose.

However, although the PMG members believe their work is done, some academics wonder whether the mentors have fully discharged their responsibility of assessing the implementation of their recommendations, whether they have studied the impact — if any — of their recommendations or have they left their job unfinished. These questions are doing the rounds in West Bengals academia.

Finding satisfactory answers to these questions is important because PU is Kolkata’s showpiece university with a stirring history. It was established by a group of 20 eminent scholars led by the legendary social reformer Raja Ram Mohan Roy (1772-1833). It played a major role in shaping the intellectual and socio-political fabric of Bengal, having produced notable leaders and avant garde thinkers such as Bankim Chandra Chatterjee, Swami Vivekananda, Subhash Chandra Bose, Rajendra Prasad, Anandaram Barooah, Humayun Kabir, Satyendra Nath Bose, Meghnad Saha, Jibananda Das, Satyajit Ray, Amartya Sen and Gayatri Spivak, who endowed it with a rich heritage of excellence in the liberal arts and sciences.

But its a telling commentary on the extent to which PU has fallen in public esteem during the past 70 years that in the past two years, this pioneer varsity has been unable to find students to fill its classrooms, unprecedented for the 200-year-old institution. Last year, 300 undergraduate and postgraduate seats remained vacant.
Informed academics in the state feel that other than overhauling its physical infrastructure, PU has barely accomplished anything since it was conferred university status in 2011. Many of them also believe the PMG has glossed over its responsibility under the Presidency University (Amendment) Act, 2013 of monitoring the implementation of its recommendations. In its very first report presented to the state government in August 2011, the PMG had called for the appointment of eminent teachers from within the country and abroad as PU faculty. But several teachers who had joined the university in the first phase of its overhaul process have put in their papers either because of better pay elsewhere or in protest against the university’s lackadaisical administration.
More specifically, the PMG had suggested that the five distinguished chair professors be given an opportunity to provide academic leadership to the university. But PU has only one distinguished chair professor, Swapan Chakravorty. Sabyasachi Bhattacharya, who had signed up with PU as a distinguished chair professor in July 2015, quit over lack of academic independence barely nine months into the appointment.

The small and shrinking minority of genuine academics in the eastern seaboard state of West Bengal (pop.91 million) believe the downward descent of PU is of a piece with the gradually deteriorating condition of education in the state. The general consensus is that in its bid to control the states education institutions, the Mamata Banerjee-led Trinamool Congress (TMC) government, now in its second term in office since 2016, is more focused on transforming all higher education institutions statewide into TMC bastions following the foolish example of the CPM (Communist Party of India-Marxist)-led Left Front government which ruled West Bengal for a record 34 years (1977-2011), during which it destroyed its rich academic heritage.

In this control-and-command environment, free-thinking academics who had looked for a renaissance of higher education with the rout of the CPM in the 2011 assembly election, have quit in disgust and disappointment. Its a sad state of affairs.

Baishali Mukherjee (Kolkata)