How To Revive Fading Glory Of Mumbai University 

Mahesh Vijapurkar

Mumbai University is one of the first three set up in the country, along with Chennai and Kolkata’s, all within a year or two of each other, in the mid-19th century. That does not make them ancient, but could be role models for other universities that came up later. But Mumbai’s is scarcely the one for it has badly floundered over time.

The students are stranded when their graduate results are not out but had planned to pursue studies elsewhere. The government is breathing down the university’s neck and the issue has figured in the legislature already. The biggest embarrassment is that faculties of other universities like Pune and Nagpur have been roped in to speed up the task though the syllabus there varies.

Once reputed for the kind of academics it fostered, the list of eminent students it produced, the line-up of vice chancellors who helmed it, the university has reached a stage when a hard look is required and the institution reinvented. At one point, while its affiliated colleges secured NAAC ratings, the university itself went without one.

Right now, it is convulsing like never before, unable to declare the results of all the examinations conducted for the academic year 2016-17 yet. The Chancellor, who is governor, worried, had set a deadline of July 31. And even if some results have been announced, they are for courses which have smaller number of students. A lot remains to be done to meet the deadline set about four weeks ago.

The students are stranded when their graduate results are not out but had planned to pursue studies elsewhere. The government is breathing down the university’s neck and the issue has figured in the legislature already. The biggest embarrassment is that faculties of other universities like Pune and Nagpur have been roped in to speed up the task though the syllabus there varies.

The irony is that this unprecedented delays should occur when the university switched to an online mode where papers are scanned and fed into computers for evaluation without the teachers having to gather at a central place, which is its campus. The introduction of technology, rather later despite an earlier policy decision, has been the trigger for the crisis. The solution is now the problem.

Not a day passes without at least one or two news outlets carrying the photograph of flashing the stock photograph of the Vice Chancellor, Sanjay Deshmukh. At least his one predecessor asking that he resign. Now college principals too have begun to voice that demand and it is now the Chancellor’s prerogative or Deshmukh’s own wisdom about his continuance in office.

The university is, however, not suddenly plunged into a crisis of lost public confidence but has been sliding towards it for over 15 years, if not more, by the issues that have surfaced. One was leakage of question papers, and then questions about the academic credentials of a VC, Rajan Welukar, appointed through what is designed to be a rigorous vetting process. Top positions remain vacant.

One VC, Bhalachandra Mungekar, now an MP, had even planned opening an overseas centre of the university because the premises in Dubai had ample parking space but a media exposure had stalled that. There has been the Tuglak-like element, if one could put it that way, in the management of the university. Welukar had wanted a convention centre when colleges do not have enough facilities.

It is not about what fate awaits Deshmukh but what is in store for the university itself, and thereby, the students. Maharashtra, it has to be noted, has a far higher access to higher education even before the private and deemed universities mushroomed. It cannot live on with the tag of a “former premier university”.