There are no ‘great’ institutions; instead, there are only conditions that allow or disallow institutions to function according to their raison d’etre (the very reason for their being).The daily ways in which the citizen experiences the state follow from this: when the vast majority of (state) institutions are forced to perish or function as fuzzy manifestations of bureaucratic will (or despotic whim), the few that do their jobs with occasional regularity become ‘great’.And when the state’s bulldozers finally arrive to raze these remaining few, we retreat into the space of folklore. Our lament about how the ‘great’ universities and ‘premier’ colleges are being wrenched hollow by the powers that be, contains a painful acknowledgment of the decades-long slow poisoning of the ‘not-so-great’. The state university sector and its vast undergrowth of affiliated colleges bear the fatal symptoms of this calculated tragedy. Borrowing from Bill Readings’ book The University in Ruins, it is ironic that ‘excellence’ becomes an instrument of self-reflection only when surrounded by the vastness of destruction.Affiliation and autonomyIt is true that the coordinated attacks on public-funded institutions like Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) or the Universities of Delhi (DU) or Hyderabad (UoH) have attracted a degree of popular attention, because they were simultaneously branded by the government’s own ranking frameworks (for example, the National Institutional Ranking Framework [NIRF]) and accreditation agencies (like National Assessment and Accreditation Council [NAAC]) as the ‘best’ in the country. The government and its detractors both came to agree on one point: that the ‘best’ must be the cause for exclusive and immediate concern.But behind this clamour for a signifying order of ‘prominence’ – parading, in the state’s reform-vocabulary, as ‘performance’ – a script was being readied for a more total dismantling of the sector. At the peak of the pandemic, in July 2020, the script was released in the form of a new National Education Policy (NEP) 2020.Building on the recommendations of a committee tasked with the framing of the policy – successively known as the Kasturirangan committee – the NEP 2020 suggested a phasing out of the affiliated college sector over the next 15 years. And for this purpose, it reinstated a model of ‘graded autonomy’ – following which the total number of higher education institutions had to be reduced to one-fourth of its current size, and the remaining infrastructures re-arranged into three ‘types’.The third and last ‘type’ – called ‘autonomous degree-granting colleges’ – is what the affiliated colleges were to be dissolved and clustered wholesale into, subject to a maximum count of 10,000.Also read: ‘Ad-hoc’ Teachers at Delhi University: From the Frying Pan into the FireHigher education, for the huge bulk of India’s youth who ever get a taste of it, is limited to a college degree. They either drop out in the struggle for it, or lack the resources and social opportunities to venture any further into a life of research or advanced academic careers.The fortunes of this most populous undergraduate college sector are pre-empted by the draft policy, in a concluding addendum – where these 10,000 degree-granting institutions are assured only half the additional finances earmarked for 300 ‘best’ research universities of the first type.‘Reforming’ DU: A brief historical detourMore than 80 colleges of the University of Delhi have currently been piloted into creating a blueprint for how the affiliated college ‘takeover’ might be managed with minimum news and maximum confusion. We will only lose the plot, if we read the narrative references as stringing a story of the decline of a ‘great’ university. Instead, it might be useful to see how ‘greatness’ is cobbled as a smokescreen for techniques of structural capture. This is exactly why and how DU has been used as an experimental laboratory for academic ‘reform’, since the introduction of the semester system in undergraduate calendars in 2010. Whether it be the subsequent vocationalisation of curricula in the name of ‘employability’, or an extra fourth year of undergraduate teaching in the excuse of multiple exit options, or the illusion of student ‘choice’ in the Choice Based Credit System (CBCS) – the ‘affiliated college’ architecture of DU has been the most opportune testing-ground for policy trials and errors.The present moment is a culmination of that long legacy, in the light of the NEP’s proposed 15-year merger plan for undergraduate colleges. Piece the recent measures back into the puzzle, and you shall have the whole recipe:Enter a centralised Common University Entrance Test (CUET) in the online mode, which claims to give equal access and a level-playing field to students of all states and state educational boards. Students can choose from infinitely more ‘options’, while institutions must witness exponential attritions through an endlessly drawn-out admissions process. Even as the process went on for nearly six months, final statistics suggest that nearly one-tenth of the cumulative seat strength has remained vacant. A massive private coaching-racket for CUET aspirants has been spawned in the process, often in collusion with local college administrations and contractually employed faculty.Next, assure the students for whom the opportunity costs of moving to Delhi for an undergraduate degree are too forbidding, that there are more ‘equalising’ alternatives still. What if the CUET has failed? There is the Academic Bank of Credit (ABC), a digital platform that allows students enrolled in any regional college in any part of the country to credit courses piecemeal from colleges of the University of Delhi – and they won’t even need to physically attend classes for it.To that effect, lump the colleges of DU into five geographic clusters and urge them to transition the ‘multidisciplinary’ components of their new curriculum – namely, Skill Enhancement Courses (SECs) like “Political Leadership and Communication” and Value Added Courses (VAC) like “Art of Being Happy” or “Fit India” or “Swachh Bharat” – into digital classrooms. Obviously, the cluster hub does not have classrooms big enough to accommodate students from the twelve or fifteen ‘network colleges’, plus the ones waiting in the wings to remotely log in to the ‘great’ experience of Delhi University from, say, a West Medinipur district. The strategic placement of VAC classes across colleges on Saturdays is an insidious move towards their eventual digital destination.Finally, triple the class size of practical and tutorial sessions to reduce teaching workload. This would create more space for teachers to offer ‘value added’ online certificate courses, over and above credit hours mandated by the curriculum.Greatness and the everyday: Ad hoc chroniclesThe structural dismantling of a ‘great’ university requires, as I have insisted, a careful and detailed sabotaging of the conditions of its everyday functioning. And that is not possible till a pliant teaching-force – depending for its appointment and advancement on the will (and charity) of a political class – is turned into a gallery of mute witnesses or active collaborators or, at best, noisy cheerleaders.The large-scale displacement of ‘ad hoc’ teachers in the several colleges of DU is precisely geared towards that end. Terminating service contracts of teachers who have, for decades, been the substance of its everyday ‘work’ of classroom encounters is the surest means of hitting at structures of institutional operation. Most of those who have been rendered jobless overnight have given all or half of their working lives to building their employer-institutions, in classrooms and college libraries and examination halls and evaluation centres and extra-curricular societies. In living the uncertainty of ‘ad hoc’ employment, renewable after every four months, many a research fellowship has not been availed, many a research paper not written, many a family wedding missed or a death unmourned, and many a spine has been lost never to be recovered. In being made institutionally redundant and irrelevant, the displaced ‘ad hoc’ teacher is warned that even not speaking up is not enough – not anymore. The successfully feted teacher – in this NEP-sponsored theatre of phasing out affiliated colleges – is one who applauds the script of her own disappearance.Joining in the chorus stands a teachers’ association, that shape-shifts into the ruling party, the college administration and the government’s proxy all at once.Interview ‘findings’Let me end with an anecdote around how such teachers are chosen (and interviewed). It is a pity that a non-existent clause of confidentiality is often used to not speak of what happens inside interview rooms and how selection committees conduct interview proceedings behind closed doors. All our public critiques of appointment-fixing are most often limited to procedural lapses, and rarely build on an archive of the most violent (and yet most commonly shared) humiliations and traumas.Also read: Why DU Selected Only 25 PhD Candidates for 30 Vacant Seats in the History DepartmentLast month, I walked into one such interview room in the University of Delhi’s Vice-Regal Lodge. The hallowed Department of English was conducting its first round of the interview process for Assistant Professor posts – where, as a tediously long email communication warranted beforehand, candidates were supposed to present their research and teaching work in a few PPT slides. We had all gone prepared, with our presentation files pre-submitted and pre-loaded on a computer left in the interview room. [I don’t usually understand the ‘point’ or ‘power’ in Power Point presentations, so I had to spend some precious time training myself in the visual aesthetics of effective bullet-point articulation.] But, at what passed for the interview, I was asked not to refer to the presentation at all.A thoroughgoing political screening followed, where the (ideological) ‘findings’ of my research had to be rehearsed for the audience. Not a single questioner – all five of them, men – waited for an answer, before pronouncing on my work, my education and my ‘deserving’. For this initial ‘presentation’ round, the chair of the assessment committee was one whose own research ‘findings’, I later discovered, are on regular display in RSS mouthpieces Panchjanya and Organiser. Five or seven minutes into the assault, he gestured at me to exit the room while I was still in the middle of a sentence.Whose confidence, whose interest? I recounted this episode not in order to provoke emotional effusions of sympathy or solidarity from like-minded colleagues. Instead, what we need is for all of us – ‘like-minded colleagues’ – to come out and speak of the bullying that both interviewees and heads of college departments (sitting on hostile selection committees) are subjected to on either side of the interview table. There is nothing confidential about our ‘experience’ of an interview, legally or otherwise. Selection committees are aware and even scared of this, which is perhaps why all candidates at the afore-mentioned DU interview were required to surrender their mobile phones before entering the presentation room.No law, and no term of our employment contract, can hold us guilty of owning our experience and using it as an archive to resist an enforced silence. If interview scores might be accessed through RTIs, they are effectively public processes that the public has the right to know of. Otherwise, ‘great’ public universities will only continue to be chipped away by the secret force of their structures.Debaditya Bhattacharya teaches literature at Kazi Nazrul University, Asansol. He researches on the idea of the university, and has been engaged in public conversations and debates around the NEP 2020.