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DU teacher refuses award based on feedback from students

NEW DELHI: In a controversial move, the University of Delhi awarded 39 teachers for 'Teacher Excellence' at its 92nd Foundation Day celebrations on the basis of student feedback. The 40th candidate, Rudrashish Chakraborty of Kirori Mal College's English department, refused to accept. In his letter to the Students' Empowerment Committee declining the award, Chakraborty—who's also a member of DU's academic council—has questioned both the mechanism and the intention behind the exercise of gathering feedback. 

"I am appalled to know from my students that they were made to answer questions on 'good' and 'bad' teachers. I feel such questions make the feedback mechanism utterly farcical and dangerous....such prejudiced feedback can reduce the entire process into cronyism and populism," writes Chakraborty in his letter. He adds that such measures by the university are ultimately divisive and will "vitiate...the academic environment of the university." 

Chakraborty, who's been staunchly against the four-year undergraduate programme introduced in 2013, also questions the logic of seeking feedback only from first-year students, arguing that that's too small a sample. "Any feedback mechanism for teachers needs to include maximum number of students from all years in order to become comprehensive and holistic," he writes adding that he doesn't teach a foundation course (the award was originally instituted for innovation in FC teaching). He further writes that he believes the award is meant to "promote" FYUP and he doesn't deserve it as all he's done in the last academic year is "desperately complete the syllabus within a reduced time-frame of a semester." 

He finishes off his list of reasons with this: "Just because I have benefitted today from such a flawed mechanism cannot make me oblivious to its dangerous possibilities for the teaching profession—especially in terms of promoting favouritism and persecution. The job of feedback is to ensure an all-round excellence for the entire teaching-learning process and not to promote exclusivity and isolation among the teaching community." 

Chakraborty had been informed of his nomination on phone last week; he sent an email turning it down on Tuesday.

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