Gender Bender

Unionised teachers, lousy management, and unruly students have all but led to a demise of quality higher education in Marxist-ruled West Bengal. And nemesis finally caught up with Presidency College, the Calcutta-based struggling centre of excellence, last week. The alleged molestation of a girl by a senior teacher and an agitation by a small group of students to roll back the price of inexpensive admission forms lit the fuse. It led to some nasty muck-raking, a shoddy cover-up attempt by a typically slothful administration, a night-long students' gherao of the principal, a six-hour blockade of the grimy potholed street on which the college is located and finally a desperate nine-hour shutdown of the college.

This is a fall from grace for the 182-year-old college that has produced some of the country's finest leaders, economists, scientists, writers and artists. The college today is a pale shadow of its glorious past: the government happily packs the 17 departments with sub-par teachers and bans rock shows in the college festival, infrastructure remains primitive, thugs from the neighbourhood invade the campus after dark and a section of its 1,800 students routinely disturb classes on the flimsiest of pretexts. Only a handful of dedicated teachers struggle hard to keep up the standards.

On July 27, a second-year postgraduate student of zoology was allegedly molested by Dilip Kumar Chakraborty, an entomology professor. The girl, in her complaint to the administration, charged that the 58-year-old teacher attempted to molest her when she went to fetch some books from an almirah in his cubicle. A livid Chakraborty, however, says that he was just helping out the girl student with old drawing books, and that she was seated opposite him in the cubicle all the time. I am 100 per cent innocent, he says. This is a conspiracy by some teachers to malign me. Interestingly, Chakraborty belongs to the cpi(m)-backed West Bengal Government College Teachers Association (wbgcta), which is busy these days flouting a University Grants Commission (ugc) diktat to spend 40 hours a week on the campus, including 16 hours of teaching.

The college administration, allege students, attempted a cover-up by trying to coax the girl into giving up entomology as a special paper so that she did not have to interact with Chakraborty again. A tumultuous week followed the incident,students boycotted classes during the time,before the government set up a two-member committee to probe the incident. Says a college official: Action will surely be taken on the basis of the inquiry report.

But will the action ever be enough? Sexual harassment is a festering problem nationwide. Yet, only one institution in India,New Delhi's Jawaharlal Nehru University,can claim to have a mechanism explicitly defined for the purpose. jnu set up a Gender Sensitisation Committee (gsc) recently to prevent sexual harassment on the campus. It didn't happen overnight. Following a Supreme Court order in August 1997, the ugc directed all Central universities to take concrete steps to prevent sexual harassment. jnu decided to respond but a debate over what the gsc's composition should be held up its formation for two years. Says Rekha Vaidyarajan, gsc chairperson: It obviously wasn't top priority.

The jnu committee has already chalked out its plans to sensitise the students, faculty members, the staff and even visitors to the university's newly-evolved policy against sexual harassment. It has been decided to conduct interviews with prospective volunteers who will then spread the message on the campus. Says Lotika Sarkar, consultant, women development studies, who was part of a four-member committee that drafted the rules of procedure for the committee: For the gsc to be successful, there has to be cooperation from all quarters. Similar mechanisms should come up everywhere.

But despite the formation of the gsc, all does not seem to be well with jnu yet. A student who was rusticated last year for two terms on a charge of sexual harassment is seeking readmission after securing a clean chit from vice-chancellor Asis Dutta. Asks Vijoo Krishnan of the jnu Students' Union: On what basis did the vice-chancellor pardon the errant student? We are going to launch an agitation.

Sexual harassment on campus, however, isn't an issue that stray agitations like the one in Presidency College can wish away. What is needed is a concerted effort. A page out of the jnu book might be in order for all institutions around the country.