The JNUTA claimed the administration unilaterally imposed a new rule for daily attendance for faculty. (Archive)The Jawaharlal Nehru University Teachers’ Association (JNUTA) Saturday said it had conducted a survey on daily attendance marking practices in 75 universities across 21 countries, and found only one university in Kuala Lumpur followed the practice.
“We wanted to explore if marking attendance is a practice followed for academic accountability in institutions of higher learning across the world. JNUTA, through its members, contacted colleagues working in universities/institutions to document the practices of academic accountability of faculty members working in universities across the world,” said JNUTA president Atul Sood.
“We got responses from colleagues at 75 premier and highly-ranked universities, spread across 21 countries. Almost all colleagues who responded expressed shock and outrage at the new attendance policy… and found it to be antithetical to the idea of a university fostering good teaching and research. Many argued that such a policy is only to establish a regime of surveillance in a university that has been noted for academic excellence. Only the University of Malaya, Kuala Lumpur, follows the procedure of recording faculty attendance,” he added.
As per their survey, only one other university — the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa — has a biometric system.
The JNUTA claimed the administration, “without any consultation with JNU’s statutory bodies, unilaterally imposed a new rule for daily attendance for faculty, starting with daily signing of an attendance register held by the school/centre office”.
“For marking attendance, the registers will soon be replaced by biometric devices. The administration has been coercing all faculty members to accept this system of control…,” the JNUTA claimed.
