DSE appointments: But who will guard the guardians?

By Rakesh Chaturvedi
But who will guard the guardians? The ancient Roman author Juvenal posed this question. In the context of a public university’s functioning, the essence of the question is: Who will enforce the rules that are in the best interests of a public university when its executive leadership, entrusted with that role, fails to do so? The recent fiasco in hiring of new faculty members at the Delhi School of Economics (DSE) prompts me to pose this question. But let me first set the institutional context.

Most public universities in India offer tenured academic positions. In an institutional setting where it cannot fire but only hire, the sole means available to a public university aspiring for high standards in research and education is hiring quality faculty. Faculty are the most important human and reputational capital of a university. In its capacity as the ultimate arbiter of the tenured positions, the Faculty Selection Committee is empowered as the quality control instrument of a university.

In an institutional setting with only tenured positions up in the market, the role of the selection committee as an effective gatekeeper is hard to overstate and a lot of social value ought to be placed on it. Consequently, for a public university, the composition of the committee, and the structure of voting rights within it, must be clearly specified and stand up to public scrutiny. Else, it is susceptible to manipulation.

The Delhi University’s Selection Committee comprises subject experts, who have the academic credentials and integrity to assess a faculty candidate on research and educational attainment, as well as some observers—members representing SC, ST, OBC, minorities, women, PWD and a visitor’s nominee. These observers may not be subject experts. In the committee constituted for DSE, there were five observers, and none of them was an economist. The role of observers, if they are not subject experts, is limited to ensuring that possible biases against candidates applying for reserved positions do not emerge.

The clear separation of functional roles has an equally clear implication for the assignment of voting rights, if there are any. I say this because the DU Regulations I could consult only specify the composition of the committee, not the structure of voting rights. This may be because the norm across global universities when it comes to academic hiring is to rely on the judgement of subject experts. Owing to their expertise, the views tend to be correlated rather than conflicted, and unanimity is not hard to achieve.

However, there is a possibility there exists a hard-to-find internal document with the provision that the majority makes the decisions. This almost seems right, until one remembers the composition of the committee and the separation of functional roles. If the observers are not subject experts, then they cannot claim or be given equal voting rights if the decision is to assess the academic credentials of a candidate in the subject. This principle implies a simple and sensible rule for a committee where observers are not subject experts—majority decision of selection committee, sans observers.

The outcome of the DSE committee is in clear violation of this principle. It is preposterous to have the observers, who are not the subject experts, assess the academic strength of faculty candidates, and worse still to enforce the observers’ decisions over the recommendations made by the subject experts. This is precisely what transpired in the recent round of hiring at the DSE. Offers were made to 14 candidates in one go, effectively increasing the strength of the department by a whopping 78%! What amounts to an egregious abuse of sound democratic principles, the views of the subject experts were ignored and the will of observers, who had no clue about the subject, and, hence, no business assessing candidates’ academic credentials, prevailed.

The consequences of this are ominous. It is likely to set in motion negative spillovers—the chilling effect on the incentives of bright economists in the coming decades to consider DSE as an option, apart from creating incentives for some current faculty to leave DSE. In a telling sign of collective frustration among the serving faculty, two of them resigned in quick succession from their role as head of the department of economics. The executive functionaries of the Delhi University, in subverting the subject experts’ recommendations, are in breach of the public trust reposed in them to uphold the standard of quality we demand of a public university. It speaks volumes about governance at Delhi University, an Institution-of-Eminence, when it makes a mockery of academic hiring by turning a selection committee into an election committee!

The observers on the DSE selection committee seem to have falsely assumed the mandate, the ability and the power to hire against all the positions from the current pool of candidates with no regards for academic credentials. That is a bad strategy in the academic labour market for tenured positions, one that is akin to buyer hoarding in commodity markets due to fears of an imminent lockdown. What opens up this bad strategy to legal scrutiny is when it is inflicted by the observers acting beyond their remit and their functional role.

Delhi School of Economics has been a premier institute for the longest time as its alumni have established a global footprint. While the government’s efforts in the direction of granting autonomy to universities and institutions will certainly improve the higher education ecosystem in India, it must not abdicate its oversight in instances where errors of commission by executive functionaries pose a threat to that very ecosystem the society wants to improve. Hence, the question: But who will guard the guardians?

Assistant professor, department of social sciences and humanities, Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology, Delhi. Views are personal