Delhi suicide raises alarm over mass layoffs of ad hoc faculty

The suicide of an ad hoc lecturer let go by one of India’s most prestigious universities has caused alarm over mass layoffs of non-permanent faculty, many of whom have taught at the university for years.

According to national media, Samarveer Singh, a 33-year-old philosophy lecturer on a temporary contract, took his life in April after he was made redundant by Delhi University (DU). The institution has over recent months ended the contracts of more than 300 ad hoc teachers and is now on a recruitment drive intended to hire more permanent employees, according to reports.

Shobhit Mahajan, a professor of astrophysics at Delhi, said that a particularly bad appointments backlog at the institution – which is one of India’s largest, with 80 colleges and about 700,000 students in total – has resulted in an acute situation.

“In DU, there were no permanent appointments for over a decade and more in some of its constituent colleges,” he said.

While a particular factor at Delhi, temporary employment is commonplace in India’s public university system, which includes upwards of 50 central universities and hundreds of state institutions, he said.

“In many state universities…there is a problem with permanent appointments since these are usually centralised for the whole state, which means a lot more bureaucracy and procedural issues,” Professor Mahajan said.

For displaced ad hoc lecturers, employment prospects at other public universities are slim, and teachers are “left to fend for themselves”, he said.

Times Higher Education has contacted Delhi University for comment. A registrar at the university previously told Indian media that there was no provision under India’s regulations for the absorption of ad hoc teachers.

Those who are made redundant are unlikely to rebuild careers in academia, although they may go on to teach in smaller private universities or in cram schools that prepare students for India’s hypercompetitive university entrance exams, he noted. “They will, of course, not get paid as much, nor will they have the prestige, but it is possibly better than starving.”

Apoorvanand, a Hindi professor at Delhi University, worried about the rapid review process preceding layoffs.

Describing the current approach at many colleges – in which expert panels take just a few minutes to assess ad hoc faculty – as a “farce”, he said it was common knowledge that the list of permanent appointees was largely predetermined ahead of time.

“If it’s only two to three minutes, it hardly matters who’s asking the questions,” he said, adding, “the list is known to those appearing for interviews”.

While he sympathised with the plight of ad hoc instructors, he cautioned that not all of them had been well suited for their jobs.

In many cases, he said, the “loyalty” of candidates took precedence over who was best qualified for the job, with principals or teachers’ associations pulling for politically like-minded employees to be hired.

He urged greater scrutiny of recruitment decisions. “It’s for the college to explain: why did you continue to employ them for years if they were not very capable? If you found them fit to teach for eight to 10 years, why is it that now you don’t find them fit for a permanent position?”

Professor Apoorvanand said political parties, which have a strong presence on India’s campuses, viewed academic vacancies as a “golden opportunity” to get loyal supporters into teaching posts in many colleges. He warned that, if successful, such a large-scale push could lead to disastrous consequences for the institution.

pola.lem@timeshighereducation.com