The more we indulge in analyzing the situations our country is undergoing, the more disturbing are the conversations that I end up having with my academic peers. A recent cause of this uneasiness has been the dark days that Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS), Guwahati is seeing. It was on April 1 when the students’ union released a statement of standing in solidarity with their 14 teaching staff members in a boycott against the ongoing admission process for the new academic year scheduled from April 1 to April 4.
The boycott is in line with the cause of 14 faculty members asking for longer contractual tenures as opposed to the one year contract offered by the institute. The 14 faculty members, who impulsed the strike, shared with the students their stand by explaining that in a meeting held in February with the deputy director (in-charge), deans of schools and chairs of various centres of the campus. It was agreed, then, that it was important for the faulty to stay for the maintenance of the excellence of the institute.
There was an expected response from TISS Mumbai for resolving the situation. In an answer to the protests by the faculty as well as the students, a notice was sent by the registrar ordering the students to call off the protests, or, “the institution will be taking appropriate actions as deemed fit.”
If the incident is seen, not as a chronology, but as a theory, it can be figured out that the problem lies in the practice of the institution of hiring faculty on contractual basis in the first place. In such a contractual work, the institute (employer) holds the power in deciding the norms of the contract. But if the nature of such a mechanism is to be scrutinized under a crucial domain of education, then I won’t refrain from doing it with the lenses of labour informality.
The ongoing fight in TISS Guwahati is not merely about the extension of the contracts, but also about the working conditions of the faculties, due to which many faculty members have left the institute in the past. It is a serious concern of the absence of formalization of work in an academic space, which is not only limited to the careers of the faculty but those of the students too.
Rapport building is not an easy process between students and teachers, which is under serious threat with such shortly tenured contracts of the teachers. Moreover, such an unstable career journey puts together an almost nullified work experience. It has been seen that the faculties who had quit the job from TISS Guwahati have been hired in worse working conditions and are inadequately paid.
TISS is a prestigious academic institute, which has acquired a reputation for the best of social workers it has produced. I am pretty sure, not even a single alumnus could do it without the grooming the faculty provides.
Teachers are like the first block of a domino grid, whose fall leads to the falling of the whole system. It is no less a pain to see that TISS is failing at holding together its faculty. The administration is obliged to work the situation out, in my opinion, for several reasons.
Firstly, TISS needs to rectify the bad picture this whole tussle has sent out to the whole country. Secondly, it is ironic to see such informal working conditions in a social work institute which teaches students how to deal with labour informality and fight against it. Thirdly, because TISS stands as an inspiration to many other institutes; with this, it bears a responsibility of not setting a bad example.
The analysis of the situation is a never-ending debate, but to wrap up the larger picture, it is important for all of us to reflect, and to ask ourselves, to what extent are our academics taken seriously in our country?