‘Value-addition courses will discourage critical thinking’: DU AC members

NEW DELHI: Delhi University (DU) teachers said that value-addition courses under the Undergraduate Curriculum Framework (UGCF) will “discourage critical thinking” and were not ready to accept any loss or gain to any selective subject or department through these courses. They urged the university to “reconsider the hasty implementation of a half-baked UGCF”. Some of the DU Academic Council (AC) members dissented on value-addition courses in the AC meeting held today.

According to AC members, these courses pay lip service to the question of the intellectual attitudes that need to be fostered in students and undermine the idea of India as a cosmopolitan site of cultural and philosophical interaction between people, languages and traditions.

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The AC members complained that they are not given clarity about the subject-wise workload implications of these courses. “The myopic conception of VAC rubric is evidently an outcome of a centralised initiative that has excluded participation of teachers from all subjects. Hence, many disciplines have not found any representation,” teachers said in a statement.

DU in its centenary year is expected to instill values that justify the word ‘University’ in its semantic expanse, as a place of engaged learning. However, these courses appear blind to these expectations, and instead feebly attempt to invoke the Indic civilisation…and the diversity of ways of life that have contributed to its socio-cultural fabric and economic sustenance, the statement added.

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“The exclusion of the Constitution as a text that acknowledges the plural basis of Indian identity and bequeaths the legacy of democratic equality to its citizens, is the most telling illustration of the university’s failure to comprehend the profound need of empowering its students with an egalitarian ethos that respects difference and rights,” AC members further stated.