Short of teaching staff,JNU attempts to fill seats by next month

The shortage has been attributed to an increase in the university’s intake capacity which has gone up 1.5 times after the OBC quota was implemented. As a result,the student strength has gone up from 5,500 to 7,800 in the last five years.

The V-C said 85 faculty positions had been advertised for last year and interviews for about 75 positions have been held recently. “With this we will meet the current faculty requirement,” he said.

Sopory said that while the university received many applications for the posts of assistant professors,it was more difficult to find suitable candidates for professorship due to strict requirements in certain specialised areas. He said in some categories “there are no applications at all”.

Regarding a long-standing demand of the university’s students’ union — providing course material in vernacular languages for all subjects — Sopory said the language of instruction at JNU was English,and so it was unlikely that the university would implement the move. However,he said “if teachers want,they can use a different language to teach the students besides the language schools,which anyway use course material in other languages”.

Two new courses to be taught free

Vice-Chancellor of JNU Sudhir Kumar Sopory said the university had recently started two “empowerment” programmes in linguistics and mathematics.

The programmes are taught free of cost and aim to empower students and research scholars in areas of language and mathematical and computational ability,Sopory said.

The linguistic empowerment programme seeks to bring uniformity among students from non English speaking backgrounds to “gain competence and exposure to English language”.

On the other hand,the programme on mathematical empowerment with elements of probability,optimisation methods and statistical methods,is being taught as “it is essential in a research university like JNU”. ENS