Faculty members at the Indian Institute of Mass Communication (IIMC) have drawn the government’s attention to the “internal turmoil, institutional stagnancy, decay” and “erosion of autonomy and excessive bureaucratisation” at the institute. Sources at the premier institute told The Indian Express that some faculty members recently sent a detailed letter to Information & Broadcasting Minister Arun Jaitley and his deputy Rajyavardhan Rathore highlighting a host of problems. A group of faculty members also met I&B Secretary Sunil Arora and flagged the issues. “In a nutshell, the erosion of autonomy and excessive bureaucratisation of IIMC has seriously affected the functioning, academic standards and morale of the faculty and employees,” said the letter to Jaitley as it sought his intervention. [related-post] “The quality and standard of the institute is falling, new centres fail on several parameters to meet academic norms, faculty and employees are extremely unhappy and feeling harassed because the IIMC administration, on the direction of bureaucracy, is running the institute as another government department, with no respect for academic excellence, by-laws, rules. encouraging nepotism, corruption and malpractices,” said the letter. “Since its inception, the chairperson of IIMC had always been an eminent mediaperson, but post-2004, the Secretary of the I&B ministry was designated as the ex-officio chairman. There was no discussion on this with IIMC faculty or in the IIMC society or the executive council, the highest decision-making bodies in IIMC,” said the letter. Another issue that has been raised is the retirement age of the director general, which has been reduced from 65 years to 60 years. This means that senior faculty members who retire at 65 years are debarred from applying for the DG’s post. “IIMC will become a university in future. And going by that, the retirement age of DG should have been raised to 70. Instead, it was reduced to 65 years in a hush-hush way and then the decision was cleared ex-post facto by the executive council,” said a source. Further, it has been pointed out that the IIMC administration has not formed an academic council “since 2005 for no apparent reason”.
