Course correction

After introducing the semester system,Delhi University is now set to restructure its BA Honours into a multidisciplinary four-year undergraduate programme. There will be exit options at the end of the second year which would get you a diploma,and the third year which would get you a degree,and completing all four years will get you an Honours degree with specialisation.

This move is clearly a nod to the American undergraduate model,developed in the late 19th century during the big bang of American higher education. The traditional four-year undergraduate degree means that you choose a major only after sampling and being tested on a range of subjects. The idea,as Harvard president Charles Eliot Norton put it when he made the general undergraduate degree mandatory for entry into specialised programmes,is to liberalise first,then professionalise in other words,first allow a fresh college entrant a broad survey of many disciplines,their various strengths,and the connections between them. It is meant to enlarge the mind,and then prepare students for more precise enquiry into a chosen subject. After all,the developmental leap between the ages of 18 and 22 is something like the tremendous mental spurt between the ages of 2 and 4,or 11 and 14 it is one of the most formative and alive phases of our lives. The current system in Delhi University has so far operated against that principle,forcing honours students to hunker down and concentrate on one narrow area,with no sense of allied disciplines,and before they have any real concept of what they have chosen for themselves. This move is also guided by the imperative to integrate better into the international system. As disciplinary limits crumble across the world,it makes sense to seek flexibility,to experiment with new ways of organising knowledge.

Delhi Universitys transition is particularly welcome,at a time when Indian higher education is tilting heavily towards technical and professional education. While those are certainly important priorities in a vaulting economy,it is also important to strengthen disinterested learning,the pursuit of ideas for the sake of ideas.