The current controversy over enhanced and new quotas announced by Delhi’s St Stephen’s College should, at the very least, fine-tune the larger debate on affirmative action. Controversy has come to the college after the authorities did two things. One, they set a target of reservations for more than 50 per cent of the seats on offer. Two, they introduced a new category for a 10 per cent quota, Dalit Christians. Taken together, these admission criteria have invited fears about declining space for merit and — this from Anil Wilson, the principal of the college himself who is on leave currently and has in the past fought a public battle with the acting principal — the technical difficulties in ascertaining how to categorise Christians by caste nomenclature. But what are really of interest in a wider context are two questions. Why is it that St Stephen’s, with the paltry 400-odd seats it offers to freshmen each year, should exercise the rest of us so much? What are the ways to adequately empower the unprivileged through affirmative action? Stephen’s matters because it is — or is perceived to be — India’s premier non-technical institution of higher education. Its way of maintaining that reputation is very different from, say, the IITs’. Being part of Delhi University, it has no latitude to set curriculum or evaluation criteria at the end of the academic year. Its great skill is in selecting students at admission time. This discretion was exercised through the additional admission routine of the interview, giving the college a way of getting around pure focus on school examination results. This process traditionally, though by all accounts much less now, was so operationalised that applicants were evaluated in less urbane and metropolitan terms. Students of diverse interests and backgrounds — some less academically brilliant than the rest — were then cocooned to given them a confident cosmopolitanism. Somehow a large enough proportion of alumni did well in life to get the college a reputation for excellence. The IITs’ success, by contrast, is based on a more direct dissemination of knowledge and skills through the faculty and curriculum. The point, we hope, of increased quotas at Stephen’s is inspired by the aim of greater access for the unprivileged to an elite educational environment. That eliteness — in terms of personality development — comes strongly from the way the college selects students. The college, given the model Stephen’s has been to other institutions, must make clear how its new formulaic admission process adheres to its own goals of empowerment. Because by every reckoning, this new process is extremely flawed.
