the selection of examiners both internal and external in a particular subject is vested solely in the teachers of that subject with a loose control by the Executive Committee consisting of an absolute majority of paid servants of the University. The result is already apparent. The external examiners appointed are generally such men as dare not or care not to protest against the present system of sham or dishonesty in teaching work and in research at Calcutta as revealed in the answer papers. People who have already made their mark in life in special subjects like Paleography, Numismatics, History of Sanskrit Literature, both in India and in Europe, are carefully ignored when external examiners are selected or text-books recommended. How many times have the Board of Higher Studies selected men of the type of Dr. F. W. Thomas, Jules Bloch, E. D. Barnett, E. J. Rapson, A. B. Keith, A. Foucher, Sir Aurel Stein or H. Lueders in Europe, aud Hoskote Krishna Sastri, R. Narasimhachar, Hiranada Sastri, Vishnu Sitaram Sukthankar, Rao Bhadur Hira Lal, Daya Ram Sahni, Sir John Marshall or R. B. Whitehead (to mention a few only)?
The Most Necessary Reforms
The unit of the present Post-Graduate system is a Board of Higher Studies. The Boards should be immediately purged of the majority of the paid teaching staff and its number should be reduced to reasonable dimensions. A certain amount of duplication of work is unnecessarily going on. The University possesses a Board of Studies in History according to Chapter V of the Regulation. The members of this Board are appointed by the Faculty of Arts at their annual meeting or in a special meeting annually. Paragraph 2 of Chapter V lays down that “The members of a Board shall be teachers of, or examiners in, or other persons who have a special knowledge of, the subject or subjects with which the Board is concerned. The best way of removing the present anomalous system and duplication is to ask the Faculty of Arts to co-opt one member from the teaching staff of each section of a Post-Graduate department and a specialist in each of these sections, who is not a paid servant of any University or has not been so. These two co-opted members in each subject are quite sufficient to impart the necessary special knowledge to the ordinary members of a Board of Studies, which they may lack. The Boards of Higher Studies should thus be abolished.
The unit in the Post-Graduate Department should be a committee of all the teachers in that section whose only function should be;—
A. Distribution of work among the members of the staff and
B. the election of a representative from that subject to the Executive Committee.
All other functions. such as;—
(a) The fixation of courses of study.
(b) The selection of text-books and recommended books.
(c) The appointment to the teaching and the fixation of their salaries, and
(d) The appointment of examiners,—
should be taken away from the Board of Higher Studies and placed in the hands of the ordinary Board of Studies in that subject. The University professor in a subject, or in the want of a professor, the senior lecturer in that subject should be made the ex-officio Chairman of this committee and he should be empowered to prepare the time-table in consultation with his colleagues.
The executive committee of each department of Post-Graduate teaching should consist of one representative from each section along with an equal number of outsiders who are specialists in particular branches of studies, plus four representatives elected by the Senate. The advantage of this method will be that the presence of outsiders will prevent the undue lowering of standards and ensure regularity and justice in the Post-Graduate examinations. The representatives of the Senate will see that the executive committee control their expenditure within the limits of the budget grants and conduct their work in accordance with the regulations and the orders of the Senate. The proceedings of the executive committee should, as at present, be confirmed by the Senate. It should elect its own chairman. In the place of the secretaries there should be a Director of Studies for each of the departments who should be the ex-officio Secretary in the executive committee of each department. The executive committee, thus divested of its absolute majority in the shape of representatives of the Boards of Higher Studies who are paid members of the teaching staff, will be able to conduct its work in a more dignified manner and will lose its present character of cringing submissiveness to the party in power and the Post-Graduate Department in Arts will lose its present evil reputation about make-believe examinations
