Unanswered Questions and Unquestioned Answers
Written on November 26th, 2020 by {"login"=>"jcbitshyd", "email"=>"journal@hyderabad.bits-pilani.ac.in", "display_name"=>"Journal Club, BPHC", "first_name"=>"", "last_name"=>""}The last General Body Meeting dated the '10th of October 2020' organized by the Election Council was supposed to clear all doubts regarding the new Acting Council appointment and functionalities. As a general trend, the attendance of the General Body was low. A few members of the GB did raise concerns about this Ordinance being a violation of the Constitution. The EC chose to respond by stating that the Acting Council decision is supposedly an instruction from the administration to replace the previous Students Union Council. Hence, the Acting Council members were selected by a few interviews conducted by the Students Union Council of the previous academic year, the administration, and the concerned student bodies involved. What is to be noted is that there was no consensus from the General Body as it was an administrative decision from the very beginning. As a sort of counter, the Acting Council was given limited discretionary powers.
However, the two crucial points in the current context are to be noted here from the guidelines given by the EC-
- Clause 12- The Council shall be accountable to the General Body and shall be answerable in a General Body Meeting.
- Clause 15- The Council shall remain the ultimate authority for Student Union's representation to the administration, henceforth, they have the right to intervene in any college activity that comes under the discretionary power of the SUC.
It is now being questioned whether the members of the acting Council are fulfilling their duties. It is also to be noted that any decision made by the Acting Council would be representing the interest of the majority of the Council. We are at a stage where it is necessary to scrutinize the happenings and the authorities of the acting Council. The minor General Body Meeting scheduled on the 27th of November would be our opportunity to do the same. Hence, through this article, we try to bring up some points the general body should keep in mind when we question the concerned authorities.
The Hijacking of A Student-Run Initiative
In the last week of November - when the official position was towards the use of PEXA Lite (renamed BITS Exam App) for the proctoring of the Comprehensive Exams of Semester 1 2020-21 - there was large student unrest regarding the proctoring app, it's safety and the legitimacy of the Comprehensive Exams themselves.
While the debate was raging over the next step to counter the use of PEXA/BITS Exam App - an initiative was set up to get the parents of the GB involved in the matter.
This initiative was notable in that it was entirely student originated - a form (and draft letter) was floated on concerned Facebook groups that worked towards highlighting common concerns from a parent's point of view.
At 2:58 PM on the 22nd of November (the same day), a mail was sent out from the official Students Union' account to all students, requesting them to fill a form and also attaching signatures from their parents electronically. This mail is clearly worded to be an urgent plea for all students to fill this form. This suggests that the Acting Council appeared to support this form unequivocally, as they chose to mail this form to the entire campus, via mail - not a few hours after it was released.
It is well-established that this form was not an Acting Council initiative, as there was a post of the BPHC Free Expression Group over an hour and a half earlier by a student unaffiliated with the Acting Council. The mail was an exact copy-paste of the post, along with the very same link which was previously being used.
The question to be asked here is one of a matter of consent - more so, because of the events that transpired later that day and in the night. So, the first question that the AC should answer in the upcoming GBM - was requisite consent taken from the developers of the form before attaching the heavyweight of the SUC behind it. Secondly, regardless of whether the form was taken with consent or not - the issue remains as to how the AC (seemingly without approval or discussion with the other two campuses) decided to involve parents of the GB into the debate. This falls slightly in contradiction to the earlier comments by the AC, which stated that all decisions were taken unanimously by all 3 campus representatives.
Back to the form - around 10 hours later, when this form had become a severe piece of dissent with around 2500 signatures, this Facebook post was put out by one of the Acting Council members, Nimish Gupta. This essentially liquidates all the effort students put in to ensure this form was as widely distributed as possible. The concerns stated regarding the "privacy of signatures" and "fake responses" might be fair. However, the Acting Council is supposed to exercise due diligence before choosing to back this form so publicly. The sheer lack of transparency is alarming. The effort was widely propagated and supported by the General Body, but for the lack of a better word, it was hijacked and then taken down unilaterally. The fact that the form was not the initiative of the AC or anyone affiliated with them was never explicit in the AC's communications on mail as well as on Facebook. The role of the student who set up the form and put all this effort in was never discussed or acknowledged by the Acting Council, and we feel this is a serious lapse on their part. A proper timeline of what happened and what internal communications were made must be made available to the General Body at the earliest. More specifically, the events from 11:30 PM (where the form supposedly had substantial backing from the AC and the GB) to 12:30 PM (when the AC decided to quell dissent by disappearing the form unilaterally) have to be clearly and chronologically explained.
The second question that must be asked at that point must be this - "Was there direct pressure from the administration to quell this specific sequence of dissent?"
If the answer is yes - does the AC not have the duty to tell the GB the limits to which the administration is willing to accept demands and accept protest from the AC? Moreover - if that is the case - why does the AC continue to (at least outwardly) push for initiatives like PCT Grading if they know that the administration would not accede to them.
Whereas if the answer was no - it must be severely questioned as to how and why the AC seemingly made a value judgement to stop a form of willing protest on their own without consultation from the GB.
Furthermore, a comment that was echoed through the interweb chambers was that parents seemingly had an issue with a form collecting signatures being floated across the Internet. Concerns of privacy were gravely expressed - according to some. Even if that was the case - why weren't alternative (and ostensibly safer) means undertaken to bring the point of views of parents under discussion - especially given that that form managed to attract a substantial level of following. Parents were clear stakeholders post the release of the form - and the AC didn't quite make it clear as to how it would redress their concerns. Moreover, an alternative mechanism to deal with signature privacy was also floated by the original implementer of the form but ignored by the SU.
Apart from the above-mentioned series of events, there are some other miscellaneous events that we feel the general body should be aware of. These would not be an exhaustive list or something which one might not know while being active on the campus Facebook groups, but we try to present them in an unbiased manner.
Firstly, the complete or partial disappearance of more than one AC member from a widely-used public platform like Facebook has made it difficult to get one's concerns addressed. People have bitterly complained about complete ignorance by the members of the Council at times or a delayed response. While "personal commitments" is an understandable reason and it is also true that the AC members might be swamped with the huge influx of queries and also their continuous evaluation components, they should also have been aware of the responsibilities that will come with such a high-profile PoR and be prepared to do justice to the same. Therefore, the General Body Meeting can be an efficient way to fill those gaps and re-establish the lost trust between the GB and the AC.
Secondly, one of the major reasons the Acting Council was formed in the first place was to exempt the previous academic year's SUC members from their duties due to the unprecedented prolongment of their tenure. The involvement of Vaishnavi Reddy, the General Secretary of the prior SUC, makes us question the credibility of the Acting Council once again. While she has mentioned that her involvement in this fiasco is a personal decision, it is often observed that she has to bear the misdirected anger of the GB because she is at the forefront of this issue. This might indicate the lack of coordination amongst the Acting council members themselves- which might be mere speculation, but their conduct does not indicate otherwise.
Thirdly, the decision regarding the postponement of the comprehensive evaluations seems to be doing more harm than good. The administration blatantly disregarded the possibility of the students having commitments beyond college after the scheduled comprehensive evaluations. While some people have scheduled competitive exams and winter internships, others have planned trips for which they have made travel reservations. This has also reduced the preparation time for the previous semester's comprehensive evaluations to a mere 3 days, for which the syllabus has not been modified either. In the words of the Acting Council mail sent out on the 24th of November, this seems to be a "positive step" and "addressing the mental stress". While this might have reduced the time crunch students were facing to prepare for the Comprehensive Exams, this does not address the mental stress caused due to the overwhelming number of evaluations which the students have been upset with for a long time. This also reduces the winter break after an exhausting semester for the faculty and students alike.
Lastly, a part of this outburst has its roots in the comments made by the AC members on a Facebook post which started the discussion on the possibility of grading being done based on pre-Compre total marks. While we resonate with the fact that as an individual student, the Acting Council member can and should have their personal opinion on what is fair and their preferred means of grading, being in a position where they represent the entire campus, they are expected to separate their personal opinion from the consensus, which as a matter of fact, was not taken at that point of time. We do not intend to comment on what the right method of grading should be. However, even after floating a university-wide form and collecting the student's opinions, the emails shared with GB have an underwhelming representation of the majority opinion- that is grading based on pre-Compre totals. This has raised concerns as to whether the AC members are trying to represent what the GB needs or are subverting this in favour of their agendas. The constant lack of clear and consistent communication ends up bolstering such theories. Even if the administration has given a rationale behind the constant rejection of the idea of PCT, the reason they state has not been shared with the GB, at least publicly. On the flip side, if they have made no comment on the rejection of PCT, it is expected that the AC continues to persuade them to find their reasoning for their reluctance to adopt the model which was implemented in the previous semester when the circumstances in play have degraded even further.
Lastly, questions must be asked over the cohesity of the Acting Council members and the decision they make. To elucidate with an example - the series of events leading to the abrupt "banning" of all club induction/workshop activities and their even more abrupt "un-banning" was not only unclear and poorly justified - but it also showcased the fact that the Acting Council failed to adequately feel the pulse of the GB and understand their grievances. To an outsider - it feels that there exists a level of chaos amongst the AC with some slightly varying responses from the body that is meant to represent the GB strongly.
The most poignant of concerns is these - regardless of which side you fall on the debate - a very overwhelming number of persons are pro Pre-Compre-Total grading (for a vast and varying number of reasons). Now, since the administration is seemingly showing a deaf ear to these concerns - there is clearly either a communication breakdown between the GB and the SU's or the SU and the admin - and either (or both) have to be addressed immediately.
Now, where does the GB come into the picture? While we understand that the emotions in this semester are running high and sway overwhelmingly towards a particular side of the spectrum - communication between the AC and the GB is a 2-way street. It is only when the GB asks poignant and respectable questions that the AC be held to account for their actions and inactions. Hence, it is a solemn request to members of the GB to be civil, calm and poignant with their questioning and decorum in the GBM tomorrow - as disruptions and disarray will only lead to further discord between the two bodies and lead to no concerns being heard by the administration.