‘It’s a Thursday, must be around 4. The 3rd year batch is having its last lecture for the day with weary faces waiting for the professor to leave them early. The lecture ends, attendance is taken and the lecturer announces that this was his last class in LSR and the university as well. He happily announces that he has finally got a job and would be going there soon. He then said good luck to everyone and asked us to leave. Surprisingly, no one moved. Class of 30 odd students remained silent and unmoved, some burst into tears as the ‘best professor’ of the department was leaving in middle of the session. Well, he had to in spite of him not wanting to leave the class or Delhi at all. How long would he remain ‘unemployed’? Within a span of half an hour, he got the farewell he deserved and left everyone with a heavy heart.’
Guest lecturers and ad-hocs are some of the very familiar terms used in DU. The ad-hocs are hired on a contract basis for 3 months at a time and guest lecturers are not hired of course but need to come every week and teach for 8-10 hours . However, these professors need not to stay back or take part in any college activities which an ad-hoc is obliged to do.
DU has not appointed a single permanent professor since over a decade and it is very unfortunate both on the part of talented professors and the students as well. The temporary staff is exploited, paid lesser and do not even enjoy any perks which a permanent staff does. They live in the constant fear of losing out their job, especially the guest lecturers. Unwillingly (most of the times) they have to look for job opportunities which might pay much lower than they deserve but at least would be permanent. This pushes them to move to remote places and even for that too they have to face a lot of difficulties. On the other hand, the students miss out some great professors just because they are not permanent. The introductory piece was just a piece of emotions about how severe the issue is.
