Does it matter what foreign students think about St Stephen's?

“In St Stephen’s, students are as much the problem as the institution,” reads the headline in piece on Scroll.in. As a former alumni, I’m intrigued. The piece is by a foreign student Gae Emilio Leanza, who attended St Stephen’s College as part of the foreign exchange programme. And it does highlight some uncomfortable truths about what is often considered as one of India’s most premier institutions. Yes, there’s ragging, and first year’s are referred to fucchas and often made to carry the luggage for second/third year students when college reopens. Yes, not every teacher will accept you strolling into their class well after it has begun. It’s almost like a school-system, if you care to add the morning assembly for first year students. Yes, plagiarism is a disease common to DU, and beyond; it’s not just a Stephen’s problem. Any history student from DU in the last ten years will tell you that “reading” essays by old students are the way to go. In fact, there’s a legend in St Stephen’s that once someone plagiarised an essay that was written by a teacher when he was young and in college, and handed it to him for his class. According to Leanza, the only positive note of this experience was the “personal interactions” with professors made “over several bottles of Old Monk, during a St Stephen’s department party”. [caption id=“attachment_1603245” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  The St Stephen’s College. Image courtesy: http://www.ststephens.edu/[/caption] And this is not the first foreign student piece to criticise the hallowed halls of Stephania. Previously Thane Richard had written a post on Kafila rightly critiquing the lack of academic rigour and excellence in the college. He pointed out, “All my fellow exchange students (six from Brown University and even more from Rutgers University in the next apartment block) concurred that the academics were a joke compared to what we were used to back home. In one economic history class the professor would enter the room, take attendance, open his notebook, and begin reading. He would read his notes word for word while we, his students, copied these notes word for word until the bell sounded.” The problem with both these pieces isn’t the argument that they make. They make fair points which need to be made. My only question is why are only foreign students writing these posts? And believe me, I don’t say this from ultra-jingoistic feeling that no foreigner should dare come and critique our system. I simply ask because the students who end up attending classes for three years never really get the space to express what they feel about the education system in India, and not just DU or Stephen’s. The question I’m asking is what privilege or weight does a foreign student’s word carry over the ones who are there for three years. For media, somewhere the answer lies in the casual appeal of the foreign student. Leanza’s “amateur ethnographic journey" where he’s trying to understand the Indian students and education system, often under the influence of hash (as he himself notes) carries with it a hint of exoticism that the boring Indian student doesn’t seem to have. But the Indian student is the one who is actually there for the long haul and has struggled to get in against great odds. Year after year, as admission season begins, from TV channels to newspapers, everyone has column seeking to help out Indian students with what courses they wish to apply to. And in this cacophony of voices, where the only concern of Indian students appears to be a programme that can help them land a job at some point, nobody in the media seems interested in asking students who are studying in India what the problems are. The lack of Indian voices, seems especially glaring because it appears to heighten this notion that the students who have made it, the ones who are end up in a St Stephen’s or St Xavier’s are living in a bubble land where they love everything about their college and have no complaints whatsoever. And it’s up to the student from abroad to prick that bubble of complacency with some home truths. When that is far from being the truth. Students in the college, no matter which one, are aware that the Indian education system doesn’t live up to its hype. While Leanza is quick to note that for many students, St Stephens is “merely a waiting room that will lead them to corporate jobs”, what his piece doesn’t mention are the ones who challenge its systems and end up paying the price. Just ask the girls who ran the House Arrest campaign on Facebook against the 10’o’ clock deadline in St Stephen’s, and you can see that these students aren’t just swallowing the myth but are actually challenging it. And for that they paid price too, as some were not given hostel in the third year. Their crime: demanding that the college treat both girls and boys equally when it came to night-time curfew  Or go back to the 80’s and read how Saba Dewan and her friends questioned the culture of misogyny in Stephen’s despite an administration that clearly f avoured the boys. Leanza also points out that there’s not too much original writing in the college and the course is too basic. He writes, “There’s no fun in simply re-writing a textbook or answering questions so basic they would be at home on a 7th grade syllabus.” I can’t help but wonder at the pomposity of the sentence. For starters, even in the US the number of students in grad-school who paraphrase/copy is fairly high. Read some numbers here and another essay on the same subject here.  Plus the complaints he makes against FYUP aren’t anything new. Indian students have been crying hoarse about the course since it was introduced. Just read any story from 2013 when FYUP was introduced. From students to teachers, everyone derided the move. As one student told Education Times, “FYUP is not beneficial at all. Now we have to complete our syllabus in two years and that’s going to be a burden. FC exams are totally irrelevant. An economics student is asked questions relating to prime numbers – this is substandard.” Once again, this is not to imply that plagiarism isn’t a problem in India. I can safely say very few Indian universities treat it as a serious issue. In fact, the one place where our entire class was penalised for plagiarism and actually taught how to ‘write’ academically, was during my MA course in the Tata Institute of Social Sciences in Mumbai. But nor can it be said that every student is busy copying essays in DU. It’s not for nothing that my friends and I spent hours getting books photocopied and had them bound and reset to keep for life. And nor are all teachers just droning out notes in college. At least in the 3-year-course system tutorials were an important part, where a much smaller group would interact with the teacher. More importantly you had to read (the actual reading material and not essays by seniors long gone), you had to ask questions or else face the music. Leanza’s piece comes at an important time. It’s admission season in DU and now that the fiasco over FYUP is over (it’s finally been scrapped) students are lining up to get into what is considered to be one of India’s top universities. Given the number of applicants and the shortage of seats, for most Indian students it’s a highly-competitive system. Even 90 percent is not good enough. Those are the real problems faced by Indian students scrambling for a place in a top-notch college as opposed to a year abroad. This perhaps why both Leanza’s piece and Thane’s piece need rejoinders from current Indian students, not just people who have passed out long ago. Or the ones who can’t afford a foreign education post their three year degree and must make the best of a system that isn’t world class. It’s only then that the debate on higher education will move forward.