Improving Service Conditions for Faculty Members at the NLUs

The following extract appears at pp. 90-94 of a report titled 'Suggestions for Reforms at the National Law Universities set up through State Legislations' which was submitted to the Department of Justice, Ministry of Law and Justice, Government of India in March 2018. It was based on surveys conducted among faculty members (33 respondents) and students (849 respondents) at 15 participating institutions in August-September 2016. I was one of the authors of this report. We welcome any feedback on its contents.  

The full text can be downloaded here:

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3171842.

Improving Service Conditions for Faculty Members

Admittedly, the problem of unsatisfactory teaching in the National Law Universities (NLUs) cannot be tackled through reliance on student feedback alone. In many cases, the immediate cause is a mismatch between a teacher’s prior training and the assignment of teaching responsibilities. As described earlier, the overarching problem is that of a limited pool of individuals with the requisite qualifications who are willing to take up full-time teaching positions. Among those who are available, there tends to be a concentration of qualifications in certain fields such as constitutional law, substantive penal laws and public international law. Inevitably, practice-oriented subjects such as the laws relating to property, taxation and procedure are frequently taught by those who don’t have much exposure to the uncertainties that arise while dealing with clients and public officials in a professional setting. While there are a few who choose to teach these subjects after gaining experience in litigious or transactional settings, a majority of full-time teachers do not have such a background. While some career academicians may progressively become well versed with the statutes, precedents and principles related to these fields, students tend to feel shortchanged in the interim. The situation becomes even more unsatisfactory when efforts to involve practising lawyers in the taught programmes attract those who may be unsuited for the latter. In some notable cases, even eminent justices and lawyers have struggled to perform in classrooms whose dynamics are fundamentally different from those inside the courtroom.

There are numerous instances where full-time instructors are initially hired to teach a given set of subjects but are subsequently asked to teach subjects in which they may have no previous experience or exposure. In conditions of scarcity, this may be a compromise that is eventually accepted by the immediate stakeholders. However, it is difficult to defend such a mismatch in highly selective institutions such as the NLUs that receive public funding and recover a considerable portion of their operating costs from tuition fees paid by students who are enrolled in their full-time taught programmes. The substantial reliance on teachers appointed on an ‘ad-hoc’ or ‘visiting’ basis tends to aggravate this problem of misallocation. Those who are hopeful of being considered for permanent positions would be reluctant to openly disagree with directives given by their administrative superiors. Those who are in ‘ad-hoc’ or ‘visiting’ positions do not have a sense of job security since their services can be terminated without the assignment of reasons. There is the very real possibility of such checkerboard solutions becoming the norm and thereby eroding the quality of instruction inside the classroom.

Many of our respondents pointed towards disparities prevailing in the service conditions for faculty members. During the course of our visits, we gathered that most of the NLUs have on average engaged 30-40 % of their full-time teachers on an ‘ad-hoc’ or ‘visiting’ basis. Only NLU Delhi, RMLNLU Lucknow and NLUJA Assam have engaged more than 80% of their faculty members in permanent positions. On the other end of the spectrum, institutions such as NLU Jodhpur and GNLU Gandhinagar have predominantly relied upon temporary appointments of teachers since their inception. The applicable regulations notified by the University Grants Commission (UGC) state that the number of teachers in temporary positions at a particular institution should not exceed 10% of the total faculty strength and that this route is specifically meant for contingencies such as regular faculty members discontinuing services or going on leave. At most of the NLUs, the non-teaching staff members are also largely occupying temporary positions. However, the overall situation at the NLUs still appears to be better than most public universities in India, many of whom presently have very high vacancy rates owing to delays of several years in conducting recruitments for filling up permanent positions. This had led to a situation where a vast majority of teachers serving in public universities and government-run colleges are doing so in ad-hoc positions. The rapidly growing sector of private universities has a natural preference for contractual appointments that make it easier to ‘hire and fire’ talent as per the fluctuating needs of an employer.

If we adopt the standpoint of those in decision-making roles, there are a few plausible arguments for retaining teachers in temporary positions for some time before considering them for permanent positions. Especially for new entrants to the profession, the time spent in temporary positions gives a good sense of whether they are well-suited for the role and are interested in teaching as a long-term career option. Some would argue that giving permanent jobs too easily would create an attitude of complacency at the early stages of one’s career. The more pragmatic argument seems to be that the continuation of teachers in temporary positions helps the institution to control spending in a context where financial support from the State is limited. This is because teachers in temporary positions usually receive consolidated salaries that are much lower than those of permanent teachers who receive emoluments based on the pay-scales notified by the Government.

However, a heavy dependence on teachers in temporary positions is not healthy for an educational institution in the long run. Prolonged engagement in temporary positions with lower pay can prove to be quite demotivating and lead to a high rate of attrition among teachers who will understandably leave once they get better employment opportunities elsewhere. Such consequences would pre-empt the improvements in curricular content and teaching standards that tend to happen if the same person continues to teach a particular set of subjects over several years. Hence, there should be a thorough review of the existing service conditions in order to draw a fair balance between the objectives of ensuring efficiency and giving employees a certain sense of stability as well as financial security. There should be a time-bound regularisation of the services of those employees who have been hired on a contractual basis, subject to their satisfactory performance. A service-period of 2-3 years in temporary positions is more than sufficient to assess an individual’s suitability for a permanent position.

There should be conscious efforts to improve service conditions – both in terms of material benefits as well as opportunities for career-advancement. It is not desirable to have a wide disparity between the pay-scales offered to teachers at the various NLUs since that may encourage poaching of individuals. We are already witnessing a clear diversion of teaching talent towards private universities that offer comparatively higher salaries. Each institution should also implement measures to provide ‘group medical insurance’ coverage for their faculty members and administrative staff. Especially in cities where costs of accommodation are high, the provision of relatively cheaper accommodation inside residential campuses is a significant incentive. Furthermore, one can look to the example set by some of the IITs and IIMs to grasp the importance of raising resources through contributions made by private parties. The funds gathered from such sources can be distributed as research grants among faculty members. Faculty members should be given adequate time to engage in their independent research projects which could be funded by external sources such as government agencies, private businesses or voluntary sector organisations.

It is in this context that the workload policies for full-time teachers at the NLUs should account for time that needs to be spent for meaningfully supervising student assignments while also pursuing one’s own research agenda. This is especially important for the serving teachers themselves since contributions made to scholarly literature carry substantial weightage for promotions in academic institutions. In the broader sense, it is also important for the institutions to be able to show that their faculty members and research scholars are publishing their work in credible peer-reviewed journals, engaged in sponsored research projects and producing books that will be given a broad platform by established academic publishing houses. Showcasing research output is absolutely vital for the NLUs to gain a position of prominence in national and international rankings of universities which place far more importance to this aspect when compared with other parameters of academic excellence. Even more significantly, high quality scholarship produced by serving teachers can give them a broader audience and reputation that goes far beyond the confines of their respective institutions. It is in this sense that we can make a cursory comparison of the workload policies for full-time teachers across the different NLUs. While some institutions such as NLU Jodhpur and RGNUL Patiala that have larger class sizes follow the norm of each teacher engaging 16-18 class hours per week, there are others such as WBNUJS Kolkata and NALSAR Hyderabad where the average teaching responsibilities range between 8-10 class hours per week. Some institutions have enjoyed a locational advantage in terms of attracting teaching talent and have retained smaller class sizes. Hence, NLU Delhi and NLSIU Bangalore have been adhering to a norm of each teacher delivering 5-6 class hours per week. It goes without saying that each institution makes such decisions after accounting for the availability of teachers and the size of the student body. However, it is not wise to place excessive burdens on serving teachers and thereby make it difficult for them to devote time for their independent research.

In respect of reservation norms for recruitment to permanent teaching positions, all public educational institutions in India are obliged to preferentially consider candidates belonging to the Scheduled Castes (SC), Scheduled Tribes (ST) as well as those identified as Persons with Disabilities. Some States have reservation policies that favour candidates from Other Backward Classes (OBCs). While we were not able to gather reliable data to examine this issue in the context of the NLUs, the widespread feeling among our respondents was that the overall representation of teachers from marginalized backgrounds is quite minimal, often below 5% of the total faculty strength in some of the participating institutions. Unlike reservation norms for students which have to be met on an annual basis, there is no impending obligation to fill up vacancies for faculty positions since institutions usually retain the discretion of not filling them up during a particular round of selections. Such practices feed the criticism that candidates who come from such disadvantaged backgrounds get a raw deal when they apply for positions at highly selective educational institutions. This in turn contributes to the view that students from disadvantaged backgrounds do not have adequate support for coping with an institutional environment that is largely shaped by persons from dominant caste backgrounds.


Suggested Readings:

1. Amita Dhanda, 'The Power of One: The Law Teacher in the Academy', in Amita Dhanda & Archana Parashar (eds.), Decolonization of Legal Knowledge (Routledge Publishers, 2009), pp. 261-281. 
2. Jane E. Schukoske, 'Legal Education Reform in India: Dialogue Among Indian Law Teachers', 1(1) Jindal Global Law Review 251-279 (2009). 
3. Lovely Dasgupta, 'Reforming Indian Legal Education: Linking Research and Teaching', 59(3) Journal of Legal Education 432-449 (2010). 
4. Anup Surendranath & Chinmayi Arun, 'Elite Law Varsities: The Crisis Within', LiveMint (April 26, 2012). 
5. Mansi Sood, 'Legal Education and Its Outcomes: Digging Deeper into the Successes and Failures of India‟s National Law Schools' [Available through Social Science Research Network (SSRN), November 2017].