St Xavier’s is Mumbai University’s first autonomous college……Anahita Mukherji
MUMBAI: If youre a first-year degree college student who sets foot in St Xaviers College Mumbai this year, you can be forgiven for thinking youre in a foreign university with a semester-based system, credits for each subject, a curriculum that has been designed by the college faculty as well as inter-disciplinary studies, which allows a chemistry student the chance to study credits in English literature and a psychology student access to credits in physics.
St Xaviers College, one of Mumbais best-known institutions, was granted academic autonomy by the University Grants Commission on Monday. The college is set to implement autonomy this year itself, joining the ranks of elite institutions like Presidency College and St Xaviers College in Kolkata, Loyola College in Chennai and Christ College, Bangalore. St Xaviers will be the first autonomous college under Mumbai University.
Autonomy will come at no extra cost to students. They will continue to pay the existing fee.
We have been blessed with competent and committed faculty and excellent students. We have a tradition of quality education. We feel that autonomy will further help us improve the kind of education that we offer by giving us the freedom to design our own curriculum and come up with our own system of evaluation, said St Xaviers College principal Fr Frazer Mascarenhas.
Currently, a students degree is given on the basis of just one examination held after three years. Nothing else counts. We will adopt a more holistic method of assessment followed by top-ranking universities across the world. We will now replace the examination system with one of continuous evaluation over three years, he said. We will now evaluate students on the basis of a grade-point average, vice-principal Vivien Amonkar added.
This is absolutely wonderful news, a jubilant Armaity Desai, former chairperson of the University Grants Commission, said. I used to push for the system of autonomy when I was with the UGC. It will be great if St Xaviers can pave the way for more autonomous institutions in the city. I believe very strongly in autonomy as it allows teachers the freedom to develop their own programme and contextualise the subjects that they are teaching. Otherwise, teachers are simply cogs in the wheel and have to teach a curriculum designed by someone else. Autonomy will also go a long way in reforming the current system of examinations, where students learn by rote and regurgitate what they have learnt, she added.
Shaheen Mistry, who founded Akanksha, a popular NGO, over 20 years ago while still a student at St Xaviers College, too, thought it was fantastic that her alma mater had got autonomy.
In addition to academics, Fr Frazer said the college would also offer compulsory credits for an extra-curricular activity as well as community work. After all, were looking for the all-round development of students, said Fr Frazer.
In addition to the regular curriculum, all students, irrespective of whether they are studying arts or science, will have to study environmental studies, human rights as well as personal and human values.
While autonomy will be offered to the fresh batch of first-year-degree college students who join St Xaviers this year, in subsequent years it will extend to the second and third year. Those students who are presently in the second and third year of degree college will continue with the existing curriculum offered by Mumbai University.