A state-aided university that affiliates the private BEd colleges has announced that “normal operations of the university will remain suspended” following “serious threat as received from some persons connected to the private or self-financed B.Ed and M.Ed Colleges”.
A notice signed by the registrar of Baba Saheb Ambedkar Education University, Maitrayee Bhattacharya, on Wednesday, said: “In view of the serious threat as received from some persons connected to the private or self-financed B.Ed and M.Ed Colleges and keeping in mind the security concerns of stakeholders of the University and loss of property belonging to the State, the normal operations of the University will remain suspended till normalisation of the current situation with cooperation of administration.”
The university affiliates about 600 private BEd colleges.
The university had on November 10 withdrawn affiliation to 253 private BEd colleges and barred them from enrolling students on grounds of not complying with NCTE guidelines.
This decision triggered protests by the colleges, said an official of the university.
Vice-chancellor Soma Bandyopadhyay said on Thursday the NCTE regulations say a college is required to have eight teachers for a batch of 50 students. She had said on November 10 that these colleges were not abiding by the prescribed teacher-student ratio. “They don’t pay their teachers following the pay scale fixed by the UGC,” the VC had said.
On Thursday, she said they were receiving threats from a section of the college heads. They threatened to ransack the university on Ballygunge Circular Road in protest, she said.
“They assembled in front of the campus. Therefore, I had to take steps to protect the campus. The state administration has been intimated at the highest level. Police were deployed outside the campus on Thursday,” Bandyopadhyay said.
Days after the university acted against the colleges, education minister Bratya Basu had said: “BEd is a must qualification for getting the job of a school teacher (in government-aided schools). I don’t know why the affiliation was withdrawn. We will conduct a formal inquiry into this”.
Bandyopadhyay said on Thursday the department can seek to know from the university why the decision was taken. “But we have not received any query from the department,” she told The Telegraph.
The university disaffiliated the colleges after a division bench of the Supreme Court had on November 6 directed that the renewal of affiliation of colleges would be subject to their “satisfying the applicable norms for affiliation of the Teachers’ Training College”.