A National Assessment and Accreditation Council (NAAC) team that visited Jadavpur University last week, told the authorities that several teaching posts were vacant and the existing teachers were forced to take the extra load.

The university has been advised to fill the vacant positions at the earliest, said a member of the team.

A six-member team visited the university from September 11 to 13 as part of the fourth cycle of the accreditation process.

Out of 890 sanctioned strength, 30 percent of teaching posts were vacant, said a JU official.

“At a time when the four-year undergraduate teaching courses have been launched in keeping with the National Education Policy (NEP) and the number of student intake has substantially increased with the introduction of a quota for the economically weaker sections, a substantial vacancy in teaching posts is coming in the way of imparting lessons effectively,” a member of the NAAC team said on Tuesday.

“We have advised the university to fill the vacant teaching positions at the earliest,” said the member.

The university’s self-assessment report, sent to the NAAC in April this year, also pointed out delays in recruitment, which affects academic performance. “Very often there are delays in the timely recruitment of (teaching) staff which lead to vacancies affecting the academic and research performances,” the April 25 self-assessment report said.

Parthapratim Roy, the secretary of the university’s teachers’ association, said they will soon submit a memorandum to the vice-chancellor to fill the vacant positions.

“Recently, when the computer science and engineering department tried to conduct interviews to recruit two assistant teachers, the higher education department stopped the process,” said Roy.

Nandini Mukhopadhya, a former head of the department, said the vice-chancellor told them to stop interviews because the department did not want the screening exercise to be held on grounds that the university does not have a full-term VC.

“Out of 44 sanctioned posts, we have only 24 teachers. Dilip Kumar Saikia, the chairperson of the visiting NAAC team who came to our department last week, expressed his concern over the vacant posts,” said Mukhopadhya.

She said that the last recruitment in her department took place in 2017.

Calls to interim VC Bhaskar Gupta failed to yield any response.

Manojit Mandal, the head of the English department, said: “Now that an exercise has been launched to appoint a full-term VC through the search committees across the state-aided universities, including JU, the teachers must be recruited at the earliest”.

The NAAC team in its exit meeting on Friday, asked the JU authorities to undertake the structural audit of the old dilapidated buildings so that urgent repair work could be started.

“Many of the buildings are in poor condition. We have told the university to undertake a safety audit of these buildings and repair them. The university told us that as they are encountering a fund crunch, they are not in a position to undertake the repair work on their own and have written to the state government for funds,” said a member of the NAAC team.