For 2 years I’ve wondered why I’ve come to despise what I’m studying, and for a long time I thought it was a problem specific to me and not because of structural issues and a general apathy. Boy, was I wrong.
There is a common joke among undergraduate students that those who take up B.Com Hons are quicker to buckle under peer pressure. I think that’s so because when your only goal in life is to earn money, it seems like the safest bet.
Yesterday, at the end of my 3:15-4:15 pm class, I overheard my professor explaining what plagiarism is to a fellow 3rd year B.Com. Hons. student in my class. My first instinct was to cringe at how uninformed one has to be to not know what plagiarism is. But come to think of it, not once in five semesters of being a B.Com. student in what is allegedly the best commerce college in the country have I been required to run a plagiarism check on something I wrote. Not once have I been required to write something completely original. Not once have I been required to think.
I use the phrase “required to” here to highlight how the course is structurally problematic, regardless of the endless critique of us B.Com students as disinterested and dull individuals.
Firstly, let’s get the quintessential debate out of the way: the supremacy of Eco Hons over our course is not even debated anymore, it’s just accepted as common knowledge. So much so that the timetable of 2nd year Eco Hons students is more accommodating than that of 3rd year B Com students. They get free before break everyday while I have classes 6 days a week, each day usually starting around 9:30 am and ending at 4:15 pm.
My section, it’s section H in case someone wants to fact-check, did not have a teacher for the entire semester for a subject called Organizational behavior. There were just no classes. Perhaps this was because we don’t have good enough teachers for every subject. Of course, this has nothing to do with the fact that the University systematically ensures that teacher’s lives are made miserable on the daily. The recent move to assign Guest Lecturer status to these employed on Ad-hoc basis is absolutely ridiculous, especially for a college that boasts of ‘employment stability’ due to ‘100% placement record’. It is only here that someone (who taught a student placed with a CTC of 31 LPA) doesn’t even get a monthly basic salary. I’m ashamed to be part of a system like this. When Article 370 was scrapped, someone close to me said “I cry for myself, I always wondered as a child how ordinary British felt occupying colonies, now I know”. The context is different, but the guilt upon being a beneficiary of a system that thrives on exploitation is the same.
Sure, we “B.Com. kids” don’t attend classes. This has absolutely nothing to do with the absurdity of our time tables. Or the fact that the commerce faculty comprises of largely disgruntled individuals who refuse to provide retests for internals, or be accommodative without always adding “SRCC mei ho, ye toh pata hona chahiye” as an afterthought. The trickle-down effect may be a myth in economics, but it’s true for apathy towards real knowledge in the commerce department. The disinterest has surely trickled down from my teachers to me. This apathy shows in faculty authored books sold at the SRCC Co-op store. Most of which are badly written and full of grammatical and spelling errors. Most of which are recommended to us while the entirety of the University of Delhi uses better, easier to understand, and more affordable materials. Sure, we only study from Shiv Das. This also has nothing to do with the fact that 10 Years is affordable and to the point since the question papers have a repetitive pattern (and even sometimes repetitive questions) every year.
The last part, I agree isn’t an SRCC problem but DU problem. The course hasn’t been updated for at least 10 years. I’ll be graduating next year (fingers crossed I don’t flunk due to my own apathy) without having studied a single course of economics or statistics. I haven’t solved a single case study for my course, except the ones I felt peer pressured into doing for case competitions.
Now that we are talking about peer-pressure (and this brings me back to where I started this rant), I think I have SRCC’s business model figured out. It functions because of the ‘invisible hand’ of competitiveness. Everything everyone does is to outdo or outsmart their friends and classmates, with the singular goal of getting placed at a good company. I have friends who are thriving on the basis of lies on their CV, while my other friends, who also by the way, are directly competing with them, justify these lies because “I would do the same if I was in her place”. This is even more pronounced among B.Com. students and I think it’s because money is the focal point of what we study. Atleast economics students are introduced to morality when they study Marx or Amartya Sen.
What’s the commerce equivalent of moral philosophy you ask? Something like, “should a manager be ethical or efficient” was once asked of me on a test. The question in itself is so problematic because it enforces a binary where there shouldn’t be one! Why does efficiency always have to come at the cost of ethicality? It’s a public university not a breeding ground for the world’s Vijay Mallyas.
I’ve had these opinions for a long time now. But everytime I discuss this with someone I’m told one thing: “if these are your problems, then you’re disenchanted with how the world works and not just SRCC in particular”
~ Nikita Bhatia (Third year B.com student in SRCC )
( Views expressed in the readers' article session are personal and not necessarily that of team 'Campus Perspectives' )
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