GNLU Gandhinagar director Bimal Patel will face a review committee that has been constituted by the Chief Justice of India (CJI) to look into allegations of Patel’s opaque faculty recruitments.
CJI TS Thakur visited the GNLU campus on 17 September and constituted the two member review committee to look into the allegations against Patel, sources inside GNLU told Legally India.
According to the allegations, potential faculty members’ fitness for recruitment should be tested on the basis of their lecture presentations made to students, to ensure a transparent and fair process.
But at GNLU, Patel allegedly required these presentations to be made to existing faculty members instead of students, said one source in the campus.
The review committee will begin its inquiry this week, sources said.
Patel did not respond to an email seeking comment.
The GNLU administration under Patel is currently also in dispute in the Gujarat high court, with existing GNLU staff members who allege that certain recent recruitments done by Patel were illegal as instead of making those new appointments Patel should have converted the claimants’ existing contractual appointments into permanent appointments.
This year Gujarat high court was of the opinion that Patel has turned GNLU into a human rights violating oligarchy.
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99% of student and faculty is fully behind Professor Patel.He appoint many good faculty (including alumni of GNLU) and also establish research professor chair.
Bimal Patel may have the support of Modi but how he runs a law school has nothing to do with politics, nor would any political parties really be interested.
If a VC or the BCI chairman or anyone else is upset that our reports are one-sided and not including their side of the story, they'd only have themselves to blame for not commenting or providing their perspective; if there is no official comment on a story, the only one hurt by such lack of comment is the admin.
It's also worth noting that as far as I recall, Bimal Patel has chosen not to respond to any of our requests for comments for a good year or so now, and every story we've carried on GNLU has been accurate and vindicated by events and other reports.
I would however specifically call this report "rabble rousing" : the allegation is that "Patel allegedly required these presentations to be made to existing faculty members instead of students" and the reported consequence is the constitution of a "review committee".
Now you report it by saying "Bimal Patel will face a review committee (...) to look into allegations of Patel’s opaque faculty recruitments" and you proceed to give it a look and feel of disciplinary action.
Is it a policy review or is it a disciplinary review ? Are there any rules on the book which provide for a diff procedure of appointment ? Nothing on that subject in your article.
If you're going to write a story like this albeit without responses, I don't see how responding to your requests for comment would help the concerned persons.
Let me point out finally I'm not the first reader to sense malice in some of your reporting : in the case of the BCI it was hilarious but if you're going to keep at it for long you're actually going to give credence to Misra's comments about this site.
Regards,
A regular reader of the rabble rousing and other content.
I don't think we implied it's a disciplinary review, but it's certainly embarrassing if faculty are hired the way they allegedly are...
There's absolutely no malice in our reports though - we simply report on that which our sources, students, etc tell us about. From our perspective it's nothing personal: if nothing secret or strange happened at BCI or GNLU or NUJS or wherever, we'd be equally happy to write about other things.
I'd be very happy if BCI chairman turned around and said, "Hi Kian, please find attached our minutes re XYZ," or, "Hi Kian, we have a really hard job - this verification exercise is essential for the well-being of the profession and unfortunately if we have a state bar council election during this process, it'll just mean that lots of fake lawyers will vote against incumbents.", or "Hi Kian, Thanks for bringing our trip of 12 BCI members to Washington to our attention, it does seem like it'll be rather more expensive than we envisaged so we'll be going with a smaller contingent."
Or, for instance, in this story, Bimal Patel could have said:
"Hi Prachi, thank you for your email. Yes, that's correct, our policy of recruitment is being looked at by a committee.
For reasons of efficiency, we have the current policy in place where prospective faculty candidates were assessed by other faculty members.
I didn't think there was a conflict of interest in that, but we'll see what the committee concludes and will take their findings under advisement.
Have a wonderful day,
Bimal Patel."
At the end of the day, this is not a huge scandal or anything and I don't think we oversold the story here or it looks particularly malicious, other than being a bit embarrassing for Patel.
But a response from the administration would nearly always be in their interest and would let us report a more balanced story. In the absence of their willingness to do so, we can only be expected to do so much trying to unearth positive things about them.
www.thehansindia.com/posts/index/Andhra-Pradesh/2016-09-24/Indian-legal-system-failed-Madhava-Menon/255379
& The previous comment about the students behind the Director is **** and we all know that to be true.
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