One of the most active student initiatives at NUJS, which has brought back many industry personnel, academics and alumni to the university over the years, is reeling from yet another controversy. Instead of the students being responsible for the activities of the cell, the admin has during the last sem decided that faculty would be handling things. Since then, the number of courses has dwindled. Students are of course putting the blame entirely on faculty and admin and busy making memes. What they are failing to do is to hold themselves accountable for the entire fiasco. In the last 3 years, the Cell has seen many controversies involving the students in charge as well as those taking part in credit courses. From illegal grade manipulation, giving friends a chance to take popular courses over other applicants, allegations of repeated misrepresentation and lies to external faculty and admin, forcing guest faculty to inflate grades to the length of giving 90-95/100, rampant plagiarism, cheating in assignments and exams, doctoring of results, hooking up in classrooms reserved for Cell activities, and even misappropriation of faculty honorarium, the students have done it all. There have been a bunch of complaints received from faculty and alum on all these counts, other than the regular ones about students not attending the classes after registering, non-submission of assignments, harassing the faculty for internships and research positions etc. It was only a time before even the notoriously lackadaisical NUJS admin was forced to take any action. It is a sad day when the existing students fail to be responsible with the power that they had got courtesy the hard work of seniors and alum over the years. Even now, much of the delay for new courses is because no existing student can be trusted by their own teachers anymore to do the grunt work without working a side angle for their own agenda. The credit courses used to be for helping the students interact with the industry better and reconnect them with alum and learn practical side of the law within a classroom setting. Now those are just subjects where one can earn easy grades without turning up and then swap it for electives to increase CGPA. The few visiting faculty who put in any effort to enforce standards are either given bad feedback, or met with indifference when it comes to response. It does not help that the admin have got no clue about how to maintain academic standards at all. From a 'student-run university' that had achieved great things because students and admin used to cooperate with each other and the students knew how to handle responsibilities in a mature manner, to a cesspool where less than 10% students are interested to learn anything at all, 90% faculty are indifferent and lazy and the admin has got completely wrong set of priorities. No wonder why NUJS has got a plummeting perception everywhere.

Every word of this post is sadly true. Senior batches of the college, graduating from 2005 to 2012, worked hard and built an excellent reputation for the college. The VCs of those days (Menon, Chimni and MP Singh) were not great administrators, but they were respected scholars who set high academic standards, were financially honest and did not suck up to politicians. During the next decade, from 2012 to 2022, came Ishwar Bhat, Amit Talukdar and NKC, whose tenures coincided with the tenure of Mamata Banerjee as Chief Minister. Eminent people in the governing bodies were pushed out and replaced with semi-literate political lackeys. A lot of mediocre faculty were given important positions, including a rank plagiarist with no subject knowledge or competence, who played recorded Powerpoint lectures in class instead of giving a proper lecture and whose idea of a book review was to mention the price, number of pages and chapter headings of the book. In the initial part of this dark decade, the overall good quality of the students, and goodwill generated by the earlier batches, ensured that the university still did well, in terms of placements or scholarships abroad. The university went into an autopilot mode that kept it among the top NLUs and ensured a decent NIRF ranking, although the gap with NALSAR and NLUD widened. However, you can’t run in autopilot mode forever and cracks began to develop during the Covid pandemic. It also hurts that the current generation of students are VERY reckless, entitled and lazy, using woke excuses as a cop out. Thus, the third decade of NUJS is proving to be its worst and will doom the university forever.

The charade continues. The students who failed to get themselves registered for more courses are now making more memes because they could not have their own way with the registration, or manipulate the results like they used to. Comically, the meme makers are even trying to take the credit for the new courses, as if the courses did not get decided earlier and it's their antics that caused this. Basically, there is a group consisting of ex and current CCC members who are angry at having lost the power which they had been abusing and hence would do anything to remain relevant. They can't even frame a sentence in English properly, but consider themselves meme experts. These are the CLAT-crackers who expect the best jobs on graduation.