Text of the Letter Written (in November 2008) to the Christ Community Explaining Why I Had to 

Resign from the School of Law, Christ University

Hello all,

My name is Dattathreya and I used to teach at the College (now 'School') of Law at Christ University, Bangalore, for the past two and a half years.

As of October 23, 2008, I resigned my position with the School of Law. I am writing this email to share my experiences with you concerning the circumstances under which I have resigned. I do this because I sense that many of you are probably facing issues similar to the ones that we ourselves faced in this department. I feel that perhaps there might be something for you to learn from our experiences, so that when you are required to negotiate with the Christ Management on any issue, you have a fair sense of what positions you may need to take and how the Management has dealt with these kinds of matters previously with other people.

1. Fundamentally, our objection was to the way in which the affairs of this department, especially policy issues, were run over the past year by the office of the Vice Chancellor, Christ University. These affairs were run in a way that was fundamentally undemocratic, and even, anti-democratic. When we first began the School of Law, we (teachers) were given the impression that we were – along with the students, the Management and the parents – equal stakeholders in this enterprise, but that has since turned out to be an illusion and the true motivations and assumptions of the Management have now come to the fore.

2. The background to this had been that in the first year and half of its existence, the Management had not merely encouraged the faculty to provide its inputs into most dimensions of running the law programme, but had left virtually all the decision-making relating to the law programme to us teachers. Indeed, our job descriptions and job responsibilities, given to us when we were considering joining here, were sold to us as involving 'institution-building' rather than just teaching. And it was on this assumption that each one of us at the Faculty of Law had begun work with the programme and with the college. And it was this responsibility that we discharged by putting in place systems for everything, from the admissions process, academic content and evaluation, recruitment of new faculty, setting up the physical library and the digital library (electronic databases), to academic integrity policies, internship policies, co-curricular and extra-curricular activities, library services policies, etc.

3. Things seemed to start to sour from our perspective, when, last year, during the admissions process, the Faculty of Law was initially entirely left out of all the policy decisions that were taken with regard to the admissions process. It was only after the Faculty of Law had got wind of what was happening, and immediately sprung to action and put pressure on the Management to get Faculty input into the process, that the Management relented. Had we not initiated this move ourselves, the Management would have gone ahead and implemented all of their own decisions by themselves and imposed those on us, the Faculty of Law, as a fait accompli.

4. As teachers, we were entitled to feel that our views would be considered before any policy or administrative decision affecting our department, our students, and the teaching of law, would be taken. Unfortunately, it has become our recurring experience in the recent past that the management of Christ University would take us for granted and try to get us to only implement decisions that they had already taken by themselves. Indeed, this trend went so far that, in one instance, minutes of a meeting at which all members of the faculty of law were present represented us as having agreed to a decision that was alleged to have been made (regarding the implementation of the undergraduate evaluation pattern for the B.A.,LL.B. course) even when each member of the faculty had explicitly articulated disagreement with the management's views in very clear and unambiguous terms.

5. Eventually, it got to the point where us Faculty of Law made it clear to the Christ Management that we had very serious disagreements with them on a series of issues, and on which we felt our own positions were largely non-negotiable. These issues related to criteria and objectivity in the admissions process, evaluation patterns for specific courses, the possible scaling-up of the instituion (i..e. by adding more 'sections' and including more students - upto 160 per batch - with the short term objective of increasing revenues for the University), fixation of the maximum number of teaching hours, relaxation of the sign-in sign-out system, and discontinuing the gender discrimination in the admissions process.

6. As a consequence of the management's attitude towards us teachers, there was a grave loss in our trust and confidence in the management. The morale of the teachers had suffered seriously and we realised that this was a deliberate ploy on the management's part. Despite this, we were trying to initiate negotations with the management. Through our negotiation process we were trying to achieve two things: (1) make sure that decisions on every issue are taken democratically, because, ultimately, it is the teachers that are going to be interacting with the students and not the management, and (b) try to re-establish even a modicum of confidence or trust in the management so that it would allow us to at least have the minimal ground on which to try to continue functioning as a team.

7. However, our one significant meeting with the Vice Chancellor made it clear to us that they were not willing to hear us on any issue. At this meeting, rather than respond substantively to the issues raised or answer the specific questions, the Vice Chancellor simply kept stonewalling, only asking repeatedly, like a parrot, "Am I in your court? Why should I answer your questions?"

Other Recent Happenings at Christ University that Made Me Determined to Want to Leave it:

Interestingly, the person that they have got to replace our team, one Mr. Jose Varghese, whom they have designated as the Principal of 'SLCU', has had an extraordinarily interesting history. Should you run into him anywhere around the Christ campus, do remember to ask him why the Central Government threw him out of Hidayatullah National Law University (HNLU), Raipur, where he used be designated as the Special Officer. (Some bird has whispered in my ear that it had something to do with corruption and mismanagement, etc., but you should perhaps try getting the full spicy story from the man himself!) Given the kind of people these CMI guys are, they are only capable of bringing their own kind in!! No one else could possibly tolerate them!!

B. Other Happenings On Campus: Over the last 3 or 4 months, I have also come to know of other things that have happened on campus in the recent past that raise grave questions about (a) the current Management's tacit claim that the monks of the CMI congregation are complete ascetics and not vulnerable to sexual temptation, (b) the current Management's ability to look within itself and admit to grave moral turpitude on the part of CMI congregational appointees to the Management, (c) the current Management's commitment to ensuring that the teacher-student relationship is treated as a sacred one, and as something that cannot be violated, (d) the current Management's commitment to standing by the sacred responsibilities (of addressing the personal issues of students) that the counselors in the current system undertake, and (e) the current Management's commitment to ensuring a campus free of the fear of being subjected to sexual indignities by its own nominees and appointees.

Many of you perhaps already know the case I am talking about. Mr. Varghese, the Finance Officer (3rd-in-line to be the next Vice Chancellor of Christ University), allegedly an ascetic priest ("not vulnerable to sexual temptation") of the CMI congregation, Professor in the Psychology Department, had been accused by one of his own students of having tried, at the minimum, to molest her. The complaint related to not just one event, but a series of events that had led to such a complaint being filed with the Counsellors. When the Counsellors took the issue up with the Management, the Management flatly refused to deal with it. Initially, they chose not to deal with it at all, and later they were forced to deal with it only because the student herself was very vociferous about it. Eventually, the Management figured it had to do something, so they summarily constituted an investigative committee (comprising solely of their own people, and, oddly enough, also the Counsellor to whom that particular student had actually gone and complained). The committee's report was published; and the Counsellor involved vehemently disagreed with the conclusions of the investigation committee that the evidence collected had proved 'inconclusive', and refused to sign on it. The Management then 'forced' the Counseller to sign it, who then proceeded to do so 'against her own conscience'. The end result: the Counsellor (who had worked with Christ for seven years) resigned, the girl (student) was accused by the Management of trying to 'frame' a priest and expelled, the sexual pervert and predator CMI priest is exculpated and vindicated and continues to be put in charge of a very powerful position on campus (i.e Finance Officer) not to mention his being 3rd-in-line to be Vice-Chancellor of Christ University!!

How can anybody possibly countenance such a grave miscarriage of justice? What was done to the girl by the Management (expulsion) is called 'retaliation' in many international legal jurisdictions and is specifically declared to be 'illegal' in these jurisdictions. Thus, the Christ Management has committed a serious legal violation by expelling this student who had filed the complaint, irrespective of the truth or falsity of the charges made in the complaint.

[A copy of the - perfunctory, motivated and, I gather now, concocted - report produced by the Management's investigative committee is available here: http://docs.google.com/Doc?id= dj9jggb_14gmxm3kg9 . It is also available, permanently, on my website: www.dattathreya.net]

[I have since spoken to the girl concerned myself and am left in no doubt at all as to the guilt of this supposedly-ascetic-priest-in- the-cassock, Varghese, CMI]

Mr. Thomas T.V. asked all of us law faculty at one of the meetings we had with the Management: "when (CMI) priests wearing cassocks enter a classroom, your students do not stand up to respect us – is this what you teach your students?"

Mr. Thomas T.V., and, I believe, the entire CMI congregation at large, need to be told that they suffer from a few fundamental misconceptions/delusions here:

(a) an ascetic priest of one religious community may feel entitled to be respected by the lay people belonging to that same religious community. However, why should lay people of an entirely different religious community feel obligated to respect ascetic priests from another religious community? (Even the Vatican, ostensibly the alma mater for the CMI, would not insist on this position).

(b) The Vice Chancellor keeps claiming on every occasion, (and this claim is also repeated on the Christ website) that Christ University's philosophy of education is a secular one. If that is the case, why should anybody wearing a cassock even enter the secular universal classroom at all and demand respect? (As a contrast, the Jesuits, who run institutions such as the St. Josephs College of Arts and Sciences in Bangalore, have a policy that their priests, even when they go to teach their own specialized subjects, cannot enter any classroom wearing a cassock).

(c) when we teach students in class, we discourage them from standing up when teachers enter the class. This is because we believe that the real learning happens through the conversations that happen in class, and these gestures - of students standing up when teachers, et al., come inside the classroom - are merely that, gestures, tokens, charades: they are not the substance of the learning process, and therefore we discourage them.

(d) respect can only be earned, not demanded.

Most importantly, and to put it a lot more bluntly, if CMI priests have so much trouble keeping their (erect? and adventuresome) penises inside their cassocks – as they apparently do, – why would anybody respect a CMI cassock?!?! For all you know, tomorrow another CMI priest might try to rub his erect penis against your own daughter, wife or mother!! And, going by past experience, he would probably even get rewarded for that act with more power and control in this tragi-comic socio/psycho-pathological institutional dispensation!!

Should you wish to talk to me about any of these issues, feel free to contact me: 9343836554, or email me at this email address: dattathreya@gmail.com

Regards,