Film students protest syllabus changes

KOLKATA: On Monday morning, slogans like ‘Chheen ke lenge azadi’ and ‘Hum hamara haq mangte/Hum kisi se bhik nahi mangte’ rent the air on the Satyajit Ray Film & Television Institute (SRFTI) campus as students protested the appointment of Gajendra Chauhan as the chairperson of the Film and Television Institute of India (FTII). The students expressed solidarity with the FTII students and in the same breath went vocal about their own problems.
Students agreed that syllabus change was one of their biggest problems. SRFTI students’ association president Ateesh Chattopadhyay said, “The admission process of the 13th batch is already in an advance stage. But there is still no clarity on the syllabus. So SRFTI aspirants are in the dark about their future.”
Ex-students claimed they had raised objections to the process of syllabus change both in the institute’s Academic Council (AC) as well as the Governing Council (GC). In April last year, a proposal was made to set up an External Committee (EC) to look into reasons for course delay, quality of teachings, infrastructure and course content. Though the first AC was supposed to meet in three months, the process got delayed. No resolution on the syllabus has yet been reached. “The next AC meet is scheduled on June 29 whereas the orientation for new students starts on June 26. The syllabus that has been sent to the AC member doesn’t address the core issue of quality of input and co-ordination between departments,” said Hitesh Chaurasia, an AC member.
Another issue was the way projects were being dropped and then brought back to the curricula. “We used to have a playback project. But suddenly, we heard that the project would be dropped from the curricula. The same has happened for the project on experimental/underground work. Documentary projects were dropped. Since we protested, they have been brought back. If a project is unimportant, why should there be a rollback?” Chattopadhyay asked.
On the inability to complete the course on time, former union president Niranjan Kujur said, “There is a lag of one year. A decent syllabus has to be drawn up. Based on that, we need a time frame to complete it. We also want a teacher evaluation system.”
Faculty members were not willing to buy the logic. “The syllabus will always evolve. Hence, projects can get dropped at points. If students want more projects, we will need a seven-year course to teach them everything,” said Subhadro Chowdhury, associate professor of SRFTI.
“Some of them claim that they can’t complete their movies on time because they are not in the ‘mood’ to film. How can this be tolerated?” another teacher said. To this, SRFTI students’ association GS Prashant R said, “Two rotten apples shouldn’t be responsible for punishing an entire batch. Disciplining them is a better option than dropping projects.”