NLU Jodhpur may soon start its very first elected student body, said vice chancellor Prof Poonam Saxena.
“I’ve always supported a student body, never resisted it,” she told us by phone today.
NLU Jodhpur does not have a formal student body, although it does have a “student chief” and “vice-chief”, selecting from fifth- and fourth-year batches two students with the highest CGPA their respective previous semester.
Saxena said that this was an “inherited legacy” system and that she was all in favour of an elected student body, having been at Delhi University previously (where she had headed up Law Centre II before joining Jodhpur in 2013).
Students had approached her again this year about the idea of reforming student representation. “I’d be really happy, I had given my go ahead in April,” she said.
In July, students had approached her again and she told them to continue with the process.
“I think they’ll be starting whole process maybe tomorrow, or day after,” Saxena noted about students discussing the next steps. “There should be [a student council], why should there not be?”
“It takes a lot of load off the administration if you [students] are interested,” she added, saying that student preferences regarding hostels or other issues should be framed by such a body. “If you have an elected body, that can also look into ensuring discipline by laying clear rules that should be practically enforceable uniformly.”
Any recent rumours that she had resigned as VC from NLU Jodhpur were not true, she clarified.
Last year, NLIU Bhopal had started its first student council.
However, several national law universities such as GNLU Gandhinagar, NLU Delhi and RGNUL Patiala do not (though the RGNUL administration has in theory agreed to the idea).
Comments
I still believe nothing will happened, the process will die after a few time.
I hope this finally happens because it is honestly long long overdue.
If you are/were a NLUJ student, you'd know that there have been multiple concerted efforts to push through reform. We even had an entire student constitution drafted by a representatives of the 2016 and 2017 batches, if I'm not wrong.
The main reason that it's been difficult to move forward on this has been that the students have been negotiating in good faith while the admin seriously doesn't give a flying ... They know that they have too much stuff to threaten us with, and at the end of the day, make a small concession on one of the demands and that satisfies enough people and momentum is lost.
Hopefully that doesn't happen this time.
The people who spoke out against all this were undermined by the students themselves who actively connived with the administration. Admin would unleash their pets in any given batch to undermine genuine free thinking and action on such vital issues.
We've been a fairly petty lot - typical of the crab mentality. Anyone who disagrees with me should stop and look at the absolute shambles in which our alumni outreach efforts are - you will find people from NLUJ gleefully running each other down for their personal grudges while other law schools have an honourable code - never run down your own in front of other college people.
This delay is something we've all contributed to - in our own way and in varying degrees. That's the ugly truth.
I find our alumni is far friendlier and likely to help each other than any other law school. I've happily called folks who are now partners in other firms and asked them the questions I wasn't able to get resolved in-house. The college folks in the firms I've been in have always willingly gone the extra length for me - and naturally I've done the same.
So, at least my experience on that account has been vastly different.
Lol who is this discipline for ? Will it be enforced against the admin also or just the students as usual? The admin was let off easily earlier because even the students had a lot of liberties. These have been eroded over the last five years. Now there's nothing stopping the students.
#ReleaseTheAccounts
But, SBA is neither to enjoy power nor to keep a check on the administration. It is a fallacious concept. The SBA is to involve itself into a "cooperative venture" with the administration for the benefit of the students. It must not behave like a labour union. Form your SBA with positivity in your thoughts and actions.
We were all getting a great laugh out of it..
Seems NLU-J has some world class web infrastructure, complete with Internet Explorer & Windows 95.