23-05-2025
- Politics
- New Indian Express
'Mutilation of academic disciplines': DU Executive Council approves curriculum overhaul amid strong criticism
NEW DELHI: Delhi University's Executive Council in its 1275th meeting held on Friday approved sweeping revisions to the curriculum in various departments, including Psychology, Sociology and English, while also clearing new programs in journalism and nuclear medicine, uniform teacher seniority rules and administrative measures.
The Executive Council (EC), the highest statutory body, approved revisions to the elective paper Psychology of Peace, replacing conflict-based case studies with references from the Indian epics for peace and conflict resolution.
In Relationship Science, a unit examining dating apps was also dropped.
Sociology curriculum changes removed foundational theorists like Karl Marx and Thomas Robert Malthus from the paper Population and Society and scrapped a unit on the Sociology of Food.
Meanwhile, the Indian authors, particularly those focused on religion, were emphasized in the Sociology of Law.
The meeting was, however, marked by strong dissent from several elected EC members over what they termed "ideological interference" and "systematic erosion of academic autonomy."
Controversial syllabus changes include the removal of case studies involving Kashmir, Palestine, India-Pakistan tensions and the Northeast, replaced by the Indian religious texts such as the Mahabharata and Bhagavad Gita.
