The imbroglio at Kolkata’s Jadavpur University on as fundamental an issue as undergraduate admissions is mercifully over. And with it yet another gherao ~ this time stretching for 44 hours ~ of the Vice-Chancellor (beleaguered at the best of times) and other worthies.

But if the state’s Advocate-General needs to be consulted on the basics of academic administration, there is life yet in the debate that the legal system is, as often as not, burdened with matters that ought to be settled by those helming the campus.

The students’ unions need to realise that the admission criteria can never come within their remit unless the dubious objective yet again was to harass the authorities, in a faint echo of its slogan, hok kalorob (let the movement continue) raised some years ago over a very different issue. The short point must be that it is not for the students to determine the terms of engagement.

That said, the VC, Professor Suranjan Das, and the Executive Council (EC) ought to have firmed up the decision much earlier, instead of provoking a showdown at the threshold of the new academic session. The authorities would appear to have choreographed a halfway-house ~ a 50:50 formula that accords equal weightage to the performance in the school-leaving board exam and the admission test to be conducted by the respective departments in the non-technical streams.

This is remarkably rational. While the second can examine the candidate’s aptitude for the subject, the first is an indicator of the student’s intrinsic merit. One cannot outdo the other. The disciplines to be covered are in the realm of humanities ~ English, Comparative Literature, History, Bengali, Political Science, and Philosophy.

On closer reflection, this is the formula that was followed in the premier colleges, pre-eminently Presidency before the college graduated to a university. Ergo, education minister Partha Chatterjee’s suggestion was rather disingenuous ~ to make the Plus-2 result the singular criterion for admission. The JU authorities ought long ago to have taken a call on the minister’s intervention ~ a distinct intrusion into campus autonomy.

A firm decision could scarcely have been delayed any further; the possibility of students opting for colleges affiliated to Calcutta University or the unitary institutions such as Presidency and St Xavier’s seemed substantial at one stage of the recent crisis.

The importance of Jadavpur University, a centre of excellence, would have been denuded in consequence. Happily, the dates for the entrance tests have eventually been announced. Now that escalation of the crisis has been staved off, the students must reflect on gheraos as Jadavpur University’s trademark method of agitprop.

Any decision on admission is best left to the Executive Council and the respective departments. It cannot be an extra-curricular activity of the students. The 44-hour gherao has once again blighted the functioning of the university. This nonsense must stop.