Saturday, November 04, 2017

Diversity at IIT Bombay --- A draft proposal

Draft Proposal for a letter to be submitted to IIT Bombay by 1992 batch

Dear Institute,

We the undersigned are students of the 1992 batch wish to record our views regarding increasing the diversity of the student and faculty at IIT Bombay.

In our view, based on our experience across the globe, diversity is an important goal in itself because representative institutions are better than merely effective institutions in terms of actualizing the potential of all students and all faculty. We do not want our institute to over-represent any individual sub-segment of the population wherever possible, because this is proven in the research literature to be sub-optimal compared to diverse representation in proportion of the population.

Moreover we surveyed the students of our batch and the issue of student wellness was the second ranking issue in terms of priority overall.

In our view, the diversity of students and faculty is an important structural factor driving student wellness. Since the institute has asked us to prioritize student wellness, our batch believes that the improving the diversity of students and faculty also needs to be considered by the institute.  While reservations for students and faculty can increase the diversity of students and faculty, these are sometimes not filled up and adequate effort is sometimes not made to fill them up. We believe that a lack of diversity is not in the best interest of the institute, so the the institute should implement reservations in full. While preparatory courses, post-admission courses and other student support initiatives have improved the diversity of the student population, we believe that the institute needs to create a pipeline of suitably qualified faculty by encouraging students from less represented segments to join doctoral and post-doctoral programmes at IIT Bombay. We do not recommend diluting quality at the altar of such diversity, but we do recommend clear, consistent and comprehensive efforts to improve the diversity of student and faculty at IIT Bombay.

As part of the student wellness initiative, we would like to work with the institute to create a zero suicide student community through a focus on mental well-being of all students. While we believe that the student wellness initiative should address the needs of all segments of students, we recognize that some segments need more support than others and such support to these segments should be sensitive to their special needs (e.g. on gender, caste and language dimensions). For example the appropriate segment of students and faculty should be engaged wherever possible to support students needing support from the student wellness initiative. We also believe that all students and faculty should annually undergo a mandatory, well designed, digital gender, caste and language sensitization training programme as part of the student wellness initiative.

Regards

Students of 1992 batch of IIT Bombay

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