PANJIM: Goa University Vice Chancellor Varun Sahni said that they are taking steps to amalgamate certain faculties to create new schools of studies, to meet the challenges in knowledge building and knowledge transmitting tasks in the coming years. 

“One of our biggest challenges in the coming years will be to approach our knowledge building and knowledge transmitting tasks with a new vigour and resolve. In order to break down disciplinary barriers, we must reorganize knowledge itself, in the understanding that the disciplines and departments existing today are artifacts of another time and place…. In GU, we are taking the first steps to amalgamate certain Departments to create new Schools of Study, as already envisaged in the Act that created our university,” he said while addressing a gathering on 29th annual convocation on Tuesday. 

He announced that the Executive Council has already approved the creation of a School of Earth, Ocean and Atmospheric Sciences out of the currently existing departments of Earth and Marine Science.

At GU, Sahni – a political scientist of international repute, said is alive to multiple challenges while also mentioning that since mainstreaming vocational education is a core challenge, the varsity is setting up a Bachelor in Vocational Studies. 

“We are alive to multiple challenges that we face, for instance, we are aware that we can no longer regard only the demographic segment that falls between the ages of 18 and 80 years as out user community. In a longer-living and aging society, providing access to second careers and lifelong learning for all who want them, becomes our institutional mandate,” he acknowledged. 

“One of our challenges is to find ways of providing affordable re-skilling opportunities for people to meet the ever-changing requirements of the job market. To promote greater mobility and flexibility, we must create modular education packages for our students,” he said emphasizing that GU is set to introduce the long-awaited Choice Based Credit System at the graduate level from the coming academic year. The university has already introduced the system for the post-graduate students. 

Sahni, who has served as vice chancellor of university of Jammu and is also a former professor in International Politics at Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), pointed out that public universities in the country are facing tough times as a meager 10 percent students are receiving public education. “Some indicators, such as persistent downgrading of vice-chancellors in the Warrant of Precedence, can perhaps be deemed trivial, even unimportant. Other indicators are more portentous,” he further said.