Message from the former Vice-Chancellor’s Desk (3)

Message from the former Vice-Chancellor Prof. TB Subba

Parting message to the members of SU family from outgoing Vice-Chancellor

I feel as if I came to Sikkim only the other day. Never did I realize that five years have gone by. The weeks fleeted, months passed and years rolled by. There were moments of boredom, frustration, and anger as well as hours of happiness, ecstasy, and excitement. I am not the kind of person who will list out what I achieved during the past five years. That is for others to appreciate if there have been some achievements at all. Some achievements might not even be visible at present but may be so years after I leave. Even those that are visible could not have been achieved without the hard work, commitment, and dedication of you all. Thank you all for giving SU your very best!

As I am leaving in a few days from now I have certain requests for you all. The first request is to the students. You are closest to my heart and hence I request you to make only reasonable demands through proper channel. I am sure any vice-chancellor will do his/her best to fulfill your legitimate demands, but should some such demands not be met immediately please do not hold the university to ransom, because it is easy to hold any university to ransom but by doing so you will be harming yourselves the most. There may be many reasons for even a legitimate demand to be not fulfilled instantly. Sometimes patience is needed, some other times perseverance pays. I would also like to request you to keep the good image of the university protected from the social as well as print media.

My second request is to the teachers. The University has not been able to provide you with the best of facilities, but please remember that the best of facilities do not make the best of faculty members. I know that some of you are sore with me personally because the University could not promote you to higher posts, could not sanction leaves that you wanted me to sanction, and did not give you laptops and printers. Some of you have even taken recourse to the court of law for not calling you for the recently completed interviews. We need to wait for the honourable court’s verdict in this regard. I have also noticed that some of you ignore your basic duty of teaching, which I find unpardonable, but I ignored them hoping that your conscience would get the better of you someday. I would therefore request you all to try and be good teachers, by which I mean those whose priority is to teach well, who will treat each student equally no matter what is their caste, creed, and sex, who will not misuse their students against fellow colleagues or the administration, and who will not try to indoctrinate their students for that is against the fundamental tenet of education.

My third request is to the non-teaching staff. You have a very important role to play in taking a university to the path of progress or doom. Fortunately, our university has an excellent crop of non-teaching staff with a very high level of work ethics, which is a rare quality these days. They are also young, well-behaved and disciplined. One of my regrets is that I could not regularize some of the most sincere and hard working staff serving our university for more than six years now, partly because the posts we got during my tenure were different from those we had asked for. But those who are awaiting regularization are not many and I hope that they would be absorbed in the near future.

I would also like to place in record that I got excellent cooperation from some officers of the Ministry of Human Resource Development, Government of India, the Chairman of the University Grants Commission, and the Government of Sikkim. When I tried to repair the relationship with the state government it was misunderstood by some in SU, but most importantly by my predecessor. I do not believe in confrontation with anyone, but if my humility is seen as my weakness I know how to teach my adversaries the lesson they deserve. I have proven that in the past five years.

For the next five years the most important agendum of our university should be campus construction. Hence, I would like to request all the three pillars of the University – students, teachers, and staff – to cooperate with the administration in the campus building project. Till we move to our own campus, many of our problems will continue to bother us on day to day basis and we cannot have proper teaching and research ambience, which is fundamental for our existence as a university.

I am happy to go back to teaching, much as my students at North-Eastern Hill University, Shillong are excited at the prospect of my imminent return. I will be missing most of you for the rest of my life and will be happy to contribute to your happiness even in future if I have any scope to do so. There are some in the University who I regret having recruited them, regularized them or supported them when they badly needed my support because I realize rather late in my life that gratefulness is not a virtue of every human being.

Sikkim University will be an important part of my remaining life. I gave it whatever I could. Even materially I gave it three times more, in terms of e-books costing about three crores, compared to about one crore I got from it in the form of pay and perks for five years. I will continue to serve this university till such time I am able to do it. It is a promise to you all.

 

T.B. Subba

Outgoing VC

 

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