A little more than two months after his joining, Chanakya National Law University (CNLU) vice chancellor Prof Faizan Mustafa on Sunday presented the revamp plan for the institution both in terms of academics as well as infrastructure.
Talking to media on Sunday, Mustafa, who was the VC of NALSAR University of Law for a decade and was the founder VC of National Law University, Odisha, said he would like to make the institution student-centric and do “some aggressive surgery” for its development as a centre of excellence in the true sense.
“I have met Chief Minister Nitish Kumar twice and the Chief Justice of the Patna High Court, who is the CNLU Chancellor, four times since taking over and both of them want things to improve to bring it at par with the best in the country. In fact, the CM told me CNLU was his dream project. I have been brought for the purpose of revamping it. I have been holding open sessions with the students to take their issues to the academic council, which was held last week and a lot of changes are on the anvil as per students’ demand,” he added.
Maintaining that academic flexibility was the need of the hour and also a key thing in the New Education Policy (NEP), which Prime Minister Narendra Modi also wants, Mustafa said that he had started it at NALSAR in 2012 itself and it had helped bring down the stress level of the students significantly. With the students unable to cope with growing stress level, a lot of unsavoury incidents have been reported from Kota as well as famed institutions, he added.
The VC has also written to the government for additional seven-acre land for CNLU, as had been planned at the time of its inception in 2006 and also met the.CM in this regard.
“We have decided to bring down the requirement of research papers in a year from 12 to one and incorporate new elements instead, as the students also aired their grievances about too much pressure. We have all kinds of students and the system should be convenient for all. We are also developing Accessibility lab for visually-impaired students and making al the classrooms digital at a cost of ₹7-crore,” he added.
He said that the emphasis would be on integration of knowledge and more research by incentivising published work and financial benefits on research projects. “We also plan to start a community radio at the CNLU to reach out to the masses for greater legal awareness. We are also planning to start new courses in cyber security & digital forensics, land law, taxation law, corporate & competition law etc., Cyber security & digital forensics centre will train the police force, as it is mandated to have one trained personnel in every police station under the new Nageik Suraksha Bill, 2023. In cyber crime, the conviction rate in India is just 3.5%, while the magnitude of crime is rising at a huge speed,” he added.
Before joining CNLU on August 3, Mustafa was at the Aligarh Muslim University (AMU), Aligarh and is the recipient of both Commonwealth Scholarship as well as Fulbright Fellowship. He was conferred on the SAARC’s ‘Best Law Teacher Award’ in 2014. He has delivered lectures in almost 32 countries of the world like USA, UK, Australia, Germany, China, Germany, Israel etc. He also runs the popular Youtube channel namely Legal Awareness WebSeries.
“My effort is to align the university to the needs of the students. Therefore, I not only engage classes, but also sit in others’ lectures. From day one, I have asked the students that they can meet me freely. The students raised the issue of lack of specialist teachers and the academic council has approved induction of new teachers,” he added.
