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Alankrita Anand | January 9, 2014 | 9.25 am ISTAs students of journalism, we are taught to be wary of state control, be it outright surveillance or other more inconspicuous forms of control.

As students of journalism, we are also taught that the media functions as the fourth estate, which is supposed to be independent of state control. So, what happens when the very government

that we are wary of decides to ‘standardize’ the journalism syllabus across all media schools with the purpose of teaching prospective journalists to ‘serve the nation’? In media schools, we

are taught papers in reporting and editing which teach us the technicalities of the job, we are taught media and culture which teaches us the importance of language and how the media is

part of a larger cultural public sphere and we are taught ethics to teach us what fairness and balance are. The syllabus for each of these papers is set by our respective universities, the

University of Delhi in my case; it is set by professors drawn from industry and academia. Yes, mine is a public university and it has even been at odds with the government of the day of

late. But we continue to have a syllabus set by professionals free from any external control.There are also institutions which come directly under the Ministry of Information &

Broadcasting, namely, the Indian Institution of Mass Communication, the Film and Television Institute of India and the Satyajit Ray Film & Television Institute. I don’t know how the

syllabi for these institutions are set but what does the regulation of the syllabus of a film school mean? Quite simply- a curb on freedom of expression.Behind the holier than thou purpose

of ‘serving the nation’, what this proposal to open a Communication University and standardize the syllabus across institution means is to nip freedom in the bud. What does serving the

nation mean? How does the government decide what serving the nation means? To take a very simple example, we watched Anand Patwardhan’s ‘controversial’ documentary Ram ke Naam as part of a

Broadcast Journalism class. In our view, this film served the nation. Does the government of the day think so as well?What then happens to a student at FTII who is learning what the essence

of a politically charged documentary is? What happens to journalism students wanting to debate the role of the country’s public service broadcasting channels?Attacking a paper or a

journalist over particular news items is bad enough, paid publication and censorship are major blots as well but what this latest move aims to do is to condition at the earliest stage

possible. How can there be dissent if one does not know what dissent is?To justify the new proposition citing the examples of the Medical Council of India (MCI) and the All India Council for

Technical Education (AICTE) is absolutely unfounded. The MCI accredits medical colleges and sees to the advancement of medical education in the country, the AICTE plans and coordinates the

technical education. Yes, both these bodies look into the syllabi for their respective fields. The difference- medicine and engineering are standardized scientific fields, media a liberal

art. What next? Will the government also standardize the History and Philosophy syllabi to serve the nation? For all we know, it might have already begun.