Oh Dean My Dean - Angelie Multani
- BSP
- 33 minutes ago
- 7 min read
IIT Delhi has just concluded its inaugural Diversity and Inclusion Deanship. It is the first deanship of its kind among Indian government institutes.
For this interview, we sat down with Professor Angelie Multani, former Dean of the Office of Diversity and Inclusion.
Here is the insider view.
Q1. You wrote a really beautiful farewell email, and in that, you told us that you were operating without any precedent when you set up this office. Which frameworks did you look for when you were designing the blueprints of this office?
There was some collective consultation with the person who had this idea, that is, Prof. Reetika Khera. She is the one who actually put it through the board of governors, and so on. There had been some meetings, and a few points were already on paper.
The challenge lay in determining the actual structure and implementation. To address this, I relied on consultations with student bodies from the various verticals of the Office of Diversity and Inclusion (ODI), specifically engaging with students from IGES.
I talked to different colleagues and looked at the way that ODI departments were run abroad, for example, in the US. From there, we mostly knew what we did not want to do. Ultimately, the blueprint emerged as a work in progress.
Q2. You mentioned different diversity verticals - they were functioning in isolation before ODI. What was your strategic vision when you were bringing them together?
As a matter of fact, we already had all the verticals working together, except ICE - which is a very unfortunate name now, and putting them together is something that the Board of Governors had suggested. The official thinking was that since all these verticals dealt with different forms of marginalisation and the office was one of diversity and inclusion, how do we create an administrative umbrella that would encompass these different kinds of marginalisation?
Individually, we all look at our own identities as being the most dominant. So, when you are putting these four together, what we wanted to do was get a sense of intersectionality: you can be different things at the same time or different things at different times. That was one thing we wanted to do when we made these different groups speak to each other in one common form.
Q3. Looking back at your tenure as the BSP President, how did your engagement with BSP shape your understanding of the campus culture as a whole?
I was the President of BSP more than 15 years ago. I think that BSP, even then, had a very, very strong motivation and the desire to talk about what they felt were the real issues that were not covered by official speech.
So, they wanted to do things like a caste census; they wanted to do things like actually talk about prejudice against female students; they wanted honest feedback on how faculty behave in the classroom - but often this was simply not allowed.
The understanding it gave me about the campus culture was that - It's like everything is an open secret. We all know how things operate, but we're not allowed to talk about them or say them, and if you actually say them out loud, you're seen as kind of troublemaking.
Q4. What is your opinion about Vibhinn (IIT Delhi's annual LGBTQIA+ pride and diversity festival ) not being conducted this year?
I think it's very sad.
Q5. IIT Delhi has a highly influential Alumni. How did the alumni community react to the formalisation of DEI policy?
Oh, very positively. I mean, at least as far as I've heard. The people who hated it didn't call me. But most of my former students were very, very happy. They thought it was a great step.
They were very pleased. They said, "Oh, we should have had something like this when we were students. If only we had something like this when we were students."
It was an overwhelmingly positive response.
Q6. In what forms did the "pushback" to ODI manifest?
Where the pushback started is, again, a complicated reason. One of the things was that people thought that the office may have the potential to intrude or cross the line into academic issues.
So, for example, again, the classroom is supposed to be the same space for everybody. I teach literature. Suppose somebody says, "trigger warning," and they leave. Now, how am I to teach everybody else in that classroom? Where does consideration of difference, which the office stands for, begin to transgress into academic independence?
Someone who says, I have a disability. I have finished my official time of staying on campus in the hostel, but my degree has been extended, which is directly linked to the disability I have. I need more time at the hostel. Now, if I'm giving that person more time in the hostel, other students may not have a physical disability, but they have other sorts of issues. Why am I not giving them extra time or advocating for it?
So these were the kind of conversations we had to have.
Apart from that, it was also that, it made things uncomfortable for people to see certain kinds of differences being made very visible.
Q7. We just concluded a lot of elections. During election times, we see a lot of spikes in identity-based discrimination. How was your office equipped to deal with it?
We took every complaint. We actually worked very closely with the Dean of Student Affairs. Any memes, any posters, any negative campaigns that targeted anybody on grounds of identity or section or region or community, whatever, would be dealt with extremely strictly, and the people found guilty of indulging in this kind of negative campaigning would be disallowed from doing so.
All their supporters would be disallowed from participating in the election. We issued warnings to everybody involved that this behaviour was not acceptable. Once we start a disco, elections would be suspended. So whether you are on this side or on that side, you're going to end up on the losing side.
Q8. You had a generational run on taking on very engaging administrative positions, ranging from Dean of ODI, Head of the Humanities Department, to BSP President. So what do you find yourself doing now that you have more time?
I've taken a sabbatical to reorient towards my own work. In the last eight years, it's been nonstop administrative work, which kind of takes you away from yourself. I find myself reading much more.
Just having that time in the mornings to read. And not just read something I have to read, you know, for my students or for class or for research, but just reading things that I enjoy reading.
Q9. ODI is one of a kind in almost all government institutions. Did you collaborate with deans or representatives from other colleges? Maybe private colleges?
Yeah, we talked to Ashoka, but Ashoka's special centre for learning is only for PWDs.
No other higher education institution in India has something like what IIT Delhi has set up. IIT Bombay wanted to set up something like this. They talked to us. IIT Madras talked to us. They wanted to put up a dean position as well. I don't know what happened eventually.
We talked to Ashoka about how they implement their special features for people with disabilities. Of course, they are a private university. They have different rules. They have different access to money. And they have different infrastructure. So, a lot of the stuff they could do, we couldn't. We do more. I think we do better than they do on many fronts. Again, we were mostly talking about issues related to PWD people. We spoke to places like Kirorimal, which had strong representation.
Q10. There is one complaint that all students have: the institute can sometimes be slow-moving. But on the other hand, you have all the enthusiastic student bodies. They have a lot of ideas and vision. So, in a leadership role, how did you balance both of these?
I mean, I hear what you are saying, and I agree with you; sometimes things move at a glacial speed, and there are unnecessary delays. But you also don't want policies or rules that affect thousands of people to be adopted in a hurry. So, you want something to be thought through really well and discussed at different levels.
For instance, while we were discussing modifying DISCOs to explicitly include Diversity and Inclusion, at one of the higher-level meetings, a question was raised about DISCO plus - Why are you calling it Plus? We don't want to imply that it's a bigger crime than regular.
So, we made it Disco with an asterisk. Our intention was that the new policies had to have special representation.
Sometimes students are extra enthusiastic because they also need to show that they've done something. It's a question of, as you said earlier, politics and election campaigning. You are able to show that I've done work in my tenure, and I’m ready to pass on the torch to somebody else and so on. That's not a great reason for doing things in a hurry. If the cause is worth doing, it's worth doing carefully and properly. So, the balance is important on both sides.
The middle path, as they say.
Q11. For the concluding question, we'd just like to ask you if there's anything that you'd like to say to all the students?
The only thing is, don't let the genie back into the bottle. There is a certain environment. Keep pushing, push for yourself, push for your friends, push for people who need you to push for them. Stand up for what you believe in. Stand by your own intelligence. Use your own critical thinking. Is this correct? Is this not correct? Is this something I want to do? And then act on it.
Don't just do something because everybody is doing it. It's your right, and it's your duty and your obligation to think for yourself and to ask questions.
Disclaimer: The views expressed in this interview solely belong to the interviewee and do not constitute the views of BSP.
Interview credits - Yuvi Bhatele, Arpit Rajput
Write-up credits - Arpit Rajput
Media credits - Prakhar
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