St Stephen’s has for long maintained its position as the college that gets the cream of candidates. The reasons for this stem largely from the academic rigour and the favourable student teacher ratio .
It’s one of the few colleges where the tutorials system still works.If ever accosted at a party and asked ’’Were you at college?’’, the chances are that you are not really being asked about your educational qualifications.
You are being asked, ’’Were you in St Stephen’s?’’ To the Stephanian, St Stephen’s is not merely a college, it is the college. Perhaps the last repository of the Oxbridge culture in India, St Stephen’s has often been accused of being a finishing school, a networking society and even a dilettante’s paradise. Of course, it is all these. But underneath the public school veneer lurks a fierce work culture and competitive spirit.
Stephanians love understating the atmosphere of excellence that permeates the college’s corridors, but are nevertheless very conscious of it. With one difference excellence is not measured in academic achievement alone. This may be why the college comes alive after the formal teaching is over. When every day at least six of the two dozen or so societies ranging from the Shakespeare Society, the Wodehouse Society and the Informal Discussion Group meet.
As Principal Anil Wilson puts it, ’’That’s when the real education starts.’’ There are day scholars and boarders, but in the college hierarchy ’’gentlemen (and, since last year, ladies) in residence’’ are the brahmins. And ’’residence’’ spawns its own sub-culture and breed of snobbery.
So too does the admission policy that dictates an interview even if the student has the requisite cut-off percentage. The idea is to select the right kind of student who fits into the Stephanian ethos. Every year there are protests in Delhi University about this unique admission policy, every year St Stephen’s has its way.
A college catering to the sciences, economics and the humanities, St Stephen’s has a distinct liberal arts bias. The extensive college library, for example, is not narrowly academic. It boasts a large section stocking fiction and even a rare collection of books on cricket. The college’s ambience forces a student to be aware of much more than his subject.
A successful Stephanian is never (at least openly) a swot. The prized attributes are versatility, articulation and even glibness. In the lottery of Indian life, being a Stephanian is like winning the first prize. But St Stephens’ greatest claim to fame is the academic innovation they undertake such as their Centre For Mathematical Sciences and MOUs with many foreign universities.
Among its few weaknesses that its detractors point out is its isolation from the rest of the university (it is one of the few colleges where the annual festival is not open to outsiders)