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AU TURNS 78 TODAY
The bust of Sir. C.R. Reddy in front of the AU Registrar's office.
"We, Andhras, know how to face the facts and how to accept the facts, and we shall certainly strive our utmost, however dissatisfied we may be with the provisions of the Bill, to shape it so as to bring it near unto our hearts, so to speak, and to bring it more into line with the true educational requirements of our Province and with the high educational ambitions which were the root of our years lone agitation for a separate Andhra University''. These were the remarks of Cattamanchi Ramalinga Reddy during the debate on the Bill of Andhra University in the Madras Assembly in 1925 when the Telugu-speaking people wanted a university of their own. The vision of Dr Reddy, as the first Vice-Chancellor of the university, the scholarly guidance of Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, followed by the hard-working V.S. Krishna and other successive Vice-Chancellors, and the untiring efforts of K.V. Gopalaswamy as Registrar during his long innings have made the university an institution of repute. The first university to be named after the language of the people in South India, AU came into being on April 27, 1926. The university will be celebrating its 78th Foundation Day on Monday. AU was formally inaugurated on August 30, 1926, in a rented building in Vijayawada (called Bezwada in those days). As sufficient infrastructure was not available there, the university was shifted to Visakhapatnam four years later. It functioned from Guntur from 1942 to 1946 due to World War II.
R. Radhakrishna and other eminent educationists served its as Vice-Chancellors, and distinguished teachers like T.R. Seshadri, Suri Bhagavantham, Hiren Mukherjee, Humayan Kabir and V.K.R.V. Rao taught in the university during its early days. It received largesses from the then princely States like Jeypore which helped it create the needed infrastructure and other facilities. The AU Post-Graduate Centre in Guntur later became Nagarjuna University in 1976. The university has two PG centres at Kakinada and Etcherla (Srikakulam) at present and is opening one each at Vizianagaram and Tadepalligudem from next year, with a view to having a PG centre in every district under its jurisdiction. The PG centres are apart from the dozens of colleges teaching PG courses and hundreds of degree colleges in the five districts.
The current Vice-Chancellor, Y.C. Simhadri, is keen to convert the university into a Central University and a Centre of Excellence. AU has received ''A'' grade from the National Assessment and Accreditation Council of the University Grants Commission, and the AU Engineering College has been recognised as a special institute of excellence. The AU Library, named after Dr.V.S. Krishna, is becoming on-line and has been provided with the Inflibnet facility and has been spruced up a lot. An annexure building is being constructed to provide more accommodation.
More courses are being introduced every year to meet the demand in the changing global scenario. New faculties in agricultural sciences, forest science and basic medical sciences will be introduced from the next academic year.
G. Narasimha Rao
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