Private varsity governance pitfalls

– Shiv Visvanathan is a professor at O.P. Jindal Global University, Sonipat (Haryana) and a member of Compost Heap, an academic think tank One of the drawbacks of academic controversies is that they surface without articulation of genealogy, or context. They erupt as scandal, evoke a few personalities, allow a trail of gossip, and fade quickly. The recent controversy around Ashoka University (AU) has that drawing room flavour. It will cease to command attention or meaning soon. The genealogy of Ashoka University can be traced back to the writings of Patrick Geddes, India’s first sociologist recognised as the inventor of town planning. Geddes wrote about the modern university in an inimitable way. He argued that a university is incomplete without dissenting academics. The holism of the university as an intellectual powerhouse needs the creative power of dissenting perspectives. Thus, every Western university system grew by absorbing intelligent dissenting viewpoints within its environment. This is precisely the balance that Pratap Bhanu Mehta provided as an autonomous and dissenting force within Ashoka University. In this particular case which forced Mehta’s resignation as vice chancellor in 2019 and as professor of political science on March 15, one should bear in mind that Ashoka’s financiers have always been ambivalent about dissent. They should have known it is normative in the university system. Nor is Mehta’s resignation a unique case for AU, promoted seven years ago with high aspirations. In 2017, the AU management fired a young lecturer for his public stand on retaining the special status of Kashmir, claiming it threatened the university. Even more embarrassing was the resignation of Prof. Meena Surie Wilson, head of AU’s women’s leadership cell. A brilliant professional with deep roots in Asia and the US, Surie discovered that the cell was without real content. As she sought to write its curriculum, she discovered the university trustees wanted to use money officially allocated to her department for other purposes. She challenged it quietly but firmly and chose to resign over the issue in 2018. The integrity and dignity of that protest should not be forgotten. If Prof. Surie challenged the ethical integrity of Ashoka, Pratap Bhanu Mehta, a formidable public intellectual, became an example of political and intellectual autonomy, a status unacceptable to its founder-trustees, who envisioned AU as an investment opportunity rather than a truly independent liberal arts university. The follow-up resignation of Arvind Subramaniam, former chief economic advisor of the BJP/NDA government at the Centre who had signed up as AU faculty, highlights this structural weakness. There is a second facet of this controversy that needs underlining. This situation is not peculiar to AU. It is common to a whole chain of universities ranging from Jamia Islamia, Aligarh, Delhi, Hyderabad and JNU which are desperately struggling for academic and intellectual freedom within an insidious political environment. This issue goes beyond colourful personalities like Mehta to the basic character of universities as intellectual terrain. The threat to emasculate the autonomy and diversity of the university has been one…