Ashoka University’s treatment of Sabyasachi Das for his working paper on possible voter suppression in Indian elections has focused attention on the future of elite private universities in India
Ashoka University’s (henceforth Ashoka) treatment of Sabyasachi Das after he uploaded a working paper that touched on possible voter suppression in Indian elections has focused attention on the future of elite private universities in India.
The pragmatic defence of Ashoka’s bid to distance itself from Das in its statement on August 1 is straightforward. In a time when public universities have been publicly brought to heel by an ideologically intolerant State (JNU, Jamia Millia Islamia and Delhi University are prominent examples within the capital), private universities trying to create centres of academic excellence must necessarily walk a tightrope.
On the one hand, they need to remain academically credible within Western university networks from which their faculty members often derive their credentials and to which their students generally aspire. The idea of a liberal arts education is derived from an American model and Ashoka’s reason for being is its determination to build a university based on that template. At a time when State-funded public universities have been broken, the alternative, of universities founded and funded by philanthropic donors not beholden to a domineering State, is attractive.
On the other hand, private universities must keep the State on-side because they are vulnerable to its whims. State governments control the land they are built on, Central governments have the power to turn off foreign funding. More generally, the State can and does use its investigative arms to bully and intimidate universities and their faculties….
Amita Baviskar: Ashoka and After: The Universities We Believe In
Ashoka University: Correspondence on Professor P. B. Mehta’s Resignation
After the truth-shower 