Ashoka University 'Breached Academic Norms', 'Forced Out' Gilles Verniers: Trivedi Centre Board
12 September 2023 | The Wire
New Delhi: The scientific board of the Trivedi Centre for Political Data, housed within Ashoka University and set up by Professor Gilles Verniers, has announced that it will be dissolving itself because they were not informed or consulted before important decisions were made about the Centre. Verniers, the Centre’s founder and director, was “forced to leave”, the board said in an open letter. After having left Ashoka, where he was Assistant Professor of Political Science, Verniers is now Karl Loewenstein Visiting Fellow at Amherst College in Massachusetts.
The board members – comprising reputed academics from across the world and a former Indian chief election commissioner – have stated that they agreed to this role because of the respect they have for Verniers’ work and the importance of publicly available political data. The datasets released and maintained by the Trivedi Centre have received acclaim from multiple quarters in the seven years since the Centre’s inception, they say.