Ashoka University’s Reluctant Politics
Zainab Firdausi | 10 September 2023 | The Wire
Illustration by Pariplab Chakraborty for The Wire
This piece is a lamentation on the campus politics of Ashoka University,and a meditation on the future of private universities in India.
Ashoka, a private university in Haryana, was founded with a pool of investment from several different individuals so as not to be beholden to a single founder’s whims. It now seems that it is beholden to all their whims. As an alumna of its undergraduate programme, I am upset by Ashoka’s recent trajectory. A helpful article by an undergraduate traces the university’s sordid history with academic freedoms; the most recent event leading to the resignations of faculty members Sabyasachi Das and Pulapre Balakrishnan in the economics department.
A closer look at the article shows how thin the commitment, if any at all, to academic freedom truly is at Ashoka, with the university leadership repeatedly making hurried and obsequious attempts to detract attention and allay concerns of political “radicalism”. Ashoka’s flagship undergraduate programme is less than 10 years old, and it seems, to the founders’ dismay, that the issue of academic freedom rears its ugly head every few years. This leads one to believe that these events are not mere aberrations in the daily workings of the university but fundamental issues in its very constitution. Without concrete changes one can expect it to occur again, and again.