Avijit Pathak | 11 July 2023 | The Tribune

THE other day, when I read news reports about the suspension of four teachers of Delhi’s South Asian University (SAU), I was shocked, but not necessarily surprised. Well, these professors, as I know, are quite good in their respective fields of specialisation. But then, instead of defining themselves as purely ‘value-neutral’ professionals, they, it seems, behaved like true teachers with a conscience — and in communion with their students. Not surprisingly, when their students were opposing the reduction of their monthly stipend and demanding representation in certain statutory committees, they urged the university administration to talk to the students and find a dignified way (instead of reducing the entire struggle to a ‘law and order’ problem to be handled by the police) to resolve the issue.

One of them visited the hospital where a student was admitted after falling severely sick during the agitation. In a good society, these teachers should have been appreciated for these qualities or virtues. However, we live in altogether different times that transform everything into its opposite: virtue into vice, compassion into non-professionalism, and scholarship into cold indifference. Hence, as I thought, their suspension was inevitable because the university administration could not tolerate their ‘misconduct’!

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