Ashoka's faculty's fantasy land

Pratap Bhanu Mehta resigned from Ashoka University alleging 'political interference'- i.e. he wanted us to believe that Modi, angered by Mehta's articles, had put the squeeze on the rich people who set up that 'Liberal Arts College'. This was not a credible charge because 

1) Ashoka had already acquired the land it needed in Haryana

2) the enmity of the ruling party at the Center would be more than offset by the friendship of the ruling party in Maharashtra, Rajasthan, Punjab etc. The fact is influential businesspeople- some of whom are NRIs or do their main business abroad- who can open Colleges and factories have the whip hand. The States have to compete with each other for f.d.i

Gurcharan Das, who has contributed money to Ashoka, writes in the Times of India

No one seemed to know why Mehta resigned. I discovered there hadn’t been any pressure from the government. Many of the 150 donors of Ashoka, however, were offended by Mehta’s weekly bashing of PM Modi and the state.

For God's sake why? Businessmen should want a Professor to flay the Government for the leaden footed pace of reform of Labor Law and Land Law and so forth. The problem was that Mehta wasn't supplying cogent economic criticism. He was babbling about 'reactionaries' and the great evil which is done when people say 'Lord Ram' instead of just 'Ram' and when Temples are built to a Deity who needs no Temples. 

Not surprising, donors are conservative.

No. Donors want reform so that the private sector can soar. If the economy grows rapidly, then Ashoka will be a great success. The demand for 'liberal arts' is highly income elastic. If growth doesn't return to its peak values, then there is a reverse 'accelerator' effect- i.e. a shakeout of Liberal Arts colleges. 

By contrast, if labour and land laws are reformed, there will be a positive accelerator effect. Ashoka will get lots more funding. Employers will want to put a lock on its graduates. Ten years from now, people would expect to see its alumni heading up Hedge funds and Law Firms and Accountancy Firms or else building up Ambani or Adani type conglomerates.  If the Economy limps along, as it is currently doing, kids will opt for skills training or professional qualifications not a liberal education.

The university worried that if funding dried up, the university might have to cut scholarships, raise student fees, freeze faculty salaries, chop new academic programmes.

This is the crucial question. Has money dried up? Why has nothing been built on the 50 acres which was acquired 3 years ago? Is it because some Professors have given the place a bad name? This is unlikely. Only money matters. 'Liberal Arts' is a positional good. When the economy slows down, the demand for it collapses. Some private colleges have to change orientation or else turn into unloved step-children or 'stranded assets'.

Still, no one asked Mehta to resign or to stop writing. But Mehta himself began slowly to realise that he was becoming a political liability. In an act of integrity, he resigned.

Integrity would require waiting till the holidays and going quietly by 'mutual agreement'.  

Dhawan had mixed feelings. As a genuine liberal, committed to dissent,

Surely he'd have been committed to pro-market criticism of the ruling party? Why would he want the warmed up sick of the Left being flung in the newspaper reading public's face by a guy whose USP was not being a typical jhollawallah?  

he felt sad. But as a protector of his baby he felt relieved.

The baby will grow up stunted and mentally retarded because the Economy shows no sign of ever booming again. You'd be better off opening a scrap metal business and joining an RSS shaka rather than getting a worthless degree.

I suppose Dhawan understands this well enough. Perhaps Ashoka will pivot to being a tony private College preparing kids for careers in Law and Accountancy and Marketing and so forth so that they can make their way in the world with credit to themselves.   

Five years ago a young, very well qualified, Statistics Lecturer named Rajendran Narayanan, resigned from Ashoka because he felt non-teaching staff were being victimized for expressing political views (re. Kashmir).

That scholar is now with Aziz Premji University- which has an explicit social mission- and appears to be doing useful work monitoring things like MNREGA. However, that work will soon become useless as more and more people realize that the thing is a hostage to the election cycle as mediated by the fiscal position. It isn't a magic wand. 

The problem with an anti-poverty academia which won't acknowledge that redistribution is no panacea is that it is part of the underlying problem, not the solution. Only raising productivity and elasticity of demand and supply can raise incomes and reduce a repugnant type of exploitation. 

Narayanan writes in Scroll-

Dismantling the labyrinth: What I learnt about power and privilege when I quit Ashoka in 2016

What we will learn from his article is that the man is a cretin. True he did his PhD at Cornell, but he was from India. He should have known that a private University won't tolerate a 'karmachari' Union. It may pay-lip service to 'academic freedom'- to pretend to be like Harvard and Yale- but it won't treat the admin and custodial staff on a par with either the special little snowflakes it looks after or the celebrity eggheads it hires to burnish its reputation.  

To truly create sanctuaries of learning and questioning, the right to be heard impartially must be universal.

Rajendran Narayanan

This is obviously false. Totalitarian countries can have great Universities. The 'right to be heard impartially' must not be universal. We don't want the janitor getting to air his views on how to perform cardiac surgery on an equal footing with the Professor of that subject.

Why is Narayanan saying something so absurd? Or, if he is being funny, why stop there?  Surely, the people who live in the neighborhood of the College too have a right to be heard impartially? So do the parents of the kids who attend. So does everybody else. Recent research shows that dolphins are pretty smart. Why are dolphins not being heard on a wide range of academic issues?  

Pratap Bhanu Mehta’s resignation from Ashoka University has been met with widespread condemnation from various academics. Rightly so.

He shouldn't leave his students in the lurch so as to pretend that he matters so much to Modi that the Government would put the squeeze on a large number of the businesspeople who finance this venture.  

He is one of the foremost scholars and an articulate commentator on the Indian Constitution and politics.

But that scholarship and commentary is shit.  You actually have to be a constitutional lawyer to say anything interesting about the Indian Constitution. As for politics, that requires being able to handle Big Data and use advanced Statistical techniques- i.e. the sort of thing in which a Prashant Kishor shines. How can Mehta compete with tech savvy youngsters of that sort? Of course, Kishor may end up a Yogendra Yadav type nonentity. But then again, he may not.  

His resignation triggered the resignation of the renowned economist, Arvind Subramanain, who was India’s Chief Economic Advisor between 2014 and 2018. Both are eminent international figures.

Who want out of rural Haryana to pursue more enticing prospects. 

Soon after Mehta’s resignation, the faculty members of Ashoka University released a public statement in solidarity with him. The faculty members expressed grave concern that the university may have acceded to government pressure in taking such a step and alluded to “academic freedom on which Ashoka University has been set up”. In particular, the letter noted, “It would also set a chilling precedent for future removals of faculty, curtailing our sense of who we are as researchers and teachers.” The letter further urged the university administration to rescind Mehta’s resignation.

Such a statement of public solidarity by the Ashoka faculty is welcome. However, the “chilling precedent” had been set as early as 2016 with three resignations, including mine, which had been covered in many media outlets. Mehta joined Ashoka University as its Vice Chancellor after these incidents.

I resigned from Ashoka University on December 14, 2016. 

There were two broad reasons why the Ashoka administration was not happy with me. The first of them was because of my involvement in creating a Workers’ Welfare Committee on campus that would seek to redress grievances of all sorts of workers on campus – academic staff, non-academic staff including housekeeping staff and maintenance staff. The committee aimed to ensure that every person on campus – not just faculty or students – had equal access to fair procedures, grievance redressal and claim-making at the university.

This failed immediately.  

The second, concerned a petition on Kashmir that was signed by many students, two non-teaching staff and me. I do not know the full extent of pressure that the university faced but my sympathies continue to be with the university for having received the unintended consequences of the petition.

Why did these fools sign a stupid petition? They were merely virtue signaling. If they wanted to show that their College was not actually funded by anti-nationalists then they succeeded. But why bother doing any such thing? If people won't act out of enlightened self-interest, preferring to virtue signal with respect to a foolish ideology, then they are not scholars- they are cretins who live in a fantasy world. 

In his resignation letter Narayanan wrote- 

I joined Ashoka because it seemed like a promising environment to nourish critical pedagogy, freedom of expression, and liberal values.

But what good do 'critical pedagogy and liberal values' actually do? A few people get to virtue signal and live out a fantasy of 'resisting Neo-Liberalism'. But it is play-acting merely. 

Narayanan joined Aziz Premji University which is focused on rural development. But it too will fail because it has become reliant on an ideology which believes that demanding things on behalf of the poor actually benefits the poor.

This is the notion that 'second order public goods'- i.e. agitating for more first order public goods- is as meritorious as actually helping poor and vulnerable people. The truth is, in a big country like India, you actually have to raise productivity not just demand a redistribution which amounts to nothing more than buying votes while there is enough money to do. When the money runs out, there will be entitlement collapse and these fools can get to feel virtuous by whining about it. But it isn't they who will starve or have to relocate to some slum. 

No doubt, with wounded innocence, they will write resignation letters- if they are employable elsewhere- expressing the loss of a trust which no sensible person would have ever had in the first place-

However, I have lost trust with the GB. I believe by continuing any further, I would be compromising both on my integrity and self-respect.

Integrity and self-respect come from actually creating goods and services and jobs and paying taxes. Demanding other people pay to help poor people should not contribute to 'integrity and self-respect'. Otherwise, you end up like Prince Harry- believing you are saving the world by indulging in adolescent angst. 

Another Cornell alumni, Sociologist Amita Baviskar, who hasn't yet resigned from Ashoka writes in the Wire 

                 After having worked most of my life in a public university and research institute, I started teaching at Ashoka last year. So my response to the many commentaries on the ongoing debacle at this private university comes from being an outsider as well as an insider. This ‘squint-eyed perspective,’ as fellow-sociologist Satish Deshpande has described it, is also a habit acquired over years of participant-observation, our discipline’s classic method of engaging with the world.

Why is this silly lady boasting of having a 'squint-eyed perspective'? Does she think parents want to pay 10 lakhs a year so their kids can develop a squint? Why not simply charge them 20 lakhs a year and poke their eyes out?  

Double vision seems to be a dubious faculty to take pride in, but I feel it is indeed what helps most of us academics – or for that matter, anyone who practises a vocation where ideals wrestle with rude political economy – make sense of our work.

In other words, if you want to indulge in a fantasy of yourself as a 'scholar' then you should have double vision so as to be able to make a living by prostituting yourself while believing you are actually a virginal Princess in a fairy tale.  

First, let’s set aside the schadenfreude that a crisis in an institution like Ashoka inevitably attracts.

If you want to 'set it aside', why mention it at all?  

Any number of commentators on social media can barely disguise their glee that a fast-rising university, flaunting its glittering faculty, hyped by its marketers as providing an ‘Ivy League education in India,’ has been publicly embarrassed.

No. We are laughing at the notion that anybody could have been stupid enough to think kids who didn't get into D.U would be capable of receiving 'Ivy League education' or that any good Professors would be content to teach there. 

It is the hypocrisy as much as the narcissism of Mehta & Co which attracts our derision.  

So much for your vaunted liberal values, they snigger. Some measure of malice and envy motivates such responses; they are best shrugged off.

The facts can't be shrugged off. You can't provide Ivy League education unless the kids in your class are as smart or smarter than the Professors. Only if you are attracting the best and the brightest can you afford to gas on about 'liberal values' and 'free speech'.

At Harvard, every Prof knows that there are 18 year olds in his lecture hall who are smarter than him. But most 21 year olds know they are also better informed about recent developments than their Professor. That's why Ivy League students should have freedom to point out that they are being taught stupid shit. Obviously, they don't actually do that. They change their major to something useful or drop out to found a billion dollar company.  

A tony private College is by no means a bad thing. But the kids aren't smart enough to challenge their Professors. Thus, the Trustees must weed out ideological nutters or histrionic fantasists. 

More serious analysts point to what they see as the fatal flaw in Ashoka’s conception: the contradiction between private ownership and the ability to uphold the public good.

That isn't the fatal flaw at all. It is that you would need to pay, not charge, 10 lakhs a year to get the smartest kids to come to Haryana. There is no point hiring the best Professors. You can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear. Smart people want the smartest students so as to push forward their Research Program. The son of Sethji and the ladli daughter of Lala Sahib may be very sweet and lovable. But there is no point introducing them to cutting edge research. Only a small portion of kids around the country are going to be able to run with that stuff. It would be cruel to expose the mediocre to it. Let Ashoka be a tony private College with lots of extra-curricular activities and very good Test prep for Law and Accountancy and so forth. 

When push comes to shove, they say, the funders will invariably yield to political pressure to protect their perceived bottom line.

Fuck off! If there were money in being anti-national everybody would be doing it. Political pressure can go hang if you profit by telling the Government to go fuck itself.  

Freedom of speech and, more broadly, the fundamental conditions where faculty and students can question, think and act independently, will be sacrificed at the altar of investment and growth.

Unless 'asking questions and thinking and acting independently' contribute to 'investment and growth'. In that case the thing pays for itself. Money is spent on fucking up any politician who tries to fuck with this productive activity.   

Central and state universities, these critics argue, are inherently better  placed to realise the progressive mandate of higher education.

Socialist methods are better at advancing Socialist mandates. It is foolish to imagine that people will pay through the nose to be told it is wrong to be rich. 

Private versus public, elite versus egalitarian: these are the binaries that underlie such a response.

No 'binaries' underlie anything at all. In this case, stupid people- i.e. academics- are pulling the hair and scratching the eyes of other stupid people- also academics. What neither side will accept is that academics don't matter. They are a superior type of child-minder- nothing more.

The larger context of economic liberalisation lends substance to some of these charges. It is true that most public universities have been gutted through mismanagement and political interference at a time when private universities have been on the ascendant. (I’ll leave out the long history of capitation fee colleges and the teaching shops that have made a travesty of technical education) But, even at the best of times, it is difficult to sustain the claim that public educational institutions wholly and solely serve the good of society.

In India, it is completely impossible. We firmly believe that you go to College so as to learn how to beat people with hockey sticks or else to mark time before joining the Civil Service or Chartered Accountancy or, for girls, just getting married and having babies.  

If large numbers of Indian Institutes of Technology graduates, whose four years of study have been heavily subsidised by taxpayers’ money, end up working in non-engineering businesses or settling abroad, what exactly does the public gain from this brain drain? 

Remittances. D'uh. We also gain when plumbers and construction workers go to the Gulf or our Doctors go to Britain or America.  

If Azim Premji University works dedicatedly to improve government schools across India, isn’t it making a valuable contribution to the public good?

Only if it actually does so. My fear is that it will turn into a safe space for ideological cretins and virtue signalers.  

  The public versus private distinction needs a lot more nuance, and waving it like a flag only distracts attention from the common problems that confront both.

In this case, the truth is that kids take the private option because they can't get into the public colleges of their choice. We can look at other countries where this happens and quickly come to the realization that though the graduates of these colleges may benefit from their time there, no ideological agenda will be advanced, though no doubt some elderly eccentrics on the faculty will cherish other illusions. But then look at Chomsky. MIT does well because MIT grads ignore that cretin.  

The truth of higher education

is that if it aint STEM it is shit- something this Sociologist can't bring herself to admit 

The argument about elite versus egalitarian institutions is best answered by turning to the sociology of education.

No it isn't. There are no 'egalitarian institutions'. You can have an open admission College but the stupid are weeded out because they can't pass the end of year exams. Of course, one could always get a PhD in finger painting from some crackpot College- but that isn't egalitarianism. It is 'special needs education' for very special little flowers.  

Pierre Bourdieu pointed out that schools and colleges mainly serve to reproduce class inequalities, not eliminate them.

Why? Coz Mummies and Daddies having intercourse are mainly serving to reproduce class and gender and racial inequalities, not eliminate them. But the same could be said about breathing or shitting. This is why we must all resolve to stop breathing till equality is established. Declare a tatti bandh now! You know you want to.  

Whether public or private, universities enable those who are already better placed to accumulate more cultural capital.

Just as breathing and shitting permit those who are already breathing or shitting comfortably to breathe and shit yet more. By contrast, people who are choking to death or who are terminally constipated may not live long enough to breathe or shit again.  

While affirmative action provides social mobility to some disadvantaged individuals, by and large, institutional practices of gatekeeping, recognition and reward, favour the already endowed.

For the same reason that Medical Services which enable people to breathe or shit reward those whose health is so good they are breathing and shitting very well without any help.  

We know that the ‘reserved category’ student with uncertain English skills is the one most likely to drop out of, say, Delhi University’s social science courses.

Because you cunts won't teach them English of a useful sort. But then, you don't yourself know any such language. What is the point of quoting some French guy who is saying something which is bleeding, fucking, obvious?  

We also know that those who come from reputed private schools (read: have well-off parents)

why read any such thing? It isn't true. Reputable private schools- Eton, Harrow, Winchester etc- make a point of recruiting a few really bright and motivated kids so as raise the general level. Perhaps this does not happen in India to the same extent. But then most Indians aren't really 'well-off'. Scions of Civil Servants get a quota in good schools. This works out quite well because the kids know they have score high marks to have a chance to escape to Amrika. 

will be more adept at the art of passing examinations, getting internships, applying for studies abroad.

Education enabled Indians to escape abroad. That was the big driver of academic achievement. Suppose the Brits hadn't imposed immigration restrictions in the early Sixties, who would have bothered with College? Everybody would have run off to Blighty to work in factories or set up shops. Indeed, there was a story of an Indian diplomat at the UN who quit to run a hot-dog stall. Money matters. Education only matters if you can make some money by it.  

Initial advantages combine with credentials and social networks acquired by studying at a ‘good’ university to cement class privilege.

Class privilege serves to cement class privilege. What an amazing discovery! No wonder Sociology has been a byword for Stupidity for over fifty years.  

Whether it is Presidency or Manipal, all universities are complicit in the cultural reproduction of unequal life chances and lifestyles.

But so is breathing and shitting.  

However, the degree to which they do so differs.

For the same reason that some are better at breathing and shitting than others. 

Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) has an admissions policy that actively recruits students of disadvantaged castes and classes, genders and regions.

Who then turn into shitty little jhollawallahs. They don't get rich. They don't raise productivity. They just continue the cycle of stupidity. This is why JNU, sooner or later, will either be reformed or will be defunded.  

Ashoka’s student body is nowhere as diverse as JNU’s. Even though half of the students receive some form of aid, its institutional culture undoubtedly reflects the fact that the other half are paying Rs 10 lakhs a year.

Which is cool if they acquire a bit of polish and get good at passing Professional Exams. Also being out in rural Haryana is a good thing. It keeps them away from the bars and night-clubs of the Capital. People world rather have a son-in-law or daughter-in-law who went to a College of this sort. 

However, for most of the adivasi boys I meet in ashram schools in Madhya Pradesh, both JNU and Ashoka lie far beyond their reach, as does college education altogether.

Then why mention them? The answer is that this cretin is virtue signaling about meeting 'adivasi boys' and not humping them dry.  

They are destined to become marginal farmers and labourers.

Unless manufacturing takes off. But for that to happen, Sociologists must be disintermediated so that wealth inequality can rise and 'class privilege' extends to more and more people of S.T background. 

This is the truth of higher education, public and private, but it is a cynical and selective truth.

In which case, it is not the truth.  

Like any important institution—elections, the media, the family—the university too only has legitimacy when it stands above the interests of powerful groups or individuals, when it is seen to uphold the greater common good.

This silly woman does not understand the meaning of the word legitimacy. She is using it in a wholly ignorant and illegitimate way.  

The family has legitimacy if 'oikos' is legitimate- i.e. kids are born to Mummies and Daddies who are married to each other. Even if the entire family is subservient to a Patriarch or Matriarch, its legitimacy is not questioned. This is true even if it is head is referred to as 'The Godfather' or the 'capo di tutti capi'. 

Why is this silly woman pretending otherwise? Did someone say to her 'you are a bastard. You were born out of wedlock. Because your Mummy controls your family it follows that it must be illegitimate'. 

The Media has no specific legitimacy. It may or may not have a reputation for being truthful. But a reputation is not legitimacy. 

Elections are either free and fair or they are not. Arguably, a free and fair election confers 'legitimacy' on the winner. But, de facto, only if Courts can enforce the outcome through the Police and the Army is this genuinely the case. 

Universities which clearly improve life-chances and which don't sell admissions or sheepskins may be considered to be legitimate by appropriate licensing or regulatory Agencies. But this is not necessarily the case. We may object to a University of Alchemy or Astrology on a priori grounds even if there is considerable proof that those who graduate from such places gain much higher income. 

It has never been the case in any country or at any period in history that a University has lost respect, authority or legitimacy in the eyes of Law or Society a a whole purely on the basis of being controlled by a few or not contributing to the common good. Thus even an atheist will accept that a Doctorate in Theology represents a legitimate academic credential. Similarly, a Business College, or Technical University is accepted as a legitimate Institution of Higher Education even by people who deplore the oligarchs who have established it or the manner in which such education might enrich them further while, perhaps, bringing on an ecological catastrophe.

For the university to have credibility, this claim to universality must work.

Fuck off! For a University to have credibility we have to see that really smart kids attend it. If they are all drooling imbeciles, it won't have any credibility at all. This University could be wholly Nazi in its ideology. Sooner or later, there will be an 'Operation Paperclip' to get hold of its alumni and get them to do advanced scientific work.  

It cannot be mere smoke-and-mirrors, nor some PR mantra.

Yes it can. A bit of hypocritical play-acting is cool if your people keep getting Nobel prizes or becoming Tech billionaires.  

The notion of the university as a shared endeavour to think and dream, question and challenge, must remain alive.

Like the notion that fairies live at the bottom of the garden. This is Bilgrami's cue to start babbling about 'enchantment'.  

Distinguished scholars lend their charisma to the institution that employs them.

Fuck off! There are no 'distinguished scholars' in non-STEM subjects. All that matters is that there is a school where the smartest kids want to go.  

At the Delhi School of Economics, where I studied in the 1980s, André Béteille and JPS Uberoi

shitheads both. Still, at the time Anthropology was more prestigious than Sociology. It was the sort of subject it would have been okay for Prince Charles to have studied. But that's not saying very much.

were not only teachers, they were leading figures in the department’s folklore. The economics department too cherished its legends about Sukhamoy Chakravarty and Amartya Sen.

Chakravarty's stint as Planning Chief put paid to any lingering doubts that Bengali mathematical economists weren't the stupidest and most worthless cunts on the planet. Sen is now universally reviled. If he is for x, we know x is the most foolish thing to do. He also shat the bed by taking the Chancellorship of Nalanda- a white elephant if ever there was one.  

But, more than the stars, it was the sincerity of all the teachers that struck a chord with students.

They may have been sincere, but they were genuinely cretinous. 

That common sense that this was work worth doing.

Wasn't common even back then. We laughed at these cretins and hoped they'd just fuck off to Amrika and leave India alone.  

At Ashoka, too, I see this shared belief permeating everyday practices.

D School was quite tough to get into. Ashoka- not so much. A belief that isn't entirely absurd at one place and at one time ought not to permeate a very different place at a very different time.  Incidentally, D School turned to shit when it became a part of Delhi University. 

A young colleague rewrites her lecture, again and again, to make sure it’s the best she can deliver.

Sadly, her older colleagues are just coasting on fumes.  

Another spends days designing ways of helping students with disabilities.

Good for her. That's an actual marketable skill. Suppose Ashoka becomes the best place for that type of pedagogy then it will more than pay for itself on the global market. Also it would be doing something genuinely useful. Disabled people have a lot to contribute. Helping them helps us all.  

Students linger after class, intent on thrashing out a particular concept or argument.

But they didn't bother at the place she last taught. This may be because she is a shit teacher teaching in a shite Department.  

Others tell me of a course that’s made them change direction from economics to philosophy,

which is a terrible idea 

or from biology to psychology.

ditto.  

Students campaign vigorously for the rights of contract workers at Ashoka.

Good for them. If the contract workers become demoralized the Institution suffers.  

They were at Shaheen Bagh and at Jantar Mantar.

That's cool when you are a kid. Once you are a partner in a good Law or Accountancy firm, you can reminisce about your imaginary Campus radicalism in the hope that the bored young intern relents and gives you a handie. 

Many distributed supplies to victims of political violence in north-east Delhi; they spoke out in support of the JNU Students Union.

And where did that get them? Their Professors are now either  running away from them or writing articles in the Wire explaining that what the kids should be doing is getting arrested for sedition so as to be sodomized in jail. 

Some work with groups fighting climate change; others against caste injustice.

These things can be done for free. Daddy and Mummy don't have to shell out lakhs so you get to do it.  

Just like progressive students and dedicated teachers elsewhere, those at Ashoka too are living and affirming the liberal promise of the university.

But this can be affirmed without paying any fees. Just enroll in Khan Academy in between getting arrested.  

They are making the university.

No. Money made the University. But that Money can disappear. 

Only someone with an utterly bleak vision of the world as totally captive to capitalism would believe that they are fooling themselves.

They are being fooled because they think 'this is what kids at Harvard and Yale are doing. We too will earn mega-bucks if we jump on the bandwagon and do what Cornell alumni tell us to do.'  Meanwhile, the country is run by a chai-wallah who joined the RSS and got external degrees. 

To be sure, such high-minded striving is not constant or perfect: in public and private universities people succumb to posturing and bouts of solipsism;

This lady succumbed to this certainly. But she never recovered.  

there are pressing anxieties about jobs and careers. Many students focus on keeping their heads down and their grades up. The conditions for thinking and questioning are vitiated by the larger environment.

i.e. Reality. If only we could get rid of Reality we could realize our vision of a truly egalitarian University where no one would need to breathe or shit and thus all would be equal to Karl Marx- who can no longer perform either activity.  

As more teachers are forced to work in temporary or ad hoc positions, persistent insecurity eats into the joy of practising a vocation.

Vocation? More like a permanent mental vacation in fantasy-land. 

At the same time, authoritarian directives from the state are getting more frequent and more dire.  The heavy tread and heavy breath of the stormtroopers stalking our steps make us second guess: will I get into trouble for saying this?

Stormtroopers, eh? Well, it was bound to happen. The woman thinks she is living in Germany in the Nineteen Thirties. She is too deracinated to speak of lathi wielding lads in khaki knickers.  

In this climate, it is disappointing, but not altogether surprising, that the founders and administration of Ashoka should have fumbled so badly. 

How have they fumbled? It looks like they made the right calculation. Losing Mehta and Subramanian means that parents and donors will say 'okay, Ashoka is going to settle for being a tony Law & Accountancy Test Prep based College. That's actually a useful and good thing. Employers like hiring kids with social poise who can crack various types of professional exams- e.g. in Banking, Insurance, Financial Services etc. Add on a couple of foreign language courses and these kids become eminently hirable. 

However—and this is why this crisis feels like a betrayal—unlike their counterparts in public universities who were deliberately appointed to push the ruling regime’s agenda, Ashoka’s founders and leaders folded of their own accord.

We don't know that. What is more likely is that they saw that hype about 'Ivy League' has been seen through.  A Rich kids' Law or Business College, on the other hand, is a credible proposition. Get shot of expensive 'super-stars' and worthless PhD research. Go back to basics. Make this a fun College where nice samskari kids get a bit of Angrezi polish.  

They failed to appreciate that the institution they started had acquired a life larger than their fears.

For the excellent reason that it hadn't at all. If Ashoka carries on, it will be a posh College for fundamentally decent kids from good families.  It was always a pipe dream that they could be turned into urban Naxals.

As the faculty and students at Ashoka struggle to institute structural reforms that will firewall the university from its donors,

in which case the money dries up and the expensive frills- e.g. PhD research- are dispensed with so that the place can pay for itself.  

there is an important lesson to be learned from the experience of public universities.

No there isn't. A place where the State picks up the tab is nothing like one where poor old Mummy and Daddy have to stump up their hard earned cash.  

Political meddling has indeed eroded the autonomy of public universities

what fucking autonomy is this cretin babbling about?  

but some of the damage was self-inflicted.

Because Indian academics are shit- or became so within ten years of Independence. The Govt. poached talent and then, later on, smart peeps emigrated. You were left with jhollawallah scum.  

Well-intended but ill-conceived rules stifled innovation.

Rules can't stifle shit because the innovative find ways to get around them. 

Patron-client relations trumped talent and ability.

Yet Japanese STEM subject research flourished despite a feudal type of relationship between mentor and disciple.

So long as patrons compete for excellence, they recruit the ablest to be their clients.  

Supremely mediocre faculty members were promoted on grounds of ‘seniority’. 

As happens in the Civil Service. But there is always a work around- for those who will seek it.  

Mutual esteem and trust frayed away into factionalism. When good faith gives way to suspicion, collegiality to barbed remarks and backbiting, when faculty meetings become a minefield, the institution loses its esprit de corps.

So what? Henry Kissinger remarked on the envenomed bitterness of academic politics (because the stakes were so small) but that didn't prevent the US from tearing ahead of its European competition  

We can try and craft perfect rules but how do we restore our shared identity and sense of purpose?

It never existed. Stop pretending there was once a golden age.  

Perhaps the answer to this is to be found in my feelings when I was asked: Well, you will also leave, won’t you?  What an odd question, I thought.

Because there was no long line of VeeCees outside her door begging her to join them on a higher salary and research budget.  

  Just as when the Modi government came to power and someone said, I can’t live in this country anymore. At that time, I drew strength and comfort from my circles of comrades and friends.

as opposed to your enemies. Hopefully, your teddy bear hugged you tightly and urged you to stop shitting yourself with fear of 'stormtroopers'.  

And at this time, I am inspired by my students and colleagues at Ashoka.

But not at any other time.  

This university is worth fighting for. And those who are striving in their own ways to uphold the integrity of the institutions that they work and believe in will recognise the value of this endeavour.    

But others won't. Why? Because these silly people and their private fantasies about their own importance don't matter to anybody else.