Amita Baviskar: Ashoka and After: The Universities We Believe In

By Dilip -

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.

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.

First, let’s set aside the schadenfreude that a crisis in an institution like Ashoka inevitably attracts. 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. So much for your vaunted liberal values, they snigger. Some measure of malice and envy motivates such responses; they are best shrugged off….

https://thewire.in/education/why-singling-out-ashoka-does-promoting-universities-in-india-no-good

Ashoka University: Correspondence on Professor P. B. Mehta's Resignation

Rajendran Narayanan: What I learnt about power and privilege when I quit Ashoka in 2016 / Yogendra Yadav: No one is asking the right questions about Pratap Bhanu Mehta’s ouster from Ashoka University

We Can't Treat Pratap Bhanu Mehta's Resignation from Ashoka as a 'Personal Decision'// Arvind Subramanian resigns from Ashoka University in protest

Mitali Saran - Standing your ground: A toolkit

Ashoka students call for class boycott next week, demand university reinstate Pratap Bhanu Mehta and Arvind Subramanian // Over 150 international academicians come out in support of PB Mehta

STATEMENT BY ASHOKA UNIVERSITY FACULTY - March 18, 2021

Founders made clear I was political liability for Ashoka University: Pratap Bhanu Mehta

Ashoka University: Pratap Bhanu Mehta’s letter and my comment DS

Bharat Bhushan - Scania Scandal: Need to step up to the challenge

Indian Medical Association strike over ‘Ayurveda surgeons’: 30,000 from Gujarat join protest, AIIMS doctors wear black band


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