Published Sep 26, 2026 | 10:30 AM ⚊ Updated Sep 26, 2026 | 10:39 AM
The freedom of a university is ultimately tested not by its prospectus but by what happens when someone disagrees with authority.
Synopsis: Public universities must be spaces of learning, unlearning and intellectual freedom. They must remain places where one can learn and unlearn, agree and disagree, enter with inherited assumptions and leave having questioned some of them.
A university is not simply a place where degrees are awarded, examinations are conducted, and students are prepared for employment. A university is a social institution.
It is one of the few spaces in society where people from different social backgrounds can encounter ideas, identities and experiences beyond their immediate worlds. It is where students learn not only what to think, but how to think; where inherited assumptions can be questioned; where uncomfortable questions can be asked; and where knowledge can be debated rather than treated as unquestionable truth.
This is why the question of the university cannot be reduced to infrastructure, rankings, placements or institutional expansion. The more fundamental question is: whose university is it?
This question has become particularly important at a time when the autonomy of public universities is under increasing pressure.
The Free to Think 2026 report by Scholars at Risk categorised academic freedom in India as “severely restricted”, citing increased government involvement in higher education affecting university governance, faculty appointments and freedom of expression on campuses.
The report examined developments between July 2025 and June 2026.
These concerns are not about whether universities should be accountable to society. Public institutions must certainly be accountable. The issue is different: accountability cannot become political control, and public funding cannot become a justification for interference in academic life.
University autonomy is often discussed as an administrative principle, but its importance is much deeper. Autonomy determines whether an institution can make academic decisions without being subjected to pressures unrelated to scholarship.
It affects who leads universities, who gets appointed, what is taught, what research receives institutional support and whether teachers and students can disagree with those in authority without fearing institutional consequences.
In recent years, the question of political influence over higher education has become increasingly visible.
Academic appointments are particularly important in this regard. The appointment of vice-chancellors, professors, deans and heads of departments is not merely an administrative exercise. These appointments determine who governs the university, who controls academic structures and who shapes its intellectual environment.
When recruitment and appointments are not transparent, when selection processes are perceived as vulnerable to external influence, or when ideological proximity becomes more important than academic independence, the consequences extend far beyond an individual appointment.
Universities have never been ideologically neutral spaces in the sense of being detached from society. Every curriculum reflects choices about what knowledge is important, whose ideas deserve attention and which histories are remembered.
The problem begins when a particular ideological worldview is given institutional authority in a way that narrows the range of questions that students can encounter.
This can happen through curriculum changes, institutional programmes, official campaigns, invited speakers, commemorative events or the privileging of particular intellectual traditions while others are excluded.
There is nothing inherently wrong with universities organising programmes around national, cultural, social or philosophical themes.
The critical question is whether universities are creating spaces for students to examine such ideas or whether institutional authority is being used to promote one particular interpretation without sufficient room for disagreement.
The freedom of a university is ultimately tested not by its prospectus but by what happens when someone disagrees with authority.
A campus that celebrates freedom in speeches but disciplines students for legitimate criticism has a contradiction at its centre.
A university must have space for protest, debate and disagreement. Students are not merely consumers of education. They are members of an intellectual community.
They should be able to question a policy, criticise an administrator, challenge a dominant idea or organise collectively without the automatic assumption that dissent is indiscipline.
If students learn that authority must never be questioned, they may leave the university with degrees but without the habits of democratic citizenship that higher education should cultivate.
The university is one of the most important spaces of socialisation in modern society. Students meet people from different regions, languages, classes, castes, religions and genders.
They encounter experiences that may be very different from their own. They discover that the world cannot always be understood through the assumptions with which they entered the campus.
This is where learning and unlearning become equally important. Education should allow a student to learn new ideas and simultaneously unlearn inherited prejudices.
It should challenge assumptions about intelligence, class, caste, gender, religion and social worth. It should create opportunities for students to discover that knowledge does not belong exclusively to the socially powerful.
But such socialisation requires an environment in which difference is not treated as a threat.
If campuses become increasingly controlled spaces in which students are expected to reproduce officially acceptable views, the university loses one of its most important functions.
A university should not manufacture intellectual agreement. It should cultivate the capacity to live with disagreement.
The question of inclusion cannot stop at admission numbers. A university may admit students from marginalised communities and remain intellectually exclusionary if their histories, experiences and forms of knowledge remain invisible.
For many first-generation students, entering a public university is not simply an educational achievement. It is an entry into a social world from which their families may historically have been excluded.
Yet physical access does not automatically create belonging. A student can sit inside a classroom and still feel that the university’s intellectual culture was not designed with people like them in mind.
This raises a difficult question: whose knowledge is considered legitimate knowledge?
The history of Indian higher education has often been shaped by dominant social groups. The experiences of Dalits, Adivasis, women, minorities, working-class communities and other marginalised groups have not always received equal space in curricula, research agendas or institutional memory.
Inclusion therefore requires more than representation in classrooms. It requires changes in what universities teach, what they research, whom they cite, which archives they preserve and whose intellectual contributions they consider central.
The presence of marginalised students should not be treated as an act of institutional charity. Their presence changes the university itself. It expands the questions that can be asked and the experiences through which knowledge can be understood.
A university does not become genuinely public merely because it receives public money or carries a public institutional identity. Its public character must also be reflected in how it functions.
A genuinely public university must be accessible to people from different social backgrounds. Its recruitment processes must be transparent. Its academic decisions must be protected from arbitrary interference.
Its classrooms must permit disagreement. Its students must have meaningful avenues to organise and express themselves. Its faculty must be able to conduct research without fear.
Its curriculum must remain open to competing perspectives. And its institutional culture must allow marginalised communities not merely to enter but to belong.
This is particularly important because public universities have historically played a role in expanding educational opportunities beyond those who can purchase them in the private market.
For students who cannot afford expensive private education, the public university is not simply another option. It can be the difference between exclusion and participation.
That is why reducing universities to rankings, employability statistics and placement packages misses their larger social purpose. These things matter, but they cannot be the measure of a university’s entire worth.
Every university has power within it: administrators exercise authority, teachers exercise authority in classrooms, committees make decisions, governments provide funding, and regulators establish rules.
The purpose of academic freedom is not to eliminate authority. It is to ensure that authority remains open to questioning.
This is also why autonomy must not be understood as an institutional privilege enjoyed by university administrators alone. Autonomy belongs to the intellectual life of the institution.
It protects teachers who want to research unpopular subjects, students who want to question established ideas and scholars whose findings may challenge powerful interests.
The university should be a place where ideology can be studied, debated and criticised. It should not become a place where an ideology is treated as institutional truth.
Political ideas should be examined rather than imposed. National questions should be debated rather than insulated from criticism. Social traditions should be studied rather than placed beyond inquiry.
And authority should be accountable without making disagreement itself suspect. The alternative is a university that produces compliance rather than critical thought.
The crisis of the public university is therefore not only about funding or infrastructure. It is about the meaning of the university itself.
If appointments become opaque, autonomy becomes fragile. If academic decisions are shaped by ideological pressures, knowledge becomes narrower.
If dissent is treated as misconduct, freedom becomes conditional. If marginalised students are present but do not experience belonging, inclusion becomes symbolic.
And if students are denied the opportunity to encounter difference, the university loses its function as a space of socialisation.
The question “Whose university is it?” therefore demands a deeper answer. It should not belong to the government of the day, the administration, a political organisation, a particular social group or an ideological tradition.
It belongs to the public in a much more substantive sense: to the students who enter it, the teachers who teach in it, the researchers who produce knowledge in it and the society whose future it helps shape.
A public university should be a place where one can learn and unlearn, agree and disagree, enter with inherited assumptions and leave having questioned some of them.
It should be a place where a student from a marginalised background does not merely receive a seat but finds intellectual and social belonging.
It should be a place where recruitment is transparent, scholarship is independent, dissent is protected, and authority can be questioned.
That is the real meaning of university autonomy.
And that is why the question before us is not simply whether our universities are functioning. It is whether they are still capable of doing what a university is supposed to do: teach, question, unsettle, learn, unlearn and make democratic life possible.
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(Akhilesh Kumar is a PhD Research Scholar at Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi, and an Independent Writer.)
