Crawling on campus

'Craven surrender by Ashoka's founders inaugurates its slide, shows how private capital is unable and unwilling to stand up'

Editorial at The Indian Express.

"When it was set up, Ashoka University seemed to be taking an important step towards addressing a great deficit in higher education. The public university had long declined due to fiscal exhaustion and breakdown of the state system combined with the exit of the Indian elites from public institutions. That, over the last couple of decades or so, had led to the proliferation of private institutions, but mostly in professional education. In its stated commitment to the liberal arts, Ashoka seemed to make a prominent and welcome promise — to harness the resources of private philanthropy to address failures and deficiencies of both the state and the market. Mehta’s exit from its faculty is a seminal moment because it points to the university’s unwillingness and inability to protect the freedom of expression and ideas that is an inalienable part of that commitment."