New Delhi: Responding to a letter by Ashoka University faculty urging the creation of a ‘Committee for Academic Freedom’ (CAF), vice chancellor Somak Raychaudhury has said that previous attempts to form such a committee had failed as “no faculty member volunteered”.
Dated Sunday (August 13), the letter has 82 signatories and is addressed to the vice chancellor as well as to Amita Baviskar, the university’s dean of faculty.
It says that having a CAF would prevent the university from making public pronouncements on academic freedom whose origins other university stakeholders may not have had a say in.
The letter’s authors also note that a 2021 university document on academic freedom had proposed the creation of a CAF, and that this document had been adopted into a handbook on faculty policies.
“We ask … that the Committee for Academic Freedom, which the document had proposed be set up soon, be created immediately. It will bring much-needed transparency and procedural fairness whenever such issues arise,” the letter reads.
“It would also prevent, on such occasions, public pronouncements that claim to speak on behalf of Ashoka University of whose provenance almost no one at the university is aware. All such pronouncements and decisions about actions to be taken in such circumstances should emanate, after deliberation, from the Committee for Academic Freedom,” it continues to say.
Letter on Academic Freedom by Members of the Faculty, Ashoka University. pic.twitter.com/4rIROaMPhh
— Saikat Majumdar (@_saikatmajumdar) August 15, 2023
But Raychaudhury said in an email to faculty and students that attempts to form a CAF in the last two years had been unsuccessful.
“As I stated in the meeting of the Academic Council yesterday [August 14], there is no need to appeal to us for the formation of the Committee for Academic Freedom,” he says in his email, a copy of which The Wire has seen.
He continues: “As I understand, even though it was proposed by the Dean of Faculty several times over the last two years, the Committee could not be formed, because no faculty member volunteered.”
The faculty member who sent the letter wrote that in the aforementioned academic council meeting, Raychaudhury and Baviskar agreed on the necessity for a CAF and asked that it be set up “without delay”.
The professor also said that a process for putting a CAF in place had begun.
To this, Raychaudhury said in his email: “I am happy that measures are now being taken to form this committee, and you have my full support to create it at the earliest, following the guidelines laid out in the Faculty handbook.”
Dr Sabyasachi Das. Photo: ashoka.edu.in
Ashoka University has become embroiled in a controversy around academic freedom after Sabyasachi Das, an assistant professor in its economics department, resigned following a political row triggered by one of his recent research papers.
Titled ‘Democratic Backsliding in the World’s Largest Democracy’, Das’s paper alleged the possibility of electoral ‘manipulation’ in the 2019 Lok Sabha elections, where the incumbent BJP rode back to power with a greater margin than in 2014.
Faculty from Ashoka’s economics department have since said that the university’s governing body attempted to “investigate” the merits of Das’s study.
“The Governing Body’s interference in this process to investigate the merits of his recent study constitutes institutional harassment, curtails academic freedom, and forces scholars to operate in an environment of fear. We condemn this in the strongest terms,” the economics faculty members’ letter says.
Open letter to the governing body of Ashoka University from the economics department pic.twitter.com/DSfnF4Ez55
— Economics @ Ashoka (@EconAtAshoka) August 16, 2023
It also says that if the governing body does not by August 23 unconditionally offer Das his position back and affirm that it would play no role in evaluating faculty research, its failure to do so would “systematically wreck the largest academic department at Ashoka and the very viability of the Ashoka vision”.
After Das’s resignation, economist Pulapre Balakrishnan also resigned from his tenured post at Ashoka, in what sources have told The Wire was a show of solidarity.
Ashoka University was quick to distance itself from Das’s paper, and The Wire has also reported on how the university’s stand has drawn criticism from students and academics.
Pratap Bhanu Mehta. Photo: World Economic Forum/Flickr. CC BY-SA 2.0.
This is especially given the track record of how it had handled its reputed political science professor and former vice chancellor Pratap Bhanu Mehta, when he was both nudged and persuaded to resign in March 2021 due to his media writings on the ruling BJP’s politics.
Days after Mehta announced his exit from Ashoka, the university’s board of trustees articulated its “deep commitment and respect for the autonomy of the university and its academic functioning” in a letter to faculty.
The board also supported the appointment of an ombudsperson for the university by May 2021. That position is currently held by former Supreme Court judge Madan Lokur.
Ashoka University’s student government said on X (formerly Twitter) on Tuesday (August 15) that it was “incredibly disappointed with the continued lack of support from Ashoka University to its professors.”
“It is your prerogative to create an environment for free academic expression. Live up to the image of providing a liberal education to students,” its post continued to say.
The Edict, a student-run news website at Ashoka, reported that a group of 158 alumni wrote an open letter to senior officials at the university condemning its stand on Das’s paper.
“We wish to call out the Administration of the University, in particular the Founders, Chancellor and Vice-Chancellor, and the PR Team for their lacklustre response and abject failure to stand by their faculty in the face of targeted harassment and trolling,” the alumni’s letter read according to The Edict.
The student news outlet posted on X that the university’s PhD students had also issued a solidarity statement.
