Ashoka University tried hard to project an unapologetic centrism, but it just couldn’t shake its notorious tag—JNU of the private sector. Now it's unravelling in a funders-vs-faculty battle.
Like all start-ups tend to be, the core founders of Ashoka have always been “hands-on”. It was never light-touch management. They didn’t recede into the background after donating money. But today, the foothold of the university’s governing body is increasing, according to professors and research scholars.
“Whenever a crisis or a controversy happened, they tended to intervene in the mode they knew best, which is to take control. That’s where the contradiction with academic freedom becomes glaring,” said a former professor with the political science department.
“Too much of the wrong type of politics is capable of destroying a university. At Ashoka, if we do get that brand of politics, I can say with certainty that every donor will be out of the door. That’s the kind of politics we don’t need at Ashoka,” Bikhchandani told ThePrint, referring to West Bengal’s student politics in the 1960s and Patna University in the ’70s.
And so, perhaps on cue, Ashoka university is now increasingly pivoting toward ‘safer’ STEM and MBA courses that tend to be less cranky than humanities. But the founders insist this isn’t a mid-course correction: it was always part of the plan.