Times Face-off: Campuses, both public and private, have become political battlegrounds. But is it a tussle over shrinking academic freedoms or ideology? | India News
Supriya Chaudhuri (FOR) Shortly before Pratap Bhanu Mehta’s widely publicised resignation from Ashoka University made academic freedom the subject of national debate, another event received less attention. This was the refusal of Errol D’Souza, director of IIM Ahmedabad, to allow the Ministry of Education (MoE) to review a PhD thesis approved by his institute. A Rajya Sabha MP had objected to the thesis’s description of the BJP. The MoE demanded a copy of the thesis last year, but D’Souza replied that a thesis passed by a duly-constituted academic board could not be judged by the min...