Why India's Professors Stayed Largely Silent During the Student Protests

On 25 July 2026, Dharmendra Pradhan resigned as the Education Minister of India. In doing so, he became the first cabinet minister in the Modi years to resign on the question of accountability and performance in office. He was compelled to do so by the massive student protests, which started at Jantar Mantar in Delhi, and later spread to other cities.Since then, much has been said about the Gen-Z and their hitherto untested political spirit and resolve. The leadership that emerged from the movement—the Cockroach Janta Party (CJP) founder Abhijit Dipke, his key lieutenants Saurav Das, Ashutosh Ranka, as well All India Students' Association (AISA) activists Neha Bora and others—are all young students or early career professionals. Curiously, with the exception of Sonam Wangchuk, there were no teachers among them. Over the course of this long and eventful summer, higher education has emerged on the frontlines of political discourse and agenda. Yet in this churning, the voice of professors and education professionals has been missing. Except for a brief period in the initial stages when competitive exam coaching teachers especially on YouTube, mobilised and directly took on the pliant and pro-state polemics of TV news anchors, educators have not been seen in the line-of-action.Even so, competitive exam coaching teachers, offline and online, are rarely considered by the Indian academia as their own fraternity. So where was the academic-professorial cohort? Why So Many Different Indias Suddenly Found Each Other at Jantar MantarIn truth, many and more were at the protest sites as individual citizens and well-wishers, playing a supporting role behind the scenes. Others still wrote in publications, digital platforms, and social media about the students’ protest and extended valuable solidarity, advice, wisdom and tacit support. Even in that minimal, purely individual capacity, they could be identified and punished, as Profs Mohit Bharadwaj and Sulekha Dalal were suspended from their respective colleges (though the latter was reinstated following public outcry). Beyond individual actions, there were no significant statements or actions by teachers’ bodies or by departments in any of the top colleges, universities, or institutions. There was mostly silence. This lays bare the extent to which the independent autonomy of professors has been destroyed within Indian academia. A professor is not simply another category of ‘employee’ and the university is not just another corporate employer. Doing so would disintegrate the fundamental social contract that keeps these spaces together. The colleges, institutions and universities are centres of learning. They are supposed to be crucibles of critical thinking, curiosity, innovation and action. This can only be facilitated in an environment of academic culture that prioritises student agency and faculty autonomy. Unfortunately, Indian academic institutions have rarely gravitated in that direction.Caste gatekeeping has for decades ossified Indian academia as a savarna echo-chamber that stifles SC/ST/OBC self-determination. Over and above this, especially in the last decade the Hindutva project has made the campus one of its handpicked sites for reshaping Indian identity and imagination. Rationality and critical thought are not sought after, instead are seen with suspicion. The administrative leadership of most institutions prioritise ‘good relations’ with the regime and often share its agenda, transforming the campus as a laboratory of ideological reproduction. Individual faculty who try to resist or non-participate are marked out, isolated and harassed. This is particularly intense for younger assistant professors who are new to the role, as well as PhD scholars who depend often on the institution for stipend, network and their degree. Any deviation brings punitive action.This precarity is further worsened by the dramatic neoliberalisation of the university within this period. ‘Corporate culture’, notably from the exploitative IT firms, has been mass imported into the campus. Biometric logins linked to payrolls, hire-and-fire policies, overworking teaching hours, underpaying qualified professionals, seated in cramped overflowing cubicles, saddled with restrictive leave rights and often abusive administrative bosses have decimated faculty morale beyond measure. This is particularly worse in private institutions and universities who have proliferated massively under the Modi government. Much like the regime itself, many of these institutions are PR and marketing obsessed. Faculty are often expected to, and frequently coerced, to promote the image of the institution on platforms like LinkedIn. Hashtags are circulated, monitoring teams report on faculty who do not comply actively, essentially turning professors into marketing staff.Independent research has no space to breathe. Many of these institutions have spent their library and laboratory budgets on hiring CEOs and elaborate sales teams, building fancy campuses and gymnasiums to lure prospective parents via campus tours. Any research or even coursework which is critically looking at big capital is discouraged aggressively. Faculty are expected to make students ‘job-ready’ and ‘employable’, rather than so skilled in their chosen field of student that they automatically become hireable. This is more than a semantic difference. Increasingly, the curriculum is being designed to be hiring-friendly. Corporates are being invited to lead what the syllabus should be and students are being farmed out carte blanche to the labor force before even completing their studies, all in the name of making the program more ‘industry-oriented’. This essentially converts the faculty from teachers to corporate-finishing-school facilitators.Dear Cockroach Janta Party, Umar Khalid Is Exactly an Education IssueIf any of these sounds familiar to a particular institution, it is because this has become a template in almost all established private universities and increasingly within public spaces. Professors are now expected to do photo-shoots and record videos talking about excellence in academia while the institution does not prioritise spending on vital research journals subscriptions. Conference travel funding is practically non-existent and professors are encouraged to pitch to corporate stakeholders for funding, adding a sales role to an already over-crowded plate. In some institutions, they are also asked to cold-call prospective students and ‘counsel’ them to join the college.Furthermore, the professors are expected to contribute towards the administrative labor of scheduling classes, keeping up documentation and records since many of these institutions do not hire adequate support staff, choosing to load this work upon the faculty. This is compounded by thoughtless, often unnecessary tech integration into the systems leading to glitching ERP systems and backend softwares—which in the absence of fully staffed IT teams, also fall to the faculty to manage somehow. Lastly, in their accreditation and rankings obsessed worldview, administrators routinely dump on the faculty the work of maintaining the exhaustive paperwork covering everything from curriculum reviews, to research outputs, capacity development, student welfare, etc. Often, these documents have to be embellished or straight up concocted. This adds potential fraud to the already long list of labours the faculty is performing in the current higher education setup. It is therefore not a surprise that attrition rates in the academia are very high. Toxic work cultures are the norm. Any attempt to speak about this on the public domain, immediately gets one flagged by HR departments and hiring committees, endangering long-term career prospects. Outside of the handful of premium colleges, universities, and public institutions, the professor is now one of the worst white-collar jobs that an educated professional can aspire for. It used to be that the techies were called ‘IT coolies’, many professors will now agree that they are dispensable ‘academic majdoors’. All of these combined and compounded have left India with a broken down, dejected, weak, and vulnerable faculty cohort. It is very unlikely that one will see, for example, a “teacher’s march” anytime soon. Instead if you want to know where the professors are, you may have to look in the absences. While Delhi University (DU), Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), and Jamia Millia Islamia issued formal advisories cautioning students from joining the protests, none of their faculty or departments did so in a similar institutional capacity. This is even more interesting considering that in all the smaller colleges, institutes, and lower tier BJP-aligned private universities in NCR, faculty enjoy none of the bare-minimum privilege that their colleagues do in more elite institutions. Yet, there was no mass campaign against protests, no condemnation. Instead, many emerged at Jantar Mantar in their individual capacities. This may not seem like much (and indeed is not), but it may yet be the last vestige of independent authority that faculty have as academicians. And if this summer has shown us anything, it is that defiance can crawl out of the smallest of cracks and explode like a swarm of cockroaches to overwhelm the mightiest of forts. (Ravikant Kisana is a professor of Cultural Studies and author of the book 'Meet the Savarnas'. He can be contacted on X/Instagram as 'Buffalo Intellectual'.The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not reflect or represent his institution.This is an opinion piece, and the views expressed above are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for the same.)

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Why India's Professors Stayed Largely Silent During the Student Protests

Higher education took centre stage this summer. Yet the voice of professors was largely missing.

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Topics: Academia Cockroach Janta Party CJP