They plan to boycott classes to oppose the exit of the academic, Arvind Subramanian.
Students at Ashoka University have demanded that Pratap Bhanu Mehta should be provided with a public acknowledgment of the pressures behind his resignation, as well as a division of powers of trustees to university staff, students and teachers.
Pro. They planned to boycott classes on 22 and 23 March to protest the exit of Mehta and Arvind Subramanian.
On March 20, the statement issued by the student union said, “If these demands are not met by Tuesday, we will organize a separate movement, which will demand that the vice-chancellor resign.”
“Not only have we lost the intellectual stalwarts and age-old academics whose scholarship we deeply value, but we have the trust and confidence in this administration to protect students from external political pressures within this university – in particular, the Vice Chancellor (Professor Probica Sarkar), Chancellor (Professor Rudranshu Mukherjee), and the founder of this university. This is a gross violation of academic freedom and we strongly condemn it.
He called for an open meeting of the founders of the university with the students’ union. “We should build an institution with faculty and student body members, which can serve as a medium to discuss matters with the founders and the administration,” he said.
On 19 March, at least four trustees met with the faculty to voice their concerns about recent developments.
According to one faculty member, the trustees insisted that Prof. There was no government pressure behind Mehta’s resignation but admitted that “donors wanted it”. However, he insisted that he did not ask for his resignation.
Several senior faculty strongly pushed the founders of future university functioning to “stay out”, the source added.
Solidarity letter
More than 170 senior academics from top universities around the world including Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard, Yale and Columbia, Prof. Signed an open letter in solidarity with Mehta, expressing his anguish over his resignation under political pressure.
“A prominent critic of the present Government of India and defender of academic freedom, he became a target for his writing. It seems that instead of Ashoka’s trustees, who should have defended him as his constitutional duty, everyone was forced to resign, ”the letter said, calling on political science, history, government, law and morality It was signed by eminent scholars.
He argued that Prof. The values that Mehta practiced included a rigid distinction between independent reasoning, tolerance, democratic sense of equal citizenship, free scrutiny, candor, and demands for intellectual honesty, and pressure from politicians, pressures, or ideological hostility.
“Whenever a scholar is punished for the content of public speech, these values come under attack. When this speech is in defense of these values, the attack is particularly shameful, ”the letter said.
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