Exception Is the New Rule: How Ashoka’s Administration Is Losing Student Trust

Ashoka University is now operating under a de facto ‘state of exception.’ Starting especially from the Spring Semester 2025, what used to be temporary or discretionary powers reserved to handle ‘serious’ cases have fast become a permanent mechanism of control. From increased surveillance of the general residence life on campus to the handling of matters involving students found in violation of university policies, the administration is subjecting students to disproportionate disciplinary action. 

To add to the list, they are now demanding mental fitness certificates from a number of students before allowing them to return for the upcoming Monsoon Semester in August. In all aspects, ranging from disciplinary matters to mental health, Ashoka University is claiming to be a victim of its own students and prosecuting them in unprecedented ways, including immediate expulsion from campus housing.

In the students’ perception, ‘serious’ cases have been largely defined in two/three ways: possession of illicit substances (alcohol, etc.) in amounts that would suggest an intent to distribute, or possession of substances that are banned even outside university premises; and a mental health “crisis” defined in the Residence Life Policy—which we will return to later. Such cases require special intervention from the higher authorities, as the regular mechanisms, like Committee Against Disciplinary Infractions (CADI) (for the former) and  The Ashoka Center for Well-Being (ACWB) (for the latter), could no longer handle them. It was not hard for the student body, at large, to recognise the seriousness of such cases and their handling using exceptional procedures involving the Vice Chancellor (VC). The blurring of the boundaries between these exceptional precedents and regularly occurring incidents on campus has marked a major shift in the residence life of this campus.

Ashoka’s promise of “creating a safe, comfortable, and vibrant residential experience for students” comprises not only the state-of-the-art infrastructure but also their efforts to “foster a sense of community among residents, giving them ample opportunities to meet, interact, bond, and have fun together.” Yes, its website still mentions “have fun together,” as alien as it may sound to the current residents of this campus. 

Having fun or not, a vibrant residential experience entails a necessary honour code of conduct between the staff and students. At Ashoka, it has historically meant several things: the warden would intervene only if one behaved irresponsibly, like not partying safely, including playing loud music during quiet hours, cross-access between residence halls beyond 12:30 a.m., indulging in substances, or being found in an inebriated state. It worked both ways, as students at large would understand such incidents as clear violations, not requiring much debate on the warden’s decision to intervene.

Breach of the Honor Code: Two of the Many Instances from the Spring Semester

Since the top-down imposition of scanners and metal detectors in January 2025—and the resulting student and faculty response—has already received significant attention, I would like to focus instead on two other instances from that semester.

The first instance is of the Residence Life Office staff conducting coordinated raids of an unprecedented nature across campus, only a few weeks after the Anti-Surveillance Protest ended with an agreement between the students and the VC. On 13th February 2025, a warden and a senior Residence Life Office member, accompanied by a Student Resident Assistant as required by the policy, conducted “inspections” of some six rooms at close intervals throughout the day. There was no immediate provocation (noise, smell, etc.) from those rooms. In fact, most of the room occupants were not present in the room when the team reached there. The Residence Life Policy was invoked to go ahead with the “inspection” in many of the occupants’ absence (after informing them over phone call). The inspections, as described by the Campus Life Ministry, involved invasive searches, rummaging through personal belongings (including chai leaves, lipsticks, peanut butter jars, and bean bags), and turning rooms upside down. They found incriminating material in four of the six rooms, which was subsequently reported to CADI.

The student body later found out that the Residence Life Policy allows for such room inspections. It contends that there may be cases when the Residence Life Office is “compelled to inspect a student’s allotted room without the consent of and prior notification to the residents under circumstances that indicate danger to the well-being of an individual(s) and/or indicate a violation of the University regulations.” It further adds that the Office must secure a permit from the authorising personnel (the Dean of Student Affairs) in order to conduct such inspections. 

What ‘compelled’ the office to “inspect” so many rooms in a single day? What were the indications/evidence that they used to justify targeting those specific rooms? The student body was left to speculate whether the “inspections” were based on arbitrary ‘hit lists’ or part of a broader surveillance and profiling system. But what we know for sure is that this provision exists in the policy for matters involving “danger to the well-being” of students and violations of the university regulations that would be considered ‘serious,’ as outlined earlier. None of the rooms “inspected” fit this category, as also evidenced by the CADI verdict in all four cases, which ranged from mere warning letters to its standard two-week suspension—nothing exceptional for all the emergency-style policies invoked to build these cases.

The second instance was a breach from the students’ side. The cross-access policy allows the students to visit the opposite/different-gender Residence Halls from 8:00 a.m. to 12:30 a.m.. Violating this policy—staying beyond 12:30 a.m.—leads to infractions processed by the Office of Student Affairs (OSA), usually resulting in warnings or meetings with the residence hall wardens. The fact that OSA manages these infractions in order to reduce CADI’s workload clearly suggests that this is considered a minor offence. Any further escalations or harsher punishments were unheard of. This caused some students to stop showing up at the warden’s office, without facing much consequences—until Spring’25.

In April this year, the Residence Life Office decided to escalate the matter of students with piling up cross-access violations who had ignored the warden’s emails to the Registrar’s Office. The Ashoka University Student Government (AUSG) soon found out that the Registrar had unilaterally revoked two fourth-year UG students’ cross-access privileges until further notice. The letter outlining the punishment did not cite any policy or precedent where revocation of cross-access was a valid punitive option. Neither did it provide the students the opportunity to present their side of the story, like other CADI cases would, nor was there an option to appeal the decision. This marked a massive leap from mere verbal warnings to a direct revocation of cross-access (a disproportionate punishment threshold), without any due procedure. When the AUSG and the CADI Elected Student Representatives raised concerns, they were informed that the two cases were ‘exceptional’ in nature: 70+ cross-access violations. The violation sounds grave, but there are important caveats that were overlooked: students can get a violation for exiting the opposite/different-gender RHs even one minute late, the time period over which these violations were accumulated, and the actual gravity of an offense involving staying over at a friend’s place. This fully residential and co-educational campus—both in academic and residential settings—has now begun restricting students from accessing certain residential buildings on the grounds that they stayed there overnight. (“having fun together,” anyone?)

What can the students make of the sudden change in the nature of room “inspections,” surveillance, and disproportionate punishments for minor offences like cross-access violations? As the scanners on the Main Gate already presume guilt on our part, which we must disprove by scanning our belongings every time we enter the campus, these two instances discussed above point to how the scanners are not an end-solution to any problem, but a starting point. If the campus is to be governed by presuming students ‘guilty until proven innocent,’ then students will have to constantly prove their innocence even after passing through the scanners. The administration seems to now work on this presumption of guilt to make the campus more ‘secure,’ where the threat, ironically, is its own students.

Forgetting the Honor Code: Present Scenario

At the time of writing this article, the trust-level between the students and the administration is at a new low. Starting May 2025, the university has expelled an unprecedented number of students from campus housing on mental health and disciplinary grounds. Their use of the student well-being and benefit jargon—something all Ashoka students are trained to see through—has further enraged the student body. According to the AUSG, some six students have been asked to vacate their Residence Hall rooms effective immediately and are now required to submit fitness certificates from a qualified medical practitioner, declaring them fit to rejoin academic responsibilities and stay on campus. Two of the cases happened in the middle of the ongoing summer semester, causing the students to lose out on academics and set them further back in their academic trajectory.

The Residence Life Policy outlines three scenarios that might require sending the student home: A physical health emergency, including communicable diseases, wherein one of the infirmary doctor’s recommendations may be “sending [the student back] home to parent(s) or guardian.” Secondly, in case a student is found in possession of forbidden items, including alcohol bottles, bongs, and substance manufacturing paraphernalia, they “shall be subject to disciplinary measures within the University, including but not limited to expulsion from campus housing and forfeiture of Financial Aid.” (The matter of threatening financial aid as a disciplinary measure is highly problematic, but outside the scope of this article.) Importantly, this policy takes a different route in case of a mental health crisis, prioritising peer-staff response by creating a circle of support. It only mentions that the university shall “consider allowing the parent(s)/guardian to take their ward home to ensure appropriate psychiatric care or treatment from a medical professional of their choice.” It goes on to confirm that  this shall be subject to “recommendations and assessment made by a registered medical professional in this regard”. 

The recent cases of sending students home do not neatly fit any of the three scenarios. The details of these cases cannot be disclosed here, but may be verified with the AUSG, with the concerned students’ permission. The four cases over May and June were mostly mental health crisis matters, and as per the AUSG’s email to the student body on 20th July, the university responded by asking students to vacate the campus housing, seek parental support, and provide fitness certificates before returning to the next semester. Comparing this to the policy summarised in the above paragraph, it is clear that the administration conveniently mixed up mental health crisis response with disciplinary procedures, and bypassed all the available on-campus options to support students before the final, exceptional case of sending the student home. When questioned, the university has maintained its ‘state of exception,’ as the administrators have asked the AUSG to stay out of these cases, because these were all ‘exceptional circumstances, requiring exceptional procedures.’ The fact that it is summer break, and campus can be even more lonely than during regular semesters, might have been used as an excuse in these four cases. But if this was a major reason, then why were two more students—each indicted in a similar mixture of disciplinary and mental health concerns—subjected to similar ‘exceptional procedures’ in the middle of the summer semester—when ACWB, Student Care Office, and all other peer-staff support mechanisms are available?

The only possible answer that the students can take seriously is that the University wishes to avoid its own liability and responsibility. Much like the students are a threat to the university’s ‘security,’ and must comply with scanning their luggage, accept intrusive “inspections” in their rooms, in order to be deemed disciplined students deserving of staying on campus; they are now an automatic liability to the university in terms of their mental health needs, and must provide fitness certificates from psychiatrists to be deemed mentally fit to stay on campus. Given that none of this falls within the regular campus life policy framework, this entire project is being governed through a new permanent emergency-situation-like regime.

The uncanny similarity in how the university is now dealing with the cases of mental health crises and regular disciplinary violations—or in fact their blurring of boundary between the two—became apparent when a VC’s “special committee”—historically set up for purely disciplinary matters—applied the same procedures to decide on the mental health crisis of an AUSG member. The committee consisted of two Ashoka professors and one staff member. It took the route of emphasising the concerned student’s well-being and hoped that they receive the right medical treatment at their home, only to arrive at the same conclusion it would do in a purely disciplinary matter: asking the student to vacate the campus on an immediate basis (how is this different from a suspension, given that no psychiatrist or other expert was a member on the committee?), demanding a fitness certificate from a qualified medical practitioner before rejoining the university, and suspending their AUSG membership with immediate effect. Once again, there is no recourse for appealing this punitive decision masked as a ‘student well-being’ effort.

As the AUSG raised concerns, in its email to the student body on 20th July, with how the “administration’s actions will lead to further isolation of students who potentially need the support that the campus community offers, and the expulsion from campus housing sets the already vulnerable section further back in their academic trajectory,” they were met with a response that this article has now sufficiently contextualised: these cases involved exceptional circumstances, with the Registrar’s Office citing the university policies to assert the Vice Chancellor’s (VC) powers to take suo moto cognisance and deal with such circumstances in exceptional way and form. Additionally, the Dean of Student Affairs was recently quoted by The Edict, contending that the VC has “unlimited powers” in such matters.

Let’s briefly look at the clause that seemingly empowers the VC. The Registrar, in his reply to the AUSG, quoted Clause 14 of the Ashoka University Guidelines and Regulations on Disciplinary Proceedings (2023): “Nothing in this document limits the powers of the Vice Chancellor to take suo moto cognizance of any disciplinary matter not covered in this document, but which affects the University.” First of all, the citation is from a disciplinary guideline, while, as discussed above, the matters at hand have an essential element of mental health distress that the University is lacking the language to address, except for tokenistic promises of caring while taking punitive actions against the students. 

Equally importantly, this clause comes after a five-page-long setting up of democratic procedures for processing disciplinary cases—with clauses ranging from membership and composition of CADI, conflict of interest, complaint screening and communication, deliberations and final decision, to an elaborate appeals process. Clause 14 sets the stage to bypass all of these procedures and vests power in a “special committee,” whose adherence to the same guidelines as CADI remains unclear. Meant for exceptional circumstances that lie outside the Disciplinary Guidelines framework, the administration’s focus on clause 14 (as the only clause invoked to justify the punitive action against the SG member) represents the larger trend at Ashoka: governing with exception as the rule.

So What—If We No Longer Enjoy the Same Honor Code? 

The purpose of the entire analysis above is to make a case for the university administration to pay attention to how their actions—however well-intended—have long-term consequences for student trust levels. Student representative positions in the statutory bodies and an elected student government are reminiscent of an idea of campus governance that actively involves students. A constant state of emergency, dealt with exceptional procedures, leaves no space for student oversight on the university’s decisions, and affords the administration “unlimited powers.” Such a governance regime cannot be sustainable for the student interests. On the one hand, this has important ramifications for how students (hesitate to) access the mental and physical health support system, and the kinds of precedents around ‘fitness’ and ‘unfitness’ the university sets for its incoming students. On the other hand, the current students can no longer rely on the administration for closed-door decision making processes, given their arbitrariness and a permanent ‘state of exception.’

There also seems to be an assumption that the level of trust students have in their university is limited to student-faculty relations and career support programmes. But Ashoka, being a mandatorily residential campus, cannot be ignorant of the impact its residence life policies and its handling of disciplinary and mental health matters have on its perception among the students. As it possibly attempts to appease or serve a larger audience outside the university, given the socio-political climate, the administration must recognise that it has an audience inside too. And that the students (and concerned faculty and staff) are worried about the widening trust-deficit between students and the administration, as the university continues its project of—what seems like to most of us students—saving its name and reputation at the risk of harming the most vulnerable members of the campus community by isolating them further and prosecuting them in exceptional ways and forms.

How does a student community reconcile with the fact that its ‘well-being’ can now be weaponised against its own members? On what grounds does it demand student oversight of the administration’s handling of ‘serious’ cases, when every case is narrativised as an exceptional circumstance? How can the students lay unquestioned trust in the administrative processes when “we have concerns regarding the procedures followed in this case” is met with “the Vice Chancellor has unlimited powers”? If the Student Government was to approach a competent authority in the administration to pose these questions, its members would most probably be told: “Please stay out of all these (exceptional) matters. Your job is to tell students to simply follow the rules—easy!” And that’s the problem.

The author is an elected member of Ashoka University Student Government 2025–26. Views are personal. The author’s name has been withheld at their request.