Putting Ashoka to Work: Shaping Criticism, Morality and Ambition

This article is intended as a response to ‘AMAANAT not JAAGIR.’

There is no doubt that Ashoka is an “endeavour of profound optimism” and idealism. Without a sense of idealism, no planning for the future can take place, and there can be no poetry with which to ultimately govern for. The trouble arises when we question who gets to write this poetry, who it is recited to and who gets to privilege the prose. 

The inspiring poetry of creating a “top-100, non-profit, non-government, multidisciplinary university” is impactful and deeply resonant with the founders and donors of Ashoka. It holds no small weight for its students either; we are here under the promise of an interdisciplinary education that no other place in India can give us. Yet, for students, the poetry of Ashoka is also resonant of something more. In his teach-in in September 2023, shortly after Professor Sabyasachi Das resigned from the university, Professor Ali Khan Mahmudabad said that “it is no wonder then that universities often end up playing a crucial role in political changes, in revolutions; a good university is as close as we can come to a utopia.” Ashoka is no utopia, but the promise of it is. The prose of the university, unfortunately, fell short of standing with Professor Mahmudabad when he was wrongfully arrested and imprisoned for an online statement on Operation Sindoor. 100 crores in scholarships, 4500 crores raised since Ashoka’s inception are only building materials. To govern in prose cannot be to build an institution of idealism while sidestepping those who write its poetry. Ashoka’s prose needs to stand with its poetry, so that it continues to be a successful endeavour of idealism and does not fall into the trap of illusion. 

The writers argue that “the first idealism [that Ashoka is built on] is that Ashoka is a multi-stakeholder environment with many equal stakeholders: faculty, students, parents, administrators, governing body, founders, donors, and government.” However, to speak plainly, we are not all equal stakeholders. If two founders can say that they “volunteer their time at Ashoka” when other people’s livelihoods depend on this university, can we really all call ourselves equal stakeholders? Because there are stakeholders who make the rules and stakeholders who have to abide by them, while we cannot be equal, how can we work towards becoming collective stakeholders? 

The idea that every Ashokan stakeholder must be mindful of their behaviour reinforces the fact that we are all collectively responsible for this university. The actions of one trickle down to all; the responsibility owed to the institution is the responsibility we owe to each other. However, institutional responsibility should not be claimed as a mechanism to supersede the trust students place in the institution. Students have to be constrained from breaking the law, but institutional responsibility cannot allow for the privacy of students to be breached or for mental health to be policed with shame. The recent policies on mental health “lean towards sending students home, rather than creating a safe space to address these issues on campus.” Does a sense of the collective entail one set of stakeholders punishing the other? These policies have come into effect with no student consultation or open deliberation. Increasingly, communication between students and administration has also broken down. If a responsibility towards the institution means that we slowly chip away at the responsibility we owe each other—to continue listening and talking across the inequality inherent in the structure of the university—we can perhaps never be collective stakeholders but only remain unequal ones.

However, far more than being unequal, it is an exclusive place and students who apply here opt into this exclusivity. This exclusivity, premised on inequality, is something Ashokans may or may not have contended with, but students have still made the choice to be here. They know Ashoka will never belong to them the way it might to those who “volunteer their time” here. Yet multiple student protests, demands from the administration, and an uptick in the turnout of students voting in Student Government elections show that students want to be part of the process of building a sense of collective responsibility—a responsibility that is both moral and ambitious. 

 How do we, as students, contend with being moral and ambitious? How do we grapple with utilising the opportunities we are offered here (many of which are exclusive to this environment) while still fundamentally disagreeing with a certain “prose” of the university? “Most Ashoka students are simply too talented and ambitious to be so cynical. Over the next fifty years, Ashoka University and its alumni will demonstrate being moral AND ambitious.” One way that morality and ambition are held together is criticism. As a student, criticism becomes a way to make your voice heard and assert your place in the university unless you are invited to be on a committee, can donate money or occupy a position that requires work with the administration. Even when students gather outside the gate, founders and administration members do not converse with them. Unlike founders or even the administration, students are the ones who constitute and experience the lived reality of this university —a lived reality that changes every day, a lived reality that is determined by the policies implemented by the founders and administration. As the writers assert, “First, the long-term evolution of any human institution is best understood as a movement towards goals that are only fleshed out in the course of the movement itself.” This “climate change” and “evolution,” then, needs to account for student experience. 

Cynicism, therefore, is not antithetical to morality and ambition. However, a move towards using this criticism to shape the vision of the university, a way to involve students in the creation of policies that govern campus life, is required. An example of this is the Working Group for the Residence Life policies that meets with the Dean of Student Affairs regularly to discuss feasible changes. As a result of this productive engagement of students with administration, alternative measures are to be implemented soon. This is the outcome of the administration’s willingness to account for student perspectives and the student body’s willingness to work towards enacting change.  

At the end of the piece, students are encouraged to “use (our) privilege well.” Coming to Ashoka is a privilege, and it would be an oversight not to acknowledge that. However, it can be something that endures without needing to be preserved—neither Amaanat nor a Jaagir. If it is an ideal that is being shaped in “movement itself,” it must also be an opportunity that is still being shaped. Blanket statements about resistance and being for sale, made by one or two individuals, and taken out of context, need not be held up as examples of a larger cynicism that is holding back students from their full potential, or from realizing the full potential of the university. 

(Edited by Nikita Bose and Madiha Tariq)