Two recent events mirrored the sharp decline of universities on either side of the Atlantic. At Norwich, the University of East Anglia declared a projected deficit of £45 million for the next couple of years. Unable to change forces beyond its control, notably, the lingering effects of the pandemic and, crucially, the steep drop in student applications, the university decided to go for what looked easier — declare the need to reduce staff by 113 people. Taking into account voluntary redundancy and redeployment schemes, the final need was to reduce staff by 48 people. The university’s eventual decision to cut 31 positions in arts and humanities sent ripples of anger and resentment in the arts community in Britain already pushed to a crisis by the Tory government’s continuing onslaught on these fields.

In Morgantown, West Virginia, the flagship university of the state, West Virginia University, also facing a $45 million shortfall, decided to eliminate 9% of its total majors — 32 in all — which would lead to the termination of employment of 169 faculty members, 7% in all. This includes the entirety of the department of world languages and linguistics. Other programmes on the chopping block include the PhD and Masters in mathematics; the PhD in higher education and the EdD in higher education administration; the Bachelors in environmental and community planning; Doctor of musical arts in composition; Masters of music in composition; Masters in acting; and Masters in creative writing.

Very different storms have been raging through Indian universities these days. As I write this, my own institution, Ashoka University, is exploding with the circumstances of resignation of two faculty members in the economics department. An academic paper by an assistant professor, Sabyasachi Das, pointing to extensive patterns of irregularity in the 2019 Lok Sabha elections that led to the victory of the Bharatiya Janata Party-led coalition, caused an uproar in mainstream and social media, first taken up by Opposition leaders in Parliament and subsequently attacked by the ruling party and its army of trolls. Within a few days, Das resigned from his position, and it was clear that he had been placed under severe pressure by the institution. While a significant segment of the faculty rallied in protest and in solidarity with Das, a senior professor from the same department, Pulapre Balakrishnan, also resigned in solidarity with Das. As student and faculty bodies continue their protests, petitions and meetings, it still remains unknown if such non-academic interference in faculty research can be procedurally prevented in the future.

Finally, a bleak and terrifying incident that will hit the readers of this newspaper close to home — the recent suicide by an undergraduate student at Jadavpur University. A first-year student of Bengali honours, a resident at the university hostel, jumped to his death from the second-floor balcony of the hostel building. That he was driven to suicide by relentless, institutionalised bullying by his seniors was established soon enough. The inevitable sufferers were students from rural and suburban areas. Perhaps the pain that will gnaw at many of us as we live with the memory of the ‘murder’ of this student from Nadia is one articulated by the writer, Anita Agnihotri, in her Facebook post in Bengali: “You would have lived if you had a flat and a car in Calcutta.”

Perhaps these are four random incidents picked out of recent headlines. Perhaps they stood out to me because of my personal associations with these institutions. But far beyond that, the strange historical togetherness of these incidents points to a pattern that has been clear over the last few years. Universities in the West, particularly in the Anglo-American world, are facing a crisis due to larger shifts in history and demography. In India, where precisely those demographic and financial conditions are currently in our favour, a great wealth of opportunity is being squandered away by violations and corrupt actions by individuals and politicians invested in the miseducation of the nation. History should have been on the side of higher education in India now; we’re taking a lot of trouble to squander that away.

To be sure, Republicans and Tories in the United States of America and the United Kingdom have done their bit to delegitimise liberal education and open thought much the way the Hindu Right has done in India. But far greater forces behind the decline of universities in these two countries are these two: a steep and almost irreversible decline in college-age youth, and the astronomically rising cost of college.

It is only the sad remembrance of that happy fact that we haven’t had either of these problems in India. Higher education has been historically available to a wide swathe of the populace at little to no cost, thanks to a Nehruvian landscape of public universities and a booming youth population that ensures that just about any institution that opens its gates will be occupied quickly. This is affirmed by the staggering profits made by private content deliverers such as Byju’s as well as the millions of CUET examinees wondering about the vagaries of placement following the arbitrarily structured, centralised examinations. But the response to this has primarily been the mushrooming of profiteering private outfits of questionable quality on one hand and, on the other, the ongoing government project to destroy the nation-spun fabric of public universities. Successive events at Ashoka have proved that even private institutions financially independent of governments are scarcely free to carry out research critical of ruling ideologies. Institutional mismanagement and differences in social positioning can still lead to the stifling of lives in manners we thought had gone out of vogue. In a nation with a large, booming population that is yearning for higher education, agents of political and institutional corruption are destroying possibilities for all but those who can afford to seek it overseas.

Asian countries have sought broad, liberal education in order to reap the economic benefits that growing economies can get from them but have failed to accept the moral and political freedom such education requires. Singapore’s booming economy hoped for such an education, but the unwillingness to accept the political implication of that education quickly led to the dissolution of the college set up through the collaboration of Yale and the National University of Singapore. India’s National Education Policy 2020, too, makes a significant gesture to interdisciplinary, liberal arts education. But nothing in the government’s behaviour indicates that it is ready to accept the liberal life of the mind, either on campus or in the intellectual lives of the disciplines.

Saikat Majumdar is Professor of English & Creative Writing at Ashoka University