The announcement by a Swiss university to stay out of a globally-coveted ranking system provides an opportunity to return to some of the fundamental imperatives. This is relevant since there are frequent reports and discussions on the woeful conditions of universities in India. These range from the institutional failure to ensure quality teaching, research, and writing, to the overall administration of the universities.

Mostly, our ruminations have been bound to a prevalent template of talking about universities in which stakeholders look like eternal enemies. Unfortunately, the collegiality among teachers, students, administrators and non-teaching staff is too frayed to allow an alternative perspective. How, then, to think of reinventing universities in such a situation?

The question leads us to a lecture Rabindranath Tagore had delivered in England in 1920. He was apprehensive of the possible failure of the university in South Asia if it were to be a mere mimicry of the Western models. He suggested that the divide between the world outside and inside the university is antithetical to the vocation of teaching and learning. Ironically, contemporary university systems have surrendered to the aspirations and the endeavours set by Western prototypes.

One common endeavour of the universities is to earn national or international ranking. Public or private, national or global, every university aims at some ranking as a panacea to institutional problems. This is without the important realisation that the ranking system is a well-marketed product that need not redress the institutional anomalies of universities in developing countries.

Even well-to-do institutions have been exceedingly critical of the ranking system. The University of Zurich was ranked 80th in 2023. However, the university announced its withdrawal from the ranking system recently citing reasons that are relevant globally. It is not as if that the limitations of the ranking of the universities have surfaced in Switzerland only. While most public institutions of higher education in India slavishly nurture the dream of ranking, the Indian Institute of Technology had raised red flags about it. In 2020, six IITs — at Delhi, Mumbai, Kanpur, Madras, Roorkee and Kharagpur — had refused to join the Times Higher Education World University Rankings. The boycott for four years was due to the alleged lack of transparency in the ranking system.

An awareness of the discontents regarding university rankings needs to be coupled with a concerted effort to make a university a bridge connecting the world inside and outside. While those institutions declining to participate in the rankings may have their reasons, universities in India ought to be finding their own. Our reasons shall lead us to intellectual uniqueness, social responsibility and an urge to develop alternative visions for a better society. A university shall be an enabling world in which teaching and learning, administration and management, legality and technicality, are in harmony.

In a reinvented university, pedagogy shall be that foundational art in which professional relationships transform into profundity, as the Black feminist pedagogue, Bell Hooks, had envisaged. Pedagogy and publication, teaching/learning and writing, shall be in a tight embrace rather than in opposition. While we must work with creative and positive energy, we shall not be blind to the possible pitfalls. The same pedagogy and relationality that can be the concrete uniqueness of a reinvented university can also be employed for destructive usage by mischievous minds.

The project of reinventing is yet to go full swing. But every stakeholder of the university system should remain committed to Tagore’s hope expressed in the first quarter of the twentieth century.

Dev Nath Pathak is Chairperson, Department of Sociology, South Asian University, New Delhi