The Ideals Behind South Asian University Have Been Crushed
Snigdha Jayakrishnan, Apoorva Yarabahally and Sapphira Beth Diengdoh | 31 October 2025 | The Wire
Recently, South Asian University (SAU) terminated the employment of Dr Snehashish Bhattacharya, a tenured faculty member in the Department of Economics. This action by the SAU administration strikes at the core of the question of academic freedom – a value that the university has claimed to espouse since its inception.
SAU was a project by SAARC nation-states that aimed at creating a space for intellectual and cultural exchange, not affected by the national agendas of the member states. In order to understand the importance of a university space like SAU in the region, we need to look at the historical, cultural and political specificities that exist in South Asia…