Where Campuses Think Aloud
John J Kennedy | 02 September 2026 | The New Indian Express
Indian universities have always been expected to produce and transmit knowledge. Increasingly, they are also expected to build skills and employability. These are legitimate concerns, but ones that have drawn attention away from what makes a university a university.
One such foundation is freedom: a place to question ideas and examine unpopular arguments without anticipating the preferences of those in authority. This freedom doesn’t rest only on individual teachers’ rights; it depends on whether their institutions have the autonomy to protect them.
This is why the Academic Freedom Index 2026 deserves attention. Prepared by the V-Dem Institute and Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, it covers 179 countries. It measures academic freedom across five dimensions, including freedom to research and teach, campus integrity and institutional autonomy. India ranks 156th among the 179 countries assessed, placing it in the bottom 10-20 percent bracket globally, below every South Asian neighbour except China. India’s decline has often been met with a familiar response: that such surveys reflect Western assumptions and fail to understand Indian realities. Methodology may raise questions. But dismissing the findings as Western bias doesn’t help. Worse, in the process, we avoid a more important question: is institutional autonomy necessary for a university to remain a place of independent thought? If it is, one cannot dismiss the issue merely because the warning comes from outside India.
A professor may, in theory, have the freedom to teach, conduct research and express an opinion. But that freedom becomes difficult to exercise when the institution employing them cannot make basic decisions without external approval. Institutional autonomy does not mean freedom from accountability; universities receiving public money must comply with the law. It means decisions about academic work and internal administration should ordinarily be made within the university, according to clear rules.