"Ashoka University Bartered Its Soul By Letting Down Free Speech": Raghuram Rajan

Faculty members, students, and alumni of Ashoka University, too, have expressed their anguish at Pratap Bhanu Mehta's exit.

The unseemly departure of two renowned intellectuals, Pratap Bhanu Mehta and Arvind Subramaniam, from Ashoka University, Sonepat, in the past few days over a shrinking free-speech space at the institution has sparked a collective howl of disappointment from academics the world over. From Raghuram Rajan to Milan Vaishnav to Martha C Nussbaum, the global intelligentsia is recoiling from what they termed a "dangerous attack on academic freedom". "Free speech is the soul of a great university. By compromising on it, the founders have bartered away its soul," the former Reserve Bank of India chief has said. Mr Rajan, economist and a professor at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, wondered what motivated Ashoka's founders "to remove their hitherto laudable protection". "...Ashoka's founders have succumbed to outside pressure to get rid of a troublesome critic," he surmised in a LinkedIn post. An eloquent and consistent critic of Prime Minister Narendra Modi's government, Mr Mehta quit as Ashoka University's Vice-Chancellor in July 2019 but continued as a professor. On Tuesday, however, he abruptly resigned from that position, too.