CHENNAI: The unceremonious removal of an activist professor as the acting head of Political Science department at Madras University is snowballing into a major controversy, with students staging a protest in front of the Vice Chancellor’s block on Monday.
They were protesting the removal of Professor Ramu Manivannan, allegedly after his refusal to take punitive action on students involved in prohibition protests. Extending support to the protests from outside was around 30 academicians and others including Madras Institute of Development Studies (MIDS) professors AR Venkatachalapathy and M Vijayabaskar, writers, film-makers, IT professionals and activists.
The students alleged that the university officials intimidated their parents through phone for protesting and asked them to pick their children back home. Meanwhile, a recorded audio clip too started making the rounds through message sharing platforms, in which university Registrar David Jawahar, was purportedly intimidating a parent of a student who took part in protests today.
However, terming this allegation completely false, David Jawahar said according to university norms, Ramu Manivannan’s consent was not necessary to remove him from the post since he was head in-charge and explanation needs to be sought only from full-time HODs.
While Manivannan claimed that the university sought additional details of students who took part in the protest to press for prohibition on August 4, the Registrar said there was no such necessity as the varsity acquired the information right after police took them into custody.