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.
What happened last April at Delhi University illustrates the difficulty. A senior Hindi professor invited to speak in New York was asked to submit his lecture text before his travel could be approved, and told that his leave required clearance from the Union education ministry. He declined, and the university denied permission. A university requiring a lecture’s text for approval raises a different question: at what point does administrative procedure become scrutiny of academic content?
A similar question arose in Karnataka in March 2026, when the State Open University was directed to postpone an international conference after the higher education department said it had not followed government protocol. The government then ordered its cancellation. The conference, on the ideas of RSS ideologue Deendayal Upadhyaya, had become politically sensitive; the university eventually held it, with the Governor inaugurating the event.
The two episodes are only representative: one involves an academic, the other an institution, but both raise the same question: who has final authority over what a university can discuss, research or organise? Karnataka’s recent debates over university administration show how easily autonomy turns into a political contest. But changing who controls appointments doesn’t create autonomy. It may just change who exercises control; governments across the spectrum have sought such influence.
Another, less discussed dimension matters. Academic freedom requires people willing to question decisions and defend unpopular positions. Employment insecurity makes that difficult. Government data put the vacancy rate for sanctioned faculty posts at central universities at about 25.4 percent in 2025. In Karnataka’s government degree colleges, a High Court judgement noted that guest faculty handled about 63 percent of the teaching workload in 440 colleges in 2023-24, with 10,600 guest faculty against 6,100 permanent faculty. Court records show 10,303 guest faculty were engaged in 2025-26.
A teacher with job insecurity is likely to be more cautious about challenging administrative decisions than one with a secure appointment. When authority is concentrated and employment is insecure, decisions that could be settled within the university are more likely to be referred upwards. Over time, caution can become part of institutional culture, and academic freedom may remain formally intact while the willingness to exercise it diminishes.
The solution has to begin with institutional design. Universities need clear rules specifying which decisions fall under academic and administrative bodies and which require government approval, including travel, conferences, visiting scholars and public events. Government oversight should be transparent and rule-based rather than dependent on an event’s political sensitivity. The appointment of vice-chancellors and senior officials also needs greater insulation from political considerations.
The Index raises a different question, then: whether V-Dem is Western. It is whether we are willing to ask what a university is for. If universities are reduced to institutions that transfer knowledge and improve employability, autonomy may appear secondary. If they are also places where society thinks aloud and pursues knowledge without fear, autonomy becomes indispensable. India should not accept an international index uncritically, but neither should it reject an uncomfortable finding simply because it comes from outside.
John J Kennedy | Former Professor and Dean, Christ (Deemed) University, Bengaluru
(Views are personal)