Every year, more than 8.4 lakh people die globally from health conditions linked to toxic workplaces. According to the International Labour Organization, psychosocial risks at work—long hours, job insecurity, bullying and harassment—cause these deaths through cardiovascular disease and mental illness. The ILO also found that 35 percent of workers worldwide work more than 48 hours a week and 23 percent have faced some form of violence or harassment at work. These statistics appear to concern factories, offices and corporations. However, they are also increasingly visible in academia, which should instead embody precisely the opposite values.
Earlier this year, the death by suicide of an assistant professor at AIIMS Bhopal attracted national attention after allegations of workplace harassment, professional humiliation and administrative pressure surfaced. Family and colleagues cited severe mental distress, raising questions about whether authorities had acted on earlier concerns. The National Human Rights Commission’s intervention reframed the tragedy as a governance failure, underscoring that faculty burnout, workplace bullying and mental health crises are institutional, not individual, problems.
If the AIIMS episode exposed the human costs of toxic institutional environments, developments across universities show how such environments are created. During a recent visit to a prestigious university, I learned that faculty members were required to record every exit from campus in a register: time out, destination, purpose and time back. It is not an isolated example. Across many Indian universities, biometric attendance, excessive documentation, CCTV monitoring and digital tracking are increasingly shaping everyday work life. These measures are usually justified in the language of accountability and professionalism. In practice, they often function as instruments of control.
A controversy at Visva-Bharati University illustrates this clearly. Faculty members strongly opposed an administrative directive requiring permission before leaving campus during working hours. Critics argued that the measure treated academics like factory workers and reflected an administration more concerned with monitoring presence than evaluating academic output.
The episode quickly became symbolic of a wider debate on whether universities were moving away from academic self-governance towards bureaucratic command-and-control systems. This raises a question: what assumptions about faculty underpin such forms of management? The answer is straightforward. They assume that academics cannot be trusted. Scholarship, which is a vocation built on reflection, independent judgement and intellectual risk, is treated as an activity that must be constantly monitored.
Michel Foucault argued that power in modern institutions often operates not through direct coercion but through continuous visibility; the awareness that one is always being watched. The result is self-regulation: individuals begin policing themselves. Surveillance does not need to catch wrongdoing. Its purpose is to ensure that no one feels entirely free. The problem with that approach is the failure to understand that academic work does not function like industrial labour. Scholarship develops through reading, conversation, fieldwork, collaboration and reflection. Research requires psychological safety, intellectual trust and a degree of autonomy. Fear and creativity cannot coexist.
Beneath these specific controversies lies a deeper structural change in how universities are organised. Earlier models of academic life valued intellectual judgement, originality and scholarly independence. Increasingly, universities are rewarding visibility, measurable compliance and administrative manageability. Performance-driven environments often reward surface conformity while eroding the deeper commitments that meaningful work requires.
What is emerging in many institutions is a broader culture of fear. Faculty members increasingly report reluctance to criticise administrative decisions, to participate in governance or to speak openly about contentious issues. Fear cultures typically develop when decision-making becomes centralised, transparency declines, dissent is viewed as disloyalty and performance metrics replace collegial relationships. Recent faculty surveys at Yale University revealed growing concerns about self-censorship and academic freedom. Some respondents reported moderating their views because of perceived professional consequences. When academics begin calculating risks before expressing ideas, intellectual inquiry inevitably narrows. The long-term consequences are serious. Younger academics quickly learn that conformity is rewarded while independence carries costs.
The purpose of universities is to protect free inquiry, to create spaces where ideas can be tested, authority questioned and knowledge produced without interference. Democratic societies depend on this function because they need citizens capable of critical thinking. Institutions reproduce internally the values they transmit externally. A university governed through surveillance cannot meaningfully teach freedom. Students who observe faculty navigating bureaucratic control, seeking permission for routine decisions and demonstrating productivity through paperwork learn a crucial lesson: authority is to be obeyed rather than questioned. And that is a dangerous lesson for any democracy.
The ILO has called on governments to address psychosocial risks in the workplace. Universities must be part of that conversation. What is at stake is the purpose of the university itself.
John J Kennedy | Former Professor and Dean, Christ (Deemed) University, Bengaluru
(Views are personal)
