India does not lack erudite earnest scholars. It lacks a hiring architecture willing to find them, and an accountability system willing to keep them honest once inside. Until both change, “full freedom” for universities will continue to mean freedom to disappoint and refusal to optimize the enormous reservoir of our academic potential, writes Delhi-based well-known historian and social scientist Dr. Smita Pandey
Every year, thousands of highly qualified PhDs — many trained at IITs, IISc, JNU and leading universities abroad — apply for a handful of assistant professor posts advertised by Indian universities. Every year, a familiar complaint afflicts the results: the best candidates were passed over, and someone with weaker credentials but the right connections walked away with the job. Ask any vice-chancellor why, and the answer is almost ritualistic: “good faculty is hard to find.” This claim contradicts facts. When two hundred qualified applicants compete for one post, the problem is not scarcity of talent. It is the process built to filter it out.
A crisis of design, not of supply: Indian universities enjoy near-total autonomy in faculty selection. This should enable them to handpick the finest minds available and shape world-class departments. In practice, that freedom has become the disease rather than the cure. Selection committees are dominated by insiders — colleagues who will work alongside the new hire for the next three decades and who often have every incentive to choose someone pliable over someone brilliant. Evaluation criteria such as “research potential” and “teaching aptitude” are vague enough to justify almost any selection. And a large number of universities continue to hire their own PhD graduates straight into faculty posts, a practice that entrenches local hierarchies instead of bringing in fresh intellectual blood.
The result is a system where caste networks, regional loyalties, ideological alignment and old-boy connections routinely outweigh publication records and teaching ability — not because good candidates are unavailable, but because the process was never designed to identify them in the first place. Courts and the Right to Information Act remain, for many aggrieved candidates, the only recourse — a remedy that arrives, if at all, years after the damage is done.
Lessons from elsewhere: Universities in the United States and Europe do not claim to have solved nepotism entirely, but they have built structural checks that make it much harder to bury merit under favouritism. External subject experts — often from rival institutions — sit on hiring panels with real, not ceremonial, authority. Shortlisted candidates deliver public research seminars before the entire department, including postdoctoral fellows and doctoral students, who question and critique the work openly. A single professor pushing a weak protégé through such a gauntlet finds it far harder to succeed unnoticed.
Crucially, most serious research universities abroad actively discourage hiring their own recent graduates, insisting instead that candidates build an independent track record elsewhere before returning, if at all. And the appointment itself is rarely the final word: a tenure-track hire faces five to seven years of rigorous, externally reviewed probation before the position becomes permanent. This lowers the stakes of any single hiring decision and reduces the political intensity that surrounds it — paradoxically making the process fairer, not more fraught.
The excuse that does not hold up: The claim that India lacks quality faculty candidates deserves particular scrutiny, because it is empirically false. The same nation whose universities complain of a talent shortage supply some of the finest researchers at MIT, Stanford, Oxford and the Max Planck Institutes. Talent is not the constraint. What is missing is a domestic process capable of recognising it, rewarding it, and retaining it — and, frequently, an institutional culture worth staying for. When a committee insists that amongst five hundred qualified applicants it could not identify the best few, the obvious conclusion is not that talent was absent, but that the evaluation method — subjective interviews with no real research scrutiny — was not designed to find it.
What needs to change:The fixes are neither exotic nor unaffordable. Every recruitment panel should include external subject experts with genuine voting power, not token presence. In-house PhD hiring should be sharply restricted, requiring candidates to demonstrate experience beyond their alma mater. Shortlisting criteria and scores should be published, allowing decisions to be challenged on transparent grounds rather than only through litigation. Also short listed candidates should be made to deliver public research seminars before the entire department, including postdoctoral fellows and doctoral students, who question and critique their work openly. Then only some professors pushing their weak protégés through such a challenge will find it difficult , if not impossible , to succeed unnoticed.
A genuine probationary period, reviewed by outside evaluators, would reduce the all-or-nothing stakes that currently make every appointment a political battle. And faculty pay and mobility need reform, so that talented researchers have real incentive to move toward better institutions — creating the kind of competitive pressure that flat, uniform government pay scales currently extinguish.
Troublingly, the trajectory of recent reform runs reverse. . The UGC’s Draft Regulations of 2025 have replaced the earlier point-based Academic Performance Indicator system with a more “holistic” and discretionary evaluation, even as it eases some qualification norms and lifts caps on contractual appointments. Critics have warned that expanding discretion in committees already dominated by nepotism, regionalism and caste biases is likely to deepen the very problem it claims to solve. Evidence from systems that reward merit more consistently points the other way: what works is not looser discretion, but tighter, more transparent constraints on it.
Let students speak: accountability does not end at hiring:Fixing recruitment addresses only who gets in the door. What happens after — whether a mediocre hire is ever held to account — is an equally neglected half of the problem, and here too India has the infrastructure but not the will. NAAC nominally requires every accredited college to run a student satisfaction survey, and most universities run some version of an end-of-semester feedback form. In practice, this is treated as paperwork: response rates are low, results rarely reach the concerned faculty member, and almost never influence retention or promotion.
A structured, anonymous, semester-end feedback system — covering clarity of concepts, depth of knowledge, articulation, and willingness to encourage questions — should be mandatory in every Indian institution, not an accreditation formality. Crucially, it must feed into real decisions, combined with peer classroom observation and learning outcomes, so that ratings cannot be gamed through mere entertainment value or lenient grading alone. Global research shows student ratings, used carefully alongside other measures, offer a window into teaching quality that no external inspector possesses. Indian higher education cannot keep asking why faculty quality lags while ignoring the one voice — the student’s — that experiences it firsthand, every single day, in the classroom.
India does not lack erudite earnest scholars. It lacks a hiring architecture willing to find them, and an accountability system willing to keep them honest once inside. Until both change, “full freedom” for universities will continue to mean freedom to disappoint and refusal to optimize the enormous reservoir of our academic potential.
(Dr. Smita Pandey is well-known social scientist and historian)
