Two Extremes, One Crisis: For Future of Nation

Dr. Amit Kumar Dashora examines how campus politics, consumer culture and falling academic standards threaten learning in India's universities.

Educational Institutes are witnessing a troubling rise in student unrest. In September 2026, unverified social media rumours set off overnight violence at two private universities in Punjab, with arson, a blocked highway and police vehicles set ablaze. In November 2025, more than 2,000 students at a private university in Madhya Pradesh torched vehicles during a protest over food and water quality. Public universities have their own list: clashes and arson during a minister’s visit to a state university in West Bengal in March 2025, a violent student-group protest against the Governor at a state university in Kerala in July 2025, and students breaking through the gates of a central university in Chandigarh in November 2025.

At first glance, these incidents seem unrelated in private or public institutes. But the crisis remains same. One treats the student as a cadre, the other as a customer. Neither treats the student as a learner, and that is the real crisis.

Institutions: Political Arena or Hotel

In many public universities, student unions have become extensions of political parties. Campus elections are fought like miniature assembly polls, with money, muscle, banners and outside patronage. Agendas are often far from real concerns of students and aligned with political parties’ ideologies. The greatest victims are often the silent majority: students from modest backgrounds who came to the university as their only route to a better life. They lose semesters that they can’t afford due to strikes, shutdowns and delayed examinations, and many feel that the institution is part of the political arena, and that is a crisis.

The other distortion is experienced by the private universities. Students are treated as customers to be satisfied through selling the campuses, through food courts, fests and concerts, through placement brochures etc. Institutions don’t want to have to fail, discipline or challenge students because they do not want a dissatisfied customer to leave, complain or post a bad review. Part of the criteria for faculty evaluation is student feedback and so rigor is dangerous and leniency is safe. Parents invest lakhs in educating their wards, but today they are finding entertainment becoming the order of the day on the campus.

The Psychological Problems We Are Creating With Two Extremes

As a society, we need to choose between politics or over-care campus for students which is imbibing low tolerance, agitation among........

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