In a country battling economic uncertainty and political polarisation, one of the most silent yet devastating crises is unfolding within the very institutions tasked with building our future: our universities.

As a faculty member at a public sector university, I do not write this as an outsider or a detached critic. I write as a witness to slow erosion, not of infrastructure alone, but of intellectual life. Our campuses, once imagined as spaces for dialogue, creativity and inquiry, are increasingly being reduced to echo chambers of compliance, guarded by invisible fences of fear and bureaucracy.

Take one telling example: the ban on student unions. It has been in place for decades; and while successive governments have occasionally promised restoration, the ban persists in practice, if not in name. The result? A generation of students whose political awareness is shaped not by debates, elections and exposure to differing worldviews, but by hashtags and algorithm-driven rage. We have replaced student leaders with........

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