Academicians write open letter to Ashoka Univ over PB Mehta’s resignation

New Delhi:  Over 150 academicians from prestigious universities across the globe like Harvard, Yale, Columbia, London School of Economics and MIT, have written an open letter to trustees of Ashoka University, expressing distress over political commentator Pratap Bhanu Mehta’s resignation from the varsity under “political pressure”.
The university in Haryana’s Sonipat became the centre of controversy earlier this week, when Mehta, who had resigned as its vice chancellor two years back, chose to step down as professor, saying that the founders made it “abundantly clear” that his association with the institution was a “political liability”.
Arvind Subramanian, the former chief economic advisor, had also resigned from the university, two days later, in solidarity with Mehta.
Also Read After PB Mehta, Arvind Subramanian also resigns from Ashoka University Students, alumni and faculty members of the varsity have been staging protests and demanding answers from the administration about whether Mehta’s exit has been a “direct consequence of him being a public intellectual and critic of the government”.
Former RBI governor Raghuram Rajan on Saturday took to social media to say that Mehta and Subramanian’s resignation is a “grievous blow to free speech and the founders have bartered away the varsity’s soul”.
“We are distressed to learn of Pratap Bhanu Mehta’s resignation under political pressure from Ashoka University. A prominent critic of the current Indian government and defender of academic freedom, he had become a target for his writings. It seems that Ashoka’s Trustees, who should have treated defending him as their institutional duty, instead all but forced his resignation,” the open letter by the academicians read.