The imagined futures of the public university in India

Through an engagement with James Mittelman’s Implausible Dream: The World Class University and Repurposing Higher Education, this paper tracks the journey of the idea of World Class Universities in India, and its most recent iteration in the form of Institutions of Eminence. The structural crisis of governance in the public university system is related to the overweening role of the state in every aspect of its functioning, with the University Grants Commission failing to perform its role as a buffer between government and university. The paper examines two recent initiatives of the government: the proposed replacement of the University Grants Commission by a Higher Education Commission of India and the initiative to support select Institutions of Eminence to achieve world class status. The core attraction of this initiative is its promise of autonomy, and this idea of autonomy is critically interrogated here, including in its ambivalent relationship to academic freedom.