Sans policies, polemics: MU lapses are a warning, not a verdict

The recent findings on faculty appointments at the University of Madras (MU) are more than an administrative story; they are a stress test for the entire project of Indian higher education. At stake is the integrity of the degrees we award, the rigour of the classrooms we entrust to our youth, and the nation’s capacity to cultivate the human capital it needs to thrive. While the legal process will run its course and all parties deserve a right of reply, the episode demands a national conversation focused on repair rather than recrimination. Treating Madras varsity as a policy prompt rather than a final verdict allows us to confront a broader vulnerability: when mandated checks are bypassed, recruitment drifts from the standards that classrooms and laboratories require.

Faculty appointments determine what students learn, how research agendas evolve, and which norms govern scholarly life. Clear, competitive, auditable procedures produce demanding syllabi, credible degrees, and research that withstands scrutiny. Opacity and irregularity impose quieter, cumulative costs: less challenging classrooms, thinner supervision, and an erosion of confidence in qualifications that employers notice and students internalise. The National Assessment and Accreditation Council explicitly links quality to transparent hiring, with the Internal Quality Assurance Cell tasked with embedding this norm. Where such routines weaken, system drift follows. India’s higher education ecosystem is vast and heterogeneous; many departments recruit with scrupulous care while others struggle with capacity or incentives. The sensible lesson is not a blanket condemnation, but a recognition that rules and incentives must make excellence the default everywhere, especially as expansion under the National Education Policy collides with employers’ demand for reliable signals of graduate competence.

Repair requires safeguards that protect integrity without politicising academic judgement. The first is real-time transparency. Every institution should host a public dashboard that records advertisements, eligibility cut-offs, shortlists, interview rubrics, committee minutes to the extent permitted by law, and final orders. Where many already publish fragments, standardising the full sequence would remove ambiguity and reduce rumour. The second is a stronger procedural gate at the Internal Quality Assurance Cell: before any offer is issued, IQAC should certify through a short checklist that each step of advertising windows, quorum, reservation compliance, and documentation met the rulebook. This is not a veto on academic merit; it is a pre-flight safety check. Third, trained independent observers from neighbouring universities should sit as non-voting witnesses on selection committees. Their mandate is not to judge subject expertise, but to attest to procedural integrity, a practice long used in civil service examinations to bolster public confidence. Fourth, a national faculty registry maintained by the University Grants Commission should standardise disclosure across institutions by listing sanctioned posts, recruitment outcomes, joining dates, and tenure milestones. A searchable registry would assist applicants and auditors and create a durable institutional memory. Finally, whistle-blowers acting in good faith must be protected, and willful violations must carry proportionate consequences, paired with a route to close unfounded allegations swiftly so that due process does not ossify into paralysis.

These safeguards build on structures that already exist, which makes them feasible and fast to implement. Their performance should be tracked with a short public set of indicators reviewed quarterly by chancellors and governing bodies. Time-to-hire, measured from advertisement to offer, reveals basic efficiency. Publication rates for selection rubrics and committee reports indicate transparency. IQAC pre-clearance rates show whether checks function without becoming bottlenecks. Where departments consistently meet these benchmarks, they should earn greater autonomy over subsequent cycles; where they fall short, they should receive targeted support templates for documentation, access to observer pools, and training for search chairs, rather than suspicion by default. The point is to couple accountability with capacity-building so that compliance becomes predictable and uncontroversial. Within twelve months, institutions can demonstrate measurable movement: shorter hiring timelines, universal publication of rubrics and orders, and zero tolerance for undocumented deviations. Public dashboards make those gains visible, enabling governing bodies to reward departments that institutionalise good practice and to resource those that need help.

Sustainable reform is ultimately cultural. The target state is a recruitment climate so predictable and well-documented that disputes are rare and swiftly resolvable. For students, that culture yields classrooms where expectations are clear and supervision has teeth. For faculty, it lowers the ambient noise around every appointment and lets academic judgement take centre stage. For the nation, it translates into universities that stretch the next generation rather than merely certify it. None of this requires new polemics about merit versus representation. It requires insisting that whatever academic judgement a committee reaches is reached through rules that are public, monitored, and auditable, with consequences for failing to meet them and recognition for doing the unglamorous procedural work well.

MU has issued a warning, not a final verdict on Indian academia. The proportionate response is national and non-partisan: adopt real-time transparency as the norm, harden IQAC’s procedural gatekeeping, install independent observers, stand up a UGC registry, and protect those who surface genuine concerns while curbing vexatious complaints. Implemented together and tracked publicly, these measures would shift incentives toward compliance and away from litigation, restore trust among students and employers, and let universities focus on what only they can do — teach well and advance knowledge. The blueprint is clear and affordable; the missing ingredient is resolve. The question now is whether universities, regulators, and political leaders will align to build a system that earns confidence through transparency, or whether we will accept a cycle of scandal and short-sightedness that none of us can afford.

Thakur is Professor and Dean at Vinayaka Mission’s School of Economics and Public Policy, Chennai