Thirty-six days at Jantar Mantar changed more than one minister. They forced thousands of students to ask a question Indian universities have spent decades avoiding: what do you owe us when the system fails?
Yet the resignation, important as it was, should not be allowed to close one of the more difficult questions raised by the protests. What is the role of the university in a social movement of this scale?
Even more indicative than the initial silence of universities was the language through which some institutions eventually addressed their students.
Delhi University’s advisory opened with the reassurance that students’ safety mattered. It cautioned that unlawful demonstrations could invite legal action, threaten personal safety and affect “academic progress and professional opportunities”. Rajni Abbi, Director of DU’s South Campus, subsequently said that students should not allow themselves to become a “political tool”. Young people, she argued, might not fully appreciate what an FIR could mean for later opportunities.
Meanwhile, Jawaharlal Nehru University addressed what it called its “epistemic community”, but asked its members to “refrain from participating in or visiting gatherings at or around Jantar Mantar”. It also warned that conduct on social media could invite legal consequences and disciplinary action.
Jamia Millia Islamia told students that “nothing is worth placing at risk a future nurtured through such hard work, dedication and sacrifice”, directing them towards their studies and academic excellence.
The most telling advisory came from IIT Roorkee, which objected to campus members displaying “affinity with a political movement” and reminded them not to express opinions that could embarrass the institute’s relationship with the Union government. After criticism, the institute described the message as a routine advisory that had been misunderstood and should not be viewed out of context.
Universities have a legitimate responsibility to tell students when demonstrations carry physical or legal risks.
These responses are of course not identical, and it would be intellectually dishonest to place every safety warning in the same category as censorship. Universities have a legitimate responsibility to tell students when demonstrations carry physical or legal risks. The protests had witnessed clashes, detentions, baton charges and the filing of criminal cases. Administrations could not simply pretend that participation was without consequence.
But there is a boundary between informing students about risk and using risk to discourage political participation itself. That boundary is crossed when the student’s academic record, professional future or relationship with the institution becomes an implicit instrument of deterrence.
Protection should enlarge a student’s capacity to make an informed decision. Paternalism, however, takes the decision away while continuing to describe the removal of agency as care. This is the particular contradiction exposed by the university advisories.
When caution becomes control
Universities regularly promise to produce critical thinkers, responsible citizens, independent minds, and future leaders. But once students collectively exercise these promised capacities against the systems governing their own lives, critical thinking is abruptly redescribed as distraction, political manipulation, indiscipline or professional recklessness.
Citizenship, under this model, becomes an extracurricular activity.
Commendable in theory, dangerous in practice and best attempted only after placements have been secured.
This is not a demand that universities endorse every claim of the movement. Protests can exaggerate, be captured by partisan interests, or spread misinformation, and a university that automatically endorses a mobilisation has abandoned judgement as completely as one that automatically suppresses it.
The failure here reflects an outdated understanding of what a university is supposed to do. The experiences brought to Jantar Mantar were not interruptions to the work of a university; they were precisely the kind of material universities should have been examining.
What universities could have done instead
A university could have asked why examination failures had become serious enough to mobilise thousands of young people. It could have brought together students, teachers, examination authorities, lawyers, economists, and mental-health professionals to openly examine what had gone wrong. It could have examined what a cancelled examination costs not only financially, but in time, confidence, and emotional stability. It could have investigated whether the problems being described as individual disappointments were, in fact, systemic.
It could have challenged misinformation circulating among protesters while demanding clearer answers from the government.
None of this would have required the university to become an extension of the movement. It would simply have required it to behave like a place interested in knowledge, including the uncomfortable knowledge produced by the lived experiences of its students.
That is the opportunity many universities missed.
Instead, several of them treated the conversation itself as a danger.
The most troubling lesson of Jantar Mantar, then, is that the street became a more credible place for discussing educational failure than the institutions created to understand education.
And so, when students must leave the campus to become audible, the university has not remained neutral.
It has simply chosen silence — and, in doing so, asked its students to do the same.
What is the role of the university in a social movement of this scale? (Image generated via AI) 
Universities have a legitimate responsibility to tell students when demonstrations carry physical or legal risks.
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