Over 250 senior academics and university administrators from various countries have called for the immediate resignation of Jawaharlal Nehru University Vice-Chancellor M. Jagadesh Kumar over violence on the university campus on January 5.
The signatories are from universities in the U.S., Canada, the U.K., Germany, Norway, France, Italy, Denmark, Australia, South Africa, Ireland, Chile, Mexico, Argentina, Taiwan, Greece, Switzerland, Sweden, Spain, Brazil, Portugal and New Zealand.
They include the former Archbishop of Canterbury and current Master of Magdalen College, Cambridge, Dr. Rowan Williams; president of the American Anthropological Association, Professor Akhil Gupta; president, Association for Asian Studies, U.S.; Prof. Prasenjit Duara, and professors Dame Caroline Humphries and Sir Christopher Clark, Cambridge.
The signatories said that the incident, “which took place on January 6 when an armed and politically motivated mob was allowed to enter the JNU campus” violated every norm of democracy.
It violated the norms of academic freedom, of the protection of universities from arbitrary state power and of the duty of university administrators to protect their students and faculty, they said.
With regard to the failure to call for police protection “as well as the university authorities’ criminalising of peaceful student protest”, they said the JNU administration, and especially the Vice-Chancellor, had lost all national and international credibility.
