THE passage of the West Bengal Universities and Colleges (Administration and Regulation) (Amendment) Bill, 2026, in the state Assembly on September 10, marks a critical turning point in the governance of higher education in West Bengal. By inserting a provision into Section 14A of the 2017 Act, the amendment empowers the state government to enforce inter-university transfers of both teaching and non-teaching personnel under the banner of "administrative purposes." While official quarters highlight assurances regarding seniority protection, relocation expenses and transfer grants, the academic community across the state has correctly recognised the legislation for what it is: a bureaucratic manoeuvre to sidestep structural investment, undermine institutional autonomy and dismantle the historical foundations of university governance.

The state government has defended the measure as an exercise in equitable development. Chief Minister Suvendu Adhikari has argued that deploying veteran faculty from legacy institutions to newly established universities in regions such as Jhargram and Cooch Behar will redress infrastructural imbalances and foster centres of excellence. Alongside this, the ruling establishment has weaponised the charge of "academic inbreeding," specifically targeting Jadavpur University on the grounds that a substantial share of its faculty are institutional alumni. Yet, beneath this administrative rhetoric lies an evasion of the real crisis: can the systemic starvation of public higher education be resolved by circulating existing personnel, or does it demand fresh recruitment, public funding and genuine institutional democracy?

REDISTRIBUTING SHORTAGES

The central fallacy of the government’s approach rests on basic arithmetic: transferring a professor does not create an additional professor. Redistributing an already strained workforce merely shifts deficits from one campus to another. Established institutions are themselves buckling under acute faculty shortages; pulling teachers out of them to plug holes in outlying regions creates new vacuums rather than solving existing ones.

This deprivation is not restricted to lecture halls. The chronic neglect of non-teaching staff—technical officers, laboratory assistants, administrative hands, and library cadres—has critically crippled teaching, research and day-to-day administrative functions.

It is this fundamental contradiction that brought representatives from 14 universities—including Jadavpur University, Calcutta University, Rabindra Bharati University, and Presidency University—alongside statewide teachers’ bodies to a joint press conference on September 12. Demanding an immediate drive to fill all sanctioned vacant posts, Calcutta University professor Mahalaya Chatterjee rightly cut through the policy's logic, observing that when higher education operates under massive vacancies, the only rational solution is to expand the system’s total academic capacity through regular recruitment, not to shuffle an overstretched workforce across districts.

Moreover, peripheral and newly established universities cannot be nurtured merely by dispatching senior academics. Building a university requires robust laboratory infrastructure, up-to-date libraries, advanced computing resources, operational funding, and administrative scaffolding. Dispatching senior scholars to campuses lacking basic academic apparatus is an empty political posture that ignores material realities.

BOGEY OF "ACADEMIC INBREEDING"

The administration’s sudden crusade against "academic inbreeding" betrays a profound disregard for the material history of scientific and humanist scholarship in India. While ensuring transparent, open, and rigorously competitive recruitment remains an unassailable necessity, treating an alumnus’s faculty appointment as an inherent sign of academic backwardness is fundamentally fallacious. Across premier Indian universities, the deliberate cultivation of institutional continuity has rarely functioned as an obstacle to excellence; rather, some of the most enduring traditions of teaching and pioneering research have been constructed precisely by scholars who returned to invest their intellectual labour into their alma maters.

This dynamic is unmistakably evident in the historical trajectory of Jadavpur University, where institutional alumni played foundational roles in building departments of national eminence. Prof. Amitabha Bhattacharyya, a recipient of the prestigious Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize, completed his degree in Mechanical Engineering at Jadavpur before joining its faculty and subsequently laying the groundwork for the Department of Production Engineering. In a similar vein, Prof. Gopal Chandra Sen—an alumnus of the historic College of Engineering and Technology from which the university emerged—served the Mechanical Engineering faculty across several decades before eventually steering the institution as its Vice-Chancellor. This tradition of sustained scholarship also defines the university's Department of Geological Sciences, where Prof. Subir Kumar Ghosh earned his doctoral degree and subsequently dedicated decades of pioneering research to the faculty, eventually being honoured as Professor Emeritus.

The University of Calcutta presents an even richer historical record of academic stature shaped by scholars returning to teach where they once studied. Renowned theoretical physicist Satyendra Nath Bose completed both his undergraduate and postgraduate studies at Calcutta University before taking up the prestigious mantle of Khaira Professor of Physics. Meghnad Saha followed a parallel path, returning to his alma mater in 1938 as the Palit Professor of Physics and Head of the Department. Humanities and biological sciences at the university reflect the same pattern: Suniti Kumar Chatterji, who completed his bachelor's and master's degrees at Calcutta, became the Khaira Professor of Indian Linguistics and Phonetics; Khudiram Das earned his postgraduate and doctoral credentials there before serving as Ramtanu Lahiri Professor of Bengali and Head of the Department; while distinguished zoologists such as Prof. D. N. Raychaudhuri and Prof. Asok Ghosh, the Sir Nilratan Sircar Professor of Zoology, were both institutional alumni who enriched their fields through lifelong affiliation with the campus.

This practice is neither anomalous nor confined to state universities in West Bengal, extending instead across India's most celebrated central institutions of higher learning. At the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) in Bangalore, Prof. Yadati Narahari and Prof. Y. N. Srikant completed their advanced research within the Department of Computer Science and Automation before joining its faculty to build premier computational laboratories. Likewise, at Banaras Hindu University (BHU), Prof. Akhilesh Singh Raghubanshi completed his entire academic progression—from B.Sc. and M.Sc. through to his Ph.D.—within the institution before ascending to a professorial chair. Historically, retaining and re-engaging exceptional homegrown talent under rigorous academic standards has actively sustained vital research ecosystems rather than stifling them. If systemic biases, favouritism or opaque procedures compromise recruitment, the rational solution lies in instituting open, competitive, and accountable public hiring processes—not in enforcing punitive, top-down bureaucratic transfers that arbitrarily treat alumnus status as an automatic disqualification.

DISMANTLING AUTONOMY

Beyond academic recruitment, the 2026 Bill strikes at the core of university autonomy and statutory protections. Autonomous universities possess distinct legislative statutes and service terms tailored to their institutional characters. Imposing a centralised, executive transfer regime fundamentally strips university bodies of control over their own human resources.

The opposition mounted by the Jadavpur University Teachers' Association (JUTA), Calcutta University Teachers' Association (CUTA), and the Calcutta University Employees' Association (CUEA) underscores this collective threat. The CUEA's mobilisation is significant because the Bill subjugates both teaching and non-teaching staff to top-down administrative fiat. Shifting administrative personnel across campuses destabilises university administration, fractures employee security, and subjects higher education to the direct control of the state secretariat.

RESEARCH IN JEOPARDY

The most devastating and immediate collateral damage of this policy will be borne by doctoral research scholars. As highlighted by the research scholars' associations, CURSA and JURSA, doctoral work in experimental and specialised humanities disciplines is inextricably bound to specific research supervisors, specialised laboratory set-ups, departmental equipment, and dedicated institutional funding. Arbitrary faculty transfers threaten to derail ongoing research projects, terminate active research grants, sever PhD scholars from their supervisors mid-stream, and throw institutional fellowships into bureaucratic limbo. Without statutory guarantees safeguarding supervision continuity, project funding, research staff, and laboratory access, the policy threatens to cause irreparable damage to an entire generation of research scholars.

POLITICAL COERCION

The timing and rhetoric accompanying this legislation reveal its punitive design. During the Assembly debate, the Chief Minister explicitly connected the transfer mechanism to the faculty of Jadavpur University, speaking openly of using the power against educators viewed as uncooperative by the regime.

This vindictive posture was reinforced by ruling-party MLA Sajal Ghosh’s public attack on Prof. Partha Pratim Roy—a leading researcher in nanomaterials, solar energy, and semiconductor physics who has been vocal against the government's education policies. Targeting an accomplished scientist over his democratic dissent makes it clear that the legislation is designed to function as an instrument of political discipline against outspoken teachers and independent-minded campuses.

EXPANSION, NOT COERCIVE REDISTRIBUTION

The coordinated resistance from 14 universities, statewide employee unions, and research scholar networks—encompassing mass signature drives, delegations to the Chancellor and legal challenges—demonstrates a united front against this authoritarian restructuring.

The developmental disparities among Bengal’s universities cannot be corrected by executive authoritarianism. If newer universities require capacity, the state must allocate public funds, construct modern laboratories, build comprehensive libraries, and conduct transparent recruitment drives for both teaching and non-teaching posts. It can invite visiting scholars and establish institutional collaborations without attacking the statutory rights of university staff.

The fundamental crisis of higher education in West Bengal cannot be solved by redistributing scarcity. The real alternative lies in defending democratic university autonomy, filling every vacant post through open and regular recruitment, investing in public academic infrastructure, and resisting the conversion of universities into subordinate departments of the state executive.