Who Owns Jammu's Universities?

The Growing Crisis of Institutional Rootedness

Col Ajay K Raina, SM (Retd)

ajaykrraina@gmail.com

Higher education in Jammu deserves attention as it raises an uncomfortable but unavoidable question: why does Jammu appear unable to produce, nurture, and eventually entrust its own academic leadership, even when it has a substantial pool of accomplished scholars?

The question becomes sharper when one looks across the principal universities in the Jammu region. The present leadership of several of them is drawn from academics whose principal professional careers were built outside Jammu. The Vice-Chancellors of the University of Jammu, Central University of Jammu, Cluster University of Jammu, Shri Mata Vaishno Devi University and SKUAST-Jammu have all come from outside the region. There is nothing inherently wrong with this. Universities should recruit the best talent available, irrespective of domicile. But the issue is the apparent absence of an institutional pipeline through which Jammu's own academics rise to the highest levels of university leadership.

The contrast with Kashmir is striking. The University of Kashmir's present leadership reflects a long institutional association with the university, and so does the VC of the IUST. Kashmir has therefore demonstrated the capacity to produce an academic leadership ecosystem from within. Jammu seems to have remained dependent on external academic leadership. That is not a question of merit versus regionalism. It is a question of institutional maturity.

A mature university should be able to produce its own successors. A young lecturer should be able to imagine becoming a professor, a professor a dean and a dean a VC. If at every transition the answer is to look elsewhere, the message eventually becomes damaging: Jammu may produce teachers and researchers, but apparently not those considered capable of leading its universities. That perception needs to be confronted.

The current developments at the University of Jammu make the issue even more important. I had raised some of the wider concerns in my earlier article, "Ideological Subversion and Case of Jammu University", published in Daily Excelsior. The present concern, however, is broader: what is happening to Jammu University's institutional culture and academic stability? The University's recent handling of teaching faculty provides a useful case study.

On 22 July 2026, Jammu University invited applications for Assistant Professors on a "purely temporary and need basis" for the 2026-27 academic session. The notification covers a wide range of disciplines and campuses, including newly introduced integrated UG-PG programmes. Temporary appointments are not unusual. The concern arises when temporary arrangements become the structural foundation of teaching. A university cannot build institutional memory on perpetual uncertainty. Certain processes distinguish a university from a coaching centre.

The remuneration structure makes the situation more troubling. The University's August 2026 order revised remuneration for teaching faculty engaged on a lecture basis to Rs 800 per lecture, subject to a ceiling of Rs 35,000 a month. Let's compare Jammu University's remuneration structure with arrangements elsewhere. Contractual faculty remuneration is Rs 45,000-Rs 50,000 at Kashmir's IUST and Rs 57,700 at the University of Ladakh. Even allowing for differences in institutional rules, disciplines and categories of appointment, the comparison raises an obvious question: Why should a PhD-qualified teacher in Jammu be treated as a cheaper academic input than a similarly qualified teacher elsewhere in the same broader Himalayan administrative space?

Meanwhile, its temporary Assistant Professor arrangements may be administratively convenient, but the academic question is whether they are institutionally sound. A university requires teachers to do much more than deliver lectures. Faculty supervise research, mentor students, develop curricula, conduct examinations, participate in academic bodies, organise seminars and build institutional knowledge. Reducing an academic's relationship with the university essentially to the number of lectures delivered risks reducing scholarship to piecework. The issue is therefore not merely about salaries. The emerging model also risks creating two classes of teachers. There are those in relatively stable positions. Then there are those who do essentially the same academic work but remain temporary, need-based, semester-based or lecture-based and underpaid. It is about academic dignity, continuity and institutional confidence.

A university led by an externally recruited academic is not necessarily a university detached from its region. But repeated external leadership, without a corresponding effort to cultivate internal successors, can gradually create such detachment. Jammu needs universities that are national in standards and international in outlook, but also rooted in Jammu's intellectual and social environment.

The answer is not a domicile quota for vice-chancellors. That would be equally wrong. The answer is a meritocratic leadership-development system. Promising professors should be given administrative responsibilities, exposed to university governance, encouraged to lead departments and research centres, and assessed against national standards. If an outsider ultimately proves better qualified, appoint the outsider. But if an academic from Jammu has the requisite scholarship, leadership and integrity, there should be no presumption that someone from elsewhere is inherently preferable. If Jammu can produce professors capable of becoming vice-chancellors elsewhere, why should it find it so difficult to develop a pool capable of leading its own universities?

The University of Jammu, in particular, should undertake an independent review of its academic governance, recruitment practices, temporary faculty arrangements and leadership-development mechanisms. Such a review need not amount to governmental interference. Eminent academics, including both Jammu-based and outside experts, could conduct it transparently. Its purpose should not be to target individuals but to establish whether recent policies are strengthening or weakening the institution.

Another issue that makes the present controversy more serious is a new nomenclature. While the universities routinely change administrative terminology, the issue is whether nomenclature is being used to create a parallel employment architecture that allows the institution to do indirectly what it could not or should not do directly. An earlier contractual faculty model was replaced by new nomenclature and then by guest- or lecture-based arrangements. The question is whether the university changed the terminology and employment architecture to strengthen the system or simply to find new administrative ways to manage the same problem. These allegations should be tested independently against the relevant court orders, since adverse rulings against the university in a matter involving a few assistant professors in 2025 already exist. Is this change an attempt to work around the court orders?

Pending investigation of the allegations, the policy trajectory is visible. The university is moving towards greater flexibility for itself and greater insecurity for its teachers. That is a legitimate subject of public scrutiny. The issue also has a broader legal context. In Mushtaq Ahmad Shah & Ors. v. University of Kashmir & Ors. (J&K and Ladakh High Court, 4 July 2025), the Court held that contractual faculty could not ordinarily be replaced by another temporary or similar arrangement where the teaching requirement continued; replacement should instead follow substantive recruitment under the applicable rules. In the case of the University's Law Department, the Court specifically cautioned that replacing contractual lecturers with visiting/guest faculty would amount to "perpetuating ad hocism" and directed their continuation until a core faculty was put in place. The principle is important: perpetual temporary employment is not an academic model; it is an administrative expedient. If a university needs a teacher year after year, the obvious long-term question is why the post is not part of a properly structured academic cadre.

The present debate around Jammu University should therefore be seen as an opportunity. The university has considerable academic strengths and continues to expand its programmes. But expansion without institutional depth can become cosmetic. Jammu needs universities that grow from within while drawing strength from outside. The objective should be simple: national standards, global outlook and local institutional ownership.

If Jammu can achieve that, the question of who occupies the Vice-Chancellor's office will become much less important. If it cannot, changing individuals at the top will merely change the nameplate while leaving the underlying problem untouched.

(The author is the founder-trustee of the Military History Research Foundation ® and Chairman of the Jammu State People's Movement)