The recent incident at Delhi University's Faculty of Law has revived an old but increasingly urgent question: what has happened to the relationship between those who teach and those who learn?
Earlier this month, CCTV footage from the Faculty of Law showed a PhD scholar allegedly assaulting a senior professor. The incident was reportedly connected to a grievance concerning an earlier PhD admission interview. The scholar was subsequently suspended, an inquiry was initiated, and the matter reached the police.
Whatever the eventual findings on the underlying grievance, one proposition should admit of no ambiguity: physical violence against a teacher cannot be an acceptable response to an academic or institutional disagreement. Universities provide grievance mechanisms, administrative processes and legal remedies precisely because disagreements cannot be settled through intimidation or force.
Yet it would be a mistake to regard the episode merely as an isolated act of indiscipline. It points towards a deeper erosion of something fundamental to university life, the relationship of trust between teacher and student.
Nor is the concern entirely new. Last year, a professor at another Delhi University college was slapped by a student office-bearer while the professor was involved in a disciplinary process. Competing allegations followed: teachers' organisations described the episode as an attack on the dignity of the profession, while the student organisation concerned alleged provocation and inappropriate conduct by the teacher.
Those competing claims illustrate precisely why universities require due process. Allegations against a teacher deserve fair investigation; violence against that teacher deserves condemnation. Neither proposition cancels the other.
What the Guru-Shishya Tradition Actually Meant
At such a moment, there may be value in returning to an older Indian conception of education, not to romanticise the past, but to recover something we may have lost.
The guru-shishya parampara is sometimes understood today as a relationship of unquestioning obedience: the teacher commands and the student follows. That is an impoverished understanding of the tradition.
The relationship was built on reciprocal obligations. The student was expected to approach learning with humility, discipline and respect. But the guru's authority was accompanied by an equally serious responsibility: to teach with patience, to understand the pupil, to correct without humiliation, and to regard the student's trust as something to be earned and preserved.
The point of invoking that tradition is therefore not to resurrect hierarchy. It is to recover an idea that modern universities are in danger of losing: authority and compassion were never meant to be opposites.
A university cannot function if every exercise of academic authority is interpreted as oppression. Teachers must be able to evaluate, disagree, reject, correct and, where necessary, discipline. A student cannot respond to an unfavourable evaluation, admission decision or disciplinary proceeding by threatening, humiliating or physically attacking the person who delivered it.
But the converse is equally important. Academic authority is not personal power. A teacher cannot demand respect merely by virtue of designation while disregarding the dignity of the student. Students are entitled to question decisions, challenge bias, seek reasons, lodge complaints and disagree, sometimes strongly with those who teach them.
What neither side is entitled to do is replace dialogue with humiliation or due process with intimidation.
Respect Cannot Be Demanded by Force
There is a temptation, whenever such incidents occur, to defend one side by diminishing the responsibility of the other. Violence is described as a “momentary reaction”; harshness or humiliation by an authority figure is dismissed as simply part of discipline.
Both instincts are dangerous.
A student who feels genuinely wronged does not lose the right to protest because the person complained against happens to be a professor. But disagreement, whether over marks, admission, disciplinary proceedings or institutional policy, can never become a licence to physically attack a teacher.
Equally, teachers should resist the assumption that institutional authority automatically carries moral authority. The latter must continuously be earned through fairness, restraint and an openness to hear grievances. An academic who exercises power arbitrarily, humiliates students publicly or treats legitimate questioning as personal disobedience weakens the very foundation from which respect is sought.
The choice, therefore, is not between restoring unquestioning reverence for teachers and empowering students to resist authority. A healthy university requires both authority and dissent.
The difficulty is learning how to preserve both without allowing either to become destructive.
Rebuilding the Compact
Universities cannot repair this relationship merely through suspension orders issued after violence has occurred. Nor can student organisations repair it through demonstrations of solidarity that instinctively defend every action committed in the name of grievance.
What is needed is a stronger institutional culture before conflicts reach that stage.
Students must believe that grievance mechanisms are accessible, impartial and capable of producing meaningful outcomes. A student who believes that no one will hear a legitimate complaint will inevitably lose faith in institutional processes. Universities must therefore take grievance redressal as seriously as they take discipline.
Teachers, too, need institutional protection. Academic decisions cannot become occasions for personal retaliation. A professor should be able to conduct an interview, award a grade, participate in disciplinary proceedings or take an unpopular academic position without fearing physical intimidation.
At the same time, teachers must recognise that authority in a modern university cannot rest on distance alone. Students increasingly expect reasons, transparency and participation. That need not diminish academic authority. Properly handled, it can strengthen it.
Perhaps this is where the older educational tradition still has something important to offer us.
The best teacher–student relationship was never based simply upon power. It depended upon an elder's patience being matched by a younger person's humility; authority being tempered by empathy; correction being accepted without violence; and disagreement being expressed without destroying the dignity of the person on the other side.
Modern universities need not recreate the gurukul. They do, however, need to rediscover the compact that made the relationship meaningful.
Respect cannot be beaten into a student, and authority cannot be beaten out of a teacher.
What Indian higher education needs is something simultaneously old and modern: mutual respect, old in spirit but renewed through contemporary ideas of accountability, fairness and institutional trust.
Author Chanchrik Shukla is a PhD Research Scholar at University of Delhi, Delhi & Dr. Nivedita Chaudhary is an Assistant Professor of Law at University of Delhi, Delhi. Views are personal.