Stanford Politics
Courtesy of Soo Ji Lee
Campus Politics

Can Stanford Afford to Lose Professor Aishwary Kumar?

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Courtesy of Soo Ji Lee

On March 30th, Assistant Professor of History Aishwary Kumar was denied tenure by the Department of History. Since then, students, alumni, and faculty members have expressed their confusion and anger at this decision to fire one of Stanford’s most impressive scholars and inspiring educators.

Professor Kumar’s dismissal would lead to the loss of his exceptional teaching and scholarship, not to mention the absence of his personal warmth as an understanding and supportive presence for his students. If Professor Kumar leaves the university, Stanford will be deprived of his rare ability to provide students with new and unique ways of thinking both within and outside of the Western tradition.

Treating thinkers of the Global South as equally important to the political and ethical visions of the human condition, Professor Kumar’s scholarship challenges implicit biases regarding the status of non-Western thought. But, to be clear, the problem is not ‘Western Civilization’ or ‘Great Books’ in themselves, as long as we remember that they are not necessarily the same thing.

We, a group of Professor Kumar’s students, protest the dismissal of this intellectual and pedagogical force who has been a source of both academic and personal inspiration. But above all else, we have a commitment to ideas understood on their own terms. We see this denial of tenure to be one piece in a systematic discrimination against intellectual traditions, and intellectual history itself. We therefore feel compelled to bring attention to this tenure decision that is indicative of a problem that plagues the humanities, and further confirms our long-standing worries about the state of Stanford’s liberal education.

As we are aware of the unsettling nature of such scholarship, we find it plausible that apprehensions surrounding Kumar’s challenges to established norms may have unjustly factored into the decision to deny him tenure. Upon investigating these suspicions, we were surprised at how confidentiality blocked even the most basic inquiries. Following our efforts to question this decision with faculty and administrators, we find it difficult to separate the procedural complications of his case from the intellectual biases that may have shaped the outcome.

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Since he joined the History Department in 2007, Aishwary Kumar has worked as a scholar of South Asian intellectual history and global political history. His book Radical Equality: Ambedkar, Gandhi, and the Risk of Democracy, published by Stanford University Press in 2015, is an original study of two pivotal thinkers of the twentieth century — the Indian constitutionalist B.R. Ambedkar and the nonviolent leader M.K. Gandhi — describing the global antecedents of democratic thought in anti-colonial struggles against inequality and empire.

Professor Kumar introduces students to South Asian thought as a rigorous intellectual exercise rather than a field relegated to the realm of spirituality: he treats South Asia as a living source of ideas. He takes modern South Asian thinkers seriously, on their own terms, just as he studies European and American thinkers in earnest — and he encourages students to follow suit. Professor Kumar’s pedagogical talent allows him to put thinkers like Gandhi and Kant, Ambedkar and Arendt, and Dewey and Fanon into conversations on violence, liberalism, caste, and democracy. In dismissing Professor Kumar, Stanford has made it nearly impossible for its students to encounter contemporary non-Western thought in this rigorous, cross-cultural intellectual setting.

In an increasingly globalized world, cultivating a transnational conversation is nothing short of a necessity. While nearly all professors demonstrate a certain level of respect for non-Western cultures, it is rare to find a professor who encourages his students to read thinkers outside the Western tradition on their own terms with such regularity. To sit in his classes and to be welcomed into his office is to see the world come alive in new ways by exploring unfamiliar modes of thought.

After voicing our concern over the loss of this invaluable education, we were kindly invited to a meeting by administrators involved in Professor Kumar’s tenure review. They explained how tenure reviews work and assured us that Stanford is serious about its commitment to “area studies” and South Asian studies. Adhering to this commitment, they asserted that they had actually already hired two new scholars studying South Asia — one specializing in South Asian religion and the other in South Asian art.

Although the study of these subjects is certainly necessary, the loss of our sole intellectual historian of South Asia cannot be remedied by hiring scholars of South Asian religion and art.

Just as the study of Europe is not restricted to that which is considered stereotypically European, the study of South Asia cannot adequately be represented by art and religion alone. When we are concerned only with South Asian ‘area studies’, we miss the distinction between representational diversity and decolonization. Mere representation is not enough.

After all, how can we think about an area without engaging with the history of its thought and its thinkers, both canonical and contemporary?

To deny space to the way these ideas have shaped and influenced the history of South Asia as well as that of Europe is to deny the equality of these ideas. This would be to say that while South Asia can serve as the site for the unfolding of European and American ideals of democracy and freedom, it cannot be the source for ideas on democracy and freedom.

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Kumar’s transformative scholarship and pedagogy decentered our worldviews and revitalized our pursuit of a global liberal education. If our tenure process is capable of missing this, then it calls for a thorough re-examination.

The very act of investigating our concerns regarding this tenure decision plunged us into a mire of administrative protection and rigid confidentiality. At each stage of the process, confidentiality is guaranteed in order to ensure that judgments and evaluations, whether positive or negative, are genuine.

We therefore acknowledge that full transparency in the tenure decision process is neither prudent nor our desired outcome. But what of accountability?

As it stands, with the professor involved and the larger student body forced to comply in a state of total ignorance, real accountability is more fiction than reality in Professor Kumar’s case. When an excess of confidentiality inhibits the circulation of even basic information, it rules out accountability to the broader Stanford community.

In any case, Professor Kumar’s departure robs Stanford of a unique space for a rigorous exchange between the moral and political traditions of the West and South, approached with equal care. Stanford hopes to offer undergraduates a global liberal education, one that trains students to think freely and beyond convention. And so, Aishwary Kumar’s dismissal is a mistake that strips Stanford of one of the few scholars who provides a truly global perspective in the humanities.

Rehan Adamjee ‘16, Anubha Anushree (Graduate Student), Radhika Bora ’16 , Truman Chen ‘17, Andy Fitzgerald (Graduate Student), Simone Hudson ‘16, Soo Ji Lee ’16, Lara Prior-Palmer ’17, Trisha Shetty ’18