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.