探花视频

Dark side of Indian academia hidden by Instagram fairytales

Videos of glamorous scholars sipping coffee portray a lifestyle far removed from the toxic culture of overwork faced by academics, says Rituparna Patgiri

Published on
August 21, 2025
Last updated
August 21, 2025
Source: istock: triloks

Yoga. Gardening. Cooking. Slowly sipping coffee. Reading novels for pleasure. Taking taxi cabs. All of this is part of the regular workday of an Indian assistant professor.

Or it is if you believe the assistant professors on , from whose videos teaching and research are conspicuous by their absence. And the problem is that many Indians do believe them – including doctoral students.

Of course, most readers of 探花视频 will know very well that the reality for junior academics the world over is very different. A real “day in the life of an assistant professor” typically involves squeezing research and PhD supervision between teaching multiple classes and doing reams of administrative work.

It is even worse in India. There, assistant professors, unlike their more senior colleagues, are often expected to work on Saturdays, and some don’t even get a summer break. There are even workplaces – often private universities – where they have to do the tasks assigned to their permanent colleagues.

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The option of saying no barely exists because assistant professorships are increasingly becoming , as encouraged by the National Education Policy of 2020. Hence, they can be terminated at any time. And they have been – including at prestigious institutions such as the University of Delhi and the Tata Institute of Social Sciences.

Overwork is common in corporate India, too, but there is more public criticism of it. There has been criticism of people in powerful positions, such as Infosys founder NR Narayana Murthy (better known in the UK as Rishi Sunak’s billionaire father-in-law) and Larsen & Toubro boss SN Subrahmanyan, who have advocated for ?and??weeks respectively. There was also and controversy last year around the suicide of an Ernst & Young (E&Y) employee, with the corporate toxic work culture being blamed for her death.

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But, very often, toxic academic work culture gets overlooked. Why? In part because contractual faculty are fearful of talking about it. Moreover, the teaching fraternity does not like to see itself as part of the labour force, and there is little deliberation about unionisation and advocating for their rights. Talking about salary and working conditions is often discouraged, and people who do it are seen as troublemakers. Nor is there much scholarly literature devoted to these questions.

All this means that there is a lot of ignorance, even among PhD students, about assistant professorships. Information remains hidden, and when people are obstructed by identities of caste, gender, religion and ethnicity, for instance, it becomes even more problematic for them to find it – especially if they are at an institution outside the elite that offers little guidance or mentoring.

For instance, it is commonly believed that passing the University Grants Commission’s National Eligibility Test (NET) is sufficient for obtaining an academic position – rather than merely being one among many necessary factors, including teaching experience, publications and, of course, a doctorate. Academia is a very competitive sector, with hundreds of applicants for a single position, so competition at entry level is very high. Even applicants for hourly paid (guest) positions often have to give teaching demonstrations.

There is also widespread confusion about salaries. In an underpaid country with rising unemployment and inflation, an assistant professorship is seen as a lucrative and stable job. According to India’s , the basic pay for assistant professors is 57,700 rupees (?486) per month, excluding allowances – but what is rarely known is that this figure only applies to public universities.

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Moreover, contractual faculty in both public and private institutions are rarely paid that much – especially those in the humanities or social sciences. For instance, a circular issued by the Directorate of Colleges, Higher Education Department, Government of Jammu and Kashmir in February 2024 mandates the replacement of contractual staff with guest faculty as per need, meaning that people who were earlier working as contractual lecturers earning 28,000 rupees monthly will now earn 14,000. Many of them are PhD holders, with many years’ experience.

While we should encourage young people to go into higher education and aspire towards academic jobs, it is also important?that they?have proper information. That is why these accounts are so pernicious. You can laugh at them and argue that they need not be taken seriously but we also cannot ignore the reality that today’s youth consume a lot of digital content and get a lot of their information from social media.

Who are these assistant professors who claim to have such desirable lifestyles? Are they even real assistant professors? From my research, I find that most of them are. Some happen to be in more benign colleges and departments and don’t have the kind of workload that most of us have. Others are motivated to project the image of assistant professors that they would like society to have, or else they are interested in boosting their employability.

In addition, during the years I have been , India has seen more and more ideological and political recruitment, and many who have used this nepotistic route to get into jobs don’t take those jobs seriously either.

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Such corruption of meritocracy facilitates ostentatious coasting for the politically well connected. But such wildly misleading Instagram accounts are undermining the futures of those who are not. ?

Rituparna Patgiri is assistant professor of sociology at the department of humanities and social sciences, Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati.

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