The University Grant Commission (UGC)’s draft rules inviting foreign universities to set up campuses in India have invited considerable commentary. One strand is centred on the fact that Ivy League campuses are hard to replicate offshore and that students attending the desi versions of these foreign institutions will not get the full experience. Another concern is that even as these universities are promised full autonomy on the recruitment of students and faculty, clause 7.9 on the need to maintain India’s national security, public order, etc., may be restrictive in terms of the wide scope it provides for undermining academic freedom.But what such commentary misses out on is that once upon a time, Indian public universities also had autonomy. Moreover, Indian campuses – at least as they functioned historically – are also unique and irreplaceable.Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi University, Jadavpur University, and other Indian universities are vastly different from each other, with each having its own charm and appeal, no less than Harvard or Cambridge. In attracting foreign universities, as well as supporting private players, the UGC is giving short shrift to the decades of nurturing that built up the Indian public university.As an alumnus of one such institution, it is both pleasure and pain to look back at its history and to see how different it is now. ‘DSchool’ (formally known as the Delhi School of Economics) was only a small part of the University of Delhi – some thought it was the best part – but many of us didn’t know the University outside the DSchool campus well enough to make any notable claims.The tea stall at Delhi School of Economics.I was an MA student at DSchool’s Department of Sociology in the mid-70s. Etched motifs from those days mingle east and west, blue jeans and handloom sarees, Karl Marx and the SFI-dominated students’ union in a fiercely independent ‘we-will-style-it-for-ourselves’ mode. I don’t live in that DSchool anymore but like Hemingway’s portrayal of a moveable feast, I seem to carry it with me wherever I go.Also read: ‘National Interest’, ‘No Online Classes’: UGC Drafts Rules for Entry of Foreign UniversitiesI entered DSchool diffidently, very much on the wrong foot, without having studied the prospectus for the Department of Sociology. But those were different times and, based on an interview, I was admitted on what seemed to be the discretion reposed in a Department Committee. By today’s standardised criteria where multiple-choice tests are the only determinant, this would be horrifying. But that was back then. The system, unencumbered by huge numbers perhaps, could still trust and value the autonomous dispositions of its faculty.As I grew into the Department, I gathered that this way of handpicking was not confined to choosing students. I learned from Professor Andre Beteille later that Professor M.N. Srinivas had selected him as a lecturer for the Department when his credentials did not extend beyond a Master’s degree, over others who had PhDs. Astonishing again, by today’s standards, that a public university could trust the judgment of its professors, overriding all paper. The quality of the DSchool faculty in those days – with Amartya Sen and Jagdish Bhagwati, M.N. Srinivas and Andre Beteille – was as good as many foreign universities.Today the UGC mandates that all teaching candidates be ranked on the basis of ‘API’ scores (academic performance indicators), where a publication in what claims to be a peer-reviewed journal gets two marks. ‘International conferences’, years of teaching, are all similarly marked. For form’s sake, a screening committee consists of three professors, but even when they can see that a journal is clearly predatory, they have no discretion to exercise their professional judgment.If the UGC can woo foreign universities today with the bait of no interference in recruitment and admission policies, one wonders why it can’t restore the same autonomy to Indian public universities. True there may be nepotism and upper caste or male bias, but that is equally likely in a private or foreign university.Also read: Why Foreign Universities Are Reluctant to Establish Campuses in IndiaClasses at DSchool began at 9:20 am, though attendance was always optional. If you went into class, it was for a measure of exhilaration that could sometimes mean that you headed straight for the library and beelined for that book – yes, the class folded effortlessly into the Ratan Tata Library’s ‘reserved’ section from where that scarce reading material had to be entreated. (Photocopying was a luxury, and the internet did not exist …unfortunately it is still patchy).We seldom fathomed all that we read, but nonetheless grappled with understanding Marx via Althusser and the intricacies of kinship elaborated by Claude Levi-Strauss (and yes, we had to tell non-DSchool folks that this Levi-Strauss was not the one of the blue jeans’ fame but a mega-star nevertheless). The syllabus was wide and eclectic – apart from French writings, it included gems from German sociology, British social anthropology, Japanese studies, and the best of articles on the sociology of India from anywhere. The syllabus and the academic culture were global before the word became prevalent.Instead of being chided for absenteeism because one may have strayed from class on a particular day, you could be drawn into an unanticipated trance under a tree, mesmerised by Professor J.P.S. Uberoi’s argument that drifting may be a good thing as it could help you find your direction. This nugget was delivered to me while the Professor recounted how he had adopted a street dog who was adrift – she was female, not-too-attractive, and dowry-less! While tutorials did consume us, since they did not count toward the official ‘internal assessment’ mercifully we could read without the tyranny of competing for marks.Representative image of students on the campus of St. Stephen’s college. Photo: PTI.Debates at DSchool were not initiated just for students. At a faculty debate across disciplines and departments, Professor Veena Das won the prize in favour of the motion, “Any system is better than the present state of affairs.” Interestingly, she drew her argument from the practice of Tibetan Buddhists who looked upon death and life as an integrated and continuous system in contrast to contexts in the West where death was regarded as an accident or tragedy with nothing to explain it.We had felt quietly triumphant that the sociological had held its ground that day without being beaten down by numerical arguments. Banter across the disciplines of sociology and economics was recurrent though students qua students found emergent common ground.In one instance, a crystal-clear exposition by a student from the Economics department, Rahul Khullar, demonstrated that the power of the hoarder to hoard, to a large extent, lay behind what was even then India’s inflation problem. It outshone the speeches of the other panellists like the Communist Party of India (CPI) leader Mohit Sen.The student seminar of the MA class at the Department of Sociology every Thursday was a heady happening. It was followed by the student-presenter ‘treating the class’ to special coffee, served in a tray with an accompaniment of fresh cream as we sat along DSchool’s curved and inviting sunny outdoor seating wall. I suspect that the treat materialised as a sigh of relief in acknowledgement of the fact that neither the presenter nor the paper had been torn apart (that happened, the grapevine told us, at the robust Friday Colloquium to which we were not privy as MA students).But there were doctoral students, like Shiv Visvanathan, who introduced us to the more rarefied levels of the discipline, as well as to read and cherish the journal Contributions to Indian Sociology, which published a whole series on what Indian sociology should look like. Today you might say DSchool was ‘decolonising sociology’ but without making grandiose claims about it.Reading in the Ratan Tata Library was often and pleasantly interrupted by being asked out for a coffee at the coffee house adjacent to the Library. The political stock-in-trade of conversation in the workers’-cooperative-run coffee house was to deprecate the Right. Here it was usual to denounce America in particular and the world in general, akin to what Simone de Beauvoir recounted of the café in The Mandarins. Even the humour had a touch of the Left: Overheard one day, “What did President Khrushchev tell Premier Zhou Enlai?” “Ah, Zhou, but you are a mandarin!” To which Zhou replied, “But we have one thing in common: We are both traitors to our own class”.The call of the larger University outside DSchool beckoned when protesting was in order. In one recall, cries of “Dilli Police hai, hai” turned into “Dilli Police pani, pani”. Those cries were met with glasses of water, not batons then. The urge to venture out also made us gravitate to St. Stephen’s College for the occasional mince cutlet or to Sukhia’s nimbu-pani stall there. But by and large, our main eat-stay was the affordable coffee house, and snacking at Ram Singh’s shack for bun-anda and chai within the precincts. Campuses have their own culinary geography which is remembered long after the texts studied in class are forgotten.Were those times sexist? We heard the Eco guys say that sociology was a “girls’ subject”, that “sociology girls were prettier”, and “that more girls took to sociology than economics because it was a softer subject” … loaded comments seen from today’s perspective. But overarchingly it was the hierarchies of the intellect and the force of the Left, not the hierarchies of dress or looks nor the lure of a foreign education that dominated DSchool then. Away from the strictures and taboos of home and family, DSchool was a congenial place to socialise, smoke (occasionally, with teachers), think, and practice in ways that broke with casteism, religious bigotry, and hierarchical moulds.The memory of that DSchool still lingers on – in all those who studied there, whether they went on to become academics or not. It is a remembered campus that cannot be replicated in any other part of the world, because it was uniquely Indian and uniquely global. But it can be replicated in a DSchool of the future, provided the UGC gives Indian public universities also the autonomy they are promising the foreign ones. Make in India also applies to Indian Public Universities.Rita Brara is a Delhi-based sociologist who is affiliated with the Institute of Economic Growth. Formerly she taught at the University of Delhi and this spring at Ashoka University.