Well for years they chased everyone competent away. Now they have a ▮▮▮ one impressive new hire who obviously cares more about his centre than teaching.

This didn’t start with new VC. This started a longtime ago - attrition was always high especially among well credentialed faculty who had options. The only ones who stayed had no where to go.

Students expected number 2 label to remain constant and hoped they’d get jobs based on stolen glory. But what yall don’t realise is every recruiter out there can see difference batch by batch . They can tell where nls kids are where yall are. And there’s no set quota they’ve promised to hire from Nalsar or nujs or nls or anything. In fact depending on how good AI gets and how stagnant yall get over the next couple of years - they might not need to hire many at all.

If by not being "interested in academics" you mean people in NALSAR are uninterested in an academic career, then I am not surprised at all. After all, tell me: other than in NLS, which law school in India genuinely inspires its students to go for academia? At the end of the day, with half-baked papers (half of those plagiarised/written with Chatgpt), teachers reading from slides instead of genuinely teaching, even the good teachers being overburdened with teaching workload, with even people who apply for PhDs spam-applying because they don't know what to do instead of being genuinely wanting to do academia (I will never believe that 650 applications to DU Faculty of Law for PhD in one year, a number I recently heard, is an indicator of that much genuine academia aspiration!!) and with research and writing being seen, as Sudhir might say, like a bonus + bonus instead of an essential quality of a law prof... where in the country do we have a law school where the genuinely rigorous thinkers and academics aren't the exception?

Nalsar never got a great VC. A visionary like Sudhir at NLS is no comparison with the guy at Nalsar ▮▮▮. That makes all the difference. Sudhir has got all the best people and mostly NLS BALLB alumni to teach at NLS. Name a single Nalsar BALLB alumnus who teaches at Nalsar.

No comparison with NLSIU

I am currently in the 5th year of the BA,LLB at NALSAR (2021-2026 batch). I can name at least four current faculty members at NALSAR Hyderabad who have earlier completed their BA,LLB at the same institution:

1) Dr. Anup Surendranath - BA,LLB 2006

2) Dr. Aymen Mohammed - BA,LLB 2015

3) Anindita Mukherjee - BA,LLB 2015

4) Sunishth Goyal - BA,LLB 2019

At the same time, it is also true that some of our best faculty members have moved out of NALSAR in the last 2-3 years. Most of them have gone to NLSIU. Since I was directly taught by some of them, I will readily admit that people like Sudhanshu Kumar (Company Law), Pranav Verma (Criminal Law, Evidence), Sidharth Chauhan (Constitutional Law, Comparative Public Law) and Varun Malik (Contracts, Civil Remedies) were heads and shoulders above most of the new Assistant Professors hired by Prof SKDR. I have no doubt that people of that calibre will prosper at NLS as well.

However, all is not lost. NALSAR still has some very good teachers like Dr. Neha Pathakji (Taxation), Mr. Sourabh Bharti (Administrative Law, Intellectual Property), Dr. Srijan Sandip Mandal (Legal History), Dr. Balu Sunilraj (Political Science) and Dr. Rohan Cherian Thomas (Intellectual Property Rights). Some of the seniors like Dr. T. Kannan (Sociology), Dr. N. Manohar Reddy (English), Hota Agni Kumar (History) and Dr. Murali Karanam (Political Science) are also very good classroom teachers. They may not have the research output or the external visibility that some of the better known professors at NLSIU have, but they have given us a good education. Prof. Sitharamam Kakarala has also joined last year and has taken charge of the Ph.D. programme and is concentrating on the LL.M. students. In short, there is still a nucleus around which the institution can be rebuilt and improved.

Not everything depends on the personality of the VC. Prof. SKDR will at the most be in charge till 2030. He does not have a very good academic judgment (especially needed for selecting teachers) but he is exceptionally good at networking with Supreme Court Judges, Ministers and Bureaucrats. That also carries certain benefits for the institution at large. In comparison, Prof. Sudhir Krishnaswamy is a much better academic, but when it comes to administration, he has repeatedly made decisions in a hurry without thinking about their practical consequences for the students at NLS. However, I must be objective and accept that on current form, NLSIU has a much stronger faculty pool and the main reason is the regular hiring efforts led by Prof. Sudhir.

Somebody had once said, after a NALSAR student's response to an LI reader asking if they should take up their place to read law at university in NALSAR in India, or in one of the non-Oxbridge big name UK unis, that NALSAR people seem to be reasonable, non-partisan folks, largely (with even the ones like so-called 'NALSAR Joe' pretending to be otherwise for fun). That NALSAR student's response to the prospective law student was characterised by rationality and objectivity, and others also pointed that out. Glad to see (as someone who didn't go to either NLSIU or NALSAR) that the qualities of impartiality and objectivity still seem to be the defining approach of NALSAR students. Whatever the truth or otherwise of the OP's claims, we have to give credit where credit is due.

Thanks for pointing out that there are at least 4 alumni from the BA,LLB programme at NALSAR who are now part of the faculty there.

The rest of the comment seems to be a measured assessment of what NALSAR has lost in terms of attrition but it also hopeful about the situation improving over the next few years. However, since some of the comments are making a direct comparison with NLSIU, I recently came across a striking piece of information. Sidharth Chauhan has a post on LinkedIn which mentions 19 names of alumni from the BA,LLB programme who are now part of the faculty at NLSIU. Their names were mentioned in a post about the retirement of Dr. V.S. Elizabeth, a well-known Professor of History, who has taught all of them when they were undergraduate students. Surely, the presence of a sizeable number of BA,LLB alums (out of the current faculty strength of 110+) must have pushed up the standards of teaching at NLSIU. This is sufficient evidence to show that NLSIU has in fact pulled far ahead of its competitors in recent years. You may or may not like Sudhir's personal demeanour, but there is no doubt that he has delivered spectacularly well when it comes to faculty recruitments. Even his worst critics on this forum will be hard pressed to deny the positive implications of 19 well-qualified alums devoting themselves to their alma mater.

"People in nlud are chilling too"

Nice Whataboutery.

You know that growth requires discomfort, not "chilling" right?

It's sad to see mediocrity spread like rot in Nalsar,Nlud,Nujs and more. Get out of your comfort zones please.

Nls would be the same if not for the admin who at least don't compromise academically.

Placements is one thing, studying from professors who change the way you think is another.

All of them who have been recruited have studied at those institutions pre-pandemic.

Back then, with active student bodies who actually cared about their future of their institutions instead of "living in the moment", they were powerhouses.

Also, the real question should be - why do their alumni prefer nls instead of giving back to their alma mater? Sounds like a retention failure.