The idea here is to be constructive and suggest ways in which they can bridge the gulf.

The gaps are as follows:

1. Faculty quality (NLU alumni talent all prefer NLSIU, because the VC is an NLU alum)

2. Private sector donors

3. Gap in NIRF and QS rankings (GNLU and NUJS don't even feature in QS)

4. Global ties

5. Overall repute and standing

NLU alumni don't prefer NLSIU only because the VC is an NLU alumnus himself. It is also because NLSIU is the only NLU to have regularly and frequently held recruitment drives during Sudhir's time. They routinely recruit once a year, at times twice and release the results relatively within reasonable time after the interviews. No other NLU does all of that at present.

Jindal is much better know in the US and UK than NLS. Having studied and worked in both countries, Jindal has a presence because of its poaching allegations of professors from abroad with the huge budget they have. And with the intro of foreign universities, it's gonna be a massacre.

Find another Rhodes Scholar + Oxford DPhil who has been taught/supervised by Paul Craig, because if there is one thing that guy teaches very well, it is how to make sure you aren't forced to suffer fools. An Indian uni VC needs to be able to do that, because she will be dealing with ministers and so on who are just about fifth class passes. Therefore, the one taking on the responsibility of doing what you are suggesting needs to first start by having the skill to put fools in their place. Hope this helps. All the best.

This is the classic behaviour which would have been funny, if it weren't so unoriginal as to be dull enough to make the (Legally India) war-weary sleepy and forgetful enough of their manners to yawn widely. You yourself didn't have the brains to do one-tenth of what the persons we are talking about have done - you don't have what my mother would call "substance in your stomach" - which makes you bitter. As all you have is bitterness and no response to the actual arguments (the result of the inferiority of your education, which, in turn, is the result of the inferiority of your brain), all you can use is the lashing out with ad hominem. If you want to do "calling out", please give actual arguments, for once. To be explicit, respond to this challenge: if I am wrong, what, in fact, qualities does a VC of one of these unis need to lead them into becoming global players?

You have not shown any indication of you having such brains either. All you keep saying is that a VC who has good foreign education can do no wrong as an administrator. Which is the mark of idiocy. Forget about global player, just to retain its national edge, NLSIU should not have tried to expand in this foolhardy manner. Any VC who signed up for that clearly does not care what will happen to the quality of education after he is no longer around in another three years. You tell me what world class education is being offered at NLSIU after 7 years of Sudhir's reign. Its graduates are good, but hardly any better than they used to be even under Venky or before. So what good has Sudhir done really? How long can one harp about his educational qualifications when that has got very little bearing with his duties as an administrator? Forget about anything else, have your seen the quality of the work that the PhD students under him have been producing? Fairly average. He lacks empathy to students according to students. He does not give his faculty enough time to do quality research according to the same faculty. He does recruit regularly, which is a plus point, but hardly in enough numbers to handle his ever growing student population. Nor are those faculty given much in terms of job security or career progression. The placement scene is growing worse, students are not getting enough infra even after paying the highest fees among all NLUs, scholarship opportunities are getting rarer, alumni are grumbling about student quality, faculty publications are nowhere close to what it should have been given Sudhir's own aspirations. You take ad hominem to another extreme. You will never address Sudhir's failures as an administrator, but rather everyone worships him because of his educational achievements two decades back. That's blind loyalty, not mark of education or intelligence. People with far less educational achievements have been leaders of NLSIU and made it what it is. Sudhir contributed very little to that and that's a fact.

1. I have never said that someone with a foreign education "can do no wrong". Indeed, I have repeatedly criticised Sudhir's attempt to get out of CLAT. While I agree that getting out of CLAT is the right thing to do, that "NLAT" was not the right way to do it. I only said that having someone like that is a pretty good recipe to cope with the current challenges of Indian (legal) higher education. I will deploy a phrase which somebody (perhaps you?) deployed to criticise my arguments: you have done "a remarkable extrapolation for a lawyer".

2. You cannot go up from nowhere on the global map to equivalent of Oxford + Harvard without serious years of effort. The starting gun on that has been fired by Sudhir, and his legacy will need to be taken forward, if it is to be a success later on. NLSIU will need years and years of Sudhir-type leaders before it can get to the stage you are wanting. The key thing was to get it started, which has been done.

3.

(a) In case you haven't noticed, it has been he who has clamped down on the grade inflation that was happening at that uni. Why were so few people getting Rhodes in those years, while now we have already seen two during his reign?

(b) When he was clamping down on bad PhD work and not admitting more than a handful of PhD students, you people were blaming him. Now when PhD work is coming out under his control, you are blaming him, too. Can you at least say what is so average about these projects you dismiss with such a cavalier mindset? What will satisfy you? Him leaving NLSIU? Academia?

(c) Equally, you would blame him for having an Eton-Oxbridge mindset if too few students were admitted. If student numbers grow, you blame him for bad market forces, though I do agree that more could be done to adapt to the changing job scene, and the current way for handling university graduates' career progression is not working.

(d) Your and the critical students' understanding of empathy is not right. You don't hand out deadline exemptions etc just for the heck of it. You give one, very exceptionally, if students have had illness, death of a loved one or other such circumstances. Nothing less.

4. Scholarship opportunities are indeed getting lesser. But that's a worldwide trend. Uni finances the world over are getting tighter and tighter every single day. But that doesn't mean that low-income deserving candidates aren't getting aid. Please set out a blueprint to ensure a better funding model of university funding. Because according to me, Sudhir Krishnaswamy is the type of person who is doing the very best possible under current conditions (and the type of hypothetical I have in mind would do the same).

A. Sudhir getting out of clat isn't the only bad decision he'd taken as an admin. Anyone who is at NLS now can provide a list of his bad decisions, which you clearly aren't aware of. But whenever they get discussed here, you come with your Paul Craig trolling, which reveals a lot about your intention. If you're so sanguine about the merit of his work, why not argue on those points instead of parroting his academic qualifications?

B. That's a very convenient deflection. The downside of his decisions are being felt now, but the upside will be felt in 2047. Very achhe din like dreams. Nobody has expected NLSIU to become like Oxbridge. Are its students demonstrably better than even their Indian counterparts? Not really. So even that low hanging fruit has not been reached yet.

C. Grade inflation is something about which I actually agree with you. Never criticised Sudhir on that point yet, nor did I see anyone here do the same, so bringing up that point is irrelevant.

D. He was not stopping PhD admission, he was trying to stop legit degrees after the people selected by him awarded those degrees. That's illegal. The point that had been raised was about the PhD was about his own PhD students, which again you would have known had you been an insider. He is certainly responsible for the quality of their work. Don't create such an anguished strawman argument. Nobody other than you care whether he leaves academia, that's his choice. He is now in an admin position and his choices affect others. So he will be held accountable for those.

E. Once again, you manufactured a hypothetical argument. Nobody would have accused him of anything had he stuck to admitting such students as his infra could support. The fact that he did not clearly goes to show that he is incapable of forethought and the effects of his actions, all of which point of lack of admin skills.

F. Your understanding of empathy is questionable as is your desire to really learn about problems. Why are you assuming that deadlines are only thing that students wanted? Have you talked to the NLS students? He has taken multiple actions which led to such matters. Read the posts before copy pasting your Paul Craig comment everywhere.

Whether according to you Sudhir is doing the best doesn't matter, just as if someone else is saying that he isn't, that doesn't matter either. However, you don't get to attack them for not having his academic qualifications, just as they don't get to attack you for being Sudhir's lackey or having ulterior motives for defending him by attacking others in random public forums.

How does an individual's academic prowess translate into a general sense of academic rigour on campus? Only if that individual is competent enough to implement the necessary policies and institutional changes, informed by their own extensive academic experience, to cultivate such rigour. A VC who is a great academic but a poor administrator will produce speeches, not results.

They require managerial competence from their leaders. They require academic quality and not merely "rigour" in their policies. Those two are not mutually exclusive. And who is a bigger fool than one who does not know how much to bite so as to chew properly? Who is a bigger fool than one who had to be chastised for not knowing his own institutional regulations time and again?

Private universities are genuinely trying to do well. Look at the new ones like Bits, Bennet, Mahindra. Also foreign universities are setting shop here as. And both these types of universities have something that NLUs don't and will never have...money. loads of it. At the end of the day no matter how great the education is, this is not STEM where you can easily succeed with your skills and credentials. You need connections, loads of them. These private universities have the money to bring in foreign professors and foreign connections as well. And that's the biggest difference.

Central Universities have the unlimited tax budget from the government and these newer universities are backed by Mahindra, Ambani, Times group etc. NLUs have neither.

In the future the only one's surviving will be the tier1 NLUs, and even those will start charging 10 lakhs per annum soon.

It's all about the money ,honey.

And where are they pulling that from ? ▮▮▮ ▮▮▮ ? Tomorrow if the state government changes, it will slash their funds down if and when it wants. You people seems not to understand that NLUs are STATE universities, and for the state governments education is never the top priority. The moment they feel like, they need to tighten the budget, they will slash the funds.

How many of these private universities are offering the goods though? BITS is charging more than half a crore for a degree, but hardly pays more than public universities to its faculty, so how can it attract these world class faculty? Jindal tried its model, but eventually had to take in almost anyone with a foreign LLM so that its huge batch can be managed. So, no. The private universities are putting up an external good show but not really offering any better quality education than the top NLUs are doing at a much lesser cost.

"What's so great about NLSIU when XYZ NLU students also work in CAM?"

"What's so great about Swiss Patek watches when desi Sonata watches also tell the time?"

This exemplifies the logic of LI readers.🙄 Your comments against NSIU/Sudhir show that you don't believe in elitism, excellence and meritocracy.

As NLUD alum, I think NLS seems to be doing a phenomenal job hiring faculty. Not only have we lost some of our best to them (Mrinal, Aparna, Arul etc), a lot of the new faculty they're hiring are also incredible. NLUD (and other unis) need to figure out how to bridge this gap. I'm still proud of our faculty, but I do not think we are where we were 8-10 years ago.

While faculty do seem to prefer moving to NLS, I do not think it is merely because Sudhir is Ex NLS. We need to find out what is that he does as an administrator that makes people flock there. My dad's a prof (non law) elsewhere, and I know that he and his colleagues do not move colleges merely because the Dean / VC has great pedigree.

From an NLUD perspective, I think we should really amp up our seminar / credit courses led by practitioners. I'm grateful for the fantastic seminars I got to attend (arul, Ankita, Sekhri, Eashan Ghosh etc) - I do not know if the present students enjoy the present seminars as much. On credit courses also, we used to have really smart people talking about really cool things - we need to focus on that as well. Solid senior counsel / corp lawyers may not want to commit to 50-60 teaching hours for an elective, but we should persist and get weekly lectures or so.