Beyond Affiliation: Why India Needs Collegial Universities

Part I: Reimagining the University

The University We Forgot to Build

India possesses one of the world's largest higher education systems. Tens of thousands of public colleges, hundreds of universities, millions of students, and an ever-expanding ecosystem of specialized institutions together form an educational network that reaches every district of the country. Over the past three decades, this network has expanded considerably through the establishment of engineering universities, medical universities, agricultural universities, private universities, and specialized institutes catering to increasingly diverse professional needs.

Most discussions on higher education naturally revolve around improving research output, increasing employability, strengthening institutional autonomy, modernizing infrastructure, enhancing faculty quality, and improving national and global rankings. These are undoubtedly important priorities. Yet an equally important question is seldom asked:

What is the purpose of a general public college?

This article argues that India has reached a stage where this question deserves fresh consideration.

This is not a proposal to construct an entirely new higher education system. Nor is it an argument for building dozens of expensive new campuses.

India has already invested enormous public resources over many decades in creating tens of thousands of public colleges distributed across India's cities and towns. These institutions represent not merely buildings but accumulated faculties, libraries, laboratories, alumni associations, and long-standing relationships with local communities.

The challenge today is increasingly one of institutional purpose rather than institutional quantity.

As specialized public and private universities continue to expand, many general public colleges risk becoming difficult to justify solely as teaching institutions. Rather than allowing these institutions to gradually lose relevance—or replacing them altogether—India has an opportunity to regroup, recalibrate, and repurpose this existing infrastructure towards serving the communities in which they already embedded.

The proposal presented here revolves around what may be called the collegial university.

The Misconception: A University Is Not a Campus

Most people instinctively imagine a university as one large campus with a collection of affiliated colleges scattered elsewhere. The campus becomes synonymous with the university, while the colleges appear almost as peripheral extensions.

The collegial university invites us to think differently.

A university is not one campus surrounded by colleges.

The university is its colleges.

Its central headquarter/s may remain relatively modest, performing functions such as administration, academic coordination, finance, quality assurance, digital infrastructure, and university-wide planning. The real intellectual life of the institution resides across its constituent colleges distributed throughout a district or administrative division.

This is therefore a distributed university.

Instead of concentrating academic life in one prestigious campus, it distributes that life across multiple institutions embedded in their respective localities. Each constituent college becomes a genuine part of the university rather than merely an affiliated institution waiting to become independent.

The university coordinates.

The colleges engage.

This simple distinction fundamentally changes how we think about higher education.

Why India's Current Model Needs Evolution

Across India, successful colleges are frequently "upgraded" into independent universities. Such decisions often receive enthusiastic support from students, faculty, alumni, and political leaders because university status carries prestige, symbolism, and institutional autonomy.

Yet an important institutional question remains largely unexplored.

Should every successful college eventually leave the university?

Or should successful colleges instead strengthen the university to which they belong?

The latter approach deserves greater consideration.

Many affiliating universities today supervise enormous numbers of colleges while simultaneously managing examinations, evaluations, administrative approvals, and academic regulation. A significant proportion of their institutional energy is devoted to maintaining this administrative machinery.

The answer, however, is not necessarily to fragment the system indefinitely.

Instead, India could form more collegial universities at the district or divisional level by reorganizing its existing public colleges wherever feasible. Each university would coordinate a manageable federation of constituent colleges rooted within a common geographical region.

This proposal therefore seeks institutional recalibration rather than institutional expansion.

It recognizes that India already possesses an extensive higher education infrastructure. The challenge is to organize that infrastructure around clearer public purposes rather than continuously expanding it.

The Architecture of the Collegial University

If the university is understood as a federation of colleges, its responsibilities naturally differ from those of its constituent institutions.

The university should provide the common academic framework through curriculum development, quality assurance, examinations, degree awarding, shared research institutes, digital infrastructure, interdisciplinary centres, and long-term regional planning.

Recruitment of faculty and staff should ideally occur through university-wide standards rather than separate college-level processes. Likewise, students should be admitted to the university through common admission mechanisms before being allotted to individual colleges and programmes.

Such an arrangement strengthens institutional identity while ensuring consistent academic standards across the federation.

Faculty members would belong primarily to the university rather than exclusively to a particular college. Colleges would remain their principal places of teaching and engagement, yet carefully considered inter-college transfers should remain possible whenever they strengthen academic collaboration, improve institutional balance, respond to regional needs, or facilitate the diffusion of good practices across the university.

This is not merely an administrative arrangement.

It creates one academic community distributed across many campuses instead of many isolated institutions loosely connected through examinations alone.

Meanwhile, the colleges themselves remain vibrant centres of teaching, mentoring, student life, community engagement, fieldwork, local partnerships, and innovation.

The university coordinates.

The colleges create.

The Region-Based University

India already possesses specialized universities dedicated to engineering, medicine, agriculture, law, veterinary sciences, and several other professional disciplines. Many of such universities also have constituent colleges. Their missions are naturally organized around particular fields of knowledge.

The general collegial university should embrace a different organizing principle altogether.

It should organize itself around a distinct region of the state. In most large states, each distinct region is demarcated as a division. 

Its central questions should no longer be:

"How do we strengthen this department?"

Instead they should become:

"What does this region need?"

"What do its villages, towns, blocks, and districts need?"

"How can the university help improve life here?"

This represents a profound shift in institutional purpose.

The general university should not attempt to imitate specialized universities by becoming another disciplinary institution.

Its comparative advantage lies in understanding the region as a whole.

Rather than asking isolated disciplinary questions, it studies the region as an interconnected social, economic, ecological, historical, and cultural system.

Its constituent colleges become deeply embedded in the communities they serve, while the university integrates knowledge generated across the entire district or division into a coherent regional understanding.

Multidisciplinary Education Rooted in Place

Much contemporary discussion celebrates multidisciplinary education as an educational ideal. There is considerable merit in that aspiration. Yet the strongest justification for multidisciplinary education is not that it has become fashionable internationally.

It is that real places are themselves multidisciplinary.

A town, block, or district simultaneously faces questions of employment, migration, entrepreneurship, ecology, heritage, education, governance, infrastructure, public health, and social change. No single academic discipline can adequately understand all of these dimensions.

Consequently, multidisciplinary education should not emerge merely from reorganizing departments or introducing additional subjects.

It should emerge naturally from engaging with the complexities of the locality itself.

A place-based college therefore becomes multidisciplinary because the community surrounding it demands multidisciplinary thinking.

Engineering universities will continue advancing engineering. Medical universities will continue advancing medicine. Agricultural universities will continue advancing agriculture.

The general collegial university performs a different, yet equally important, function.

It brings disciplines together around places.

It asks not simply how knowledge can advance individual academic fields, but how knowledge from many fields can improve the lives of the communities in which the university is embedded.

This is the public purpose that India's general universities have the opportunity to rediscover.

The future of India's public higher education may therefore lie less in constructing larger campuses and more in giving existing institutions a deeper mission.

The collegial university offers one possible blueprint for that transformation.

Part II: From Teaching to Public Knowledge

Extending the University's Public Mission

If the collegial university is organized around place rather than discipline, its responsibilities inevitably extend beyond the classroom.

This does not mean that teaching becomes less important. On the contrary, teaching remains the university's central mission. But education need not stop at graduation, nor should knowledge remain confined within lecture halls and examination papers.

A public university funded by taxpayers carries a broader public responsibility.

It should not merely produce graduates.

It should continuously extend knowledge into the society that sustains it.

India has long practised this principle in selected sectors. Agricultural universities, for example, have developed extension programs that carry research from laboratories to farms.

The general collegial university offers an opportunity to broaden this philosophy.

Knowledge extension should become an institutional function rather than an occasional outreach activity.

Its constituent colleges should evolve into long-term partners of their surrounding communities, helping preserve knowledge, generate new knowledge, and apply knowledge to local challenges.

This transformation is possible precisely because these colleges already exist. They are already geographically embedded in rural towns, blocks, and districts. The proposal therefore does not ask universities to move closer to society.

It asks them to rediscover the society that already surrounds them.

Universities as Partners in Local Knowledge and Governance

India's villages, towns, blocks, and districts increasingly face complex questions concerning employment, entrepreneurship, ecology, heritage, public health, urbanization, digital governance, waste management, tourism, and climate resilience. These issues require continuous knowledge generation rather than occasional administrative responses.

The collegial university should therefore become a long-term, not-for-profit knowledge partner for local governments.

Its constituent colleges could work closely with village panchayats, block panchayats, and municipal councils. The university as a whole could similarly partner with district panchayats, district administrations, and divisional administrations.

Such partnerships should never blur constitutional responsibilities.

Local governments and administrations continue to govern and administer. 

Universities continue to educate, research, and generate knowledge.

Democratic authority remains with elected authorities. 

The university contributes evidence, analysis, and long-term institutional memory.

The relationship is therefore complementary rather than hierarchical.

Knowledge strengthens democracy.

It does not replace it.

The University as the Region's Multidisciplinary Knowledge Institution

The greatest strength of a collegial university is not that it possesses ready-made answers to public problems.

Its greatest strength is that it already possesses, at least on paper, something remarkably valuable: a multidisciplinary academic community embedded within the locality itself.

A typical general public college may already include faculty from the fundamental sciences, environmental science, commerce, economics, sociology, geography, languages, etc. Individually, these departments often pursue their own teaching and academic activities. Collectively, however, they possess the intellectual resources to understand the communities surrounding them from multiple perspectives.

The challenge, therefore, is not the absence of expertise.

It is the absence of a shared public mission.

The collegial university provides precisely that mission.

Rather than functioning as isolated departments, colleges begin collaborating around the realities of the villages, towns, and blocks they serve. Their knowledge of local environment, geography, institutions, communities, economies, histories, and social relations becomes an academic resource in itself.

This is also why the university should not be viewed as a consultancy.

Consultancies are normally external organizations engaged for limited assignments. They arrive, prepare reports, and leave.

The collegial university does not leave.

Its students largely come from the region.

Many graduates remain within it.

Faculty continue teaching and researching there for years, often decades.

Its reputation evolves alongside the community's own progress.

The university therefore lives with the long-term consequences of its recommendations.

This institutional embeddedness gives it a fundamentally different role.

Its objective is not to produce consultancy reports for clients.

Its objective is to strengthen the long-term capability of the region itself.

Whether the challenge concerns investment actualization, industrial development, municipal governance, ecological restoration, heritage conservation, youth dynamics, or entrepreneurship - the university's contribution should lie in assembling temporary multidisciplinary teams drawn from different disciplines and colleges.

The task itself becomes the integrator.

Economists work alongside geographers. Environment scientists collaborate with commerce faculty. Biologists engage with sociologists.

The locality—not the discipline—becomes the organizing principle.

The collegial university's comparative advantage therefore lies not in possessing expertise in one field, but in integrating many disciplines around one place.

Locally Embedded, Intellectually Independent

Being deeply embedded within a locality is both the university's greatest strength and one of its greatest responsibilities.

Unlike external advisers, the collegial university remains a permanent stakeholder within the region. It experiences the consequences of successful policies and unsuccessful ones alike. This gives it strong incentives to contribute meaningfully to the long-term well-being of the communities that sustain it.

Yet local embeddedness alone does not automatically produce wise public advice.

Universities, like all public institutions, can become intellectually insulated. Departments may stop engaging with one another. Institutions may gradually align themselves with local political interests, regionalist populism, or narrow institutional priorities. Good intentions alone cannot prevent such outcomes.

The answer is not to withdraw universities from public life.

It is to strengthen the principles governing their public engagement.

Responsible public advice should therefore emerge from multidisciplinary collaboration rather than individual opinion. It should begin with diagnosis before advocacy, allowing evidence to shape recommendations instead of predetermined ideological positions. Important reports should undergo internal academic review, openly discuss alternative approaches, identify trade-offs, and make their underlying assumptions transparent.

The university's role is not to validate what governments, communities, or political actors already wish to hear.

Its role is to help them understand complex realities more clearly.

Sometimes the evidence may support greater public investment.

At other times it may suggest institutional reform, better local governance, stronger revenue generation, improved implementation, or entirely different approaches.

Its responsibility is to the quality of public reasoning rather than to any particular policy preference.

Ultimately, the collegial university should aspire to become something that every democratic society needs but few deliberately cultivate: a trusted public knowledge institution.

It should be deeply rooted in its region without becoming captive to it.

It should understand local aspirations without becoming constrained by local pressures.

It should remain committed to the public good while preserving the intellectual independence necessary to question prevailing assumptions.

In short, the collegial university should strive to be locally embedded, yet intellectually independent.

That balance, more than any single policy recommendation, is what gives the region-based university its enduring public value.

Part III: Universities as Long-Term Public Institutions

Regional Rootedness Without Regional Capture

A region-based university should certainly become deeply rooted in its region. Yet there is an important distinction between being rooted and being captured.

Public universities are long-lived institutions. Their faculty often spend decades in a particular region. Their students largely come from surrounding communities. Their research increasingly focuses on local realities. Over time, universities naturally become influential public institutions.

This influence can develop in two very different directions.

In its most progressive form, regional rootedness encourages universities to promote local innovation, preserve heritage, strengthen public institutions, support entrepreneurship, understand ecological systems, and contribute to regional development. The university becomes an intellectual anchor for the region.

But regional influence can also become regressive.

Universities may gradually become territorially protective, intellectually insulated, or excessively aligned with particular political interests. Academic debate risks giving way to institutional self-preservation. Regional pride may slowly transform into exclusionary regionalism.

The collegial university should consciously resist this tendency.

Its purpose is not to defend the region against the rest of the country.

Nor is it to become another political actor competing for influence.

Its purpose is to understand the region deeply and contribute to its progress - while simultaneously connecting it to national and global networks of knowledge.

Progressive regionalism encourages confidence.

Regressive regionalism encourages isolation.

The region-based university should cultivate the former while avoiding the latter.

A Distributed Knowledge Network

One of the greatest strengths of the collegial university lies in its distributed nature.

Conventional discussions often evaluate universities by the size of their campuses, the prestige of their buildings, or the concentration of facilities in a single location.

The collegial university suggests a different way of thinking.

Its greatest asset is not one campus.

It is the network.

Each constituent college becomes deeply familiar with its own locality. Faculty build long-term relationships with communities. Students undertake fieldwork close to home. Local partnerships develop gradually through repeated engagement rather than one-off projects.

The university then connects these individual streams of knowledge into a broader regional understanding.

Knowledge therefore flows in two directions simultaneously.

The university shares academic standards, research, and institutional resources with its colleges.

The colleges contribute continuous local knowledge back to the university.

The result is a dynamic knowledge network rather than a hierarchy.

This distributed structure also strengthens institutional resilience.

Individual colleges may experience fluctuations in leadership, faculty strength, or enrolment. Regional priorities may evolve over time. New disciplines may emerge while others transform.

Yet the university as a whole continues accumulating knowledge, relationships, institutional memory, and public trust.

Its strength lies not in centralization but in federation.

A Flexible Model for a Federal India

India's diversity suggests that no single institutional model should be imposed uniformly across every state.

The collegial university is therefore best understood as an adaptable framework rather than a rigid blueprint.

In larger states, division-level collegial universities could naturally be established and funded by state governments.

Smaller states may choose different arrangements depending upon geography, population, and administrative needs.

An interesting possibility arises in India's fiscally constrained states, particularly some of the smaller northeastern states.

Maintaining an extensive public higher education system places significant financial demands upon governments with relatively limited revenue bases.

In such situations, the Central Government could consider establishing and funding the principal collegial university of the state, comprising its federation of public colleges.

Such an arrangement would primarily serve as a fiscal easing mechanism.

The university's mission, however, would remain fundamentally regional.

Its constituent colleges would continue engaging with local communities, local institutions, local ecologies, local histories, etc. The state's own role in regulating and supporting private universities would remain unaffected.

The proposal therefore is not one of centralization for its own sake.

It is simply one institutional variant within a flexible federal framework.

Recalibrating Rather Than Rebuilding

Perhaps the most important feature of this proposal is what it does not require.

It does not call for constructing thousands of new colleges.

It does not demand a vast expansion of government infrastructure.

It does not seek to replace India's existing higher education system.

Instead, it asks a simpler question.

Can the remarkable public infrastructure that India has already built over many decades be reorganized around a clearer public purpose?

Thousands of public colleges already exist.

They already possess classrooms, libraries, laboratories, faculty, students, and community relationships.

As specialized universities continue expanding, many of these general colleges risk becoming increasingly difficult to justify solely as teaching institutions.

Rather than allowing this enormous public investment to gradually lose relevance, India can recalibrate and repurpose it.

The objective is not expansion.

The objective is transformation.

Existing institutions acquire broader public purposes while continuing to perform their educational functions.

In this sense, the proposal represents institutional evolution rather than institutional replacement.

The University as the Region's Enduring Knowledge Institution

Every society possesses institutions that endure beyond individual governments, policies, and political cycles.

Courts accumulate legal traditions.

Legislatures preserve democratic continuity.

Libraries safeguard knowledge.

Museums preserve heritage.

Universities, too, should possess such long-term public purposes.

For much of their history, universities have primarily been understood as places for teaching and research. Those functions remain indispensable.

Yet the challenges confronting contemporary societies increasingly require institutions capable of integrating knowledge across disciplines while remaining deeply connected to the places they serve.

The collegial university offers one possible response.

It educates students.

It advances research.

It coordinates constituent colleges.

It extends knowledge into society.

It helps steward local heritage, ecology, archives, and manuscripts.

It supports local governments without replacing them.

It strengthens communities without becoming captive to them.

It develops institutional memory that accumulates over generations.

Above all, it helps regions understand themselves.

That, perhaps, is the public university's most enduring contribution.

Conclusion: Reimagining the Regional Public University

India's future higher education debate should certainly continue discussing rankings, research funding, employability, internationalization, artificial intelligence, and infrastructure. These remain vital priorities.

But alongside these discussions, another conversation deserves equal attention.

What is the purpose of India's rural public colleges?

This article has argued that India's answer need not begin with constructing entirely new infrastructure.

The opportunity before us is to regroup, recalibrate, and repurpose this distributed infrastructure - as regional collegial universities. 

It would become the region's enduring knowledge institution.

Its distributed constituent colleges would become place-based institutions serving villages, towns, blocks, districts, and their communities and institutions. 

Together, they would educate, research, preserve, convene, advise, and extend knowledge into public life.

The university of the future may therefore be judged not only by the number of papers it publishes or the rankings it achieves, but also by the depth of its engagement with the communities that sustain it.

In a country as diverse and federal as India, such universities would not merely award degrees.

They would help regions understand themselves, solve their own problems, preserve their own ecology and heritage, and shape their own futures.

That is not simply a new model of the public university.

It is a new vision of future higher education.