Why the Admin needs to Solve its PR crisis with the student body

By Akanksha Mishra, Undergraduate Batch of 2022

This year has not been one of the best ones, especially for the Ashokan administration. Since the day I first set foot on campus about eight months ago, there have been constant complaints by the students about the fallacies and shortcomings of the administration. A look back at the numerous issues that plagued the campus through the lens of the student body this year tells the tale of an apparently insensitive, and unaccountable Ashokan administration.

What has happened over the past year, however, parallel to the administration’s shortcomings in responding to student needs, has been a form of scapegoating by the student body in blaming almost all disagreeable decisions and policies on the administration. This two-way street had led to a sense of deep mistrust and debates being reduced to ‘Us vs Them’ narratives. This is visible most starkly by looking through the descriptive and informative annals of Ashokan students — the posts on Facebook groups.

1. The administration started its ‘power trip’, as dubbed by countless frustrated Ashokans, by arbitrarily revoking the weekend cross access timings as well as the mess policy without consulting the student body.

Another highly contested issue was the decision to house the ASP women in the barely constructed SH5, in the company of dust, health hazards, unattended pieces of metal and rods and the occasional monkey sighting.

1. A change in the Clubs and Societies policy stated that hereafter the events that Ashokans could hold should align with ‘Ashokan ethos’, a move that was seen by Ashokans as a sanctimonious hijacking of the definition of said ‘ethos’ by a group of administrators, which resulted in the term ‘Ashokan ethos’ becoming a constant gag among the student community.

While meme groups on Facebook are not the most trustworthy of records, they mirror what the students are feeling. Most jokes and posts are primarily to serve the function of eliciting laughter and do not mean to show disrespect, but the underlying emotion behind these memes was the feeling that the administration did not play an adequate role in solving problems and being directly answerable to the students.

These events and student frustration culminated in the famous Townhall organized by the then Student Government at Takshila, the overwhelming response to which was testimony to the fact that the student body was ready to demand accountability from the administration.

However, demands for accountability are one thing and constant vilification for every little problem on campus is another thing altogether. As the year progressed, posts like the ones seen above started circulating, portraying the administration as ‘totalitarian’, and ‘undemocratic’ and completely against student interests. This cultivated a level of deep mistrust for actions taken by any office of the administration in the student body, so much so that once any mishap occurs, the students rush to blame the admin — from locker thefts to a shortage of counselors at ACWB. The reliability of these claims is not in question here.

The trends of student conversations also show that there is no longer a distinction between different offices such as Res Life or Student Affairs, as the blame collectively falls on the ‘admin’. This probably comes from a conception of all offices of administration and organization being part of a larger single corporate entity which is why we find it easy to unceremoniously jumble them as one. But there are various other factors involved in decision-making processes like the BoM, VC’s office, founders and other stakeholders who all have different, well-defined roles. The idea then is to question and communicate.

When one delves a couple of years deeper into the archives of the Ashokan student body’s opinions (read: Facebook posts), we find much fewer complaints against the administration, and the ones that are there are the subject of rigorous debate with many students supporting the administration. Was this the case because the admin was just doing a much better job back then? One can hope. But student-admin controversies have always been a part of the fabric of university relations.

A more reasonable explanation for the current level of loathing and mistrust for the admin is the image that has been created recently wherein the admin has displayed callousness with regard to explaining itself and ensuring accountability. Students are left to their own devices to come up with possible ‘logical’ explanations for the administration’s actions. This, coupled with collective student frustration at the decisions has led us to overlook the admin as actual human beings with real responsibilities and complications and just made them out to be this arbitrary other, the root of our problems and the butt of our jokes. The admin is seen as the solution to all our problems. At the same time, they have been labeled as evil and seen to be acting against student interests. While this is neither rational nor true, it does provide the student body with an easy out by blaming them for their actions, considering we don’t have their side of the story.

The reason we need to think about this issue is the current situation. After the recent clarification by the Board of Management that the universal grading policy will not be changed and will depend on individual professors, the Ashoka cohort once again exploded with dissatisfaction and outrage at the BoM’s supposedly insensitive decision. The onus of the backlash by the students however, once again, fell disproportionately on the administration. The admin, once again, did not respond adequately to student demands. The cycle continues. This chasm between the students and the admin needs to be resolved by efforts from the admin if we wish to stop this endless otherization and come to agreeable conclusions. The goal is to understand the importance of effective communication regarding decisions made by the offices that affect all stakeholders, primarily students; and to understand why the tropes used in Facebook groups creep in mails soliciting accountability.