No norms violated, says Ashoka University in row over its data centre

The scientific board of Ashoka University’s Trivedi Centre for Political Data (TCPD) announced its dissolution in an open letter on Tuesday, citing “substantial changes” in the centre’s operations that were in “breach of academic norms” and claiming that its founder and director, political scientist Gilles Verniers, was forced to leave the university.

Hours later, the university issued a statement, saying that TCPD was being integrated with the newly created Centre for Data Sciences and Analytics (CDSA), and denying that Verniers was forced to leave, saying his departure was due to his not clearing the tenure process.

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The statement read, “It is proposed that some of the Centres and offices at Ashoka University be integrated with the new Centre (CDSA) in an effort to enhance its data-driven capabilities and fostering a readily accessible collection of data sets... Professor Verniers’s departure from Ashoka University is due to him not clearing the University’s stringent tenure process, which in his case occurred almost a year ago. Faculty who do not qualify for tenure exit the University within three semesters. Professor Verniers has not taught at Ashoka for the last year and has decided to leave the University.”

It was not immediately clear when Verniers left his post as an assistant professor at Ashoka University. He is currently a Karl Loewenstein visiting fellow at Amherst College in the US, according to the college website.

Verniers said that the board sent an earlier letter 10 days ago, requesting clarification from the vice-chancellor about the status of the centre and of its data. “A response came two days ago, saying that a decision was yet to be taken about the centre but that it was likely that it would be merged with the new data centre… For more than a year, they did not contact the board or any of the partners of the Centre that major changes were in the offing, which they should have, as standard practice in academia,” he said.

Regarding the issues with his tenure, Verniers said the university had followed the rules.

About the dissolution of TCPD, Verniers said that it was created to serve a public purpose, which was done painstakingly over nearly ten years. “These efforts paid off as we created something truly valuable for scholars, for journalists, for graduate students who have used our data in their job market papers, and to students at Ashoka who took our classes and worked at TCPD. It had an impact on the field of Indian elections studies,” he said.

Verniers’s departure and the board’s dissolution come shortly after Sabyasachi Das, an assistant professor of economics, resigned in August amid a controversy over a research paper authored by him. Days later, another professor in the economics department, Pulapre Balakrishnan, resigned.

Ashoka University officials did not respond to requests seeking comment.