Academic life today is being lived in a state of continuous acceleration. Notifications do not stop. Dashboards keep demanding updates. Deadlines overlap. Visibility has become a professional requirement. The pressure to publish, to be cited, to remain relevant in the field, and to respond instantly has created a work rhythm that leaves very little room for reflection. In such a climate, exhaustion is not only physical. It is intellectual and moral. The more profound fatigue comes from the steady erosion of meaning. When time is broken into administrative fragments, and thought is forced to move at the speed of response, teaching slowly begins to look like a contractual function rather than a civilisational responsibility.
This is precisely why the question of the teacher has returned to the centre of the conversation on higher education. Teaching has never been an ordinary profession. Its authority has never really come from salary, designation, or regulatory power. It stems from the moral trust society places in those who work for the future. The classroom is not a workspace for the day. It is a space where generations are shaped. That is what makes academic responsibility intergenerational. Respect for the profession cannot be claimed. It is sustained only through lived integrity. The moment teaching is reduced to workload, forms, and API scores, the first casualty is meaning. And once meaning is lost, well-being becomes a managerial concern instead of an inner condition. To reclaim responsibility over routine is, therefore, not romanticism but a professional necessity. It restores dignity, motivation, and the sense that one’s work matters. The fact that policy now recognises the teacher as the central agent of transformation gives institutional legitimacy to this deeper understanding.
The ethical task of the teacher is demanding in its simplicity. It is to do justice to ideas and not to produce ideological replicas. Classrooms become smaller when they turn into sites of mobilisation. They expand when they remain spaces of inquiry. Our responsibility is to present traditions in their full strength, to train judgment, and to cultivate the capacity to disagree without intellectual hostility. Students today are not suffering from a lack of information. They are surrounded by it. What they need is the ability to distinguish between argument and assertion. Academic ethics is not about “what we think”, but about how “we enable thinking”. When this moral purpose weakens, everything becomes mechanical. Teaching becomes delivery, meetings become procedural, while research becomes mere output. Even collaboration becomes a formality. But when moral purpose returns, work acquires energy and direction because it is anchored in responsibility. The emphasis on value-based education and the idea that knowledge must transform the “self” offers both a contemporary and a civilisational foundation for this recovery.
Capacity building, then, must be understood in this broader sense. It cannot remain limited to acquiring new tools or to exposure to new formats. The real question is the formation of the whole academic. Intellectual depth comes only through sustained engagement with one’s discipline and through the ability to locate it within multiple knowledge systems. Ethical clarity comes from fairness in evaluation, integrity in research, and the discipline to separate scholarship from advocacy. Pedagogic growth requires a movement from monologue to dialogue and the recognition that mentorship is not an extra burden but a core academic function. The most neglected dimension is the capacity for self-renewal. Without time for reflection, without peer learning, without purpose-driven work, no teacher can remain intellectually alive. Continuous professional development must, therefore, mean the development of the academic person.
Collegiality is equally central to this recovery. It is often misunderstood as personal niceness. In reality, it is the sharing of a common intellectual and moral project. One of the deepest sources of academic stress today is isolation. It exists even in spaces that are constantly connected. Teachers communicate all the time, but rarely think together. The individualisation of performance has produced parallel academic lives. Collaboration in such a situation is not simply a research strategy. It is a condition for well-being. Institutions have to create structures that normalise team teaching, peer mentoring, collective curriculum thinking, and research clusters. The traditions of samvada remind us that dialogue is the natural condition of scholarship. Knowledge must produce vinaya. And as such, we must realise that Vidya Dadati Vinayam is not a slogan but an institutional principle that prevents achievement from turning into hierarchy.
Teacher well-being must follow from meaningful work. It cannot be treated primarily as a welfare measure. Burnout is highest where work is fragmented and disconnected from purpose. A balanced academic identity that brings together teaching, research, mentorship, and institution-building creates stability by restoring coherence to professional life. Universities must consciously make time to read, to think, and to converse. Intellectual autonomy remains the strongest source of job satisfaction. Recognition systems must value what actually sustains institutions. Mentoring students. Building programmes. Contributing to academic citizenship. No vision of vibrant multidisciplinary universities can be realised without teachers who are intellectually alive and psychologically secure.
What finally brings these elements together is an ethic of work. The idea of the Karmayogi offers such an integrative framework. It is not a spiritual ornament but a professional orientation that shifts motivation from reward to responsibility and from anxiety to contribution. For the teacher, it means fulfilment through rigorous and selfless engagement with knowledge. For leadership, it means understanding authority as stewardship of institutional culture. At a time when the mind is constantly pulled outward, yoga becomes a discipline of attention. It restores the unity of body, mind, and intellect that serious scholarship requires. It creates the stillness in which reading becomes possible again and the emotional balance that makes collegial life meaningful. As a daily practice, it becomes the basis of self-renewal. Its civilisational anchors remain directly relevant to academic practice.
Satyameva Jayate as uncompromising academic integrity. Vidya Dadati Vinayam is the foundation of collegiality. Lokasamgraha is the link between scholarship and social good. Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam is the basis for collaborative academic communities. Through these, we can see the structural pathway clearly and realise our civilisational depth. Because the lived practice has to come from the teacher.
We are not facing a crisis of policy. We are facing a crisis of meaning. NEP (National Education Policy) provides the framework, IKS (Indian Knowledge System) delivers the depth, but the lived practice has to come from the teacher. A system can mandate performance, but it cannot produce purpose. That comes only when teaching is once again seen as a public responsibility rooted in a civilisational ethic where knowledge transforms the self, truth governs scholarship, and learning is a shared pursuit. When that shift happens, dignity returns to the profession, collegiality becomes natural, and excellence becomes sustainable. India’s higher education transformation will be decided there.
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Prof Santishree Dhulipudi Pandit is the Vice Chancellor of JNU.
