Santishree Dhulipudi Pandit appointed first woman JNU Vice Chancellor

M Jagadesh Kumar was holding the charge of acting VC at JNU after his five-year term ended last year

The ministry of education on Monday appointed Santishree Dhulipudi Pandit as the first woman Vice-Chancellor of Jawaharlal Nehru University. Pandit, a professor at the Savitribai Phule Pune University, succeeds M Jagadesh Kumar who was appointed the chairman of the University Grants Commission last week.

Pandit, 59, is an alumna of JNU and she has an MPhil and PhD in International Relations from the School of International Studies.

In a statement, Pandit thanked the president and the prime minister for the appointment. “As vice-chancellor, JNU I thank both the Hon'ble Prime Minister and Minister of Higher Education for giving me this opportunity as the first woman and alumnus of this esteemed University from the state of Tamil Nadu.”

“The immediate focus of this administration would be to provide clean administration, student-friendly and gender-sensitive environment for academic excellence. We would strive to implement NEP-2020,” read her statement.

Soon after her appointment, her tweets were in focus where she used slurs like “rice-bag converts” for Christians and “jihadis” for Left-liberals. In her social media posts, she had lamented the phenomena of “love jihad” and urged people to vote for the Bharatiya Janata Party over the Congress.

Her Twitter account was deleted once the tweets surfaced.

Pandit, who currently teaches Political Science at the Department of Politics and Public Administration at SPPU, had taught at Goa University earlier. She had also been in government-appointed committees including the University Grants Commission (UGC) panel on higher education for the XI Grants Plan, and advisory committees for the Union Ministry of Youth Affairs and Ministry of Sports.

Dhulipudi takes over from predecessor Kumar whose five-year tenure saw the students at the university at loggerheads with the government. Controversies that he courted include the filing of sedition charges against students in 2016 for alleged anti-India slogans and an attack on the campus by a mob that left several injured in 2020. Protests against Kumar for fee hikes, redistribution of seats and faculty appointments were held several times.

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