Back
Indian Law Teachers Grapple with , Systemic Pressures Compromise : Analysis
The Indian legal academy is facing a silent crisis. Law teachers are expected to simultaneously excel as educators, event organisers, mentors, and researchers—a “” that the system imposes without adequate support. A new analysis of the structural demands on law faculty reveals that these overlapping pressures are pushing many towards , rewarding superficial output over genuine scholarship and teaching.
The rewards of being a teacher, the analysis notes, “are abysmal when compared to the kind of physical, mental, emotional and intellectual labour the demands.” Yet the expectations keep mounting. Beyond classroom teaching, a law teacher must organise conferences, secure research grants, guide postgraduate and doctoral scholars, and publish one to two research papers annually in high-impact journals like those indexed in Scopus. The resulting workload, as one commentator puts it, is “unimaginably overwhelming.”
The Dilemma
At the heart of the problem is the mismatch between the lofty ideals of and the ground realities of India’s . The analysis draws a sharp contrast between the teaching philosophy of Upendra Baxi—who urged teachers to provoke students into questioning settled answers—and the Kafkaesque solitude required for serious research. “For research, the law teacher would need Kafka's solitude, not of a hermit but, of a dead man for writing,” the article states.
Yet the same teacher must also be a visible presence on campus, organising events that generate social media capital for the institution. Those who prioritise teaching over event management often find their names absent from flex boards and university websites. Meanwhile, “event manager” teachers—those who excel at organising—are valued highly and can substitute their classes with research scholars. The system thus inadvertently incentivises a bifurcation: either become a dedicated teacher who risks invisibility, or become a prolific researcher who may cut corners.
Systemic Pressures and
The analysis presents two archetypes to illustrate the ethical tightrope. One teacher invests deeply in pedagogy, takes students to the library, writes self-reflections, and guides research scholars ethically—but publishes slowly and rarely appears in citation indexes. Another teacher, pressed by the same demands, puts his name on papers ghostwritten by scholars, uses student assignments to build his own research, and treats classroom time as a venue for promoting his current work. “The pressures of the blur his vision of ethics,” the article observes.
The system itself is complicit. University accreditation norms, borrowed from engineering and management institutions, impose inflexible yardsticks that count the number of projects, publications, or events without evaluating their quality. “A reward system involving objective yardsticks where number of projects, publications or events outweigh their quality, is the pressures that are felt by the , which then is transferred to the teachers and translates into of varied degrees.” This structural flaw means that a teacher who produces three low-quality, pay-to-publish papers may receive more institutional recognition than one who writes one rigorous, impactful article.
Impact on and the Profession
The consequences for are profound. If law teachers are forced to become “superficial” box-tickers, the quality of instruction suffers. Students, in turn, are not exposed to the and that the demands. The analysis warns that “we collectively kill the good law teachers,” and those who survive the pressures are often only in the top three . In most other institutions, good teachers are exceptions, not the rule.
The ripple effects extend to the and legal practice. As the article notes, “with far lesser mental and emotional contributions, a law student would become a judicial officer, and a better one; than with the commitments required for being a teacher.” If fails to attract and retain passionate educators, the entire pipeline of legal talent—from litigators to judges—is weakened.
The Way Forward
The analysis ends with a set of probing questions: Should law teachers be expected to push a bare minimum weight in their quadruple roles? Is there a systemic production of a superficial teacher? It calls for a “thorough reset” of the what, why, and how of . Among the key issues to address are: What does the current system promote in law teachers? Why do we rely on inflexible, objective yardsticks? How can we account for the unsaid labour of teachers who compensate for poorly equipped administration and staff?
Until these questions are answered, the article concludes, a law teacher must continue “pushing the rock uphill like the Kafka's dead man-researcher and the Baxian teacher-provocator.” The choice of metaphor is deliberate: like Sisyphus, law teachers are condemned to an endless cycle of effort without systemic relief. The legal community must now decide whether to reset the rock or break the cycle.
