"We Will Teach Under the Trees": Jauhar University's Students and VC on the Demolition Notice

The Rampur Development Authority (RDA) has told Mohammad Ali Jauhar University that 38 of its 40 buildings, spread across 250 to 300 acres, are illegal construction, and given the trust 15 days to demolish them voluntarily or have the authority do it and bill the university for the cost. On campus, in conversations with students, an alumna and the university's Vice-Chancellor, the response is less a legal argument against the notice than an account of what is actually being threatened.

What the degree is actually worth

Several students interviewed on campus describe fee structures that make the university's value concrete rather than abstract. One student, who identifies as physically disabled and falls under the PH reservation category, says she is completing an LLM for ₹24,000 total — and that the university provides a free rickshaw from the gate to her faculty building and back, specifically because of her disability. Another student, now in his second year of an LLM after completing a BA LLB at the university and qualifying as an advocate, points out the fee gap with Rampur's private schools, where admission alone to nursery classes can cost more than his entire legal education did.

A gynaecologist and alumna of the university's paramedical programme, now practising at Milangarh Hospital, describes herself as the first graduate of that department's first batch. She credits the university's low cost directly with her career, and notes that two of her sisters went through its pharmacy programme into MBBS study, while her brother, also a university graduate, now works as an engineer and researcher in Norway. She adds a detail about the university's fee-waiver policy: students who have lost one parent get a 50 percent fee reduction, and those who have lost both get a full waiver — something she says is unique among institutions she knows of.

"We didn't take admission here thinking of it as politics"

Multiple students pre-empt the obvious political reading of the demolition before being asked. One says explicitly that students did not enrol because the university was built by Samajwadi Party veteran Azam Khan, and would have enrolled regardless of who built it — they came for the degree, not the politics, and object to having their education recast as a political statement now. Another describes a pattern of heavy police deployment specifically during admission season, framing it as a deliberate deterrent: "As if some terrorist training is going on here," when in fact, she says, the institution's graduates become doctors, scientists and lawyers. A sociology teacher and alumna, who says she has been "suffocating inside for four days" over the threat to a college she now teaches at, calls the university "not just a structure for us" but "an emotion."

Several students note that Rampur has no other university, meaning the threat is not abstract displacement to another campus but the removal of the only option in the district. Asked directly whether they believe the targeting is connected to the university's status as a minority institution, one student's response is a half-finished, visibly frustrated non-answer: "Can we really say that? Neither am I allowed to suffer, nor can I plead my case."

The Vice-Chancellor's jurisdiction argument

The university's Vice-Chancellor — addressed on camera as Zaheer Sahab, and who identifies himself as a law professor who previously served as Dean, Chairman and Vice-Chancellor at Aligarh Muslim University — lays out a specific procedural objection to the RDA notice rather than a general complaint of persecution. The university sits in a village called Singhankheda, he says, which was only brought under the RDA's jurisdiction in 2024. Citing his legal background, he argues that an authority's powers take effect from the date its governing notification is published in the official gazette — not retroactively — and that applying 2024 jurisdiction to buildings constructed years earlier is improper.

He extends the argument to its logical conclusion: if the standard being applied here — strict compliance with every current building regulation — were applied uniformly, he says, "there won't be a single educational institution that meets all the building standards" anywhere in the country, since regulations evolve faster than institutions can retrofit older construction. He frames the practical stakes bluntly, invoking students from Rampur, Moradabad and Bareilly whose families, he says, struggle to be certain of a second meal in a day — the population the university was built to serve — and asks what crime, specifically, justifies disrupting their education over a jurisdictional technicality applied after the fact.

Visibly emotional through the exchange, he commits to a specific fallback: "If it is their desire to demolish the building, let them demolish it. We will teach under the trees. We will teach on the streets. You cannot erase the university." He also connects the timing to Azam Khan's continued detention, noting that cases against the Chancellor have been filed continuously since 2019, and argues the demolition notice functions as a way of reaching Khan psychologically through the institution he built, since direct cases against him have not produced the same effect.

A protest that expects to lose, and says so anyway

The correspondent's closing observation is less about legal argument than atmosphere: across students, faculty and the Vice-Chancellor himself, the recurring note is barely controlled emotion rather than confident defiance. Several voices invoke the possibility of being physically present when any demolition happens — "they will have to pass over our dead bodies" — while simultaneously expressing continued faith in the courts, the constitution and, repeatedly, in God to prevent it. That combination — preparing for the worst outcome while still professing confidence it won't come to that — runs through nearly every voice on campus, suggesting a community that has already priced in losing even as it keeps insisting, out loud, that it won't.