The hollowing out of the vocation of teaching

The career of teachers is facing a crisis due to the slow pace of recruitment, peanut-paid contractual appointments, and guest and ad hoc faculty and the fatigue of the existing faculty buried under the weight of vacancies in their departments.A university teaching job has been reduced to a labyrinth of administrative burden, ranking-driven metrics and career stagnation, which is destroying the scholarly drive it is supposed to foster.The 2025-26 Demands for Grants of the Department of Higher Education report reveals shocking statistics. Over 56% of professor positions in top universities are vacant; 26% of sanctioned faculty posts in 46 Central universities are empty; 28.56% of the 18,940 faculty positions approved by the government across IITs, NITs, IIMs, IISERs and Central universities sit empty. This crisis exposes systemic dysfunctions and apathy towards higher education. Against the NEP-2020 target of increasing the allocation for higher education to 6% of GDP, only 4.6% has been allocated this FY.Universities respond to such budget pressures by replacing permanent positions with temporary faculty. Not only does this alter academic careers, it also leads to exclusion of marginalised groups due to the suspension of affirmative action embedded in the universities' permanent recruitment systems.Even elite US universities are facing similar challenges. Harvard's recent hiring freeze left departments scrambling to fill essential positions in the middle of the semester, a pattern replicated globally. As departments lose faculty to retirement and attrition, the few who remain must shoulder enormous teaching loads and administrative responsibilities.Academic roles in India are becoming a battleground of forms, protocols and performance data. A teacher's struggle is also against the globalising logic of various university rankings, which dictate what is visible, valuable and promotable within academia. Faculty autonomy, whether in curricular design or research agenda, is hemmed in by ranking checklists and the resultant tick-box culture.Early-career faculty burn out under the weight of digital audit trails and the relentless demand to tick the ranking boxes. Research imagination is suffocated by the pursuit of metrics. Historical sensibility is smothered by the forced adoption of digital tools and the erasure of dialogic and reflective pedagogy. Even state universities and colleges whose mandate is to provide quality and flexible education to the regional students have to abide by the homogenisation of global ranking frameworks. This growth formula re-emerges as the algorithm that governs the teachers’ tenure and promotion. As a result, the pursuit of meaningful knowledge, transmission of critical ideas and labour of mentorship is subordinated to the choreography of visibility, performance, bureaucracy and compliance.University campuses that were once terrains of unhurried intergenerational cultivation of knowledge and intimacy can feel hollowed out by the manic reporting of impact factors, employability indices and strategic partnerships and by another step away from the vocation of teaching.The cumulative effect of staffing shortfalls, administrative excess and rankings manifests in a wave of exhaustion, existential futility, anxiety and burnout in faculty. University teachers report occupational stress with strong correlations to emotional fatigue and workplace disengagement. Aggression in undergraduate classrooms, anxiety amid job insecurity and emotional detachment under conditions of precarity are no longer anomalies but symptoms of a sector-wide crisis.This collapse of teaching as a vocation at every level demands a fundamental rethinking of how academic labour is structured and institutional success evaluated.

The hollowing out of the vocation of teaching

Over half of all professor positions in top universities remain vacant — a symbol of systemic neglect.

Navneet Sharma and Sushant Kishore

The hollowing out of the vocation of teaching

Over half of all professor positions in top universities remain vacant — a symbol of systemic neglect.

Navneet Sharma and Sushant Kishore

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