Jadavpur University has always been political. That is not its shame. It is, in many ways, its inheritance. It was born out of the nationalist educational movement; Jadavpur was never intended to be an institution that produced merely obedient graduates. It was meant to cultivate independent minds. Its history of dissent from the radical politics of the late 1960s to the anti-Emergency movement and the more recent protests over Singur, Nandigram and a range of national and campus issues is part of the intellectual character of the university. But there is a point at which a tradition of dissent becomes a culture of disruption.