ABSTRACT
This chapter is an account of a private, liberal arts university in India as its various actors attempted to deal with the Covid-19 pandemic when it first struck the country in 2020. As a visiting faculty at said university, I look back at the period from March to June 2020 and ask – If the university is to be imagined as a space committed to socio-political transformation, what ethico-political work are we being called upon to do in the current moment? This central question is engaged in the light of the historical making of the private, liberal arts university and its embeddedness in a certain rhetoric of choice, merit, and benevolent protectionism. I, therefore, examine the ways in which the ‘here and now’ of the university is constituted through shifts but also continuities in the ‘pre-pandemic’ university.
