Let experience into the classroom

India is full of people who have spent decades solving hard problems: founders, engineers, designers, bureaucrats, physicians, artists and technologists. Its universities, meanwhile, struggle to fill faculty positions. Yet the rules governing higher education have let only a trickle of these practitioners into lecture halls, and mostly as short-term guests.

That is the contradiction behind the stalled push for academia-industry integration: a system that welcomes real-world knowledge as a visitor but refuses it a permanent seat. The National Education Policy (NEP) 2020, with its stress on skills, pointed towards fixing this. In 2022, the University Grants Commission (UGC) issued guidelines for appointing “Professors of Practice” (PoP), drawing on the NEP’s vision of mixing general education with vocational training and pulling industry closer to higher education institutions (HEIs).

The document argued that learners should think like employers and employers like learners, and that such appointments would carry lived experience into classrooms while adding to thin faculty ranks. It allowed eminent experts to teach without the usual degrees or publication records. Yet the same guidelines undercut themselves. PoPs cannot exceed 10 per cent of an institution’s sanctioned faculty posts. Tenure runs three years, with one extra year only in exceptional cases, and no institution may keep a PoP beyond four years in total, which effectively shuts the door on reappointment. India built a channel for practical expertise and then narrowed it to a trickle.

Those limits look even harder to defend given the scale of vacancies. The parliamentary standing committee on education, in its report on the 2025-26 Demands for Grants of the Department of Higher Education, found that 28.56 per cent of sanctioned teaching posts across IITs, IIMs, NITs, IISERs and central universities were vacant as of January 31, 2025. At the professor level, 56.18 per cent of posts sat empty. A Hindustan Times analysis put the picture at the IITs alone: 4,804 of 12,498 sanctioned posts, or 38.4 per cent, were unfilled as of January 30, 2026. IIT Patna and IIT Kharagpur had more than half their posts vacant, and twelve other IITs had over a third.

Two problems are tangled together here. One is a shortage of regular faculty. The other is a shortage of people with hands-on experience in the classroom. The PoP framework targets the second and could ease the first along the way, but its design keeps it from touching either at scale. The appointment data confirms this. According to UGC figures released earlier this year, private and deemed universities account for 76.8 per cent of PoP appointments. Central universities, where vacancies bite hardest, account for 0.8 per cent, a mere 15 appointments. The institutions that most need practitioner faculty are the ones using the provision least.

This should be read alongside the UGC’s January 2024 guidelines on university-industry linkages. They aim to tie higher education directly to MSMEs and regional industry through joint R&D clusters, with an Industry Relations Cell in every academic institution and a University Relations Cell in every industry partner. The vision stretches past internships and campus hiring. It imagines students and faculty working with local industry on local problems, backed by incentives for technology transfer and IP creation. But such partnerships need people who can speak both languages, and permanent practitioner faculty are the obvious candidates.

Elite universities abroad handle the role in different ways. SOAS and Harvard treat it as honorary and fixed-term: appointments sit outside the tenure system and can be renewed, but depend on continued relevance rather than scholarly output. Princeton offers multi-year appointments reviewed by the Dean, also outside the tenure ladder, with clear and deadline-bound notice on renewal. The Technion - Israel Institute of Technology goes furthest, allowing real tenure and promotion to full Professor of Practice, assessed on criteria suited to practice, such as patents, industry impact and competitive grants. India’s model looks most like SOAS’s, without the option to renew.

The case grows stronger in the age of artificial intelligence. As machines take over much of the transmission of information, a teacher’s value shifts towards judgement, tacit knowledge, problem framing, professional ethics and decision-making under uncertainty. These are the skills that come from experience, and accomplished practitioners hold them in abundance. Some knowledge simply does not travel well through textbooks: the instinct that comes from having built something, run something or repaired something under real constraints. This applies well beyond engineering and management. Every sector now needs graduates who understand society as well as technology, so the social sciences benefit as much as any technical field. Professors of practice should be seen as strategic assets in designing curricula and training for a future-ready workforce, not as a conduit to industry contacts. Talk of academia-industry integration will stay a pipedream until industry’s experience can enter the classroom more easily. The NEP 2020 was drafted before AI reshaped the workplace, and the PoP rules need recalibrating for the world universities now work in.
 
The uniform 10 per cent ceiling is the place to start. A university teaching computer science, design, entrepreneurship, public policy, healthcare management or media may reasonably need far more practitioner faculty than one focused on pure mathematics or theoretical physics. Instead of one number for everyone, the cap should vary by discipline, allowing much higher proportions in practice-intensive fields under transparent academic governance. A figure such as 40 per cent could serve as an illustrative upper limit. The UGC should also drop its blanket ban on reappointment. Resource-strapped universities that manage to attract a few practitioners should not be forced to lose them after four years. India’s universities need people who have built companies, run cities, designed technologies, treated patients, founded institutions and solved public problems, and they need them as a lasting part of the faculty, not an occasional presence. Whether Indian higher education makes room for that is the real policy question.