This week, Lance Fortnow, a long-serving computer scientist at the Illinois Institute of Technology, wrote on LinkedIn that he had lost his job. Illinois Tech, he explained, had declared a state of “extraordinary financial exigency” and had laid off roughly 160 faculty and staff – tenured academics among them.
What followed in the comments was, in its own way, more instructive than the announcement itself. Yann LeCun called it “shocking, albeit not entirely surprising given federal funding cuts.” A statistics professor in Nebraska said his own department had lost every one of its faculty to an almost identical declaration a few months earlier, and that episodes like this were becoming, in his words, “canaries singing” with troubling regularity. A colleague laid off from UC Davis back in April noted that his university had cut 450 positions this year despite record enrolment and healthy philanthropic giving – a reminder that the usual explanation, falling enrolment, is not always the real one. A professor at the University of Illinois Chicago wrote that tenure “should give more protection than this, even if IIT reserved a legal escape hatch.” Others reached for larger frames still: a demographic decline in the college-age population, an accountability gap in which long-term job security was never matched by pressure to keep bringing in research funding, and – more cynically – a sense that “financial exigency” has become a convenient device for institutions that feel, in this era, that consequences are avoidable.
Beneath the disagreement about causes, nearly everyone agreed on one thing: this keeps happening, and it is no longer confined to a handful of struggling institutions.
For most readers, that is the whole story – a piece about the financial pressures now bearing down on American higher education. For India, it should be something else.
Illinois Tech is not simply another university caught in a difficult year. In May last year, it became the first American university to receive approval from India’s University Grants Commission to establish a full, degree-granting campus on Indian soil – not through the GIFT City route that institutions like Deakin and Wollongong have used, but through the mainstream UGC pathway, offering complete undergraduate and graduate degrees directly to Indian students under Indian regulation. Its Mumbai campus, in the Godrej Business District in Vikhroli, is set to welcome its first cohort of students this very fall – the same fall in which its parent campus in Chicago is absorbing a faculty senate vote of no confidence against its own president and provost, a declaration of financial exigency, and the layoff of a substantial share of its academic staff, some reportedly given as little as two weeks’ notice.
I want to be careful here, because it would be easy to turn a coincidence of timing into something it is not. This is not an indictment of Illinois Tech, and it is certainly not an indictment of international branch campuses as a model. I have argued before, and still believe, that well-conceived IBCs can enrich India’s higher education ecosystem – through research capacity, faculty exposure, and choices that simply did not exist for Indian students a decade ago. Illinois Tech may weather this storm entirely, and its Mumbai campus may go on to become exactly what it promises. None of that is being questioned here.
What is worth questioning is what this moment reveals about how India evaluates the universities it invites in.
When we discuss International Branch Campuses in India, the conversation is almost entirely about entry. Has the university received regulatory approval? Where does it rank? What programmes will it offer? Where will the campus sit? These are necessary questions. They are not sufficient ones – because they are all asked and answered at a single point in time, and universities, like every other institution, do not stay still.
Illinois Tech’s own promotional material for Mumbai promises Indian students access to faculty who also teach in Chicago, participation in its Elevate research and internship programme, and the kind of cross-campus mobility that is supposed to be the actual value of a branch campus – not a rebadged degree, but a genuine extension of the parent institution’s academic life. That promise depends on the parent having a stable, well-resourced faculty able and willing to make the exchange real. A faculty that has just been through a no-confidence vote, a financial exigency declaration, and the loss of a meaningful share of its ranks is not, at least for now, the settled ecosystem that promise assumes. I don’t say this to suggest Mumbai’s students are getting a hollow degree – it is far too early to say anything of the kind. I say it because this is precisely the sort of question that ought to be asked continuously about an IBC’s parent, not asked once at approval and then filed away.
There is a structural irony worth naming too. A meaningful share of the pressure on universities like Illinois Tech traces back to a decline in international student enrolment, driven in no small part by a harder US visa and immigration climate. Universities across the country are now looking to campuses abroad, in India among other places, partly as a way of reaching the very students who have become harder to recruit to their home campuses. That is not a criticism of the strategy – it is, if anything, a sensible response to a changing world, and I expect more universities to make a similar bet in the years ahead. But it does mean India cannot assume an IBC’s fortunes rise and fall independently of what happens to its parent elsewhere. If anything, the two are becoming more entangled, not less.
India has built a serious regulatory framework to decide which foreign universities may set up campuses here – first through the IFSCA route in GIFT City, and now, with Illinois Tech, through the mainstream UGC pathway that other universities are watching closely. Southampton, Queen’s Belfast, and Western Sydney have all signalled interest in India; the University of York has already announced its own Mumbai campus for the same year. But approval, however rigorous, is a point-in-time decision. Institutional health is not a point-in-time fact. It is a condition that has to be continuously true.
Banks are supervised long after they receive their licences. Insurers remain under regulatory watch for as long as they write policies, not merely when they first register. Listed companies carry disclosure obligations for the life of their listing, not just at their IPO. In each case, we accepted long ago that the risk to the public does not end at approval – it begins there. Universities entrusted with the education, and increasingly the degrees and career trajectories, of thousands of Indian students and their families deserve at least the same degree of ongoing seriousness. Not suspicion. Not an assumption of bad faith. Simply the recognition that a year-old approval letter tells you very little about an institution’s condition today.
What might continuous institutional due diligence for IBCs actually look like? It need not be onerous. Periodic disclosure of the parent institution’s financial position. Some visibility into faculty turnover, both at the branch and at the parent campus meant to be feeding it. A mechanism for registering governance stress of the kind Illinois Tech’s faculty senate just made public – a vote of no confidence is, after all, a disclosure event of sorts, even if no regulator currently treats it as one. None of this threatens a well-run IBC. It only ensures that “well-run” remains something India keeps checking, rather than something it decided once, in an approval letter.
Illinois Tech may recover fully, and its Mumbai campus may go on to be exactly what its brochures promise: a genuine extension of a strong research university, not a hedge dressed up as an opportunity. I hope it does. But the episode leaves behind a question bigger than any one university. When India approves an International Branch Campus, it is not importing a curriculum or a logo. It is entering a long-term relationship with an institution whose fortunes will keep changing long after the approval letter is signed – sometimes for the better, and sometimes, as this fall in Chicago shows, considerably for the worse.
The real work, then, is not in deciding who gets to come in. It is in building the capacity to keep watching, carefully and continuously, after they do.
Source: Lance Fortnow, LinkedIn, August 2026.
