Santishree Dhulipudi Pandit, a political science professor at Savitribai Phule Pune University, has been appointed as the first women Vice Chancellor of Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU).
She was appointed by President Ram Nath Kovind, who is the University’s Visitor. She will hold the job for the next five years. She succeeds M. Jagadesh Kumar, who was appointed chairperson of the University Grants Commission last week, after a stormy tenure. He congratulated her and wished her success in a press statement on Monday.
Alumna of JNU
Dr. Pandit is herself an alumna of JNU, having completed her M.Phil and Ph.D there at the School of International Relations, writing her doctoral thesis on “Parliament and Foreign Policy in India — The Nehru Years”. She started her teaching career as a lecturer at Goa University before moving to the University of Pune in 1992, where she focussed on teaching and research on international politics and economics, global governance, security and human rights, peace and conflict studies and India’s foreign policy.
Dr. Pandit has previously been a member of the Indian Council of Social Science Research, the UGC Committee on Higher Education and Indicators and a number of think tanks, according to her profile on the university website. She is currently president of the Indian Political Science Association. She has been a resource person for the Academic Staff Colleges and the Military Intelligence Training School in Pune, providing insight into the Asia Pacific region and India’s security perceptions.
Born in the erstwhile USSR, where her mother taught Tamil and Telugu at the Leningrad Oriental Faculty Department, Dr. Pandit hails from Chennai and is a gold medallist graduate of the University of Madras. She herself is multilingual, speaking Telugu, Tamil, Marathi, Hindi, Sanskrit and English. ( The Hindu )
