For NLSIU’s graduating class, the first loss is obvious. A convocation is a one-time event. Degrees can be conferred in absentia and certificates sent home, but the ceremony - the walk across the stage, families in the audience, a batch graduating together - cannot really be substituted.

That makes the calling off of NLSIU’s 34th Annual Convocation regrettable. There is little virtue in pretending that students have lost nothing. But there is another kind of loss that should worry law students or broadly any law university more: the loss of its capacity for dissent.

NLSIU has attributed the cancellation to “unavoidable circumstances”; it has not said that the decision was taken in response to the controversy surrounding the proposed presence of Chief Justice of India (CJI) Surya Kant and Bar Council of India (BCI) Chairman Manan Kumar Mishra. That distinction matters. Yet, given what has unfolded between students, law universities and the institutions governing the legal profession over the past few weeks, the cancelled convocation is unlikely to be remembered as an administrative scheduling decision. Its absence has already acquired a context.

What began with NALSAR students questioning who should occupy their convocation stage became a much larger argument when the BCI briefly sought to prevent an entire graduating batch from enrolling as advocates. NLSIU students subsequently stood with their counterparts. The issue had ceased to be about whether students had chosen the right form of protest. It had become a question of whether law students could question institutional authority without putting their professional futures at stake.

One may disagree with the students. That is almost besides the point. Dissent that deserves protection only when it is agreeable is not much of a right. Nor should universities teach students to interrogate judgments, challenge arbitrary power and test the limits of legal authority for five years, only to become uncomfortable when they apply those to institutions closer to home.

This is what makes the NLSIU calling off its convocation significant.

India’s law schools have spent three decades becoming extraordinarily good at producing employable graduates. The NLU model has created a recognisable professional trajectory: moots, internships, publications, pre-placement offers and corporate law firms. There is nothing inherently wrong with that trajectory. But somewhere along the way, “industry-ready” has risked becoming too complete a description of what a successful law graduate ought to be.

A university, particularly a law university, has another responsibility: to produce people capable of being institutionally inconvenient and that responsibility assumes greater significance in India today. The recent Academic Freedom Index 2026, produced by researchers at FAU and the V-Dem Institute, places India among countries that have experienced a substantial decline in academic freedom over the past decade. The index measures not merely freedom to research and teach but institutional autonomy, campus integrity and freedom of academic and cultural expression.

An index cannot tell us whether the modus operandi of a particular protest is wise, but it can very well tell us why the existence of spaces in which such protests remain possible matters.

Academic freedom is not preserved by declarations in university brochures. It survives through use. Every generation must decide whether the university remains a place where authority may actually be questioned or merely a place where students are taught that, theoretically, it can be. Seen that way, the events at NLSIU and NALSAR are not important because law students have discovered protest. Indian universities have a much longer history of student resistance. What is notable is where this resistance has emerged and more importantly against whom: within institutions increasingly identified with professionalisation, high-paying placements and carefully managed career trajectories and against authorities like the BCI and the CJI.

These students may still join corporate firms next year. Many probably will. The point is not to romanticise litigation or public interest practice over corporate firms. It is something simpler: they have demonstrated that becoming professionally successful need not require becoming institutionally deferential.

There is, then, an almost perfect irony in who has been at the centre of this controversy.

At GNLU’s convocation in March, CJI Surya Kant expressed concern that 93 per cent of its students were being “hijacked” by corporate entities. Speaking as the head of the judiciary, he wanted National Law Universities (NLUs) to send more graduates towards the Bar and the Bench and towards a deeper engagement with the profession. The NLUs appear to have produced something even more demanding: students willing to argue with the institutions they are preparing to enter.

And here the story resists an easy villain. When the BCI Chairman sought action against NALSAR students, the Chief Justice himself objected and defended their right to protest. That matters. A constitutional culture is strengthened not merely when students question authority, but when authority can tolerate being questioned. Perhaps that is the more enduring lesson of this episode.

NLSIU’s graduating students have lost something they cannot get back. Their convocation should have been a celebration and its cancellation ought not to be casually converted into a heroic sacrifice on their behalf. But years from now, the legal fraternity may remember this graduating class for something other batches with perfectly conducted convocations will not be remembered for. An empty stage came to stand at the end of their legal education. And around that empty stage was an argument about what legal education should produce. The ceremony may be lost. The capacity to dissent need not be.

For years, the institutions have asked NLUs to produce something more than corporate-ready graduates. Perhaps they just got what they asked for.

Huzaifa Shaikh is a Doctoral Scholar at University of Massachusetts (US) and an alumnus of NALSAR.