When the degree travels, does merit travel with it?

Academic recruitment is ordinarily described in the language of merit - qualifications, scholarship, teaching experience, research potential. But academic careers do not begin with a blank CV. The institutions in which a scholar has studied carry reputations of their own. And those reputations can become part of how an academic career is presented and understood.

This distinction matters increasingly in Indian legal education. National Law Universities, Central and State universities, private universities and long-established law colleges form a diverse and stratified landscape, one visible in the Government of India’s NIRF rankings. Internationalisation has also become an explicit part of higher education policy, with the UGC listing guidelines for internationalisation among its initiatives.

When the degree travels, does merit travel with it?

It would be tempting to divide academics into two categories: those with foreign degrees and those without. That would be too simple.

Publicly available institutional profiles show a variety of trajectories - some entirely Indian, some combining Indian and foreign qualifications, some involving postgraduate or doctoral study abroad. The point is not to treat any of these as inherently superior. It is to recognise that the institution named on a CV is itself a piece of information: a qualification tells us what someone studied; the institution tells us where. Institutions occupy different positions within the academic landscape, particularly visible in law, where a small number of institutions carry considerable national and international visibility. The question, therefore, is not simply whether a scholar has a foreign qualification, but whether academic pedigree and accumulated institutional trajectory have become increasingly important features of academic careers.

There is nothing speculative about this. Jindal Global Law School, for instance, describes itself as India’s first global law school and promotes its international collaborations and exchange programmes. NLSIU publicly maintains a faculty directory distinguishing core faculty from adjunct, visiting and practice-track categories. Other institutions similarly publish faculty qualifications. Taken together, these profiles make it possible to ask where law academics were educated and how their trajectories relate to institutional position. That is an empirical question and it need not begin with an accusation.

A more useful approach would reconstruct academic trajectories rather than simply count foreign degrees:

Education → First academic appointment → Subsequent appointments → Present institution.

This allows different forms of mobility to be observed: a scholar moving from a conventional university into a National Law University, or acquiring international postgraduate training before returning to India. Treating such trajectories simply as “foreign educated” or “Indian educated” loses much of what makes them interesting, which is why the concept of academic pedigree may be more useful than that binary.

There is substantial international literature suggesting that academic hiring itself can be studied as a network of institutional mobility. Lee, Clauset and Larremore’s study of faculty hiring networks found steep hierarchies, arguing that such structures can reinforce existing social and epistemic inequalities. This research does not establish that Indian legal education follows the same pattern, nor should its findings be transplanted wholesale. It does, however, offer a useful methodological proposition: academic careers can be studied through institutional movement rather than qualifications alone. The Indian legal education would benefit from such an examination.

Consider an academic with an Indian LL.B., LL.M. and PhD, followed by years of teaching and research - a trajectory representing considerable investment and sustained engagement with Indian courts and institutions. Now consider another whose Indian law degree was followed by postgraduate education abroad and international experience. The two trajectories are different, but that does not establish that one academic is better than the other; it simply means their CVs contain different forms of institutional experience. The difficulty arises when institutional names become so prominent in evaluation that they begin to communicate more than the qualifications themselves, often without any formal rule ever being stated. That is why the issue deserves empirical examination rather than assumption.

There is an important distinction to make here. An argument about academic pedigree should not become an argument against international education. International mobility can enrich comparative research, expand collaboration and provide access to different methodologies and scholarly communities. India is already moving toward greater internationalisation through its higher education policy and regulatory framework. The question is not whether India should become more international - it already is. The question is what standards of academic evaluation should accompany that internationalisation.

There is a difference between valuing a qualification and treating the institutional name attached to it as a proxy for the person who holds it. A foreign qualification may be highly relevant to one field; a domestic qualification equally valuable in another. Research output, teaching experience, methodological ability, subject expertise and intellectual contribution remain independent dimensions of quality. The institution from which someone graduated is another piece of information.

It should not automatically become a summary judgment particularly in legal academia, closely tied as it is to Indian constitutional, statutory and institutional life. An academic whose scholarship concerns Indian law is no less capable for having trained entirely within India; nor does international training make a scholar more capable merely because a selection committee recognises the name. The relevant question should always return to what the scholar has done with that education.

The more interesting phenomenon may not be the foreign degree itself. It may be accumulated academic pedigree. A trajectory containing multiple institutional signals: an undergraduate degree from one institution, postgraduate education at another, doctoral training elsewhere, a fellowship, a research position, subsequent appointments. None of this is inherently problematic; academic careers naturally accumulate credentials and experience.

But it raises real questions: Does an accumulation of prestigious institutional names affect how a candidate’s scholarship is perceived and, if so, how much? Does the effect remain after research output, teaching experience and subject expertise are accounted for? These are empirical questions, to be answered through evidence rather than assumption.

India’s higher education system is becoming more internationally connected, and institutional evaluation will need to keep pace with that diversity of trajectories. A foreign degree should be neither an automatic advantage nor an automatic disadvantage and neither should an Indian one. What matters is whether the academic work that follows receives appropriate weight.

The answer need not be complicated. Academic recruitment should evaluate international experience, research productivity, teaching experience, methodological training and knowledge of Indian law according to their relevance to the position. And if institutional pedigree is being used as an informal signal, institutions should be conscious of that possibility rather than assuming institutional reputation and individual merit are interchangeable. This is not an argument for disregarding prestigious universities, nor for artificially creating parity where genuine differences in resources or training exist. It is an argument for separating institutional reputation from individual achievement wherever possible.

Academic hierarchy is unavoidable to some extent. Universities differ in resources, research environments, selectivity and intellectual traditions. The problem begins only when those differences become invisible criteria for evaluating individuals. A degree from a prestigious institution may tell us something; it cannot tell us everything. A foreign degree may indicate international exposure; an Indian degree may indicate sustained domestic engagement, neither can by itself establish scholarly quality.

The important question is not whether foreign graduates are “better.” That is too crude a proposition to be useful. The better question is whether institutional pedigree has acquired a weight in academic evaluation that deserves closer examination. A proper empirical study could tell us, and that is precisely why the question should be asked without becoming an accusation. Indian legal education is entering a period of deeper internationalisation. That should be welcomed and will be most valuable if it expands academic opportunity while preserving a broad conception of merit.

The academic world will always contain prestigious institutions and degrees that carry recognition. What it should resist is the assumption that the name on a degree is a sufficient account of the person who holds it.

The degree may travel. The question is whether merit travels with it.

Dr Najeed Naved Siddiqui is an Assistant Professor of Law at Manipal Law School.