The recent episode involving a private university at the AI Impact Summit has been painful to watch.

First, a word for the students and faculty. There are good students and committed teachers in every institution. When something goes viral for the wrong reasons, it is not only the management that feels the heat. It is the final year student sitting for placements. It is the young assistant professor building a research profile. Social media can be brutal. The debate quickly escalates into questions of national prestige. That part is deeply unfortunate.

Now to the uncomfortable questions.

What is fundamentally wrong in such incidents is not one exhibition or one poorly handled explanation. It is a culture where optics begin to dominate substance.
A serious academic institution does not send a marketing executive to explain a technical prototype. The person standing next to a demo must be someone who designed it, built it,

coded it or experimentally validated it. The moment scripted marketing language replaces technical depth, credibility collapses. In today’s world, every audience member can fact-check in real time.

Second, excessive freedom to marketing teams in academic matters is risky. Universities are not branding agencies. Communication must be academically vetted. Leadership must take responsibility. Public claims are not just about visibility. They reflect the intellectual integrity of the institution.

Third, when something goes wrong, own up to the mistake. Issue a clear clarification. Do not attempt to defend it with clever explanations and wordplay. Institutions earn long-term respect through accountability, not spin.

There is also a deeper structural issue that such episodes expose.

An academic institution cannot file an extraordinary numbers of patents without extraordinary investment. Filing, prosecuting and maintaining patents costs serious money. Converting them into granted patents and then into licensed technologies requires labs, researchers, legal support and sustained funding. If financial investments do not align with public claims, the mismatch will eventually surface.

The same applies to publications. Quality research is expensive. Equipment, consumables, PhD fellowships, postdoctoral support, conference travel and publication costs all add up. If managements set aggressive numerical targets for papers and patents without matching infrastructure and funding, perverse incentives creep in. Quantity replaces quality. Faculty feel pressured. Students get pushed into superficial outputs. The ecosystem notices. Word travels.

Rankings cannot be used as a shield. Many stakeholders understand how metrics can be gamed. Enduring reputation is built over decades of consistent work, not through sudden spike in numbers.

There are several institutions in the country walking a similar path. The only difference is that they have not yet faced scrutiny. They should learn from this moment. Build guardrails before you are forced to.

Align claims with capacity. Make research expenditure and outcomes transparent. Ensure that every technical claim is validated by faculty. Stop reducing academic performance to crude numerical targets. Encourage depth and real problem-solving.

If your strength is undergraduate teaching, embrace it. There is nothing inferior about being an excellent teaching-focused institution. Not every university needs to project itself as a top research powerhouse.

Finally, regulators must intervene earlier when visible anomalies appear in patent counts, publication patterns or faculty ratios. Timely correction is far better than public embarrassment.

One genuinely feels for the students and faculty who had no role in strategic decisions but now face the consequences of perception. The way forward is not outrage. It is reform.

Let this be a moment of introspection for all of us. Let us build institutions that are honest about their capabilities, transparent in their claims and ambitious in ways that are backed by real investment.

Reputation is fragile in this age of viral videos. Culture, if corrected in time, can still secure the future.

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