As artificial intelligence, digital businesses and emerging technologies reshape industries faster than university curricula can often respond, Indian higher education is confronting an old question with new urgency: who is best equipped to teach what happens at the frontier of practice?
The University Grants Commission created the Professor of Practice route precisely to bridge this gap. Under its guidelines, accomplished professionals from fields ranging from engineering and technology to entrepreneurship, management, law, media and public administration can teach in universities without the conventional academic requirements expected of professors. Candidates are expected to have at least 15 years of professional experience, while formal academic qualifications and publication records can be waived for those with exemplary expertise.
For Vineet Gupta, Founder of Ashoka University and Plaksha University, the significance of the model goes beyond inviting an industry leader for an occasional lecture.
“A Professor of Practice should be treated as seriously as a conventional academic professor in disciplines where professional experience is central to learning,” Gupta said. “The two bring different strengths to a university. One should not replace the other, but students should have meaningful access to both.”
That distinction is particularly relevant in fast-changing fields such as artificial intelligence.
In May, the government’s AI Curriculum Taskforce, working with industry experts and NASSCOM, identified gaps in existing computer science and allied curricula. Its recommendations placed faculty development and industry-integrated learning at the centre of the response, including a structured pathway for corporate practitioners to serve as educators and the engagement of experienced industry professionals as adjunct faculty.
AI makes the case especially visible because industry practice is evolving faster than traditional academic recruitment cycles. Someone building generative-AI products, deploying machine-learning systems or running AI infrastructure may be working on technologies that did not exist in their present form when a university syllabus was designed.
“It will be challenging for universities to develop every emerging capability only through the conventional faculty recruitment model, especially since a lot of the research talent in emerging technologies is joining industry” Gupta said. “In areas such as AI, many of the people closest to the technology are practitioners building products, companies and applications. It will be great for students to learn from such people.”
The same argument extends beyond technology. Entrepreneurship is difficult to teach entirely through textbooks. A founder who has built a company, raised capital, hired teams, entered markets and dealt with failure can bring a different dimension to a course on entrepreneurship. Design thinking, product management, advertising, filmmaking, public policy and several professional disciplines similarly benefit from experience acquired outside academia.
UGC’s framework itself recognises this. Professors of Practice can participate not only in teaching but also in curriculum design, entrepreneurship mentoring, industry collaboration, joint research and consultancy. Universities can appoint them up to 10% of their sanctioned faculty strength, without affecting recruitment to regular academic positions.
Yet adoption remains modest.
According to Ministry of Education data reported earlier this year, 1,841 Professors of Practice had been engaged across 349 higher education institutions, while around 80% of central universities had yet to appoint one. Private institutions have moved faster than many public universities. The UGC’s dedicated portal now shows more than 20,000 registered experts and 565 registered institutions, indicating that interest is considerably larger than actual deployment.
For Gupta, this is where the next phase of the experiment matters. Bringing a well-known executive to campus for a few talks does little to change education. Practitioners need to become part of the academic process.
“The model will work only when professionals are involved in designing courses, mentoring projects and working with students over meaningful periods,” he said. “A guest lecture gives exposure. A serious Professor of Practice can change how a student understands a discipline.”
Some institutions are already taking this approach. BITS Pilani, for instance, describes its Professor of Practice cadre as a senior industry track in which professionals can design and teach niche electives, mentor students and connect academic research with applied industry work. Ashoka University through its “Centre for Entrepreneurship” also follows a similar approach where many courses in business, design thinking, leadership are taught by some of the best industry leaders and practitioners.
There are safeguards to consider. Professional success does not automatically make someone a good teacher. Universities will still need rigorous selection, orientation and evaluation. Practitioners must learn how to structure learning, assess students and work alongside career academics. Academic faculty, meanwhile, remain essential for foundational knowledge, sustained research and intellectual depth.
The opportunity, therefore, is not to create a parallel faculty system. It is to build teams in which scholarship and practice reinforce each other.
This becomes even more important as universities introduce interdisciplinary courses that did not fit neatly within traditional departments. A programme combining AI, entrepreneurship and design, for instance, may require a computer scientist, a practising technologist, a designer and an entrepreneur to teach different parts of the same learning experience.
“Universities should ask a simple question: who can create the best learning experience for the student?” Gupta said. “In most disciplines that will be a distinguished researcher, but increasingly in emerging technologies and professional courses, it will be a practitioner with decades of experience.”
India’s Professor of Practice framework has already created the regulatory opening. The bigger challenge is cultural: whether institutions are prepared to treat professional expertise as a serious academic resource rather than an occasional addition to the timetable.
If they do, the experiment could become far more consequential than a new faculty designation. It could change who participates in building curricula, how quickly universities respond to new industries and, ultimately, how closely classroom learning connects with the world students enter after graduation.
