You are sitting in a departmental meeting in Srinagar. On the table is an order to remove "problematic" books. No list of titles. No list of authors. Someone has to decide, today, what comes off the shelf - and no one above you will say where the line actually is. Placeholder Placeholder

A Head of Department's Real Dilemma Isn't Whether to Comply - It's How Much to Cull A Head of Department at Kashmir University has just received an order: screen your department's books and remove anything "problematic." No title list.

No author list. No appeal process if a decision is questioned later. That absence isn't a gap in an otherwise clear instruction - it is the instruction. And it puts the actual ethical weight on the one person now forced to define, alone, what "problematic" means.

The obvious framing - comply with state security or defend academic freedom - misses the real trap. Compliance isn't a single, definable act here, because there's nothing concrete to comply with. There's no checklist to follow, so "complying" actually means guessing at the state's intent and then acting preemptively to avoid being wrong.

That's not obedience. That's anticipatory self-censorship and it's a fundamentally different - and heavier - choice than following a defined rule. Consider what each direction of error actually costs. Remove too little and a book later flagged by an inspection or a political complaint becomes personal and institutional liability - disciplinary action, reputational damage, possibly worse, for a Head of Department who has no defined criteria to point to in their defense.

Remove too much and the department quietly loses genuine scholarship - texts on Kashmir's history, on separatist movements as academic subjects rather than endorsements, on political theory that engages critically with the state - the very material Political Science, Law and History departments exist to teach.

Neither error is hypothetical. Both are already happening in real departments this week. This is what makes the dilemma real rather than performed: a genuinely careful, security-conscious HoD and a genuinely principled, academically committed HoD could each make defensible but opposite decisions about the same book, because the directive gives neither of them anything specific to reason from.

The vagueness doesn't test their judgment fairly - it tests how much institutional risk they're willing to personally absorb. The fiduciary duty question sits underneath all of this. A Head of Department holds a duty to preserve the department's scholarly integrity and archive - that duty doesn't disappear because a directive is unclear.

But it now has to be balanced against a second, competing duty: institutional survival and personal protection, when the rules for staying safe were never actually written down. For the exam, the sharpest version of this case isn't "should institutions comply with state security directives" - that's too broad to test real reasoning.

It's the much narrower, harder question: what does a person owe their institution and their discipline when the authority issuing an order refuses to define its own terms, leaving the moral and practical risk of interpretation entirely on the person executing it.