Manoj Kumar Tiwari suffers from persistent neck pain. It’s so debilitating sometimes that he schedules his calls around the half-hour of exercise his doctor has advised. His head, though, is in a much better space.

That’s because he no longer has to run the Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS), which, from how he talks about it, was a headache of a task.

Tiwari, the director of IIM Mumbai, took over as the temporary vice chancellor of the institute in late 2023 and handed back the reins in August 2025. In that time, he put in place the masonry to recast India’s best-known social-science institution into a management school replica. An IIM tribute act. 

It’s a pattern: institutions of higher learning, including Jawaharlal Nehru University, are increasingly sacrificing arts and humanities at the altar of what the market is supposed to like. Which, in this country, typically means management or engineering. If anything, TISS arrived late to this party, mainly because the education ministry had a limited say in its running. 

That changed in 2023, when TISS changed hands from the Tata Trusts, paving the way for Tiwari’s appointment.

Tiwari, then, wasn’t acting all on his own.

The Tatas, despite headlining the name, had not funded TISS for a while. They provided the bulk of the money in the first few decades after it was established in 1936, but the central government, through the University Grants Commission, became the primary funder in 1964. The Tatas, though, continued to sponsor a number of research projects in social sciences. This arrangement continued until 2014, when the Narendra Modi government came to power and squeezedEconomic TimesTISS flounders as government fails to bolster it with funds funding.

The only time the Tatas made a contribution thereafter was in 2023, when they hastily wrote a cheque for Rs 5 crore to prevent a mass staff layoff. 

By the time Tiwari handed over the vice chancellorship to Badri Narayan Tiwari, he had charted—and paved some distance—the new IIM lite path the education ministry envisioned. 

TISS, known for pioneering social science courses like social work, has traditionally had a field-based, skill-based and social sensitivity-based approach to teaching, even for management courses.