“New times” in the university are marked by narratives that bemoan a “decline in plurality and standards” especially in places where a new generation of scholars and students from historically disadvantaged sections in Indian society is posing challenges to the social homogeneity of the classroom, boards of studies and other academic bodies, leading to obvious frictions on issues related to standards and merit. A new generation of dalit scholarship has raised questions both about the accessibility of higher education and the limitations in making it enabling for those who struggle to gain entry into it. This has enabled an open debate on the absence of transparency in higher education and the nexus of networks of exclusion that operate formally and informally on campuses to reproduce caste inequalities in the metropolitan university.