The Measure of Dignity

I visited the Gandhi Ashram in Ahmedabad, India today. It is a quiet place with spare buildings, set along the Sabarmati River. The exhibits are restrained, thoughtful, and text-heavy. The sound of what seemed to be thousands of birds was impossible to ignore, loud and alive, their presence filling a space that was once residential, once home to intellectuals, anti-colonial nationalists, nonviolent resisters, and civil rights activists.

Much of what is displayed there centers on the idea of human dignity, but not as an abstraction or a legal term or a marketing slogan. It is dignity as something recognized and respected daily, in how one speaks, in how one resists, and in how one refuses to cooperate with systems that humiliate or dehumanize, even when those systems are efficient, normalized, or profitable. Dignity is not selective. It is not contingent on nationality, usefulness, education level, religion, or compliance. Once dignity becomes conditional, it ceases to exist.

I think about dignity a lot. From daily interactions I have and see, to my work, when I read history, and more broadly, in how the world is currently organizing power.

We often talk about dignity only at moments of catastrophe: mass displacement, war, genocide, famine. Those moments demand attention, but they are not where dignity is first lost.

Dignity shows up in how a server is spoken to. In whether a visa applicant is treated as a human being or a risk profile. In whether international students are framed as contributors to a learning community or reduced to revenue lines. In whether migrant labor is acknowledged as labor or treated as an inconvenience.

Gandhi insisted that moral consistency mattered because small humiliations train societies to tolerate larger ones. If it is acceptable to demean someone with less power in ordinary life, it becomes easier to justify their exclusion or suffering when stakes escalate.

This resonates with international education. Ours is a field that prides itself on certain values like exchange, mutual understanding, and global learning. Yet we operate inside systems that routinely compromise dignity in the name of efficiency, security, or national interest.

I’ve been in rooms where people spoke fluently about global citizenship while simultaneously designing processes that assumed suspicion as a default for students from certain countries. I have watched institutions celebrate diversity while outsourcing recruitment to agents with little oversight, then expressing surprise when students arrive misinformed, indebted, or disillusioned. None of this is usually framed as cruelty but as pragmatism.

Gandhi was skeptical of pragmatism divorced from ethics. He understood that systems rarely announce themselves as unjust. They announce themselves as necessary.

“The means may be likened to a seed, the end to a tree, and there is just the same inviolable connection between the means and the end as there is between the seed and the tree.”

— Mahatma Gandhi

In international education, we might tell ourselves that complex visa systems are unavoidable, that surveillance is protective, that excessive documentation is just the price of mobility. Some of that is true. Much of it is not. The line between necessary regulation and unnecessary humiliation is crossed far more often than we admit.

When students are forced to prove their legitimacy repeatedly, to justify their presence even after admission, to live under constant threat of status loss for minor infractions, we should be honest about what that does to human dignity. When universities benefit from international enrollment but distance themselves from students when political winds shift, we should name that too.

Mohandas Gandhi was trained as a lawyer. He understood law as a lived instrument of power. His early legal work in South Africa shaped much of his thinking about dignity precisely because it exposed the gap between legality and justice. He saw, firsthand, how perfectly legal systems could be used to humiliate, exclude, and control. Pass laws, registration regimes, racial classifications, and mobility restrictions were all lawful. Law, untethered from dignity, becomes dangerous.

This insight remains deeply relevant to the legal profession today. Lawyers are trained to ask whether something is permissible, compliant, defensible. But perhaps we should be asking a more unsettling question: What does this do to the human being subjected to it?

In modern legal systems, dignity often appears as a principle rather than a practice. It shows up in constitutional preambles, in human rights instruments, in aspirational language. Yet day-to-day legal processes frequently erode the very dignity they claim to protect. Procedural fairness becomes ritual rather than substance. Due process becomes a checklist rather than a safeguard, if it even exists at all.

I see this tension constantly. Immigration law is perhaps the clearest example. Many of the most dehumanizing aspects of migration control are entirely legal. Endless documentation requirements. Presumptions of fraud. Surveillance framed as protection. Discretion exercised without transparency. These systems are lawful, but they are not dignified.

Gandhi’s approach to law was radical precisely because it refused to let legality absolve moral responsibility. He believed that obedience to unjust law did not preserve social order; it corroded it. His use of civil disobedience was not anti-legal. It was an argument about the purpose of law. Law exists to structure justice, not to excuse harm.

For those of us trained in the legal field, this presents an uncomfortable mirror. Lawyers often pride themselves on neutrality. But Gandhi understood that neutrality within unjust systems functions as endorsement. Silence, too, is a form of participation.

This has implications for universities and international education leaders who operate at the intersection of law and human mobility. We comply with visa regimes, export controls, sanctions, and risk frameworks because we must. Compliance does not require moral blindness. Nor does it excuse us from interrogating how these frameworks shape human lives.

Respecting dignity in legal practice does not mean ignoring the law. It means insisting that law remain intelligible, reviewable, and bounded by principle. It means resisting the quiet slide from regulation into humiliation. It means remembering that every policy ultimately lands on a person.

It is impossible to reflect on dignity today without acknowledging current global atrocities. I will not pretend neutrality where neutrality itself becomes a moral position. The ongoing devastation in Gaza, alongside other conflicts around the world, confronts us with the same question: Do we believe that some lives are inherently more grievable than others?

Gaza is also a legal story, about siege, proportionality, collective punishment, and whose suffering is rendered legible under international law.

Gandhi’s commitment to nonviolence did not come from naïveté. It came from an unflinching belief that once a society accepts the logic that certain human beings may be erased for the sake of security or progress, there is no principled place to stop. Violence, once normalized, always expands its reach.

For those of us in education, particularly international education, this matters because our work exists at the intersection of borders, power, and identity. We send students into the world with narratives about cooperation and peace, while often failing to grapple with how easily those ideals collapse under political pressure.

Respect for dignity does not mean avoiding difficult conversations. It means refusing to dehumanize, even rhetorically. It means resisting language that turns people into abstractions: collateral damage, illegal flows, bad actors, security threats. There is moral danger in such language, because it prepares the ground for atrocity long before the first bomb falls.

Back home, the issue of human dignity intersects with law enforcement in widely reported events. Currently, federal ICE agents in Minneapolis have been involved in multiple fatal shootings, including the killing of Alex Pretti and Renée Good, both U.S. citizens, during broad immigration enforcement operations. These incidents have continued to spark protests, legal challenges, and intensified scrutiny of federal immigration enforcement, with advocates, local officials, and even some national political figures calling for accountability and constraints on how enforcement agencies exercise discretionary power.

What makes this reckoning unavoidable is that the erosion of dignity is not confined to distant battlefields. It is visible at home, in the ordinary mechanics of immigration enforcement. Across the United States, people have been taken from their homes early in the morning, walked outside in robes or bare feet into freezing temperatures, handcuffed in front of neighbors and children. Parents have been detained while their children watch from doorways or school bus stops, sometimes with the children themselves used as leverage to compel adults to emerge. None of this requires a declaration of emergency. Much of it occurs under color of law, framed as routine procedure, even when it is anything but.

What is stripped away in these moments is not only liberty but personhood. Dignity collapses when fear becomes a tool, when family bonds are exploited, when exposure and humiliation are treated as acceptable collateral in the name of enforcement efficiency. This is how societies lose their moral bearings, not through dramatic acts alone, but through practices that train the public to accept degradation as normal, lawful, and necessary.

These episodes raise a deeper question: when the legal authority of the state operates without sufficient moral constraint, what is the measure of human dignity left in its wake?

One of Gandhi’s most radical commitments was his insistence on seeing the whole person, even in his opponents, a principle rooted in his belief that one must oppose injustice without denying the humanity of the wrongdoer.

In international education, this discipline is especially necessary. Students are not visas. Refugees are not crises. Migrants are not problems to be managed. Agents are not inherently exploitative, nor are institutions inherently benevolent. Every actor exists within constraints, incentives, histories, and fears.

Acknowledging complexity does not absolve responsibility. Gandhi combined radical empathy with radical accountability and believed dignity required both.

For universities, that means examining where our policies quietly harm those with the least power. It means asking whether our partnerships are reciprocal in substance or only in rhetoric. It means deciding whether we are willing to lose convenience, speed, or even revenue in order to uphold the values we claim to teach.

Human dignity is often framed as a personal moral value. But really, it is a public duty.

For educators, and especially for those of us who lead institutions, dignity cannot be optional or situational. It must inform hiring, admissions, student support, crisis response, and advocacy. It must shape how we speak when our communities are targeted, and how we act when it would be easier to stay silent.

Dignity is not proven through proclamations but through consistency. Sometimes that consistency looks small. It looks like pushing back on demeaning language in a meeting. It looks like designing processes that assume good faith unless proven otherwise. It looks like standing with students when political rhetoric turns hostile, even when doing so invites criticism.

Other times, it looks like refusal. Refusal to normalize the unacceptable. Refusal to cooperate with systems that demand complicity in humiliation.

Dignity is inherent. What must be practiced is respect for it, and what must be extended is its recognition.

International education, at its best, is a daily exercise in that practice. At its worst, it becomes a polished veneer over deeply unequal systems.

The choice between those two paths is not abstract. It is made in policies, budgets, partnerships, and words. It is made when we decide who belongs, who is protected, and who is expendable.

It begins, as it always has, with how we treat the people standing right in front of us, in spaces far less extraordinary than an ashram but no less revealing.