Vice-Chancellor from 1906 to 1914 and again from 1921 to 1923. He was instrumental in discovering the talents of C. V. Raman and S. Radhakrishnan.The French scholar Sylvain Lévi commented : Academic career and later life Ashutosh Mukherjee had a vision of the kind of education he wanted young people to have, and he had the acumen and courage to extract it from his colonial masters. He set up several new academic graduate programs at the Calcutta University: comparative literature, anthropology, applied psychology, industrial chemistry, ancient Indian history and culture as well as Islamic culture. He also made arrangements for postgraduate teaching and research in Bengali, Hindi, Pali and Sanskrit. Scholars from all over India, irrespective of race, caste, and gender, came to study and teach there. He even persuaded European scholars to teach at his university. He was one of the first persons to recognise the work of Srinivasa Ramanujan. He also established Asutosh College in South Kolkata in 1916. He laid the foundry stone of Jagadbandhu Institution in 1914 and Santragachi Kedarnath Institution in 1925. Curzon's education mission in 1902 identified the universities including the Calcutta University, as centres of sedition where young people formed networks of resistance to colonial domination. The cause of this was thought to be the unwise granting of autonomy to these universities in the nineteenth century. Thus in the period of 1905 to 1935, the colonial administration tried to reinstate government control of education. In 1910, he was appointed the President of the Imperial (now National) Library Council to which he donated his personal collection of 80,000 books which are arranged in a separate section. He was the president of the inaugural session of the Indian Science Congress in 1914. Mukherjee was a member of the 1917–1919 Sadler Commission, presided over by Michael Ernest Sadler, which inquired into the state of Indian education. He was thrice elected as the president of The Asiatic Society. Having served as a fellow and subsequently as a vice-president of the Indian Association for the Cultivation of Science since the 1890s, in 1922 he was elected President of the IACS and held the office until his death. After serving five terms as Vice-Chancellor of Calcutta University, Mukherjee declined to be reappointed to a sixth term in 1923 when the university's Chancellor, Governor of Bengal the Earl of Lytton, tried to impose conditions on his reappointment. Shortly thereafter, he