The moment the middle class feels it has no access to a public good, it does everything it can to devalue it. The systematic destruction of Delhi University is a case study in elite secession Mukul Kesavan The death of Delhi University has gone unremarked. It isn’t formally dead; it still educates tens of thousands… Read More In memoriam
PRESS RELEASEFor Immediate Release: Ambedkar Jayanti Marks a Milestone: Release of Draft Policy for Strengthening Public Libraries in India by the Free Libraries Network5 PM, 13 April 2024, Press Club, New Delhi. [Delhi, April 3, 2024]: Commemorating the birth anniversary of Dr BR Ambedkar, the FreeLibraries Network announces the release of a landmark draft policy… Read More Free Libraries Network: Draft Policy for Strengthening Public Libraries in India
(NB: In 2022 alone, 7.5 lac Indian students migrated abroad for higher studies. By 2025, Indian students studying abroad are expected to spend up to $70 billion. Those curious about Sardar Patel’s proficiency in English and also his views on V. D. Savarkar’s role in Gandhiji’s assassination, could check volume 6 of Selected Correspondence of Sardar… Read More Ruchir Joshi: Out of depth – India’s anti-knowledge brigade
NB: Hari Sen was a close friend, a highly regarded colleague at Ramjas College History department – where he taught for nearly three decades – and a wonderful person. He was a committed teacher, devoted to his students and played a big role in making our department well-respected across the university. He had a mischievous… Read More R.I.P. Hari Sen (1955-2024). Beloved teacher and outstanding human being
NB: Observation by a psychoanalyst: The writer seems to know little about psychotherapy: what the latter does is validate the feelings of trauma, and provide empathy and support. How the person copes is best left to themselves and to whatever strategies, personal and collective they can creatively access or create. We all live through adolescence… Read More ‘We are all unwell’: a scholar’s radical approach to health
NB: Anyone concerned about the intellectual health of their country should recall what Mao’s regime did to China’s academic life under the so-called Cultural Revolution in the late 1960’s. This was Mao Zedong’s motivated assault on academics, intellectuals and on his critics in the Communist Party leadership. Professor Frank Dikotter’s research study of this momentous… Read More Where Are the ‘Don Quixotes’ of Indian Academia?
The infantilizing social control of the university. Rita Koganzon When I was a graduate teaching assistant at Harvard University a decade ago, one of my students missed a final exam because he forgot to set his alarm. I didn’t learn about this because he told me, in person or even by email; nor did he… Read More The Coddling of the American Undergraduate
Real intelligence requires critical thinking and causal reasoning. LLMs cannot acquire these skills by finding statistical patterns in words they don’t understand. By Gary Smith and Jeffrey Funk It has been almost 70 years since the term “artificial intelligence” was coined at a 1956 Dartmouth College summer workshop. The conference was convened by the mathematician… Read More When It Comes to Critical Thinking, AI Flunks the Test
By Forest Hunt Before 2022, only two colleges had a union representing undergraduate workers. Now undergraduate students at two large universities and at least seven other colleges have unionized since October — accelerating a trend that began 18 months ago. Last week, 20,000 student workers across the California State University system voted to form a union, following… Read More American Colleges Contend With a Tidal Wave of New Undergraduate Unions
First posted June 07, 2016 The astonishing story of the uproar in Egypt over the publication of a Syrian novel set in Algeria—a work of literature as trigger for political crisis and polemical turmoil, two decades after it was written, in a landscape completely transformed. Haydar Haydar’s fiction as tuning-fork of stark dissonances of time… Read More Sabry Hafez: the Novel, Politics and Islam – Haydar Haydar’s Banquet for Seaweed
After the truth-shower 