American Colleges Contend With a Tidal Wave of New Undergraduate Unions

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

Sabry Hafez: the Novel, Politics and Islam – Haydar Haydar’s Banquet for Seaweed

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

Nakul Krishna on A. K. Ramanujan: The literary legacy of an Indian modernist / The essay censored by DU’s Academic Council

First posted August 15, 2013 “Yes, I know all that. I should be modern” – begins Ramanujan’s ‘Conventions of Despair’. Others in India have felt this impulse, and it has pulled them in different directions. In politics, it has drawn them towards nationalism, socialism and fascism. In religion, it has had similarly contradictory effects: either… Read More Nakul Krishna on A. K. Ramanujan: The literary legacy of an Indian modernist / The essay censored by DU’s Academic Council

Toys from Trash: Teaching kids science using everyday objects / Visit Arvind Gupta’s Archive

First posted January 24, 2014 The road to the offices inside Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics’ (IUCAA) Children Science Centre in Pune passes through a well-set, well-manicured lawn past the administrative buildings of the place. The tranquil atmosphere of the campus is broken only by the chaos in the room opposite his office. Noisy… Read More Toys from Trash: Teaching kids science using everyday objects / Visit Arvind Gupta’s Archive

The Rise of the Sectarian University (in the USA)

Greg Conti It has quickly become a commonplace that American elite higher education is in a more perilous position than it has been in recent memory. Long-standing conservative discontent has crystallized as a result of recent events; multiple proposals targeting universities’ pocketbooks have been floated by lawmakers in the past weeks. Republican officials have made… Read More The Rise of the Sectarian University (in the USA)

Remembering Professor J.P.S. Uberoi: Scholar, Mentor, and Teacher (1934-2024) / Antim Ardas for Professor Jit Pal Singh Uberoi

NB: Jit Singh Uberoi was beloved of many of us who were not students of sociology. My personal link with him was not slight: he was on the interview committee which appointed me to a teaching position in Ramjas College, in August 1974. Thereafter we met and interacted in academic seminars as well as on… Read More Remembering Professor J.P.S. Uberoi: Scholar, Mentor, and Teacher (1934-2024) / Antim Ardas for Professor Jit Pal Singh Uberoi