By Katherine Mangan The first clue that the trajectories of their doctoral studies were about to veer off course was in July 2022 when emails to their longtime adviser suddenly bounced. The second, for Tanner Dulay, Rosa McGuire, and Madeline Cowen, erased any doubt. It came in the form of an email, on July 8,… Read More When Your Professor Disappears and No One Will Tell You Why
The mindset of the university’s leadership is telling Zainab Firdausi NB: A timely reflection by an ex-student. The article speaks for itself. I will add some remarks about a scenario in which founders make sweeping public statements which subtract from the dignity of the Vice Chancellor and the academic community. To contrapose ‘Bhagat Singh’ with… Read More Ashoka University’s Reluctant Politics
Ashoka University’s treatment of Sabyasachi Das for his working paper on possible voter suppression in Indian elections has focused attention on the future of elite private universities in India Mukul Kesavan Ashoka University’s (henceforth Ashoka) treatment of Sabyasachi Das after he uploaded a working paper that touched on possible voter suppression in Indian elections has… Read More Ashokan Edicts
Widespread precarity has facilitated a culture of illegal underpayment, with more than $80m in underpayments since 2020 across public universities, according to the National Tertiary Education Union’s wage theft report Jeff Sparrow On Monday, unionised workers at the University of Melbourne (where I teach) will go on strike. In the faculty of arts, the Melbourne law school, student… Read More How did Australia’s university system get so broken?
Vrinda Narain The second anniversary of the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan is fast approaching. Since then, Afghan women have been denied the most basic human rights in what can only be described as gender apartheid. Only by labelling it as such and making clear the situation in Afghanistan is a crime against humanity can the… Read More Taliban’s war on women must be formally recognized as gender apartheid
Shah Meer Baloch Attaullah, 16, was travelling to school on Tuesday to collect his exam results, using a cable car to cross the ravine from his village – as he had done many times before. But when a cable broke and left him, five other children and two adults hanging precariously in the air hundreds… Read More ‘I thought I was dead’: Pakistan cable car survivors describe 16-hour ordeal
NB: A recurring bad dream.. Here’s relevant correspondence from the time a senior scholar was forced out of Ashoka University in 2021. University authorities should protect their faculty from ideologically motivated attacks, not undermine them. If you dont stand up to such bullying there will never be an end to it. You may as well… Read More Significance of Ashoka University’s Teachers Calling for a Strike Over Academic Freedom / Solidarity with faculty of Ashoka University by the international academic community
Any attempt to reimagine or recreate a constitution may fall woefully short in its objective if ‘freedoms’ are threatened and ‘unfreedoms’ are instilled by a usurper of power Deepanshu Mohan Source: The Wire In an attempt to initiate a discussion on the ‘new’ foundations of the Indian Constitution, chief economic advisor to the prime minister Bibek… Read More Safeguarding Academic Freedom Is the Bedrock of India’s Constitutional Morality
JUAN COLE Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – White Power nationalism in South Africa during the Apartheid period from the 1940s until the early 1990s demanded that the 20% of the population that was white control the lives of the 68% of the population that was Black. (Actually, during this era the whites declined to only… Read More Israel to deny Palestinian-Israelis Preparation for University, in Exact Parallel to Apartheid South Africa
Despite official campaigns against the practice, ragging has never been an issue in campus politics. Far less does it figure in the larger political arena, where ideological debates are similarly oblivious to gender discrimination, hate crimes, all generated by the same psychopathology of violence linked to the exercise of power Supriya Chaudhuri On the night… Read More Jadavpur University ragging row: A failure to safeguard higher education institutions
After the truth-shower 