‘I thought I was dead’: Pakistan cable car survivors describe 16-hour ordeal

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

Significance of Ashoka University’s Teachers Calling for a Strike Over Academic Freedom / Solidarity with faculty of Ashoka University by the international academic community

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

Safeguarding Academic Freedom Is the Bedrock of India’s Constitutional Morality

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

Israel to deny Palestinian-Israelis Preparation for University, in Exact Parallel to Apartheid South Africa

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

Jadavpur University ragging row: A failure to safeguard higher education institutions

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

Afghan women are being ‘erased from everything’

Tuesday marks the two-year anniversary of Kabul falling to the Taliban, which seized control of Afghanistan amid the United States’ chaotic, controversial withdrawal from the country after nearly 20 years of fighting…. But celebrating is the last thing many Afghan women want to do… as life under Taliban rule becomes increasingly repressive and brutal. When Zahra thinks back to her life before the… Read More Afghan women are being ‘erased from everything’

After Pune teacher’s arrest: Fear and surveillance in the classroom

If, as a teacher, you become overly cautious before you utter a word, if you worry that a student is recording your lecture, or the administration is continually monitoring your every move, how can you teach Marx, Gandhi, Ambedkar, Tagore, Iqbal, Manto and Premchand freely, spontaneously and creatively?  Avijit Pathak The primary reason I could… Read More After Pune teacher’s arrest: Fear and surveillance in the classroom

Appeal & Signature Campaign to Save the Centre for Historical Studies Library in JNU

NB: The temptation of our day is to accept the intolerable, for fear of still worse to come: Hermann Rauschning, The Revolution of Nihilism (1939). DS This is an appeal to the national and global academic community at large, including JNU alumni as well as teachers’ associations, student bodies and individual professors and students across the world.… Read More Appeal & Signature Campaign to Save the Centre for Historical Studies Library in JNU