Contents – The Idea of the University (Issue 29)
Contents - The Idea of the University (Issue 29)
Sep 15
Contents - The Idea of the University (Issue 29)
By Debaditya Bhattacharya
With the recent electoral rise of the Hindu Right in India, the sustained assault on public universities in the name of their being ‘anti-national’ or ‘seditious’ spaces is an accurate instance of how transnational economic designs are executed under the guise of an aggressive cultural nationalism. It is no paradox that universities are being used as a site of manufacturing a certain hegemonic consensus, because that has historically been its function as part of a bourgeois public sphere.
By Prabhat Patnaik
One of the most striking features of the current Indian scenario is the commoditization of education, which means not only that the labour power of those who are the products of the education system becomes a commodity, but that the education itself that goes into the production of this commodity becomes a commodity.
By Henry A. Giroux
Hyper-capitalism or market fundamentalism has put higher education in its cross hairs and the result has been the ongoing transformation of higher education into an adjunct of the very rich and powerful corporate interests.
By Nandini Chandra
With the privatization of higher education, the expertise learnt in the university is no longer a means of improved subsistence and social mobility, but an embodied end, which paradoxically arrests the flow of labour to the other industries. In other words, the fashioning of education as a service industry attempts to turn wage labour into goods, supposedly for improved efficiency.
By Peter McLaren
The tendrils of capitalism’s poisonous vine are spreading into all the spaces and virtual spaces of potential capital accumulation and we need cadres of teachers to speak out and to create spaces where their students can assume roles as razor-tongued public instigators for the social good. Globalized finance capitalism is the most widespread authoritarian structure in the history of civilization, giving the rich even greater riches and forcing the dispossessed to set up markets on moonlit streets to augment their exiguous incomes.
By Anup Dhar
Why did Tagore in the first instance set up Shantiniketan? Was it a rejection of the then existing University of Calcutta, set up largely by the British, by the colonizer? Was it a rejection of the university (system)? What was wrong with the extant idea of the university that Tagore had to reject it? Was it simply because the idea of the university was always already coloured with colonizing intentions? Or were there deeper critiques?
By Debarun Sarkar
a sectoral bridge
forever expanding
expanding, retires
into sublime nothingness
of your mind’s trap