Sep 15
By Lawrence Liang
In 2011, three publishers – Oxford University Press, Cambridge University Press, and Taylor, Francis and Routledge – sued Delhi University and a photocopy shop on its premises for unauthorized distribution of course packs to students – claiming $100,000 (6 million rupees) in damages.
By Rina Ramdev
This concurrence of state control and market driven codes and conduct is already in the present moment blurring the boundaries between public and private. And in a deferential nod to its demands, universities are changing their structure as also their modes of functioning.
By Ari Sitas
Whereas the fiscal assault attempted to treat the University as a corporate entity and to instill managerial structures that enforce productivity and a peculiar notion of excellence, the political assault originated from movements and parties of authoritative restoration, trampling over areas of dissent and diversity. The key problem has been that the struggles have been reactive and defensive and that they lack an alternative vision of what a University ought to be in the 21st century.
By Mushahid Hussain
The colonial origins of the modern university in South Asia followed a different historical trajectory while retaining its consistency in terms of a similar operational logic and its objectives at different levels. British imperial expansion in South Asia and the specific modes of its (re)incorporation into the capitalist world-economy as a colony faced complexities quite different from the contexts of sub-Saharan Africa.
By Debaditya Bhattacharya
It merely alerts us that no matter how many of those in these lesser-known and still-less-written-about Indian universities participated in hashtag campaigns of #WeAreJNU earlier this year, there is precious little in the history of our universities that approximates to what has severally been termed “the idea of JNU”.
By Mosarrap Hossain Khan
This essay is a brief attempt at understanding the ways in which the idea of the university has evolved in India and the role of the university in inventing an Indian national culture since colonial times. Owing to colonial subjugation, the transplanted modern European university evolved very differently and served a very different function in India than in the West, where the modern university emerged in the eighteenth century in the wake of Enlightenment.
By Paramita Banerjee
It is perhaps ironical that the autonomous status of a university was granted by Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharya just about a year before his party and its allies were to lose power in the state after thirty-four long years of Left Front rule. Was it being in power that allowed this shift of position, or was the CPI(M) always in tacit support?
By Akanksha Ahluwalia, Ishan Mohan and Sagar Sachdeva
The university, as an object-out-there for the dreamy-eyed student just out of school, therefore, transforms into a lived space of relations with time. And it is in this living, that the abstraction the University is, gets felt in concrete relations with fellow students, professors, administrations and so on, within the campus-space and beyond.
By Saiyem Iftekhar
Why is it that university education today focuses disproportionately on the development of cognitive and vocational skills, to the exclusion of critical practices of learning altogether? Why is it that the affective domain of human personality remains untouched to a large extent, and university education only becomes a factory for turning out individuals who become a tool in the hands of corporate elites for perpetuation of socio-economic disparities?
Café Dissensus 