University Autonomy | Café Dissensus

Sep 15

Lineages of the Modern Public University: Perils and Prospects in a Comparative Perspective

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.

Sep 15

Of Feudal Intellectual Capital: The History of the New Provincial Universities

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”.

Sep 15

1 Comment

The Idea of a University and the Invention of Culture in Colonial/Post-colonial India

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.

Sep 15

The Presidential Transition

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?

Sep 15

University: The State’s Kitchen?

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.

Sep 15

Living and Learning at the University: Studentspeak

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?