Sunday Posts

 I am trying to ascertain what historical moment we are living through. Should we compare this with 27th May 1905, the  Battle of Tsushima, the moment when the anti-colonial self-confidence emerged in Asia? That an underdog - Japan then, Iran now - can win in an assymetric battlefield is an important lesson. Iran hasn't really won, or can win, but that it did not submit easily will count. This would change the calculus of the alliances: An Arab leader today would be circumspect about its alliances now. Whatever started after Saddan Hussain's invasion of Kuwait would now end. Of course, the United States can destroy Iran with its superior firepower, but it can only do so at a great cost. Bringing all its firepower in the Middle East may open the space for China in South China sea, and even Russia in Europe, and indeed, this could spiral into a world at war. I am hoping that won't come to pass, a situation when no one would win. But if Marco Rubio was lecturing the European l...

It is hard to explain my feelings about the war in Iran.  I have no particular love for the regime, growing up, as I did, with the shadow of Khomeini's fatwa on Salman Rushdie. But like many others, I saw the Islamic Revolution as a part of anti-colonial movement. When Saddam, backed by the Americans, attacked Iran, my sympathies were with the Iranians. That Persia/ Iran is standing on a civilisation thousands of years old, and with which, as a Bengali, my own has a great affinity, was an idea that was ingrained in my thinking. It was an integral part of how I think: East vs West, Coloniser vs the Colonised, Old world vs the New world! But I see Trump's war not so much against Iran but against the rules that we were all supposed to follow, and this is why I am even more upset. Since when 'eliminating' a country's leadership by assassination become a legitimate thing to talk about? If they didn't know that they were starting a forever war, they were stupid: And o...

 Are we in a new world, or witnessing the end of the old one? As I write this, the US and Israeli forces have attacked Iran. Iran has retaliated by sending missile barrages towards Baharin, Qatar, UAE and Israel. Trump is calling for a regime change in Iran and wants to install the son of deposed Shah. Not quite the way of the world I knew, where there was at least the figleaf of international law used by countries wanting to attack one another. I feel pity for Keir Starmer. As far as I am aware, his government is trying to fix Britain's institutions after the stupidity of Brexit and fifteen years of Tory assault on public economy and straightlaced corruption. But Sir Keir has no courage to do something or say something openly. He appears like Trump's poodle, and Trump is a difficult master even to be a poodle too. Therefore, notwithstanding whatever his government is doing, he looks like a joke. He is hollowness personified, and at moments like this, he could as well be a holo...

My New Year's resolution is not to wait any longer, but to get on with what I have always wanted to do: set up a new higher-education institution. I have been waiting forever. Not that I haven't tried, but I have ended up taking the wrong route a few times. Each time I learnt, I have learnt about the merits and considerable challenges of for-profit higher education, and how to balance the different interests to do something innovative. I have learnt about international markets and the rapidly changing expectations of the students. I have taught and know firsthand what social media has done to students' attention and commitment. Having tried project-based learning, I have seen its possibilities and also why it does not work at scale. But, in the learning mode, I was forever waiting - doing various projects adjacent to what I r...

The opening of international university campuses in India has a distinct gold rush feel to it. There are 17 universities whose applications are already through and the projects are at several stages of implementation. Several are in the pipeline. The British universities were quick to move in, given their historical affinity. The Australians followed suit, taking advantage of the geopolitical bonhomie between the two nations. The Canadian universities, despite Canada being a top destination of Indian students in the last decade, were hampered by the rift between the two nations around an alleged state-sponsored assassination of a Canadian citizen. But they feel left behind, and will soon turn up in force at the India AI Summit in February, looking for deals. And, finally, the US universities, ever so inward-looking (international students at US universities make up only 6% of the population, compared to about a quarter in UK or Australia), are slower, but some, like the Illinois Instit...

It feels like another life but I used to be all-in for microcredentials not so long ago. That was the effect of Australia for me. The Australian national framework and the buzz around Microcredentials converted me. I loved its flexibility and the focus on practical stuff. In the UK, where a Masters could be achieved through negotiated learning, it is possible to build a course as close to practical life and work as possible. And, yet, not many people can afford multi-year commitment that such postgrad degrees offer. Microcredentials were that sweet everything - short, flexible, close to real-life and daily work, and in theory, stackable, to make a full qualification! But the standard formula was not exciting enough. Work needed to be team-based and collaborative, otherwise it was to become academic and make-believe. And, therefore, the assessment was meant to be complex. I saw the MCs which are meant to be practical but ended up in reflective essays marked by academic mentors - that wa...

As I set down to write a sequence of paragraphs - I promised to myself not to call it a book - on what makes a person today successfully negotiate life and work over the next 20 or 30 years, I should start with an admission: I have nothing new or insightful to say about how such future lives would pan out to be. I simply don't know.  Therefore, unlike the other 'books' of this kind, I can't start this project with a confident posture, peppered with quotations from McKinsey, PwC or the World Economic Forum. Not that I don't find what they publish useful, but they are useful to me for a different reason. I don't look so much into the Executive Summary and the bold claims these make, but more to the footnotes and the methodology they followed. The methodology often tells a story very different: That these reports, presented as guides for the future of humanity, reflect the views of a very small number of people, drawn from mostly similar backgrounds. They reflect a...

If I thought India was the El Dorado of International Higher Ed - everyone wanted to go there, but no one knew how - it may no longer be true: Reportedly, 17 foreign universities have got permission to open their campuses in India, with more waiting in the queue. At the same time, Indian higher education policymaking continues to send mixed signals. The Prime Minister recently talked about the 'Macaulay Mindset' and the invitation to free India of the influence of the long-dead Lord M. (See here ' Modi wages war against the ghost of British Empire ') In effect, therefore, India is telling the foreign universities that 'we want your brands but none of your methods', when China is doing the opposite - taking their methods and building its own brands!  This is what triggered me to write this post, and I do want to make more posts about the prospects of foreign universities in India. But, as a starting point, it may be worthwhile to understand...

I believe my life of start-ups is over now. There are personal reasons behind it - this has forced me to rethink my priorities - but this is as much triggered by professional considerations. I have come to realise the essentially speculative nature of start-ups, and also that in the industry I have chosen to be in, its unsuitability. Speculation may be permissible and even productive in other industries, particularly where the customers are also venturesome, as in consumer technology; but in education, there is an added layer of responsibility, which speculators disregard. I would call it an 'alignment problem', just as in machine learning, where the ways of doing business and the desireable objectives may be in conflict with the expectations of its intended customers and socially desireable outcomes. This objection is only to the private higher education, however. The idea of higher education is enmeshed in the modern, middle-class-dominated social structure. The degree is the...

There is no way I could stop rolling the stone up the slope Even if it would roll back down again - I am cursed! Born to be futile is how I would be remembered, And yet remembered, not restfully anonymous My work won't end, but does anything ever complete? The meaning is in doing, rather than like a take-away meal, Each moment is spent with my senses alert My life of labour has no time to regret - I don't envy anyone's leisure, or success, I haven't expected fairness of the gods My stone's heavy, and worthy of its name, I am blessed, as I am always looking upward.

I have the wrong idea about what entrepreneurship is. I must blame my grandfather. An austere man, he built a business by working hard, paying his taxes and keeping his word. He created something. He made money, invested in blue chip stocks and lived within his means. He would turn down opportunities, much to my uncle's disappointment, if he thought he couldn't service the contract. The first English sentence I learnt - from him - is 'Cut your coat according to your cloth'. Growing up, I had plenty of disagreements with him. Most of it was political. He never voted, which enraged me. His reason was simple: In India, once one votes, a mark of indelible ink used to be put on one's index finger. He hated that and objected to the implicit lack of trust this implied. He also told me that Gandhi destroyed the country by teaching people to disobey the laws, which did not go down well with the revolutionary sympathies of a twenty-year old. However, I watched him ru...

I am putting my faith in Z.  I shall not be popular among my radical friends if I say that Z seems to be the Thatcher of the Left! He is full of conviction in a sea of opportunists and can build a broad coalition. Mrs T brought small traders and middle-classmen to the party of the landlords; Z is bringing the small traders and gig workers to the party of the intellectual snobs ( see this profile here ). The self-declared democratic socialist is cutting through the cynicism of his party colleagues - just as Mrs T did once - and making democracy meaningful again. This is why the grumpy right-wingers, Republicans as well as Democrats, are so angry. I don't want to take the Thatcher comparison too far, but one I can't avoid: Thatcher was serious and admonishing, appropriate for her stiff-upper-lip party; Z is sunny and smiles all the time, just as the constituency he represents, those on minimum wage who must keep hope, does. The Clinton-Blair left imagined Thatcher's policies ...

Let us defeat fear with hope. Let joy overcome the gloom.   Darkness no more, let the morning bring   The task of building a future of our own.   No, we have said.    Now, let us begin yes.

I have forever been preparing for this, but now I am starting it. I want to write the history of the colonial university in India.  I was supposed to start this in 2019, but Covid and various personal crisis kept me from it. I am living through yet another crisis, but that only tells me that there would be no better time and that I should get started. The upside of this current crisis - if there could be any upside at all - is that I am completely grounded and now I won't think of travelling, for work or for leisure, for a very long time. I am recalibrating all my work and focusing on what I can do in the UK, first time in the 22 years I have lived here, and this gives me the stability and focus a project like these demands. Indeed, I am expecting archival work to be done in India and elsewhere, but that is different from spending time in airport lounges. In summary, I am embracing a quieter, boring life, with my only pleasure emanating from doing this work that I always w...

Project-based Learning (PBL), in its various forms, has many benefits, not least that it puts application at the heart of learning and allows learners to connect their knowledge more effectively to their lives. But I came to appreciate it from another angle altogether: sitting in the classrooms of a top university, as a mature immigrant who spoke English as a second language, I have come to see how much one takes for granted in traditional university education and how subtle, unintentional exclusion can work. Projects, particularly those that allowed me to work with my peers, enabled me to learn differently, with my eagerness and work ethic making up much of the cultural deficit I initially faced. Thereafter, I have consistently been an advocate, dedicating my entire career to exploring and refining it. Because it does need perfecting! My work in PBL usually involves two kinds of negotiation: one with educators who think PBL results in poor learning, cannot be adequa...

 Photo by Vance Osterhout on Unsplash The standard approach to enhancing employability outcomes in Higher Education takes the form of additional soft skills and technical skills training, internships, career counselling and renewed efforts to ensure campus placement. All of these have their place but the changes in the employer expectations, structures of the professions and breakdown of the traditional career paths demand changes in the traditional, one-size-fits-all approach. As such, there are five key factors why the standard approach isn't enough and must change: 1. Different student motivations: Students in higher education today are different from the students in large, traditional universities. They are often older, from ethnic minority ba...

                                                                 Photo by Lachlan Donald   The idea underlying all my work is this: At the time of great technological and social change, learning by practice gets better results than academic study. Having invested myself in finding better ways to organise learning by practice and in designing better measurements to assess its impact, I am aware of the objections this position might give rise to. At a time of great change - and the resulting uncertainty - it is better to focus on what does not change, human universals, as practice focus may lead to superficiality. The real change, it is true, happens at the fringes. If one really wants to get a sense of what's happening in AI, they are better off at a Research University today than interning ...

When The Economist starts saying that debt levels are unsustainable and a market crash is imminent, one should take notice. This was a lesson I learnt in 2007, before many others woke up to it.  If anything, this time it would be different. In my mind, 2008 was just the beginning of the breakdown. This time, we have multiple bubbles to burst: All those extra money from the bank bailouts, all those extra money from Covid, and all those valuation excesses from AI - the world economy is just several times bigger than what it should be. I am not a doom-monger, and right now, I am terribly unprepared for a market meltdown. Everything that could go wrong has gone wrong for me in the recent days and I am not ready for another crisis. But purely intellectually, this appears like the judgement day. That the global financial system works like a giant hoover, sucking labour, time and ideas from people who believe in hard work, good work and honest work, has been clear to me for some time. Thi...

What is an Indian education? I stumbled upon the debate pretty much unknowingly, attempting to call out a hoax ( see here ). Before that, I worked for ten years setting up Computer Education centres in hundreds of towns and cities across the Indian subcontinent but never questioned the cultural significance of my work. After that 2008 post though, I couldn't unsee it anymore. It became the focus of my academic work, which I took up only subsequently.  If anyone asks what my big goal in life is, it will still be to return to India and set up, together in a community of fellow travellers, a truly Indian university. I consider all my current work to be a preparation, daily attempts to understand and to perfect my craft, so that, one day, it can all come together. Periodically, therefore, I get interested in projects in India and excitedly promote projects which show promise. However, within India's current privately driven mass higher education and its crass...

The excitement about AI made it urgent, but it is not about AI. Education systems, in general, and tertiary education systems, in particular, have been operating within a specific environment of ideas since the 1990s, which has now undergone a change. In summary, the entire system functioned as a component of a talent value chain. The industrial thinking has been apparent - the student came in as the input, the graduate came out as the output - and the goal of educational improvement has been process efficiency. The value of the educational intervention sprang not from the process of education itself, but the value that the talent marketplace accorded to the graduate thus produced. Some institutions, particularly top-ranked research institutions, may claim that they haven't been affected by this 'vocational' transformation. They claim that their processes are not attuned to the immediate requirements of the job market, and in the case of Oxford, I was told that their focus ...