Sunday Posts

Professor Amartya Sen has withdrawn his candidature for the Second Term as Chancellor of Nalanda University, the prestigious International University the Indian government has set up. The reason is apparent reluctance of powers that be in Delhi to clear his appointment, even after being elected by the University board, and use the protocol requirement of President's approval of the Board Decision to signal their disapproval to Professor Sen's appointment.  Professor Sen's resignation has been met with the usual flood of ridicule on social media by the current Prime Minister's ardent supporters. Professor Sen was always an outspoken critic of the current Prime Minister on ground of his Human Rights records, and once he came to power, a retribution was expected. Indeed, Professor Sen's resignation taints the whole Nalanda University project - who wants to go to an university lorded over by Fascist lackeys - and undermines India's soft power further.   Ho...

As I wrote about a tipping point may be coming to Indian Education ( see here ), when a rollback of regulation may open up the space for experimentation and innovation, and allow the Indian institutions to take advantage of the domestic demand, something was playing out in Delhi indicating just the opposite was happening. A friend and correspondent was quick to point out that my optimistic musings may be off the mark, particularly on a day when an ugly example of political interference on academic decisions was playing out. This is about Delhi University (DU) wanting to introduce the Four Year Undergraduate Programme (FYUP) instead of the usual three years. There was nothing in the University Statutes that disallows the university from doing it, and the university laid out the explanations for changing the system. Initially, the regulators, University Grants Commission (UGC) was backing the decision, so much so that the university admissions started as usual. This was an unpo...

There is a lot of talk about freedom and tolerance in Chinese Higher Ed. I remember one English University getting into trouble for letting a student writing a dissertation on Pornography in their campus in Dubai. Tales like this are often told by Indian Academics, implicitly highlighting the freedom that a democracy is supposed to guarantee. And, at one level, that's almost taken for granted - no one discusses whether academic freedom could be an issue in Indian campuses.  However, if one needed an ugly incident to start talking about this, we have got one now. Indeed, the case I am referring to relates to basic freedom of expression, a much more fundamental issue than academic freedom, but without which, discussions about academic freedom is meaningless. An event which brings out a picture of India's campus culture that would undermine the smugness about democracy guarantees freedom. I am talking about the decision of Meerut's Subharati University ( the website ...

As it happens, during the course of last few days, I came across two very specific instances of questioning the value of freedom. One was specifically about academic freedom, and the other about freedom in general. Set in context of the rhetoric that freedom is central to progress, these are rather surprising points of views, hence demand further exploration. In the first instance, I am referring to John Morgan's China on Fast Track in Times Higher Education of 19th December. One of the central issues this article grapples with is whether the lack of academic freedom will stall the progress of Chinese universities in the global league tables. Indeed, academic freedom is sacrosanct in the Western academic circles, and that one can conduct meaningful research and teaching without the freedom to explore anything that inspires curiousity and without the freedom to express one's opinion sounds deeply anachronistic.  Various interviews presented in this article tell of a d...