Sunday Posts

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...

The conversation about universities today are defined by two extreme views: One says that the universities are failing their mission by failing to serve their students, by failing to connect them to jobs, and therefore, failing to make them successful; the other says that the universities are failing their mission as they have abandoned their traditional values, they have become 'marketised' and are engaged in a struggle to fit into badly fitting form as education can't be a market activity. Two polar opposites, united in the agreement that universities are failing their mission - they are not doing what they are supposed to do. I have admittedly oscillated between these two views as I 'blogged' (rather than systematically researched) about the universities. I did see the problem of disconnectedness, the teleological view of the universities in some quarters that the universities have a purpose of their own, rather than being an institution to serve contempora...