higher education
-
Thoughts That Shape Power
In a guest essay shared by Omar Ali, Varun argues that universities and think tanks train a country’s elite, and that lax standards and borrowed Western and Soviet theories, plus…
-
Liberal college bastions are taking body blows
Indosaurus recounts the reported plagiarism affair around Cambridge professor Jason Arday, compares it with Claudine Gay’s ousting at Harvard, and asks whether Indians and Pakistanis back progressive causes abroad yet…
-
Is Pakistan primitive?
An intolerant minority sets the menu for everyone, in a comment thread and in a country. For two months we moderated so carefully against Islamophobia that we let the confinement…
-
Quite Hectic Days
Writing from fieldwork assessing the governance of 46 Pakistani universities, the author notes that universities grew from 95 to 269 and PhDs from 177 to 3,489 since 2002 without a…
-
Merit, Class, and the Ossified Dream
Writing from Newark Airport, X.T.M argues that class structures have ossified in the Global North, and suggests that educated upper-middle-class Hindus who followed the IIT and Ivy route face a…
-
A Postcard from Princeton
A postcard from a visit to Princeton, admiring its curated elegance while arguing that the town is a gated community whose wealth underwrites academics’ ideals. The author also says anti-Asian…
-
Indian futures
Responding to Noah Smith’s bullish piece on India, the author takes agglomeration as the economist’s main lesson, argues that huge nations scale in ways small ones cannot, and flags human…
-
American University in Delhi?
Responding to an op-ed urging India to admit foreign universities, the author notes the shortage of seats, then warns that India would import US pathologies in the sector, such as…
-
India as a global factory: A project seventy years in the making
The author argues that Apple’s plan to make the iPhone 14 in India reflects a seventy-year project, from a country struggling to feed itself in the 1950s to state promotion…
-
Life is a great test
Razib Khan compares two pieces on Asian American test-prep culture, criticising The Juggernaut for starting from a conclusion that test scores are a proxy for privilege and preferring a Refinery29…
