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I recall a slapstick film from back in the mid-1960s with the title The Great Race. In it, the quintessential hero (the Great Leslie, dressed in white, of course) is challenged by a despicable and traditionally melodramatic villain known as Professor Fate, who proposes an epic over-ground automobile race from …

The modern Indian University dates back to the establishment of the three universities in the Presidency towns of Calcutta, Bombay and Madras in the middle of the 19th century. Indian higher education has taken diverse forms since then, from the prestigious IIT’s to the 500-odd public universities. (Mehta & Kapur, …

Learning is, by nature, a personal activity. From an economic perspective, increasing our income by acquiring knowledge and skills through study is an “investment”, and, furthermore, obtaining knowledge and learn-ing new skills are forms of “consumption” that satisfy our curiosity. A neces-sary condition for this is to be able to …

In the winter of 1827/28, half of the city of Berlin — from the workers to the members of court society — listened to Alexander von Humboldt’s legendary Cosmos Lectures, which form the nucleus of his great work. At each lecture, hundreds of listeners gained insight into the state of …

In this era of globalization and rapid change, the notion that a university is a place solely to get a degree will, in time, be superseded by a realization that even after graduating from university, none of us can afford to stop learning. The learning profile and needs of society …

In American higher education today, as indeed in American political dis-course, there is a palpable and widespread reaction to globalization. A recent front-page story in the Chronicle of Higher Education proclaims the end of the global era for education (Chronicle, 2019). Noting a recent drop in the open-ing of international …