The Margins Review · Culture-Centered Approach

  Whose 88 Percent? A Rejoinder to Kishore Mahbubani Refusing the West is one task. Refusing democracy is another, and the second is being smuggled in under the first. In April 2020 the men who built Singapore's towers were locked inside them. Twelve to twenty to a room, in dormitories on the industrial edges of the island, hundreds of thousands of migrant construction and shipyard workers were sealed behind fences while the rest of the city was told to stay home. By the end of that year, more than nine in every ten of Singapore's recorded COVID-19 infections belonged to men living in those dormitories. The rest of the country had a pandemic. The dormitories had an epidemic, administered by the state that had built them, and the men inside had no vote, no union, no newspaper of their own, and no path to citizenship in the country whose skyline they had poured by hand. I keep that image in front of me when I read Kishore Mahbubani's latest essay for the Institute of Art a...

  The Flag They Agreed to Hate Militant unionism in Bengal, the people who sneer at it, and what their sneer is made of The first union I ever saw was a room. It stood near the railway workshop gate in Kharagpur, a low building with a red flag on a bamboo pole and a blackboard where somebody had chalked the date of the next meeting. From the outside it looked like nothing. From the inside, if you were a fitter's widow whose pension file had gone missing, or a casual labourer whose contractor had vanished on payday, or an apprentice who had been told to work through the night without a rest break, it was the only room in the town where you could say what had happened to you and expect the saying to have a consequence. Someone would write it down. Someone would walk with you to the office. Someone would stand at the gate until the contractor came back. That is what a union is, before it is anything else. It is a place where a worker's sentence lands. I carry that room with me ...

  The Spinning Wheel Has a Line Manager Lecture theatre B4 was built to make everybody look at one thing. Twelve raked rows descend like a quarry towards a lectern, a whiteboard nobody has cleaned since the refurbishment, and a projection screen the size of a garage door, and every seat in the room is angled so that the eye slides down the slope and lands on that screen. Sixty students sit scattered across two hundred seats in the pattern of people avoiding one another at a bus stop. Each of them has a laptop open, and each laptop lid glows with the sticker of a brand or a cause, and behind each lid a face is lit from below in the blue of an aquarium. The garage door shows a grey circle. Every laptop shows the same grey circle. Sixty-one circles turn in perfect unison in a room engineered for attention, and the attention has nowhere to go, so it pools in the aisle beside the fire exit with the smell of instant noodles. The lecturer stands at the lectern in the bottom of the quarr...

  Nobody Has Ever Watched Them Teach The platform goes down in week seven, on a Wednesday, at about twenty past two, which is roughly ninety minutes after three hundred and forty second-year physiology students were told that the quiz closing Friday could only be taken inside it. It does not go down in the honest way, with an error page and an apology. It goes down in the modern way, which is that it stays up and stops working. The video player loads, plays four seconds, and stalls. The quiz submits and returns a blank confirmation with no record against the student's name. The discussion board accepts a post and shows it to nobody. On a phone, which is how two-thirds of the cohort do everything, the left-hand menu covers the content and cannot be dismissed. Every one of these failures is small enough to be plausibly the student's fault, and that is the cruellest part of the design, because for the first two days the emails that arrive in the lecturer's inbox all begin wi...

  Excellence Before Office The scholar-leader model and the long history of the university In the 630s a Chinese monk named Xuanzang walked through the gate of Nalanda, in the Gangetic plain of what is now Bihar, at the end of a journey that had taken him across the Taklamakan and over the Hindu Kush. He had come for one teacher. Śīlabhadra, the abbot, was by then a very old man and the most authoritative living exponent of the Yogācāra school of Buddhist philosophy, and Xuanzang wanted to sit at his feet before he died. The monastery around them held thousands of students, a library that later pilgrims described with awe, and a daily programme of lectures and public debate in which a scholar's standing rose or fell on argument. Kings supplied the land and the revenue. The learned supplied the authority. Xuanzang's own account, written after his return to the Tang court, records who ran the place and why. Rank at Nalanda followed mastery. Gatekeeper scholars examined new arr...