The Margins Review · Culture-Centered Approach

  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...

  The Suit Walks the Corridor At ten past nine on a Monday the corridor on the top floor of the administration building fills with the sound of expensive shoes. The carpet up here was laid in the last refurbishment and still gives slightly underfoot, the way a good hotel lobby does, and the doors along it close with the soft, well-engineered thud of a German car. Along this carpet, in the direction of the lift marked Executive, comes the suit. It comes in navy and in charcoal, in the odd daring pinstripe, in the female version too, a tailored jacket over a silk shell, and heels that announce themselves on the tile of the lift lobby a full three seconds before the person arrives. The suit carries a flat white from the good cafe, the one that closed the student cafe to open, and a lanyard that swings with the confidence of a thing that opens doors. The suit passes the framed founding professors, who were photographed in gowns and look, at this distance, like a row of disapproving pe...

  The money that never touches the party When undercover reporters set out to put foreign money into British politics, they did not wire cash to a party account. They paid a pollster. Channel 4 News and the investigative group Verbatim revealed this week that senior figures around Nigel Farage arranged for a company registered in the United States, controlled by the undercover team and presented as the vehicle of a wealthy American, to pay for polling that Reform UK had itself commissioned. The bill came to more than £30,000. The results ran in the Telegraph and the Times as independent research, and neither paper was told that the party had ordered the work. The benefit was never declared to the Electoral Commission. Reform UK's head of policy, James Orr, was filmed saying the party could "easily get away with it." Bob Posner, who once ran the Electoral Commission, told the programme that serious criminal offences may have been committed. The Liberal Democrats have wri...

  David Cumin, the Free Speech Union and the White Supremacist Pseudoscience The two hundred and sixty-ninth name, the Free Speech Union, and the machinery that arrived here from somewhere else Position two hundred and sixty-nine on the letter reads "Dr David Cumin, The University of Aucklamd." The typo belongs to the original, which tells you something about the speed at which these documents are assembled.  Figure 1: David Cumin's signature and the links to his ORCID and LinkedIn Profiles, linked from the Hyperlink on the name. The letter asks the rector of Ghent University to protect Nathan Cofnas from disciplinary consequence, and Cofnas describes himself as a race realist. He holds that genes account for a meaningful share of the gap in measured intelligence between racial groups, he wrote in 2024 that under a true meritocracy Black people would vanish from almost every high-profile position outside sport and entertainment, and he has published a defence of what he...

  The Doubt Industry Has Seventy-Six Followers Inside one account's feed, and the architecture of manufactured doubt it belongs to Mohan Dutta His name is wakeywakey. His avatar is a Himalayan cat with sapphire eyes, fur so pale it could pass for innocence. The bio beneath it reads like a manifesto compressed into two sentences: in the movies, rebels who fight an evil empire are heroes; in real life, when we expose government lies, they call us cookers and extremists. Seventy-six people follow him. He follows seven hundred and fifty-three. New Zealand, the location field says, nothing more specific than that, and joined October 2017, a year before I arrived in this country myself, stepping down from a Provost's Chair at the National University of Singapore into a much smaller university on the North Island because Aotearoa was attempting something I had not seen tried anywhere else at that scale: scholarship that took Te Tiriti o Waitangi as its starting proposition rathe...