The Margins Review · Culture-Centered Approach

As universities globally are being pushed to offer valid and reliable accounts of their work and performance, there is a global frenzy across university campuses for measurement and evaluation. University administrators, all set to capture university productivity in some raw number, are driven by the quest for simplified metrics, algorithms, and statistics. The controversial Purdue president Mitch Daniels, who during his time as Indiana governor had come under fire for introducing school-wide performance-driven reforms that many academics argue fundamentally broke the backbone of K-12 education in Indiana, is now all set to introduce metrics for measuring critical thinking. Faced with a faculty that is uncertain about the meaningfulness and effectiveness of a research design that would capture critical thinking, Daniels notes " "How about we get going on the meat and potatoes of critical learning and not put that off another 12 months? … There could be a little learn-...

Liberty, Western hypocrisy, and cultural context Mohan Jyoti Dutta The recent terrorist attacks on the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo have put on the global center-stage the ideas of free speech and liberty. Mainstream media and politicians, a large number of them from the West, have framed the attacks in the language of liberty, suggesting that the attacks are acts of violence on the ways of the free world, aka the West. In solidarity with the magazine, the twitter hashtag #jesuischarlie has garnered global popularity. The hashtag expresses the global support for media to draw and voice diverse, even provocative ideas, freely. The #jesuischarlie twitter feed also serves as a space for sharing many of the Charlie Hebdo images, equating the act of sharing the images with assertions of freedom and liberty. The images of a free global order juxtaposed against the images of extremist Islamic fundamentalists, are presented in a binary. The many different depictions o...

University of Michigan Professor of Communication Susan Douglas has come under attack from the political Right for a column in the magazine In The Times. In her column titled "It's okay to hate Republicans," Douglas opens with a rhetorical attention grabber "I hate Republicans," beginning with "I can't stand the thought of having to spend the next two years watching Mitch McConnell, John Boehner, Ted Cruz, Darrell Issa or any of the legions of other blowhards denying climate change, thwarting immigration reform or championing fetal 'personhood'," and drawing the attention of the reader to the climate of intolerance that is promoted by the conservatives. Professor Douglas' essay, read in full, attends to the underlying principles of aversion to social change and acceptance of inequality that form the core of the conservatives. The political right, including a Republican member of the Board of Regents of the University...

The accelerated corporatization of University structures breeds new forms of vulnerabilities within Universities, essentially altering the mission, vision, and organizing structures of Universities. Universities, having had to raise funds in the face of reduced state funding and public support, have to increasingly depend on donors to carry out their vital functions. Moreover, in order to participate in this continually reinvented game of branding and unique selling propositions, which in turn are essential to further fund-raising, Universities have to keep generating the perceptions of speed, innovation, and change. To sustain the brand image of the university, new programs must be introduced, new buildings must be built, new initiatives must be launched, and new labs must be built. The glamor and appeal of the university are maintained through the deployment of an army of mid-managers who implement newly borrowed metrics, come up with new set of indicators, and introduce eve...

This past summer, the months of July and August in 2014, witnessed gruesome attacks carried out by Israel on Gaza. As the social media reverberated with images and protests against these ghastly and uncivil acts of violence carried out by a powerful nation state with its imperial backing, civility on social media emerged as the metric of conversation, operating strategically to silence dissent. As I have blogged in earlier posts, Professor Steven Salaita, who had secured an appointment at the University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign, was de-hired from his job apparently because he had violated some unspoken civility code. In speaking about the decision to de-hire Professor Salaita, Chancellor Phyllis Wise of the UIUC cited personnel reasons while ironically parroting her well-practiced speech on her commitment to diversity, multiculturalism, safe spaces on university campuses, and academic freedom. Later in the summer and through the early Fall, several University leaders across t...