Mukul Kesavan on l'affaire Mehta

Mukul Kesavan's column in The Telegraph concludes with this: "... From Devanampiya to this, every epoch gets the Ashoka it deserves."

Before reaching this sentence, he has much to say about pretty much every key person in this episode -- Pratap Bhanu Mehta, Arvind Subramanian, the Chancellor, the Vice Chancellor -- and the subtext in their public pronouncements. He also has comments on a couple of commentators: Raghuram Rajan (who is deeply involved in another university not very different from Ashoka) and Gurcharan Das (the less said about him, the better).

Worth reading in full, but I have to include at least an excerpt here; so, here goes:

Universities like Ashoka are best understood as liberal arts universities with Indian characteristics. The philanthropists who fund and found these universities loom over them like colossi. The virtue of giving generously seems to purge them of self-awareness. In every official communication I’ve read, Ashoka’s founders capitalize their consequence: they are Founders. Ashoka’s board of trustees sent a statement to the faculty declaring that they had never interfered with the academic functioning of the university nor the freedom of faculty members to write about anything they wanted, in any forum that they wanted. That they could write this soon after seeing Mehta off the premises gives chutzpah a new meaning. They signalled their commitment to the autonomy of the university by endorsing the appointment of an Ombudsperson. A Lokpal. Fancy that. [Bold emphasis added]

* * *

There are just way too many news stories and opinion pieces following Pratap Bhanu Mehta's resignation from a professorship at Ashoka. Here's a (non-exhaustive) list of stuff allueded to in Kesavan's piece:

• Pratap Bhanu Mehta, Critic of Government Policies, Resigns as Professor at Ashoka University (The Wire, 17 March)

• Apoorvanand's opinion piece -- We Can't Treat Pratap Bhanu Mehta's Resignation from Ashoka as a 'Personal Decision' -- from the same day.

• My Association With Ashoka Considered a Political Liability: Pratap Bhanu Mehta in Resignation Letter (The Wire, 18 March)

• Raghuram Rajan's comments excerpted here: 'Founders Succumbed to Pressure': Raghuram Rajan on Pratap Bhanu Mehta's Exit From Ashoka (20 March)

• World Scholars on Ashoka Controversy: A Dangerous Attack on Academic Freedom (The Wire, 20 March)

• Ashoka University Acknowledges ‘Some Lapses’ but Pratap Bhanu Mehta Insists on Moving On (The Wire, 21 March)

• Okay, with gritted teeth, here's Gurcharan Das: A tale of two heroes: An Ashoka University donor on the challenges of doing good in today’s world.

  Das's has this in the first paragraph, and it's all just downhill from here:

  ... Pratap Bhanu Mehta, professor of political science and a passionate critic of the government, resigned from Ashoka University last week because he felt he’d become a ‘political liability’" [Bold emphasis added]

  Here's the actual quote from Mehta's resignation letter:

  ... After a meeting with Founders it has become abundantly clear to me that my association with the University may be considered a political liability. [Bold emphasis added]

Update (3 June 2021): I should have linked to this excellent piece by Yogendra Yadav in The Print: No one is asking the right questions about Pratap Bhanu Mehta’s ouster from Ashoka University. "We pick soft targets, we discuss inanities, but do not talk about the elephant in the room when it comes to Pratap Bhanu Mehta’s resignation."

How do you say, "I don't know" in Discipline X

Performance poet and writer Hannah Chutzpah asked on Twitter:

What are the technical terms, in your field, for 'dunno'? In medicine there's 'ideopathic' [corrected the original, incorrect spelling] In archeology/anthropology there's 'ritual purposes' How do you professionally term 'we haven't got a clue'?

And the answers are a veritable riot!

As they say on Twitter, Thread.

And Fun.

Graduate students as slave labour

Let's begin with the post titled Cruelty in Academia from December 2006. That was about grad students in several Indian universities.

Fast forward to a US university in 2018, and we get this: Professor used students as servants. UMKC knew and didn’t stop him. The report by Mará Rose Williams and Mike Hendricks is about Ashim Mitra, an Indian-origin professor in the University of Missouri at Kansas City:

The [Kansas City] Star found that over Mitra’s 24 years as a leader in the UMKC School of Pharmacy, the professor compelled his students to act as his personal servants. They hauled equipment and bused tables at his social events. They were expected to tend his lawn, look after his dog and water the house plants, sometimes for weeks at a time when he and his wife were away. [...]

Through Mitra’s hints and direct threats, students said they feared he would have their visas revoked if they did not comply with his demands. [...]

When Kuchimanchi once told Mitra he wouldn’t be a servant, “he threatened to kick me out of the university and force me to lose my visa and lose everything. That was his ammo. Either fall in line or you would be thrown out. You didn’t want to be in that situation where you have to go back home empty-handed.” So he continued to do what Mitra asked.

This part of the report nails it:

At best, critics say, Mitra’s demands violated ethical standards and university policy. At worst, a U.S. immigration official told The Star, coerced off-campus labors would be tantamount to human trafficking.

Zimbardo's Lie

From this week's must-read article: Ben Blum's The Lifespan of a Lie -- The most famous psychology study of all time was a sham. Why can’t we escape the Stanford Prison Experiment?:

Despite the Stanford prison experiment’s canonical status in intro psych classes around the country today, methodological criticism of it was swift and widespread in the years after it was conducted. Deviating from scientific protocol, Zimbardo and his students had published their first article about the experiment not in an academic journal of psychology but in The New York Times Magazine, sidestepping the usual peer review. Famed psychologist Erich Fromm, unaware that guards had been explicitly instructed to be “tough,” nonetheless opined that in light of the obvious pressures to abuse, what was most surprising about the experiment was how few guards did. “The authors believe it proves that the situation alone can within a few days transform normal people into abject, submissive individuals or into ruthless sadists,” Fromm wrote. “It seems to me that the experiment proves, if anything, rather the contrary.” Some scholars have argued that it wasn’t an experiment at all. Leon Festinger, the psychologist who pioneered the concept of cognitive dissonance, dismissed it as a “happening.”

A steady trickle of critiques have continued to emerge over the years, expanding the attack on the experiment to more technical issues around its methodology, such as demand characteristics, ecological validity, and selection bias. In 2005, Carlo Prescott, the San Quentin parolee who consulted on the experiment’s design, published an Op-Ed in The Stanford Daily entitled “The Lie of the Stanford Prison Experiment,” revealing that many of the guards’ techniques for tormenting prisoners had been taken from his own experience at San Quentin rather than having been invented by the participants. In another blow to the experiment’s scientific credibility, Haslam and Reicher’s attempted replication, in which guards received no coaching and prisoners were free to quit at any time, failed to reproduce Zimbardo’s findings. Far from breaking down under escalating abuse, prisoners banded together and won extra privileges from guards, who became increasingly passive and cowed. According to Reicher, Zimbardo did not take it well when they attempted to publish their findings in the British Journal of Social Psychology.

“We discovered that he was privately writing to editors to try to stop us getting published by claiming that we were fraudulent,” Reicher told me.

UGC strikes back: INSA's Indian Journal of History of Science is not an "approved" journal!

After many people pointed out that the University Grants Commission's "White List" of "approved" journals had many, many predatory journals (see, for example, this recent report in The Hindu), UGC tried to make amends by issuing another list [pdf], which now consists of all the journals which are "removed" from the list of "approved" journals.

What is really galling is that in this pruning process, which killed some 4000+ journals, UGC has gone way too far on the other side, and removed a whole bunch of legitimate journals. [see this report from today's The Hindu].

I just learnt that The Indian Journal of History of Science, published by the Indian National Science Academy, has also been kicked out of the "approved" list!

Obituary of the 100 Dollar Laptop

Way back in March 2014, OLPC News, which used to track all the OLPC-related news and developments, bid farewell to this pipe dream riding on poor people's money. Earlier this month, Adi Robertson penned a formal detailed obituary in The Verge: OLPC’S $100 laptop was going to change the world — Then it all went wrong. Buried deep within Robertson's essay (actually, right at its end), we find this:

There’s surprisingly little hard data about the long-term impact of OLPCs on childhood education, though. Zamora points to some case studies for individual countries, and says OLPC wants to commission more comprehensive research in the future. But the organization has mostly focused on anecdotes and distribution numbers as markers of success. “OLPC was always very averse to measuring how well they were doing versus the traditional school system,” says Gros. “There have only been a very limited number of attempts to actually measure how well students were doing with OLPC versus not, because it was very hard to do.”

Ames thinks that OLPC’s high-profile failures helped temper the hype around ed-tech programs. “There was a lot of worry that OLPC would crash and take everything with it — that there would be no funding in [educational technology], there would be no funding in tech development,” says Ames. “I think ed-tech in particular can still really draw on some of the same tropes, and hasn’t fully learned the lessons that OLPC should have taught it. But both of those spaces did have to mature to some degree, and stop being quite so naive in their tech utopianism.” Non-OLPC student laptop programs are still contentious. Maine Governor Paul LePage trashed his state’s initiative as a “massive failure” in 2016, and while it’s still running, its results have been ambiguous and difficult to measure. Mitra’s Hole-in-the-Wall project won a $1 million TED prize in 2013, but critics say he still hasn’t published any rigorous studies of its effects. Bender isn’t convinced that Mitra’s minimalist computing project proved anything. “We already knew that kids could learn to use computers. They’ve been doing that since day one,” he says. “What the project did not demonstrate is that kids could use computers for learning.”

Ames says the real question isn’t whether laptop programs help students, but whether they’re more effective than other programs competing for the same money. “I think that given unlimited funding, absolutely ... Learning about technology is very important,” she says. “That said, there’s always a tradeoff. There’s always some project that will be defunded or de-emphasized as a result of this.”

Thirteen years ago, OLPC told the world that every child should get a laptop. It never stopped to prove that they needed one.

The New Yorker on the Deutche Bank's 10 Billion Dollar Scandal

As always, we go the extra mile to get you the juiciest of excerpts from the actual story:

Although the bank’s headquarters remained in Germany, power migrated from conservative Frankfurt to London, the investment-banking hub where the most lavish profits were generated. The assimilation of different banking cultures was not always successful. In the nineties, when hundreds of Americans went to work for Deutsche Bank in London, German managers had to place a sign in the entrance hall spelling out “Deutsche” phonetically, because many Americans called their employer “Douche Bank.”

[Bold emphasis added, in case any nanopolitan reader needed a confirmation].

Life Imitates Onion - Part Deux: Area People Search for Google CEO's Chennai Origins

The farcical search for Venky Ramakrishnan's origins in Chidambaram, Tamil Nadu, is playing out all over again. This time, the search is for the Chennai origins of Google's newly minted CEO Sundar Pichai.

Exhibit A: Chennai digs for Pichai’s past:

The search for his Chennai connections began soon after news of his new role at Google was announced. Schools, alumni associations and the media came together to track down Mr. Pichai’s roots in the city.

Mr. Pichai was born and brought up in Chennai, but left the city after he completed his class XII in 1989.

At his alma mater, Jawahar Vidyalaya (JV) in Ashok Nagar, the phone has been ringing non-stop since Tuesday morning. “Only when the media alerted us to the news did we start looking through our records. He studied here from 1979 to 1987, and then switched schools,” Alice Jeevan, school Principal said. While the school was able to locate his transfer certificate, they have not yet found his other school records.

“Had he been a naughty child, we would have remembered him,” she said. Mr. Pichai was a quiet student and, though he studied well, was not the school topper.

One of his schoolmates, now in Kolkata, recalls being in the same class with Mr. Pichai, but says they were not good friends. “The only thing I remember is that he and Shankar Subramanian used to compete for the highest marks in science.” She did not wish to be identified.

Vanavani, where he is believed to have attended Classes XI and XII, has been unable to locate his records yet.

Exhibit B: Editing spree on Wikipedia for Sundar Pichai:

The day broke in India with the Wikipedia entry mentioning “done his schooling in Vanavani and Jawahar Vidyalaya, Chennai.” [...]

But then began the edits to the Wikipedia entry on Pichai and, in a sense, all hell broke loose.

Subsequently, various permutations and combinations involving three schools — Vanavani, PSBB and Jawahar Vidyalaya — were the flavour of the day. Other notable mentions were GRT Mahalakshmi Vidyalaya and All Angels Matriculation Higher Secondary School. While the first three were at least in the running, the others were probably long shots for publicity by enthusiastic alumni, taking advantage of the open editing format of Wikipedia.

The FBI File on Paul Erdős

You know you are in for some surreal stuff when the article's headline carries this quote:

"Nothing to indicate the subject had any interest in any matter other than Mathematics.”

And this is followed immediately by this opening line:

Turns out, J. Edgar Hoover's Erdős number is lower than yours.

Vedic Planes

Siddhartha Deb has a great piece on Those mythological men and their sacred, supersonic flying temples in The New Republic. Subtitle: "What tales of ancient Vedic aircraft tell us about India’s place in the modern world."

Excerpts won't do any justice to the piece. So, go read the whole thing!

Visa Hardball

At the lunch table the other day, the Visa Venkateswara   posts came up for discussion, and it occurred to us that, given her name, Goddess Visalakshi should be able to beat every Hindu deity hollow in this very popular and lucrative game. She is certainly losing out!

The materials-engineer-turned-journalist Sidin Vadukut has a funny post (funny only if you have not been hit by a stray ball in the game of visa hardball) -- Borderline Personality: Put Your Game Face On, Passport Control -- on India's e-visa scheme. Its funny-ness comes from his advocacy of strict reciprocity in dealing with travelers from different countries. For example:

USA: When visitors arrive at an Indian airport, immediately ask them to furnish the passport officer with passport photos that are no more than one hour old. Provide photo booths in the airport where visitors can take pictures at a nominal fee of ₹15,000 per photograph. When they have submitted seven copies of the photograph, allow them into the country after confiscating their footwear.

In any case, the reciprocity-in-the-visa-game is turning into a source of pain for Indians traveling to the US, and vice versa. While this has been happening on and off for quite sometime (1, 2, 3, 4, and 5, with the earliest occurrence in this blog being from way back in February of 2006), the flare-ups make it to the press when the affected parties occupy positions far higher that that of a grad student or a professor. The latest celebrity to be denied a US visa is the Director General of CSIR!

Here's the The Economic Times report -- Indo-US ties: Denial of visas to scientists thorn in the flesh -- by Pallava Bagla who points out that India has been quite good at dishing out pain to the American academics who want to travel to India. The following excerpt is about the troubles of Dr. M.O. Garg, DG-CSIR:

This week, India's leading petroleum researcher Dr M O Garg, Director General of the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), New Delhi went livid on what he called was a 'denial of granting a US visa' for him to attend a scientific meeting in Columbus, Ohio. Garg heads India's largest network of 38 civilian labs employing over 4000 scientists with an annually budget of about Rs 3800 crore.

On June 1, Garg recounts that he spent almost half a day filling out screen after screen of questions to apply for his US visa which he calls was like writing down 'my janam-patri or life history', a day later in usual fashion he was finger printed and photographed. On June 3, he was asked to appear for the 'visa interview' which he did at 8.30 am and he recalls that 'questions for which the consular official already had answers' were popped to him which he says he patiently answered.

Then it seems his troubles began when he was asked to appear for another face-to-face interview at new window where he was now given a piece of paper with several questions and a 'tracking number'. Garg says having procured several US visas in the past this now meant to him that he was being 'singled out'.

It's a war out there: Journal Impact vs. Editors' Impact

Mark Johnston fires the first shot in his editorial at the journal Genetics with a journal-to-journal comparison (within a select set of biology journals) of the journal impact factors (JIF) against what he calls the "Journal Authority Factor" (JAF), the average h-index of the journals' editors. [See also: his follow-up post].

The inverse correlation (see the table, above) is pretty strong!

This editorial gets an enthusiastic response from Stefano Bertuzzi of American Society for Cell Biology.

Group Discussion to Select IIT Directors?

Basant Kumar Mohanty reports The Telegraph: Smriti bins IIT heads shortlist:

In May last year, after the results of the national elections were out but no HRD minister had formally taken charge, the ministry had advertised the posts seeking fresh applications.

The NDA government later set up the search panels for scrutinising applications.

The committees invited the applicants for group discussions and decided to video-record the interaction. But some of the applicants found the process embarrassing and later - when called for the interview with the HRD minister - opted out.

The last sentence doesn't surprise me.

The result of this royal botch-up is that the selection of new directors for three IITs (Ropar, Bhubaneswar and Patna) has been set back by months.

Links

1. The Caravan: No double entendres: The words the censor board doesn't want you to hear (discretion advised).

2. Robert Frank in Vox: Why have weddings and houses gotten so ridiculously expensive? Blame inequality.

3. Paul Krugman: Floor Waxes, Dessert Toppings, and Blogging.

Links: Vedic Aviation Edition

Sidebar

See also:

Jayant Narlikar: Going Back in Time -- Science and Technology in Epics (The Times of India 1995).

Mayank Vahia (TIFR) in DNA: Cry my beloved science, cry my beloved country.

* * *

1. Hartosh Singh Bal in The Caravan: Why the Indian Scientific Community is to Blame for the Lack of Science at the 102nd Indian Science Congress.

   A copy of the proceedings that would include Bodas’ draft will only serve to confirm what the Islamic scholar Abu'l Raihan al-Biruni, writing almost a thousand years ago, had said about the state of Indian scientific knowledge: “I can only compare their mathematical and astronomical literature, as far as I know it, to a mixture of pearl shells and sour dates, or of pearls and dung, or of costly crystals and common pebbles. Both kinds of things are equal in their eyes, since they cannot raise themselves to the methods of a strictly scientific deduction.”

   But even these harsh words would constitute a charitable view. The reason the proceedings may still end up carrying Yonath and Ashtekar’s pearls along with Hindutva’s dung is not because our scientists cannot distinguish between them, but because they choose to look away in the face of a new political dispensation.

2. At one point, Bal refers to the Indian Science Congress as "India's premier scientific gathering." It looks like he hasn't got the memo that the ISC turned into some kind of a sad joke quite a while ago -- most Indian scientists avoid going to it if they can. In case they do go there, it's more likely because of an invitation from some hapless friend who got saddled with the responsibility of organizing a session on something or the other.

3. In any event, we now have some info on how the session on "Ancient Science through Sanskrit" got into the program, and how the organizers vetted the "contributions":

   Organisers defend session Organisers said the idea to conduct a session on ancient sciences emerged following a meeting of various university vice-chancellors with the Governor of Maharashtra. It was the vice-chancellor of Kavikulaguru Kalidas Sanskrit University in Nagpur, Uma Vaidya, who proposed the idea for such a session, said S B Nimse, chairman of the 102nd Indian Science Congress. Nimse said the sessions had been decided by a committee he headed and which had seven members, including TIFR Director Mustansir Barma, IIT Bombay Director Devang Khakhar, scientist Anil Kakodkar, Professor Kothari and two local secretaries. He too agreed that the controversy had “impacted other sessions”.

   Associate prof and head of Sanskrit department at Mumbai University, Gauri Mahulikar, who gave an overview on ancient Indian sciences through Sanskrit at the Science Congress, said that between August to December this year, there were several meetings between Vaidya and Sanskrit department of Mumbai University. “In one of the meetings, which included Vaidya, myself and teachers from Mumbai University’s Sanskrit department, it was decided to have such a topic at the Indian Science Congress. Thereafter, we called for papers and received five abstracts or presentations, which were jointly reviewed by Vaidya, myself and our teachers,” said Mahulikar.

4. It also turns out that neither the author of the Vedic aeronautics paper nor the organizer of that session is keen to part with the paper:

   When asked the reasons for not sharing a public presentation, Gauri Mahulikar, co-host of the event, associate professor and Head of Sanskrit Department, Mumbai University, said, "There are copyright issues. We fear that others who have nothing to do with this research, will claim it as their finding," she said. She said that a few students of Sanskrit had already taken some papers from them, and claimed to be their own works.

On the Indian Science Congress Agenda Today ...

... is a session on Ancient Sciences through Sanskrit -- see page 20 of the program. Some of the talks in the session have attracted media commentary (justifiably) filled with ridicule and scorn.

For many, this is like a bad dream that just won't go away -- Vedic astrology, Vedic nanotech, and now this. All trying to gain public legitimacy by being seen in the company of real science.

Here's just a sample of news reports on this session:

1. Stop Scientific Distortion (Mumbai Mirror). "NASA scientist Ram Prasad Gandhiraman, who started an online petition against an ISC lecture on ancient aviation, on why we must fight pseudo-science. [...] He has launched an online petition demanding that Capt Bodas's lecture scheduled for January 4 be cancelled as it brings into question the 'integrity of the scientific process'."

2. Hindu scientific temper: Elephant and cow urine to fuel aeroplanes? (Dinesh Sharma, Daily O). "Hindu organisations are on a mission to portray mythological and Sanskrit texts as the origins of modern science."

3. At Science Congress, Vedic aeroplanes and virus-proof suits - See more at: http://indianexpress.com/article/india/india-others/at-science-congress-vedic-aeroplanes-and-virus-proof-suits/99/#sthash.sUaAtlHU.dpuf (Mithika Basu, The Indian Express).

4. Science meet to discuss ancient Indian aviation (Kalyan Ray, Deccan Herald).

Auctioning of Jim Watson's Nobel Medal

There are just too many bizarre twists in this sequence: James Watson auctioned off his 1962 Nobel Medal; the highest bidder, a Russian multi-billionaire, bought it and returned it to Watson. Read more about Watson's peevish motivations here, and about the aftermath of the auction here.

When a HBS Faculty Met a Chinese Restaurant Owner

The tale of a professor of negotiation tangling with a mom-and-pop restaurant owner over 4 dollars is, like, totally awesome ...

The Other Big Verdict

Outlook reports [hat tip to my collegue Atul Chokshi for the e-mail alert]:

Delhi High Court

restrains

IIPM

and its management from using “MBA, BBA, Management Course, Management School, Business School or B-School” ” in relation to the courses / programmes being conducted by them."

The Outlook link also has the pdf of the verdict.

* * *

See also this Mint report: High court censures IIPM, Arindam Chaudhuri for misleading students.

BUMS

This is at # 96 in the list of UGC approved degrees in the Gazette notification of July 5, 2014.

That's all.