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India Considers Quotas for Muslims at Public Universities

September 21, 2011, 10:51 am

The Indian government is considering setting minimum quotas for the country’s minority Muslim community at public universities and for government jobs, the Hindustan Times reports. India’s public universities reserve almost 50 percent of their seats for economically and socially disadvantaged castes and classes. Salman Khurshid, India’s law minister, said the government hadn’t decided on the percentage of seats to be reserved for Muslims, but had indicated that it would probably follow the model of the southern state of Andhra Pradesh, which has specified a 4-percent quota for Muslims in jobs and education.

 

 

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  • marktropolis

    I think it’s always curious that the right wants to trumpet the former leftists-turrned-conservatives like Sol Stern or David Horowitz (especially if there were sufficiently radial to have worked at Ramparts), praising their consciousness. But when someone like Diane Ravitch makes a change in the other direction, she is criticized for being two-faced or a political opportunist.

    Not to mention the dismissive attitude towards the OWS marches – those uninformed rabble-rousers. Obviously, if the NAS gang was having their meeting at a prestigious 5th Avenue address, they *must* know what they are talking about. 

    And then the old trope that unions are by definition evil. But those guys hanging out in an over-priced few-thousand-foot apartment on 5th Ave are assumed to know what they’re talking about. Clearly address doesn’t equal knowledge, seeing as how Bloomberg lives right down the street…

  • peterwwood

    bscmath78 wonders what Sol Stern, I, and the audience at Stern’s talk think was disappointing about No Child Left Behind.  I can speak mostly for myself, though Mr. Stern did say some relevant things.  He pointed out, for example, that the NCLB set impossible goals (e.g. all students to have achieved proficiency in math and reading by 2014); that the law left it to the states to define the standards, creating an incentive to set them low; and that the emphasis on testing was an invitation to abuse that many teachers and even whole school districts responded to with a determination to cheat.

     My own view of NCLB is similar to bscmath78′s at least in regard to the humanities.  A system of rigorous testing in core subjects makes sense up to a point but inevitably puts emphasis on the easily testable and undervalues forms of knowledge and judgment that resist quantification. 

    As to the several individuals who have posted comments to the effect that I am, as one put it, “discrediting protesters,” I disagree.  The OWS movement has chosen its own tactics and messages.  These are indeed discrediting in the eyes of most observers, but I don’t see any need to insist on the point.  People can make up their own minds.

    Peter Wood

  • ruth13l

    I thank the authors for bringing this up because situations like this one need to be brought to light. I was present when the discussant made these comments, the discussant also mentioned that Latinos don’t make education a priority as much as “us.” Who is “us”? As mentioned in the article, we are “those” families and students that the discussant was talking about, but we are also part of this academic world. Along with the comments, what was also disheartening to me were the head nods of agreement from some of the audience members when the discussant was making very stereotypical statements. This showed me that the discussant is not the exception, but that prejudice and racism are alive and well in academia. In that moment, this situation of being in a national conference, faced with comments like this made me question how it is that we should respond to these situations. What is generally accepted? I honestly didn’t know. How might I have reacted if this was not an academic conference and these comments were made? The comments by the discussant are indicative of power relationships that exist in academia and also the invisibility many of us feel in spaces such as this. The discussant chose not to acknowledge our realities and our presence, and instead helped to further stereotypes of communities of color. Once again, tremendous thanks to the authors, I really believe this is a step in the right direction for challenging this type of “academic” thinking.

  • reddyh

    This is actually not a great solution – it takes a lot of energy to create a bottle of water and recycle it. The bottles have to be produced, filled, packaged, and shipped to their destination – which wastes a lot of resources. And the recycling process alone expends energy/takes resources and labor (including having to dispose of the bottles in containers ready for pick-up, hauling them to a recycling plant ,etc). There is not always enough ‘need’ or ‘demand’ for the recycled product produced, either. To me it makes more sense environmentally to just eliminate the entire product/process altogether. Students/staff can buy 1 aluminum bottled and reuse it over and over at the dining hall/dorm. 
    I work at a college that eliminated bottled water a few years ago and it has worked out very well. At the time I was told that the university would save some crazy amount of money per year by eliminating the bottled water – somewhere in the six-figure range.  Sounds like a good solution for both the university and the environment. 

  • badger74

    I enjoy drinking bottled water and have done so for many years. It is better for me than soda or coffee and costs much less at around $0.15 per pint. And I resent people trying to tell me what to buy, like or do with my money/time.  And it tastes much better to me than the stuff out of the fountains. Yuk. People piss in those things and worse.  

  • busyslinky

    Caffeine, lots of caffeine.  Both for the instructor and the students. 

  • nico108

    I struggled with this all semester. I also had a class that met in the evenings and once a week. I feel like I lost the entire semester to apathy and if it had been my first semester teaching I would have decided teaching was not for me. (Thankfully, I have had great classes with the same texts in the past…)
    It wasn’t just one class but the entire semester. They didn’t like me and I didn’t like them. I tired various things to bring them back—incorporating more writing (and getting rid of writing), trying to read just with the text St John’s style, trying more lecture, posing a question…nothing seemed to work.
    I really deeply feel like I failed with them.

  • jstuntz

    I have them stand up, turn around a few times, and then they have to keep standing until they ask a good question. If the weather is good, we can go outside. (Yes, they do not retain much from an outside lesson but they weren’t getting much inside, either, in this example.) Sometime we do the hokey-pokey. Anything that is out-of-norm will revive them, especially if it is silly. If I could tell jokes well, I would do that.

  • climate_change

    Here’s 25 years of teaching experience talking…some times a particular group of students is just plain bad (apathetic, rude, uncaring, whatever).  Just forget it.  Don’t sacrifice your teaching aspirations, positive attitude, goals for tricks and games.  It won’t work, and the students will see through it.  Just move on and look forward to next semester.

    And guess what?  Sometimes a student from one of those hopeless classes will approach you years later and tell you what a great class it was.  Go figure.

  • 1hova

    Yep, you and Frank are they only ones who care.

  • neurojoe

    “The Top Ten Reasons I’m Apathetic”
    #1:

  • 11134078

     I once had an evening class that didn’t end until 10:45 PM—and we were all working adults, of course. Interestingly, the idea of a break or breaks was voted down by an overwhelming majority. Almost everyone preferred to soldier on, grimly if necessary, so as to get home and get a decent bit of sleep before having to go work early the following morning.

  • matias_addy

    I had a handful of students in spring who expected to fail but continued to attend. Some didn’t even try to make it look as though they were the least bit attune to lecture: nothing out on their desks, smart-phone clearly visible, talking to neighbor, etc. I’d have to ask them to stop talking, or put away smart-phones, oftentimes more than once during a single 75-min class. They just didn’t care. They never did homework and were consistently scoring below 50% on tests but didn’t take this as an indication that they should perhaps take notes.

    Why keep attending if there’s no way for you to pass? Why keep wasting your time? There are other places where you can screw around on your smart-phones, in fact places where there isn’t a professor repeatedly telling you to put it away.  I think that they continued to attend due to an unfortunate short-term outlook on consequences. These were students who, based on all outward indicators, were fresh-off-the-boat from high school. This being a commuter college, I assume they were still living with their parents. My guess is that they didn’t want to tell their parents that they were failing and found it easier in the short-term to keep attending and lie about how they were doing.  They expected to fail, but better deal with explaining that when it occurs.

    Our college policy is such that I can withdraw them if they are failing and have accumulated a threshold level of absences relative to the number of class sessions, so maybe they had this in mind, too.  One student seemed to be attempting to stay in the class by repeated attendance, but wasn’t keeping close-enough track of absences, so I managed to cut him or her–thankfully, too, as s/he had a habit of looking up from the smart-phone every couple of minutes and demanding that everything be re-explained, extremely frustrating when you don’t want to engage publicly in a verbal confrontation.

    These students came increasingly to conceptualize the classroom entirely as a social/recreational space, where as long as they sat there and were a bit discreet about it, then they could use smart-phones and talk to friends they might have had in the class. Yes, the professor impedes these activities with reminders to be quiet or put away the phone, but it’s a milder form of harassment than one gets from parents or employers for doing those things during times when they’re supposed to be working. Having a back-pack was a formality mainly for appearance’s sake.  The best part is that I may well have some of them in my class for their second and maybe third tours.

  • educate_run

    You cared!  When you tried and everything fell flat, you tried something new.  You could just go in and lecture and feed into the students apathy.  I have been educating college students for over 15 years and I had apathetic classes.  I have to just keep reaching into my bag of tricks or talk to another cohort and see what they do about apathetic classes.

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