South Asia Citizens Wire - 18 June 2016 - No. 2900 [via South Asia Citizens Web - sacw.net since 1996]
Contents: 1. How Afghanistan’s mixed messages on homosexuality play into the Orlando shooting debate | Pamela Constable 2. Inside Bangladesh’s killing fields: bloggers and outsiders targeted by fanatics | Emma Graham-Harrison and Saad Hammadi 3. Bangladesh: Unless the Hasina government acts, murderous religious fantatics will destroy the moderate Muslim nation | Editorial in The Observer 4. Pakistan: Keeping Pace With Changing Society - Interview with Arif Hasan 5. India: National Food Security Act (NFSA) makes headway in poorest states, Bihar and Jharkhand lag behind - point out 2016 public hearings 6. India: Public Statement(s) by Sabrang Trust on Ministry of Home Affairs Cancellation of FCRA 7. Eleanor Zelliot (1926 - 2016): Tributes 8. Recent On Communalism Watch: - India: The registration of Sabrang Trust cancelled - Anumeha Yadav's report on Kairana: This town in UP has grappled with a divide since 2013 – and BJP's 'Hindu exodus' claim may deepen it - India: Piercing Kashmir’s Doublethink About the Return of the Pandits (Shakir Mir) - Justice for Rohith Campaign: New Petition Against Telangana Chief Minister - India: A familiar re-run in UP - BJP sanctifies rumour to incite communal divide says Editorial in The Tribune - Bangladesh: No excuse for inaction (editorial, Dhaka Tribune) - India: The BJP’s Plans for Assam - An RSS-Run School in Every Panchayat - Video: Hindu Sena's Celebration Of Donald Trump's Birthday In India - India: A is for anti-national (Amrita Dutta) - India: Virendra Tawade had two accomplices who executed Dabholkar's murder (A catchnews report by Ashwin Aghor) - India: Muzaffarnagar +Dadri + Kairana=Love Jihad+Beef+"Hindu" Exodus=Hard Communalism=Votes - Ramadan & Ramazan schedule (Jawed Naqvi) - India: "Muslim Personal Law is the biggest stumbling block . . . support a Common Indian Personal Law" - Zarina Bhatty - India: The Hindu Right Celebrating Donald Trump's Birthday in Delhi - Why are Indian Muslims using the Arabic word ‘Ramadan’ instead of the traditional 'Ramzan'? (Shoaib Daniyal) - India: The cult under the scanner for the Dabholkar, Pansare murders wants to establish the Kingdom of God (Dhirendra K Jha) ::: URLs & FULL TEXT ::: 9. The Saint and the Skyscraper | Mohammed Hanif 10. Skanthakumar reviews Jayawardena and Kurian's Class, Patriarchy and Ethnicity on Sri Lankan Plantations 11. India: As We Remember Eleanor Zelliot - on culture wars, xenophobia, and their ill-effects on research and scholarship | Ananya Vajpeyi 12. Economist who sought to improve the lot of women during global changes in work and technology | Sheila Rowbotham 13. Statement by Feminists in India Seeking Release of Dr. Homa Hoodfar from Prison in Iran 14. The Mistrust of Science | Atul Gawande 15. Carrington. Review of Reddy, William M., The Making of Romantic Love: Longing and Sexuality in Europe, South Asia, and Japan, 900-1200 16. Want to Kill Your Economy? Have MBA Programs Churn out Takers Not Makers. | Rana Foroohar ======================================== 1. HOW AFGHANISTAN’S MIXED MESSAGES ON HOMOSEXUALITY PLAY INTO THE ORLANDO SHOOTING DEBATE | Pamela Constable ======================================== The revulsion Afghans express toward Western gay lifestyles that involve affection and sex between consenting peers, and their society’s simultaneous acceptance of forced sex between powerful men and young boys, is an apparent contradiction that is never confronted, acknowledged or publicly discussed in Afghan society. But it has been reported in detail by Western visitors, including former Post reporter Ernesto Londono, who investigated the practice of older men buying and keeping dancing boys, known as bacha bazi. http://sacw.net/article12825.html ======================================== 2. INSIDE BANGLADESH’S KILLING FIELDS: BLOGGERS AND OUTSIDERS TARGETED BY FANATICS | Emma Graham-Harrison and Saad Hammadi ======================================== First they came for the bloggers, the atheists, the secular intellectuals. Then the three-year murder spree spread to aid workers, minority religions and Muslims who did not want their country reshaped by extremist Islam. http://www.sacw.net/article12823.html ======================================== 3. BANGLADESH: UNLESS THE HASINA GOVERNMENT ACTS, MURDEROUS RELIGIOUS FANTATICS WILL DESTROY THE MODERATE MUSLIM NATION | Editorial in The Observer ======================================== Crime and punishment is not the sole issue here. At stake is Bangladesh’s tradition of cultural diversity, religious tolerance and secular governance. At risk is the future of a moderate Muslim nation battered by a destructive international political cyclone that it alone cannot control. http://www.sacw.net/article12822.html ======================================== 4. PAKISTAN: KEEPING PACE WITH CHANGING SOCIETY - INTERVIEW WITH ARIF HASAN ======================================== Arif Hasan, architect, planner, social activist, points to social and political changes taking place in Pakistan and why the state does not consider these when making policy http://sacw.net/article12786.html ======================================== 5. INDIA: NATIONAL FOOD SECURITY ACT (NFSA) MAKES HEADWAY IN POOREST STATES, BIHAR AND JHARKHAND LAG BEHIND - POINT OUT 2016 PUBLIC HEARINGS ======================================== Eastern India, the world capital of malnutrition, has reached a make-or-break point in the battle against hunger. For the first time, the National Food Security Act (NFSA) makes it possible to ensure that no-one sleeps on an empty stomach. Many people, however, are still struggling to secure their entitlements under the Act. By way of reality check, a careful survey of NFSA was conducted by student volunteers in six of India’s poorest states in early June 2016. Early survey findings suggests that four of these six states (Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh, Odisha and West Bengal) are making good progress towards food security for all: the Public Distribution System is working quite well and most people are covered. Bihar and Jharkhand, however, are yet to complete essential PDS reforms http://sacw.net/article12824.html ======================================== 6. INDIA: PUBLIC STATEMENT(S) BY SABRANG TRUST ON MINISTRY OF HOME AFFAIRS CANCELLATION OF FCRA ======================================== the MHA issued a notice cancelling the FCRA of Sabrang Trust. Sabrang Trust’s primary activities have involved working in the area of secular education, advocacy and documentation while Citizens for Justice and Peace (CJP) have been working on the issue deliverance of justice to the Survivors of Mass Crimes, especially Gujarat 2002. Both need continued and sustained citizen’s support. http://sacw.net/article12826.html ======================================== 7. ELEANOR ZELLIOT (1926 - 2016): TRIBUTES ======================================== http://sacw.net/article12820.html ======================================== 8. RECENT ON COMMUNALISM WATCH: ======================================== India: The registration of Sabrang Trust cancelled India: Uttar Pradesh town, in the news for communal divide, is also the birth place of the Kirana ‘gharana’ - A tour through the town with two musicians from Delhi (Mayank Austen Soofi) Anumeha Yadav's report on Kairana: This town in UP has grappled with a divide since 2013 – and BJP's 'Hindu exodus' claim may deepen it India: Uniform Civil Code is good but it can wait (RD Sharma) India: All insecure in Kairana - Comment in Hindustan Times India: Piercing Kashmir’s Doublethink About the Return of the Pandits (Shakir Mir) India: Jammu temple row: 22 detained for arson released after ‘VHP threat’ ndia: Fact-Finding Report on the alleged Exodus of Hindus from Kairana Justice for Rohith Campaign: New Petition Against Telangana Chief Minister India: A familiar re-run in UP - BJP sanctifies rumour to incite communal divide says Editorial in The Tribune Bangladesh: No excuse for inaction (editorial, Dhaka Tribune) India: The BJP’s Plans for Assam - An RSS-Run School in Every Panchayat Video: Hindu Sena's Celebration Of Donald Trump's Birthday In India India: A is for anti-national (Amrita Dutta) ndia: Virendra Tawade had two accomplices who executed Dabholkar's murder (A catchnews report by Ashwin Aghor) ndia: Muzaffarnagar +Dadri + Kairana=Love Jihad+Beef+"Hindu" Exodus=Hard Communalism=Votes Ramadan & Ramazan schedule (Jawed Naqvi) India: "Muslim Personal Law is the biggest stumbling block . . . support a Common Indian Personal Law" - Zarina Bhatty India: The Hindu Right Celebrating Donald Trump's Birthday in Delhi India: Excerpt from the chapter Survivors of Mass Communal Violence in Muzaffarnagar: profiles of loss, dispossession, and recovery by Sajjad Hassan, published in the India Exclusion Report 2015 Why are Indian Muslims using the Arabic word ‘Ramadan’ instead of the traditional 'Ramzan'? (Shoaib Daniyal) India: The cult under the scanner for the Dabholkar, Pansare murders wants to establish the Kingdom of God (Dhirendra K Jha) India: An investigative report on the claims of Hindu's migration from Kairana (in Shamli) | an ABPlive video report India: Laws that accord secondary status to women need to be reformed says Ram Puniyani -> available via: http://communalism.blogspot.com/ ::: FULL TEXT ::: ======================================== 9. THE SAINT AND THE SKYSCRAPER by Mohammed Hanif ======================================== (The New York Times, June 15, 2016) KARACHI, Pakistan — I live in a neighborhood by the shore made famous by the eighth-century saint Abdullah Shah Ghazi. He has been the city’s designated trouble-shooter since he arrived here as a horse trader. If you have an urgent problem that the living can’t help with, you walk up the stairs of the shrine. You offer a prayer and maybe a handful of rose petals. Your problem may not be solved immediately, but you come out feeling better. So confident are Karachiites of Ghazi’s power that whenever there is a storm warning, instead of running away, they rush to the sea to have some fun. This city has had its share of troubles — water shortages, ethnic strife, gang wars, criminalized local politics — but for more than 12 centuries Ghazi has protected it from the fury of the Arabian Sea. Now Karachi’s savior saint is himself in trouble. Ghazi has a new upstart neighbor: the Bahria Icon Towers, a pair of buildings including one 62 stories high that will be Pakistan’s highest building and the country’s first proper skyscraper. The project, though unfinished, doesn’t just dwarf the saint’s shrine; it has surrounded it with ugly prison-like walls, making the shrine invisible and very, very difficult to access. Like any wise saint living by the sea, Ghazi, according to folklore, chose to set his shrine at the top of a hillock. Its green and white striped dome used to be visible from miles away. Its open courtyards and surrounding empty spaces have hosted thousands of people every day, and hundreds of thousands on public holidays and on the anniversary of Ghazi’s death. People come for prayer, music, food and rendezvous. The shrine hosts a nonstop party for the kind of people who don’t get invited to parties. Ghazi’s new neighbor will have corporate offices, luxury apartments and shopping malls with international brands. Its ads promise a life full of aromatherapy, desserts decorated with spun sugar and happy, healthy babies bobbing in infinity pools. Bahria Icon Towers is expecting lots of cars, for corporate workers and the residents of luxury apartments. The developers have built a multistory car park and a flyover with a network of underpasses. A “gift to the people,” they never forget to tell us. Every weekday, get thought-provoking commentary from Op-Ed columnists, The Times editorial board and contributing writers from around the world. The affluent residents of the area resisted initially, but gave up after the developers dug up entire roads around the shrine and went to court to get an injunction so they could keep going. The courts also relented because, frankly, who can resist the lure of a skyscraper? Now that the flyover and underpasses are complete, the area has become so labyrinthine that if Ghazi himself passed by he would need all his saintly powers to navigate the entrance to his own shrine. That is, if he recognized it all. After citizens warned that the skyscraper might damage the structure of the shrine, the developers decided to build huge sand-colored concrete walls around it. A “gift to the people.” The green and white dome and the blue and white striped exterior of the shrine that were the emblem of the city have disappeared from its skyline. Ghazi, who once lorded over Karachi, has been practically imprisoned in an ugly giant riad-like villa. Pakistan is dotted with shrines of saints with great reputations. There’s the one who cures diabetes. The one who will give you a son. The one who can get your son off death row. And all the ones who wrote great poetry and made brilliant music that have survived centuries. But love for Abdullah Shah Ghazi is so widespread that even people who don’t believe in mosques, prayer or spiritual healing walk up to his shrine with secret wishes and plastic bags full of petals. A suicide attack in 2010, which left at least seven people dead, didn't scare visitors away. Ghazi’s shrine is a last-chance saloon for those who can’t go to the government and can’t afford a therapist. For those who can’t talk to their sister or whose sister won’t talk to them; for those with sick babies or who are desperate for babies; for newly married couples or for people who want their spouses back. It’s the only public place in Karachi where people can break down and cry and everyone around them will understand. Many of the regulars here are sweaty, smelly people, and they will never be allowed inside the Bahria Icon Towers. Who will protect them now that property developers are threatening Ghazi? And who will protect all of us from the elements? There was a time when the Arabian Sea lapped at the shrine’s feet. Over the decades the sea has been pushed back, and all around the shrine miles and miles of land have been reclaimed so that posh mansions and shopping areas could be built. This is the development model Karachi has followed. There are signal-free corridors for car owners, but hardly any footpaths for the millions who walk to work. There are air-conditioned shopping malls for affluent consumers, but the police hound street vendors claiming they’re a threat to public order. McDonald’s occupies the prime spot on the beach, and that’s become the smelliest part. Developers cared more about the parking lot than the sewage system, and waste is being dumped in the Arabian Sea. But then who needs the sea, or a saint to protect us against it, when we can have infinity pools in the sky? Mohammed Hanif is the author of the novels “A Case of Exploding Mangoes” and “Our Lady of Alice Bhatti,” and the librettist for the opera “Bhutto.” ======================================== 10. SKANTHAKUMAR REVIEWS JAYAWARDENA AND KURIAN'S CLASS, PATRIARCHY AND ETHNICITY ON SRI LANKAN PLANTATIONS ======================================== (Sunday Island, 12 June 2016) Class, Patriarchy and Ethnicity on Sri Lankan Plantations: Two Centuries of Power and Protest by Kumari Jayawardena and Rachel Kurian New Delhi: Orient Black Swan 2015; pp 364, INR 825 Reviewer: B. Skanthakumar Kumari Jayawardena and Rachel Kurian have uncovered the injustices heaped upon the plantation community of immigrant Tamil and oppressed caste origin by the powerful – while recovering their individual and collective acts of resistance in the struggle for human dignity – in an important work of engaged scholarship drawing on archival records in Britain, India, the Netherlands and Sri Lanka; supplemented by interviews over three decades with politicians, trade unionists and others; and a comprehensive survey of the secondary literature. Their core categories are class, patriarchy, and ethnicity. In particular, the authors underline the tenacity through time of the ‘plantation patriarchy’: an economic and social system that upholds the privileged position of men and the subordination of women within the plantation. "In many ways", say the authors, "women workers on the plantations could be viewed as the ‘slaves of slaves’ ". This particular manifestation of patriarchy, "assimilated social hierarchies and gender biases stemming from colonialism, race, caste, ethnicity, religion and cultural practices into the structure of the labour regime and social organisation on plantations". Planter Raj Part one discusses the emergence and consolidation in the 19th century of the ‘Planter Raj’. The planter was afforded almost complete authority and impunity within the plantation, and enjoyed enormous influence on labour, economic and social policy elsewhere. The plantation was a ‘total institution’, at once home, community, and workplace for its labouring population; where almost every aspect of the life of the worker – from ‘womb to tomb’ as the Planters’ Association repeats to this day – are situated within its boundaries: including educational, health, spiritual, recreational, and so on. By design it was, and to a great extent remains, distanced – spatially, administratively, and legally – from the rural social formation in which it is implanted. Jayawardena and Kurian make a sustained case for how "force and compulsion" or extra-economic coercion "were inherent to the nature of labour relations on the plantations"; including by means of debt-bondage and a captive labour-force. In British Ceylon they argue, ideologies and practices from the Atlantic plantations combined with indigenous and pre-capitalist beliefs and institutions – including caste, religion, forced labour (rajakariya) and patriarchy – to forge "a new kind of slavery". Outsiders The weakening of the tyrannical Planter Raj is tracked from the early 20th century in the second part. Segregated as they were in the hill country districts, and being monolingual Tamil speakers, the plantation workers neither participated in, nor appeared to be affected by, the growing militancy of urban and largely Sinhala-speaking workers at the turn of the century. Initially it was ‘outsiders’ of diverse social origins and convictions: ranging from liberal bureaucrats, to reform-minded urban professionals, followed by radical labour activists, and the anti-imperialist Left, who protested the working and social conditions of the tea and rubber workers. Indian nationalists including MK Gandhi, Sarojini Naidu, Jawaharlal Nehru, Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay, and EV Ramasamy (‘Periyar’) visited the island and spoke out on the welfare of Tamil plantation workers. The remarkable Gujarati couple Manilal Maganlal Doctor and Jayunkvar Manilal (Mehta) who had championed the cause of Indian indentured labourers in Mauritius, South Africa and Fiji, landed in 1921 to do the same, only to be deported by the British within months. The best remembered ‘outsider’ is the Tamil Brahmin journalist Natesa Aiyar, who campaigned for labour rights including higher minimum wages; higher wages for women (who were paid less than men); and abolition of child labour. In 1931 he founded the All Ceylon Indian Estate Labour Federation which by 1940 claimed membership of 37,000, and branches in Badulla, Hatton and Nuwara Eliya. Women such as Meenachi Ammal struggled for women’s equality including of franchise. She was a labour organiser, co-editor of the Desabhaktan newspaper (along with her husband Natesa Aiyar), public speaker, lyricist, and singer. Class struggle Part three is located in the 1930s and 1940s in the lead-up to decolonisation. The seeds of organisation and politicisation of plantation workers, sown among others by the left-wing Lanka Sama Samaja Party, bore fruit in greater militancy, self-organisation, and heightened struggles for labour and political rights. These were the decades of extra-legal strikes, occupations, and physical confrontation with thugs and the police, for recognition of trade unions; dismissal of head kanganies (labour contractors and overseers) and kanakapulles (accountants); higher wages; and shorter working days, among other demands. However, the class struggle was never one-sided. The planters fought tooth and nail to break the resistance of the workers, aided and abetted by the colonial state and its armoury. Meanwhile, Sinhala nationalist politicians stoked anti-Indian xenophobia by pointing to their number (one million or one-sixth of the population in 1939); blaming the urban Malayali and Tamil workers and the rural plantation workers for the problem of unemployment, and agitating for their repatriation to India. Three pieces of legislation: the Ceylon Citizenship Act of 1948; the Indian and Pakistani Residents (Citizenship) Act of 1949; and the Parliamentary Elections Amendment Act of 1949 – some enacted with the support of North-Eastern Tamil and Muslim legislators – systematically stripped plantation workers of the right to vote and permanent residence, leave alone nationality, in the country many had been born and almost all had ever known. Disenfranchisement and Statelessness Part four dramatises how the aftermath of disenfranchisement and statelessness from the 1950s onwards framed and formed the post-colonial identity of the plantation community. Its parliamentary representation was reduced to zero in 1952. Its struggles as an exploited class intertwined with those of an oppressed ethnic minority; estranged from urban workers through geographical isolation and Tamil ethnic and linguistic identity, and stigmatised by other Tamil-speakers for its recent immigration, class, and caste origin. Further miseries were visited upon them. Large numbers were deported to the south of India, dumped to live and labour in its ‘tea gardens’, under agreements in 1964 and 1974 between the governments of Ceylon and India. The Left parties, once fighters for equality and workers’ rights but now in coalition politics, caved into ethnic chauvinism and supported these ‘Pacts’. The Left had long advocated nationalisation of the plantations and had its way by 1975. A Sinhala youth insurrection four years earlier, blamed on high levels of unemployment and land hunger, stung the government into taking-over of large estates. The shift from private to state ownership did not change labour relations on the plantations. Instead, stateless workers and their families were expelled from the estates, losing their only shelter and income; while the reduction in the rice ration and rocketing prices of essentials (rice by 600% and kerosene by 500% between 1970 and 1974) condemned others to destitution and death by starvation. Further, in the anti-Tamil riots of 1977, 1981 and 1983 and in sporadic communal attacks thereafter, the plantation community periodically suffered loss of life and property, and displacement; leading some to migrate to the Vanni where they were caught up in the battles there to its bitter end. State Ownership Following the exit of private interests, and with the state now at once owner, employer and manager of the plantations, pressure was brought to bear on the government to improve social provisioning through upgrading the centuries-old ‘line rooms’; greater resourcing of estate health services especially maternity care; and absorption of estate schools into the national education system. There were also raised expectations among plantation workers that as public sector employees, their incomes would rise. In April 1984, hundreds of thousands went on strike for nine days. The government conceded a substantial increase in wages for men and women. Significantly the trade unions won their demand for the equalisation of women and men’s wages and the daily wage of women workers rose by 70%. Those who were able to claim their citizenship also began to regain their franchise. Over time, the plantation community electorate expanded in numbers; allowing for their direct representation in parliament from 1977 onwards after a hiatus of thirty years. A combination of factors including countering sympathy for Tamil separatism in the North and East; anxieties over a new front in the hill country through tie-ups between North-Eastern Tamil militants and Plantation Tamils; as well as the vote bank that trade union boss Saumyamoorthy Thondaman brought his coalition partners, contributed to the gradual restoration of citizenship rights to all – beginning in 1986 and only ending in 2003. Privatisation Part five spans the end of the 20th century and up to the present, taking up some contemporary issues. Though relatively late in the sequencing of neo-liberal reforms, the plantations were privatised in a staggered process between 1992 and 1996. The new employers were disinterested in non-production issues of water, sanitation, housing, and estate infrastructure. These former obligations were assigned to the Plantation Human Development Trust, and to multilateral agencies, and international non-governmental organisations with uneven outcomes. Post-privatisation despite greater state provisioning, partial integration into national delivery systems, and substantial donor funding, the plantation community lags behind other sections of the poor when it comes to household income, nutrition of mothers and children, school completion, higher education enrolment, life expectancy, sexual and reproductive health rights etc., and is denied ownership of housing and land. Trade unions are legitimately criticised as hierarchical, authoritarian and patriarchal workers’ organisatio?ns, which are in long-term decline. Instead non-governmental and community-based-organisations are canvassed, over-expectantly in my view, as new agents for social justice and in ‘deepening democracy’ in the plantations. The changing consciousness of the plantation community is highlighted in the assertion and politics of a Malaiyaha (‘Hill Country’) Tamil identity in place of the ‘Indian Tamil’ one foisted upon them. An over-reliance on secondary sources and a handful of informants, an unnecessary excursus into academic debates on human development, and indulgent estimation of Thondaman’s historical role make this the least satisfactory part of an otherwise fecund and fluent people’s history. In Class, Patriarchy and Ethnicity on Sri Lankan Plantations, Kumari Jayawardena and Rachel Kurian offer an indispensable point of departure to explore the past, present and future of the people whose blood, sweat and tears has sustained export revenues for 200 years, shedding light on how the island’s political economy has been shaped in ways yet little known and even less appreciated. B. Skanthakumar is a researcher with the Social Scientists’ Association in Colombo, and co-editor of Pathways of the Left in Sri Lanka (EISD 2014). ======================================== 11. INDIA: AS WE REMEMBER ELEANOR ZELLIOT - ON CULTURE WARS, XENOPHOBIA, AND THEIR ILL-EFFECTS ON RESEARCH AND SCHOLARSHIP by Ananya Vajpeyi ======================================== (Indian Cultural Forum - 15 June 2016) The recent death of American Ambedkar scholar Eleanor Zelliot is another reminder that scholarship about India has been the work of many minds, some Indian, others foreign. The field of Maharashtra Studies alone, for example, is impossible to imagine without the contributions of scholars like Eleanor Zelliot, Günther Sontheimer, Anne Feldhaus, Gail Omvedt, Lee Schlesinger, Stewart Gordon and so many others, including the unfortunate James Laine, whose career as an Indianist was abruptly truncated by right-wing attacks on his book about Shivaji back in 2003-2004, under the BJP-led NDA administration. Today, the central and state governments increasingly deny research visas and other requisite permissions to scholars wanting to come to study India or study in India from overseas. Research areas as wide-ranging as “Caste”, “Tribals”, “Insurgency”, “Social Inequality”, “Religion” etc. are off limits, either because of formally enforced rules or because of informally understood but nonetheless crippling taboos and restrictions on research. How could such policies not hurt the quality and depth of scholarship about India? The answer will become clear in another 5-10 years, as language skills disappear, papers and books begin to dry up, fieldwork becomes a distant memory, and archives languish unused. In Egypt recently, the Italian research scholar Giulio Regeni, a doctoral student at Cambridge University, was abducted by secret police, brutally tortured and left for dead. He was working on labor unions and labor politics in Egypt, and spoke fluent Arabic. The Egyptian regime’s message was clear: foreign researchers are not welcome. But the real cost is borne by Egyptian academics and intellectuals, many of whom face jail sentences at home, are forced into exile and seek asylum at American universities and think tanks, or simply fall silent as the price they must pay to save their jobs and their lives. This is not yet the case in India, but who can say with any confidence that we are not headed the same way? Screen Shot 2016-02-25 at 6.42.57 AM Eleanor Zelliot was a specialist on the history of India, Southeast Asia, Vietnam, women of Asia, Untouchables, social movements. She wrote over eighty articles and edited three books on the movement among Untouchables in India led by Dr. B.R. Ambedkar, on saint-poets of the medieval period, and on the current Ambedkar-inspired Buddhist movement, The Experience of Hinduism, From Untouchable to Dalit: Essays on the Ambedkar Movement, and Untouchable Saints, an Indian Phenomenon. Eleanor’s fourth book Ambedkar’s World: The Making of Babasaheb and the Dalit Movement, was published in 2013. See also Eleanor’s bibliography and additional publications (via Carleton College). Ananya Vajpeyi works at the intersection of intellectual history, political theory and critical philology. She is currently writing two books: one, a history of caste categories in India from pre-colonial to modern times, and the other, her long-term project, a life of Dr. B.R. Ambedkar (via the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies). ======================================== 12. ECONOMIST WHO SOUGHT TO IMPROVE THE LOT OF WOMEN DURING GLOBAL CHANGES IN WORK AND TECHNOLOGY by Sheila Rowbotham ======================================== (The Guardian - 14 June 2016) The radical economist Swasti Mitter, who has died of cancer aged 76, pioneered the investigation of how global changes in work and technology have affected women in developing countries. She applied the skills of a hard-headed, mathematically inclined economist, plus an exceptional capacity for empathetic social investigation, to the human consequences of shifts in the international division of labour. Beginning by collecting the testimonies of Bangladeshi immigrant homeworkers in the clothing industry in the East End of London in 1982, she went on to trace connections between the casualisation of labour in Britain and the operations of transnational corporations in developing countries. The result was Common Fate, Common Bond: Women in the Global Economy (1986), which described the growth of export processing zones, together with the spread of low-pay sweatshops and homeworking, producing goods sold by large outlets in Europe and the US. Swasti argued that changes in the organisation of production, made possible by new technology, were contributing to the emergence of “a third world among the first”, and called for the creation of a new labour movement in the developed world that was prepared to learn from methods of empowering poor women in developing countries. The book drew on work by feminist economists such as Ursula Huws, and on emergent networks of resistance, including Women Working Worldwide, formed in the first half of the 1980s; but the thoughtful clarity of its influential synthesis was Swasti’s own. She pursued similar themes in the book she edited with me, Dignity and Daily Bread: New Forms of Economic Organising Among Poor Women in the Third World and the First (1994), which detailed attempts to organise labour in free trade zones, in clothing sweatshops in Mexico, among homeworkers in India and West Yorkshire, and in small businesses run by women in Tanzania. The research was made possible by the United Nations University’s World Institute for Development Economics Research and led to Swasti’s involvement with the UNU’s Institute for New Technologies (Intech) and another edited work, Women Encounter Technology (1995). This showed the contradictory effects of new technology upon women workers while exploring the relations between tacit “knowhow” and theoretical knowledge. The International Labour Organisation (ILO) published Women in Trade Unions: Organising the Unorganised (1994), which she edited with Margaret Martens. Swasti was a cooperative scholar, researching and writing with activists and feminist economists such as Anneke van Luijken, Naila Kabeer, Nirmala Banerjee, Cecilia Ng Choon Sim, Carol Yong, Diane Elson and Ruth Pearson. I found working alongside her both stimulating and joyous. She was born in Baharampur in West Bengal, India, to Sasanka Sanyal, a leading nationalist and lawyer, and his wife, Ushararini. Her mother not only had a strong belief in the need for women to receive education but great faith in her daughter’s scholarly abilities, and was able to persuade Swasti’s father to allow her to study economics first at Presidency College in Calcutta (now Kolkata, 1956-57) and then at Khrishnath College in Baharampur (1957-58). Advertisement Swasti’s first struggle was to overcome her parents’ opposition to her marrying Partha Mitter, whom she met in 1957. They married three years later in 1960 and moved to Britain, where Swasti studied at the London School of Economics and Cambridge University. Her initial research ranged from an account of the demand for food and agricultural products in the UK to an oral history of how peasant movements in West Bengal altered agrarian class relations. Employed by Brighton Polytechnic (later the University of Brighton) from 1974, she was appointed professor of gender and technology there in 1993. Between 1994 and 2000 she was deputy director of Intech, where she continued to study the human consequences of economic transformation, focusing particularly on new technology in Europe and in Asia. She never abandoned her commitment to opening up new opportunities for democratic participation of poor women by expanding the narrow circuits through which economic knowledge is exchanged internationally. Opposed to all forms of injustice, she wanted to enable poor women to develop their voices so they could assert their needs. She understood that this involved access to information and the transfer of economic and social resources from the powerful to the vulnerable. She also played a key part in linking grassroots activists and trade unionists with academic researchers and large-scale organisations such as the United Nations. She is survived by Partha, by their children, Rana and Pamina, and by two grandchildren, Iskandar and Malavika. Swasti Mitter, economist, born 22 May 1939; died 1 May 2016 ======================================== 13. STATEMENT BY FEMINISTS IN INDIA SEEKING RELEASE OF DR. HOMA HOODFAR FROM PRISON IN IRAN ======================================== June 15, 2016 We, the undersigned, are in solidarity with Dr. Homa Hoodfar, a Canadian anthropologist of Iranian origin who has been imprisoned by the Iranian authorities on June 6, 2016. Dr. Hoodfar is a respected academic scholar and researcher on women and family in the Middle East and the Muslim world. She travelled to Iran in March 2016 to visit family and for research on women’s participation in public life. Prior to her arrest, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard interrogated Ms. Hoodfar repeatedly without the presence of a lawyer, searched and seized her belongings including passport, phone and laptop. Ms. Hoodfar fully cooperated with the process and has been very respectful of the domestic Iranian judicial system. Since her arrest however, her family, colleagues and supporters in Iran were left with no choice but to go public with the news of the arrest. Iranian authorities have given no reason for the arrest and the charges under which she has been held. She has not been granted access to her family or legal counsel. Dr. Hoodfar, aged 65, is not in good health and has already suffered from a mild stroke in 2015. Her family is concerned about her health and fears she may not have access to the specialized care that she requires. We urge the Iranian government to: * Provide Dr Hoodfar immediate access to her family and lawyer; * Ensure Dr Hoodfar has the medicines she requires for her neurological illness, her condition is monitored and the report shared with her family; * Release Dr Hoodfar and return her passport and other essential documents so she can travel back to Canada to continue her treatment there and resume her academic work. A. Mani Abha Bhaiya Albertina Almeida, Goa Ammu Abraham Anuradha Kapoor Anuradha Pati Aruna Burte Ayesha Kidwai Celin Thomas Chayanika Shah Chayya Datar Dr. Mira Shiva Dyuti Ailawadi Gabriele Dietrich Geeta Seshu Geetanjali Joshua Geetanjoli Gangoli Hasina Khan Indira Jaising Jessica Mahadevan Johanna Lokhande Kalyani Menon-Sen Kamal Kavitha Murlidharan Kiran Shaheen Lata P.M. Mary E John Mira Savara Nalini Nayak Nandita Shah Nazia Akhtar Neeraj Malik Nevedita Menon Nimisha Desai Nivedita Menon Nizara Hazarika Pramada Menon Prof. Saswati Ghosh, Kolkatta Pushpa Achanta (Journalist, Bangalore) Rajashri Dasgupta Ramlath Kavil Rohini Hensman Roshmi Goswami Sadhana Arya Sagari R Ramdas Saheli Women’s Resource Centre Sakina Bohra Sarojini N Saumya Uma Shahida Murtaza Shalini Mahajan, Writer, Bombay Sheetal Sharma Shilpa Phadke Shraddha Chickerur Shreya Sangai Shubha Chacko Sujatha Gothoskar Sumi Krishna Suneeta Dhar Supriya Madangarli Swatija Manorama Teena Gill Uma Chakravarti Urvashi Butalia Vahida Nainar Vani Subramaniam, Film Maker Vibhuti Patel Virginia Saldanha Vrinda Grover ======================================== 14. THE MISTRUST OF SCIENCE by Atul Gawande ======================================== (New Yorker - June 10, 2016) The following was delivered as the commencement address at the California Institute of Technology, on Friday, June 10th. If this place has done its job—and I suspect it has—you’re all scientists now. Sorry, English and history graduates, even you are, too. Science is not a major or a career. It is a commitment to a systematic way of thinking, an allegiance to a way of building knowledge and explaining the universe through testing and factual observation. The thing is, that isn’t a normal way of thinking. It is unnatural and counterintuitive. It has to be learned. Scientific explanation stands in contrast to the wisdom of divinity and experience and common sense. Common sense once told us that the sun moves across the sky and that being out in the cold produced colds. But a scientific mind recognized that these intuitions were only hypotheses. They had to be tested. When I came to college from my Ohio home town, the most intellectually unnerving thing I discovered was how wrong many of my assumptions were about how the world works—whether the natural or the human-made world. I looked to my professors and fellow-students to supply my replacement ideas. Then I returned home with some of those ideas and told my parents everything they’d got wrong (which they just loved). But, even then, I was just replacing one set of received beliefs for another. It took me a long time to recognize the particular mind-set that scientists have. The great physicist Edwin Hubble, speaking at Caltech’s commencement in 1938, said a scientist has “a healthy skepticism, suspended judgement, and disciplined imagination”—not only about other people’s ideas but also about his or her own. The scientist has an experimental mind, not a litigious one. As a student, this seemed to me more than a way of thinking. It was a way of being—a weird way of being. You are supposed to have skepticism and imagination, but not too much. You are supposed to suspend judgment, yet exercise it. Ultimately, you hope to observe the world with an open mind, gathering facts and testing your predictions and expectations against them. Then you make up your mind and either affirm or reject the ideas at hand. But you also hope to accept that nothing is ever completely settled, that all knowledge is just probable knowledge. A contradictory piece of evidence can always emerge. Hubble said it best when he said, “The scientist explains the world by successive approximations.” The scientific orientation has proved immensely powerful. It has allowed us to nearly double our lifespan during the past century, to increase our global abundance, and to deepen our understanding of the nature of the universe. Yet scientific knowledge is not necessarily trusted. Partly, that’s because it is incomplete. But even where the knowledge provided by science is overwhelming, people often resist it—sometimes outright deny it. Many people continue to believe, for instance, despite massive evidence to the contrary, that childhood vaccines cause autism (they do not); that people are safer owning a gun (they are not); that genetically modified crops are harmful (on balance, they have been beneficial); that climate change is not happening (it is). Vaccine fears, for example, have persisted despite decades of research showing them to be unfounded. Some twenty-five years ago, a statistical analysis suggested a possible association between autism and thimerosal, a preservative used in vaccines to prevent bacterial contamination. The analysis turned out to be flawed, but fears took hold. Scientists then carried out hundreds of studies, and found no link. Still, fears persisted. Countries removed the preservative but experienced no reduction in autism—yet fears grew. A British study claimed a connection between the onset of autism in eight children and the timing of their vaccinations for measles, mumps, and rubella. That paper was retracted due to findings of fraud: the lead author had falsified and misrepresented the data on the children. Repeated efforts to confirm the findings were unsuccessful. Nonetheless, vaccine rates plunged, leading to outbreaks of measles and mumps that, last year, sickened tens of thousands of children across the U.S., Canada, and Europe, and resulted in deaths. People are prone to resist scientific claims when they clash with intuitive beliefs. They don’t see measles or mumps around anymore. They do see children with autism. And they see a mom who says, “My child was perfectly fine until he got a vaccine and became autistic.” Now, you can tell them that correlation is not causation. You can say that children get a vaccine every two to three months for the first couple years of their life, so the onset of any illness is bound to follow vaccination for many kids. You can say that the science shows no connection. But once an idea has got embedded and become widespread, it becomes very difficult to dig it out of people’s brains—especially when they do not trust scientific authorities. And we are experiencing a significant decline in trust in scientific authorities. The sociologist Gordon Gauchat studied U.S. survey data from 1974 to 2010 and found some deeply alarming trends. Despite increasing education levels, the public’s trust in the scientific community has been decreasing. This is particularly true among conservatives, even educated conservatives. In 1974, conservatives with college degrees had the highest level of trust in science and the scientific community. Today, they have the lowest. Today, we have multiple factions putting themselves forward as what Gauchat describes as their own cultural domains, “generating their own knowledge base that is often in conflict with the cultural authority of the scientific community.” Some are religious groups (challenging evolution, for instance). Some are industry groups (as with climate skepticism). Others tilt more to the left (such as those that reject the medical establishment). As varied as these groups are, they are all alike in one way. They all harbor sacred beliefs that they do not consider open to question. To defend those beliefs, few dismiss the authority of science. They dismiss the authority of the scientific community. People don’t argue back by claiming divine authority anymore. They argue back by claiming to have the truer scientific authority. It can make matters incredibly confusing. You have to be able to recognize the difference between claims of science and those of pseudoscience. Science’s defenders have identified five hallmark moves of pseudoscientists. They argue that the scientific consensus emerges from a conspiracy to suppress dissenting views. They produce fake experts, who have views contrary to established knowledge but do not actually have a credible scientific track record. They cherry-pick the data and papers that challenge the dominant view as a means of discrediting an entire field. They deploy false analogies and other logical fallacies. And they set impossible expectations of research: when scientists produce one level of certainty, the pseudoscientists insist they achieve another. It’s not that some of these approaches never provide valid arguments. Sometimes an analogy is useful, or higher levels of certainty are required. But when you see several or all of these tactics deployed, you know that you’re not dealing with a scientific claim anymore. Pseudoscience is the form of science without the substance. The challenge of what to do about this—how to defend science as a more valid approach to explaining the world—has actually been addressed by science itself. Scientists have done experiments. In 2011, two Australian researchers compiled many of the findings in “The Debunking Handbook.” The results are sobering. The evidence is that rebutting bad science doesn’t work; in fact, it commonly backfires. Describing facts that contradict an unscientific belief actually spreads familiarity with the belief and strengthens the conviction of believers. That’s just the way the brain operates; misinformation sticks, in part because it gets incorporated into a person’s mental model of how the world works. Stripping out the misinformation therefore fails, because it threatens to leave a painful gap in that mental model—or no model at all. So, then, what is a science believer to do? Is the future just an unending battle of warring claims? Not necessarily. Emerging from the findings was also evidence that suggested how you might build trust in science. Rebutting bad science may not be effective, but asserting the true facts of good science is. And including the narrative that explains them is even better. You don’t focus on what’s wrong with the vaccine myths, for instance. Instead, you point out: giving children vaccines has proved far safer than not. How do we know? Because of a massive body of evidence, including the fact that we’ve tried the alternate experiment before. Between 1989 and 1991, vaccination among poor urban children in the U.S. dropped. And the result was fifty-five thousand cases of measles and a hundred and twenty-three deaths. The other important thing is to expose the bad science tactics that are being used to mislead people. Bad science has a pattern, and helping people recognize the pattern arms them to come to more scientific beliefs themselves. Having a scientific understanding of the world is fundamentally about how you judge which information to trust. It doesn’t mean poring through the evidence on every question yourself. You can’t. Knowledge has become too vast and complex for any one person, scientist or otherwise, to convincingly master more than corners of it. Few working scientists can give a ground-up explanation of the phenomenon they study; they rely on information and techniques borrowed from other scientists. Knowledge and the virtues of the scientific orientation live far more in the community than the individual. When we talk of a “scientific community,” we are pointing to something critical: that advanced science is a social enterprise, characterized by an intricate division of cognitive labor. Individual scientists, no less than the quacks, can be famously bull-headed, overly enamored of pet theories, dismissive of new evidence, and heedless of their fallibility. (Hence Max Planck’s observation that science advances one funeral at a time.) But as a community endeavor, it is beautifully self-correcting. Beautifully organized, however, it is not. Seen up close, the scientific community—with its muddled peer-review process, badly written journal articles, subtly contemptuous letters to the editor, overtly contemptuous subreddit threads, and pompous pronouncements of the academy— looks like a rickety vehicle for getting to truth. Yet the hive mind swarms ever forward. It now advances knowledge in almost every realm of existence—even the humanities, where neuroscience and computerization are shaping understanding of everything from free will to how art and literature have evolved over time. Today, you become part of the scientific community, arguably the most powerful collective enterprise in human history. In doing so, you also inherit a role in explaining it and helping it reclaim territory of trust at a time when that territory has been shrinking. In my clinic and my work in public health, I regularly encounter people who are deeply skeptical of even the most basic knowledge established by what journalists label “mainstream” science (as if the other thing is anything like science)—whether it’s facts about physiology, nutrition, disease, medicines, you name it. The doubting is usually among my most, not least, educated patients. Education may expose people to science, but it has a countervailing effect as well, leading people to be more individualistic and ideological. The mistake, then, is to believe that the educational credentials you get today give you any special authority on truth. What you have gained is far more important: an understanding of what real truth-seeking looks like. It is the effort not of a single person but of a group of people—the bigger the better—pursuing ideas with curiosity, inquisitiveness, openness, and discipline. As scientists, in other words. Even more than what you think, how you think matters. The stakes for understanding this could not be higher than they are today, because we are not just battling for what it means to be scientists. We are battling for what it means to be citizens. Atul Gawande, a surgeon and public-health researcher, became a New Yorker staff writer in 1998 ======================================== 15. CARRINGTON. REVIEW OF REDDY, WILLIAM M., THE MAKING OF ROMANTIC LOVE: LONGING AND SEXUALITY IN EUROPE, SOUTH ASIA, AND JAPAN, 900-1200 ======================================== William M. Reddy. The Making of Romantic Love: Longing and Sexuality in Europe, South Asia, and Japan, 900-1200 CE. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012. 456 pp. $43.00 (paper), ISBN 978-0-226-70627-6. Reviewed by Tyler Carrington (Cornell College) Published on H-Emotions (June, 2016) Commissioned by Sara Hidalgo García In novels and newspapers, on stage and screen, the boundary between sex and love is blurry at best: chaste, nonsexual romantic love is uninteresting enough that it is rarely thematized, and characters who attempt to enjoy sex without falling in love usually fail. In the last decade or so, though, Hollywood and premium cable have tried (often successfully) to convince us that untangling sex from love is both possible and compelling, and the success of films and television shows like Kinsey and Masters of Sex speaks to our willingness to entertain this decoupling. Of course, these are dramas about sexologists, and as interest in the history of sexology has grown, so too has our understanding of what made the scientific endeavors of people like Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Otto Weininger, Havelock Ellis, and Magnus Hirschfeld (and later Sigmund Freud, Alfred Kinsey, William Masters, and Virginia Johnson) so remarkable. Their study of sex and sexuality may not have been without an agenda, but it was unique inasmuch as it was an attempt to examine sexual behavior from a biological, chemical, and psychological--and not moral--perspective. In his recent book, The Making of Romantic Love: Longing and Sexuality in Europe, South Asia & Japan, 900-1200 CE, William Reddy, a historian of France and a pioneer of the study of emotions, returns time and again to these same sexologists, for he sees in their methodological pivot (separating sex from morality and even from complex emotions like love) an important parallel to the eleventh- and twelfth-century world he takes up here. Like the sexologists of (relatively) modern times, Reddy has discovered a set of voices in the medieval world that dissented from the hegemonic (if not terribly popular) church teaching on the inherent sinfulness of any and all sexual activity--even within marriage. This dissent came from aristocrats (chapter 1), troubadours and trobairitz (chapter 2), and romance writers (chapter 3), who, in their quarrels, songs, and verses, posited the existence of a love--an emotion--that was separate from sex; that, in other words, the desire for intimacy (what Reddy rather cleverly calls “longing for attachment” so as to avoid any problematic anachronisms or discursive strictures) could be separate from the desire for sex, from lust or sexual appetite. He marshals a great many stories, songs, and poems from medieval Europe as evidence to this point, and they all evince an effort to, put simply, elevate sexual partnerships from the lowly (and sinful) status ascribed to them by the Gregorian Reforms. As Reddy puts it, love was, in this way, “a limited form of ‘queer performativity’ …, a practice that aimed to counter the effects of habitual shame” (p. 37). Frankly, Reddy could have stopped here and had an important and interesting book to add to his already impressive list of scholarly achievement. But, in the spirit of “global history” and, more importantly, because it amplifies the punch of the whole argument, Reddy then pans the camera lens to Asia--in particular, Bengal and Orissa, India (chapter 4), and Japan (chapter 5)--where, he argues, there was neither an effort to isolate true love (and true-love-sex) from base lust nor, crucially, any such epistemological or discursive (or etc.) differentiation between this “longing for attachment” (i.e., love) and a desire for sex. Indeed, sexual partnerships were usually considered inherently spiritual (“a matter of interest for the gods,” p. 291), and there was in this context “no need for a notion of ‘true love’ capable of taming desire,” for desire and release (pleasure) were really only possible, thinkable, feelable in the context of “the spiritual” (pp. 5-6). To prove his point, Reddy pulls together an incredibly impressive collection of sources analogous to his European ones: Bhakti (meaning love) troubadours from Bengal and Orissa (representing Hinduism), and Buddhist literature in Heian-era Japan. These voices he dissects and compiles into a chorus that makes clear the artificiality of this Western lust-love dualism and underscores the argument Reddy has, for well over a decade now, been making about sentiment and emotions, to wit, that they are “cultural construct[s] ... with a long and intricate history” (pp. 13-14). Reddy’s theoretical and methodological work here is both meticulous and sophisticated (he, after all, has played no small role in articulating and honing the theoretical foundation of the historical study of emotions), and his case studies are recondite enough that only the true subspecialist might possibly identify any misstep or oversight. Reddy is, in any case, a compelling storyteller, and while scholars of emotions (and graduate students) will benefit greatly from reading just the introduction (which is packed with the latest emotions research and theory--including recent work in neuroscience), those who journey with Reddy into the emotive heart of the medieval world will not regret it. =============== 16. WANT TO KILL YOUR ECONOMY? HAVE MBA PROGRAMS CHURN OUT TAKERS NOT MAKERS. by Rana Foroohar =============== (http://evonomics.com/want-to-kill-your-economy-have-mba-programs/) Why has business education failed business? After the financial crisis of 2008, many people predicted that there would be a crisis of capitalism. The best and the brightest would forgo careers filled with financial ledgers and become teachers or engineers, or start small businesses. Needless to say, that didn’t happen. In fact, getting an MBA has never been a more popular career path. The number of MBAs graduating from America’s business schools has skyrocketed since the 1980s. But over that time, the health of American business has decreased by many metrics: corporate R&D spending, new business creation, productivity, and the level of public trust in business in general. There are many reasons for this, but one key factor is that the basic training that future business leaders in this country receive is dictated not by the needs of Main Street but by those of Wall Street. With very few exceptions, MBA education today is basically an education in finance, not business—a major distinction. So it’s no wonder that business leaders make many of the finance-friendly decisions. MBA programs don’t churn out innovators well prepared to cope with a fast-changing world, or leaders who can stand up to the Street and put the long-term health of their company (not to mention their customers) first; they churn out followers who learn how to run firms by the numbers. Despite the financial crisis of 2008, most top MBA programs in the United States still teach standard “markets know best” efficiency theory and preach that share price is the best representation of a firm’s underlying value, glossing over the fact that the markets tend to brutalize firms for long-term investment and reward them for short-term paybacks to investors. (Consider that the year Apple debuted the iPod, its stock price fell roughly 25 percent, yet it rises every time the company hands cash back to shareholders.) This dysfunction is reflected at both a philosophical and a practical level. Business schools by and large teach an extremely limited notion of “value,” and of who corporate stakeholders are. Many courses offer a pretense of data-driven knowledge without a rigorous understanding and analysis of on-the-ground facts. Students are given little practical experience but lots of high-altitude postulating. They learn complex mathematical models and ratios, but these are in many cases skills that are becoming somewhat devalued. As Nitin Nohria, dean of the Harvard Business School, admits, “anyone can teach you how to read a P&L [profit-and-loss statement] or value a derivative; those kinds of things have become commoditized.” The bigger challenge is to teach America’s future business leaders how to be curious, humane, and moral; how to think outside the box about problems like funding the research for a new blockbuster drug. And how to be strong enough to stand up to Wall Street when it demands the opposite. Get Evonomics in your inbox Sadly, most business schools in America aren’t doing that. What’s more, unlike those in many other countries, they aren’t so much teaching the specifics of the industries students want to enter, or even broader ideas about growth and innovation, as they are training future executives to manage P&Ls. It is very telling that Finance 101 is always a mandatory MBA course, while most others are not. But finance isn’t taught in a way that is rigorous, or truly representative of the real world. Financial risk modeling, one of the basic concepts taught in business schools, is an inexact science at best; many people feel it’s more like rune reading. After all, it involves throwing thousands of variables about all the bad things that could happen into a black box, shaking them up with the millions of positions taken daily by banks, and extrapolating it all into a simple, easy-to-understand number about how much is likely to be lost if things go belly-up. What could possibly go wrong, especially when you’re relying on past assumptions (“the sovereign debts of the United States and Europe will never be downgraded!”) and don’t account for the fact that market-moving events often create their own momentum? Yet the notion that financial models can reveal truth is still taken as fact in most business schools—that was, of course, one of the key factors that fueled the great financial crisis of 2008. “The premise of financial theory [taught in MBA programs] is bogus,” says Robert Johnson, an economist and former quantitative trader for George Soros’s Quantum fund who now heads the Institute for New Economic Thinking, an influential group that, among other things, is trying to broaden the nature of economics and business education. “That’s why we end up living with very thin margins of safety—because of the pretense of knowledge and precision about the future which does not exist.” Meanwhile, the social, moral, and even larger macroeconomic consequences of corporate actions are largely ignored in the case studies students pore over. Even after the financial crisis, a survey of the world’s one hundred top business schools (most of them in the United States) found that only half of all MBA programs make ethics a required course, and only 6 percent deal with issues of sustainability in their core curriculum, despite the fact that a large body of research shows that firms that focus on these issues actually have higher longer-term performance. Instead, students are taught that what matters most is maximizing profits and bolstering a company’s share price. It’s something they carry straight with them to corporate America. People do keep heading to business school, though—in large part because business, and in particular the business of finance, is where the money is. A full quarter of American graduate students earn a master’s degree in business, more than the combined share of master’s degrees sought in the legal, health, and computer science fields (business is also far and away the most popular undergraduate degree). The greatest percentage of those who receive an MBA degree end up not in industry, but in some area of finance. Although figures have dropped somewhat since the financial crisis of 2008, the financial conglomerate—banking, insurance, hedge funds, investment management, and consulting firms—is still the largest single block of MBA employers, along with the accounting and finance departments of Fortune 500 companies. Given that the quickest path to being a CEO these days is through a finance track, many of the top decision makers in the largest and most powerful firms not only have an MBA, but come from one of a handful of elite programs, like Harvard, Chicago, Columbia, and Wharton. “[Within] the first three months of your MBA program, you’re surrounded by people in suits,” says one 2015 graduate of Columbia Business School. “It’s not peer pressure, but there’s definitely a social element to feeling like you want to revert back to mainstream [areas of employment] with job security.” She, like most of her peers, is planning to work for a consulting firm, an investment bank, or a private equity shop upon graduation. Given the six-figure cost of an MBA education, that’s not so much a choice for many students as it is a financial necessity. Yet ironically, many business leaders, even those who have MBAs themselves, have begun to question the value of these programs. “I went to business school before I knew any better, kind of like sailors get tattoos,” jokes former GM vice chairman Bob Lutz, whose book Car Guys vs. Bean Counters decries the rise of the MBAs. The problem with business education, according to him, is that students are taught not what happens in real business—which tends to be unpredictable and messy—but a series of techniques and questions that should take them to the right answers, no matter what the problem is. “The techniques, if you read the Harvard Business School cases, they are all about finding efficiencies, cost optimization, reducing your [product] assortment, buying out competitors, improving logistics, getting rid of too many warehouses, or putting in more warehouses. It’s all words, and then there’s a sea of numbers, and you read it all and analyze your way through this batch of charts and numbers, and then you figure out the silver bullet: the problem is X. And you’re then considered brilliant.” The real problem, says Lutz, is that the case studies are static—they don’t reflect the messy, emotional, dynamic world of business as it is. “In these studies, annual sales are never in question. I’ve never seen a Harvard Business School case study that says, ‘Hey, our sales are going down and we don’t know why. Now what?’ Lutz believes this kind of approach was one of the things that tanked the American automobile industry and manufacturing in general from the 1970s onward. He’s not alone. Many of America’s iconic business leaders believe an MBA degree makes you less equipped to run a business well for the long term, particularly in high-growth, innovation-driven industries like pharmaceuticals or technology, which depend on leaders who are willing to invest in the future. MBAs are everywhere, yet the industries where you find fewer of them tend to be the most successful. America’s shining technology and innovation hub—Silicon Valley—is relatively light on MBAs and heavy on engineers. MBAs had almost nothing to do with the two major developments in the American business landscape over the last forty years: the Japanese-style quality revolution in manufacturing and the digital revolution. Indeed, the top-down, hierarchical, financially driven management style typically taught in business schools is useless in flat, nimble start-up companies that create the majority of jobs in the country. Moreover, when that style is imposed on Silicon Valley firms, they typically falter (think of John Sculley, the Wharton MBA who made the ill-fated decision to oust Steve Jobs after his first tenure at Apple, or the reign of Carly Fiorina at HP, during which that company’s stock lost half its value). One of the scariest trends in business these days is the increased movement of MBAs and finance types into the technology industry. They now are bringing their focus on financial engineering and balance sheet manipulation to firms such as Google, Apple, Facebook, Yahoo, and Snapchat—a shift that, if history is any indicator, doesn’t bode well for the future of such firms. Why has business education failed business? Why has it fallen so much in love with finance and the ideas it espouses? It’s a problem with deep roots, which have been spreading for decades. It encompasses issues like the rise of neoliberal economic views as a challenge to the postwar threat of socialism. It’s about an academic inferiority complex that propelled business educators to try to emulate hard sciences like physics rather than take lessons from biology or the humanities. It dovetails with the growth of computing power that enabled complex financial modeling. The bottom line, though, is that far from empowering business, MBA education has fostered the sort of short-term, balance-sheet-oriented thinking that is threatening the economic competitiveness of the country as a whole. If you wonder why most businesses still think of shareholders as their main priority or treat skilled labor as a cost rather than an asset—or why 80 percent of CEOs surveyed in one study said they’d pass up making an investment that would fuel a decade’s worth of innovation if it meant they’d miss a quarter of earnings results— it’s because that’s exactly what they are being educated to do. cover.makersandtakersAdapted from Makers & Takers: The Rise of Finance and the Fall of American Business Copyright © 2016 by Rana Foroohar. Published by Crown Business, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC. _/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/ South Asia Citizens Wire Buzz for secularism, on the dangers of fundamentalism(s), on matters of peace and democratisation in South Asia. Newsletter of South Asia Citizens Web: www.sacw.net/ ##### #### _\_ ________ ##=-[.].]| \ \ #( _\ | |------| # __| | |||||||| \ _/ | |||||||| .--'--'-. | | ____ | / __ `|__|[o__o]| _(____nm_______ /____\____ DISCLAIMER: Opinions expressed in materials carried in the posts do not necessarily reflect the views of SACW compilers. ===================================== _______________________________________________ SACW mailing list SACW@insaf.net http://insaf.net/mailman/listinfo/sacw_insaf.net
