Small universities with focused teaching and research agenda are likely to be more successful.

It is quite common for university management offices to be padlocked for months.

Ensuring access to universities closer to under-represented individuals ought to be a national goal.

It all started as a simple proposal from Madhab Lal Maharjan, the owner of Mandala Book Point.

As a graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania with the declared intention of qualifying in modern South Asian history, I took several interesting and challenging courses during the two academic years,

After being a student in the Department of South Asia Regional Studies at the University of Pennsylvania for a year, I joined the Department of History at the same university in fall 1990.

During the academic year 1988-1989, I was a very unhappy doctoral student in economics at the University of Pennsylvania. Earlier, I have described that year as the jhurest year of my life in these pages (August 26, 2017).

The end of Rana rule in 1951 was an important rupture in the history of public life in Nepal. In an important essay first published in 1970, the scholar of literature and history Kamal P Malla characterised the 1950s in the following manner:

History students have been missing in Nepal’s oldest university, Tribhuvan Univesity (TU). Or at least that is what one or another journalist has been telling us in the recent past. On 28 July this year, Rohej Khatiwada published a long story in Naya Patrika on this subject (“Ritindai TriBiko Itihas Vibhag”).

When I arrived at the campus of Brandeis University (located just outside of Boston, Massachusetts, United States) in August 1984 to start my undergraduate education, I knew only one thing about liberal arts education.

Although Nepal’s oldest university Tribhuvan University (TU) was founded in 1959 as a teaching-only university, within some years of its founding, research efforts had already begun there in many different central departments and research institutes. Some of this started happening during the second half of the 1960s when some students opted to do research for their MA and PhD theses. This “transitioning to research” process at TU is incomplete, much like our country’s march towards democracy.

The earthquake of 25 April 2015 and its aftershocks extensively damaged some of the buildings in the University Campus of Tribhuvan University (TU) in Kirtipur, Kathmandu. The main administrative buildings housing the offices of the top managers of TU, including its Vice Chancellor (VC), were completely ruined. The old building of TU’s Central Library was also wrecked by the quakes.

I am not a fan of world rankings of universities and I don’t think those interested in reforming higher education in Nepal should be obsessed with such rankings.

There has long been a fascination with state-supported think tanks in Nepal. Most recently, the new government led by Prime Minister KP Sharma Oli has publicly announced that it is thinking of establishing a think tank under the prime minister’s office (PMO).

Every few months, some member of the Nepali journalism fraternity writes an article lamenting the decline of the Centre for Nepal and Asian Studies (CNAS) as ‘a think-tank that did great work’ during the Panchayat Era.