A variety of institutions that work on a number of different research themes should be supported.

It should be state funded and functionally autonomous of political and bureaucratic interference.

We have a mix of state-supported, commercial and non-profit academic publishing at work.

Given the irregularity of publications, they do not make the research landscape robustly plural.

Nepali universities (except for Kathmandu University) have relied overwhelmingly on state funds.

Creating friendly institutions to attract non-heteronormative students would be equally important.

A diverse faculty would be crucial if new Nepali universities want to be successful.

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: