Two of South African literature’s best-known titles from the turn of the twenty-first century are works of campus fiction that rarely get recognized as such. In this article I read J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace (1999) and Phaswane Mpe’s Welcome to Our Hillbrow (2001) as novels whose figuration of the university is far more central to their treatment of the contradictions and ambiguities that characterize postapartheid South Africa than is generally acknowledged. In the course of narratives that seem largely focused on other things, these texts offer up a distinctly South African but also distinctly postcolonial variety of campus fiction, and a critical engagement with the neoliberal university and the conditions under which upward mobility and intellectual inquiry take shape in the twenty-first-century global south. Coetzee and Mpe suggest capacious and transformative, if also deeply ambivalent, ways of imagining an as-yet unrealized decolonial future for universities.

From 1905–1920, American college and university students carried on active and understudied campaigns to gain legitimacy and support for women’s suffrage at institutions of higher education across the United States. The primary organization responsible for initiating and directing campus activism was the College Equal Suffrage League (CESL), formed in 1900 by Massachusetts teachers Maud Wood Park and Inez Haynes Gillmore to recruit more upper- and middle-class, well-educated, students and alumni to the women’s rights movement. Exploring the records of state and national suffragists, women’s organizations, and academic institutions associated with the CESL shows that the league’s campaigns helped to reinvigorate the suffrage cause at an important moment in the early twentieth century by using educational tactics as powerful tools to cultivate a scholarly voice for the campaign, appeal to the upper classes, and fit within the contexts of higher education and larger movement for progressive reform. In addition to influencing the suffrage cause, campus organizing for equal voting rights changed the culture of female political activism and higher education by ushering a younger generation of articulate and well-trained activists into the women’s rights campaign and starting in a trend of organized youth mobilization for women’s rights at colleges and universities.

In Turkish Kaleidoscope, social anthropologist and novelist Jenny White has expanded her repertoire to the graphic novel format to create an account of the violence and political chaos that pervaded Turkey in the late 1970s.2 White builds here on her academic work and her own student experience at Hacettepe University in Ankara. Artist Ergün Gündüz has created visual interpretations of place, space, events, and emotions that bring the story to life. This review is a collaborative class exercise for “Turkey: From Atatürk to Erdoğan” at Brandeis University in the Spring 2021 semester. It reflects on the novel as a text for Turkish history; the format of the work; the aesthetic choices of artist and author; and the experience of encountering this work in the contemporary historical moment. The review incorporates student comments as direct quotations. It was co-authored by Chris Martin, a student in the course.

Based on archival material and interviews, the paper argues that the autonomy of Hong Kong's institutions of higher education has varied since 1911, with the colonial state initially exercising tight control and relaxing it especially as the transfer of sovereignty over Hong Kong approached. China has sought to reassert control especially since 2014 in what continues to be contested space.

The article tells the story of a pedagogical experiment that the author conducted in collaboration with final year master’s students in Kolkata, India. The aim was to “open up the classroom,” adapting Brazilian educator Paolo Freire’s notion of critical pedagogy to an Indian context. The diverse group of students who participated in this experiment had a high degree of political consciousness regarding issues of gender, caste, sexuality, disability, and class due to the university’s history of student activism. Most students had already read a fair amount of postcolonial literature and theory. Postcolonial literature syllabus as it had conventionally been taught would not be able to engage these restive students or be relevant to their lived experiences. The experiment on classroom democratization and collaborative teaching would demonstrate to the future college teacher one kind of interventionist approach for raising student awareness in the Indian classroom.

How did students at the Imperial University (taixue 太學) in the late Northern Song comment on politics in response to political crises caused by the Jurchen invasion and what enabled them to do so? Through a comparison of 14 memorials submitted by university students and personnel to Emperor Qinzong, this paper examines the ways in which students submitted their petitions, the responsiveness of the court towards their appeals, students’ political sensitivities as well as the channels by which they accessed political information. A close examination of the memorials reveals that students were highly responsive to the rapidly changing political circumstances. Such responsiveness, I would argue, owes much to the presence of different communication channels that facilitated the circulation of political information within literati circles.

The reasons for peer education's ascendance as a core pedagogy in sex education are as much historical as they are reasonable or ethical. This article traces the history of peer-led sex education from the 1970s to the 1990s against the backdrop of New York City's financial ruin, social unrest, and a public health crisis. Starting with an analysis of the Student Coalition for Relevant Sex Education's Peer Information Project, founded in 1974, it investigates the application of new pedagogical techniques, the interplay between pedagogy and bureaucracy, and the transformation of school culture. Peer education thrived when educators and activists agreed that young people were more likely to accept advice from other young people, a reasonable contention that was nonetheless underassessed. Yet peer education's least intriguing attribute proved to be its most important characteristic: it could be quickly and inexpensively enacted. When HIV/AIDS began to decimate New York City's adolescent population, and the Board of Education proved slow and contradictory in its actions, the city turned to peer education, henceforth coupling the concepts of sex education and peer education.