Exams or applications? Elite Taiwanese students’ perceptions and navigation of college admissions systems

Studies often portray elite students as self-interested adolescents who justify educational selection systems that favor them. However, this perspective neglects critiques of the college admissions system on the part of the elite, who often have no other option than to support it as fulfilling the ideals of fairness. This study examines academic elite students’ perceptions of college admissions systems when they are given choices as to which system to use. Data for this study come from surveys, interviews, and participant observation in Taiwan, where students are selected through two systems: exam-based selections and application-based selections. The findings show that students in elite high schools perceive whichever system that benefits them to be the fairest. By narrowly defining fairness as family influence on admission outcomes, these students downplay the institutional advantages they enjoy and present themselves as deserving candidates. Using the example of elite Taiwanese students, this study highlights that elites justify privilege based on self-interest and strategically navigate admissions systems to accrue advantages.

In Dystopian Retrospect of a Crisis Mood: My Life as a Spy by Katherine Verdery

My essay bears a deliberately oxymoronic title as it offers, on the one hand, a reminiscence of 1984, as a most depressing year in the actual history of Romania and likewise in my own earliest career memories. On the other hand, it proposes a contemplation of George Orwell’s British postmodern dystopia Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949). Last but not least, it presents certain 1984 aspects as rendered by the following exceptional book, a great challenge for any scholar of my homeland and my generation: My Life as a Spy: Investigations in a Secret Police File (2018). Distinguished Professor Katherine Verdery, its author, a contemporary American scholar, belongs now also to our Romanian academic elite. Yet this book testifies to her darkest experience in our country, just before the Iron Curtain fell down. Although the parallel between these two books may seem risky at first sight, they share much more than meets the eye; and my claim endeavors to go beyond this visible pretext of the new COVID-19 pandemic, another crisis which has intruded upon all our lives – just like a spy.

Anniversary of the USSR Academy of Sciences in the Victorious 1945: Idea, Celebration Scenario, International Response

The authors focus on the celebration of the 220th anniversary of the USSR Academy of Sciences in 1945. The festive events hosted both due to the anniversary, joyful victory and cease of warfare in Europe were attended by 124 delegates from 17 countries, as well as by nearly 1,000 Soviet academics. The situation was unique in its concept and inspired people with hope for world reconstruction. The occasion was widely publicized, eliciting an extensive response. The anniversary served an occasion to organize the forum where academics discussed their perception of science field in the victorious year of 1945. Based on a wide range of sources, including foreign archives first introduced to the academia, the paper presents the scenarios of the celebration of the 220th anniversary of the USSR Academy of Sciences, as well as the images of the Russian and Soviet science represented by the academic elite, and their perception by the international scientific community. The authors reveal the factors that influence the establishment and functioning of the communicative field of global science. It is concluded that in a contextual way the anniversary events featured the overestima­ted expectations of new forms of international cooperation, with various forms of collaboration being discussed. However, the triumph over the “unified science” and the establishment of the universal communicative field was temporary.

Nach dem „Great War“

This essay is concerned with the philosophical, ethical, political and other forms of criticism directed at Western European imperialism after the First World War. By concentrating on the British case it looks at the structural and individual critique coming from members of the British political and academic elite as well as from media representatives. Debates about imperial rule and the right of conquest confronted the very nature of European empires and questioned their continuation if they were not ready for reform. While anticolonial arguments from the colonial “peripheries” in times of the “Wilsonian moment” were the rule and globally organised, “metropolitan” sceptics of empire were not only in the minority but also somewhat out-dated because they often connected to Victorian understandings of imperialism. Thus, they need to be seen both in nineteenth-century intellectual traditions and in their own right at a crucial time after the First World War when questions of the global order needed to be negotiated.

Nicasius Ellebodius and the “otium litterarum” The Vicissitudes of a Flemish Humanist in Pozsony (1571–77)

This study reviews Nicasius Ellebodius’s Pozsony (today: Bratislava) period (1571–77) from a biographical and intellectual historical perspective. Ellebodius (1535–1577) was a Flemish philologist of vast erudition, one of the finest Graecists of his day. His biography and character are much less discussed in scholarship than his works, although his letters provide us with invaluable information about his life, as well as about the participation of the academic elite of 16th-century Hungary in the international res publica litteraria. The article will revisit the problem of how far he could realize the otium litterarum that he yearned for so much, and what challenges he had to face in his everyday life in Pozsony.

Liberal Islamic Theology in Conservative Russia: Taufik Ibragim’s “Qurʾānic Humanism”

This article studies the work of the Moscow-based Syrian academic scholar Taufik Ibragim. Originally a Marxist historian of Islamic philosophy and kalām, after the end of the ussr Ibragim became one of Russia’s most authoritative scholars also of the Qurʾān and the Islamic tradition more broadly. Since the mid-2000s, Ibragim has publicly propagated the concept of “Qurʾānic humanism”, which is meant to demonstrate the tolerance of the Qurʾān and the humanist character of Islam in general, against Islamic extremism and stagnation in Muslim thought. In his opposition to the dominant political “traditionalism” in Russia’s Islamic landscape, Ibragim links back to the heritage of the Tatar Muslim educational and religious reformers (Jadids) of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Without reference to any other contemporary Islamic thinker, Ibragim advocates a reform of Islam to adapt it to the conditions of modern Russia. His interpretations appeal to Russia’s academic elite, as well as to the Jadid-oriented muftiate of the Russian Federation (dumrf) in Moscow, which until recently propagated Ibragim’s concepts against the vague “traditionalism” that other muftiates in the Russian Federation claim to follow. But his insistence on a rational approach to the Qurʾān and his challenging of the authority of ḥadīth have brought Ibragim the enmity of many conservative muftis and Muslim theologians in Russia, and Islamic reformism is under increasing attack.

Chaos in the Ivory Tower: Postcolonial Representations of the Nigerian Academic Elite in Esiaba Irobi’s Cemetery Road and Ojo Rasaki Bakare’s Once Upon a Tower

This work explores Esiaba Irobi’s Cemetery Road (2009) and Ojo Rasaki Bakare’s Once Upon a Tower (2000) with a view to examining the manner in which Irobi and Bakare represent the Nigerian academic elite in the chaos that hobbles Nigerian public universities and the country in general. Through Louis Althusser’s idea of Ideological State Apparatuses, the work analyses how the two playwrights deploy character, setting and other dramatic elements to capture ways in which the Nigerian academic elite, especially those in Nigerian public universities, promote disorder in the polity. The two plays show that some members of the Nigerian academic elite are involved in using undemocratic methods for personal gains and to create anomie in universities and in Nigerian society at large. The work reveals that the academic elite, as represented in the two plays, are not different from the corrupt Nigerian political elite because both are preoccupied with violent and corrupt acts, thereby undermining peace, stability and development in the country. It contends that the two playwrights’ representations of the Nigerian academic elite are important not only because they challenge the assumed binary opposition between the Nigerian ruling elite and the Nigerian academic elite, but also because they illuminate the complexity of the recurring chaos in Nigerian universities and the country in general. Consequently, the playwrights invite the Nigerian academic elite to engage in critical self-interrogation, genuine scholarly and community-based activities that are geared towards real national development.

Doomed Youth

The chapter opens by noting the recurrence of depictions of disillusioned young executives, products of France’s elite business schools, in films by Cantet, Moutout, Corneau and Kim Chapiron and in testimonial literature by Sophie Talneau, Jonathan Curiel, Alexandre des Isnards and Thomas Zuber. In their different ways, all of these texts depict France’s young academic elite as being doomed to disillusionment by the nature of the education they receive and the realities of the contemporary labour market. In this, these privileged individuals betray an unexpected similarity with what might seem more obvious candidates for the moniker ‘doomed youth’, namely France’s ethnic minority banlieue inhabitants, whose fate is also understood to reflect problems in the interrelationships between education and employment. This chapter will therefore examine films and novels that seek to represent the ways in which shifts in the labour market have been mirrored in the adoption of post-disciplinary pedagogies and business-oriented curricula that challenge fundamental republican notions of meritocracy and social integration through education and employment.