New Agendas, New Mandates Susie Tharu Satish Poduval Pavan Kumar IT may already be a truism to say that higher education is in crisis in our time. Along a whole gamut of dimensions (ranging from the tortured lives of 5 per cent of the Indian eighteen-year-olds who may hope for entry into its precincts and the 95 per cent who as yet may foster no such aspiration, empty classrooms, demoralised teachers, and rapidly changing job markets, to budgetary allocations that have changed the macro-economic planning of tertiary education into a farce), institutions are crumbling, certitudes wearing thin. But what exactly constitutes this crisis? How might it be analysed? What does it imply for students, planners, teachers, administrators, for the existing disciplines and curricular formations?
