Yogesh Chandrani

This man is so so intelligent. YES, he has a very autocratic teaching style - he will cold call students and holds high expectations; he will shoot you down if you are wrong; he will remain in silence waiting for students to respond. However, there was not one class where he did not blow my mind with his insights. Take his class and don't be put off by his demeanour, he is a really fantastic person.

This was by far the worst class I have ever taken at Columbia. My biggest regret to this day has been switching into this class second semester. I will corroborate previous comments referencing his knowledge of course content but his efficacy as a professor unworthy of any praise. He is so soft-spoken to the point that students 3 chairs away from the head of the table will only hear indistinguishable mumbles. If you are so blessed to actually hear what he says, he provides explanations without any references to the text. Seeing as though papers and examinations are all take-home, you end up with a notebook full of notes, without any textual support. His grading is extremely harsh with minimal feedback and only question marks on the margins. He does offer to discuss papers before they are due but you basically have to have the entire paper written weeks in advance in order to receive any meaningful feedback. Finally, his course expectations are extremely unclear. For instance, he provides no feedback on weekly discussion posts, yet these posts are graded based on quality and content. As a result, you spend the entire semester trying to ask meaningful questions with no idea whether these questions are acceptable. Overall, his grading criteria for all aspects of the course lacked transparency and detail. STAY AWAY FROM THIS CLASS. Yogesh has the lowest A-range percentage out of a…

I think people are missing the point with some of these reviews. Most of what I've read sounds like it was a judgement made on the first day of class and then the person just held onto that for a whole semester. Yogesh is brilliant, no one on this page argues with how intelligent he is. Now here's a question; if your teacher is brilliant, and knows the texts way better than you ever will, why wouldn't you try to learn from him? He's the teacher, that's the point of the class. You will get nothing out of this class if you don't put anything into it. Yogesh is a demanding professor who wants you to think critically about the texts. If you want to make up your own interpretation and never be challenged on it, take a different section. In class he is going to offer his own interpretations, and I know some people don't like being told things that contradict what they think. It's not that he wants you to just blindly accept everything he says, its that in order to have a nuanced conversation you need to be able to understand what he is saying. Most of his notes require a lot of thought to fully comprehend, I know I usually only fully got them after hours of writing an essay. With this in mind, you will be far better off if you try to understand where he is coming from on each text. The reason he shuts people down in class is because their arguments don't make much sense. If he chall…

I don't want to make this review long, because the December 2013 comment pretty much sums up what this class was like. Yogesh is extremely condescending and often times unresponsive to students' efforts to participate in the lecture and discussion. This year he taught two sections of the class, however he clearly treated each section differently as is apparent in the other reviews. Yogesh did not start off being a terrible professor, but his snide and hypocritical comments/remarks slowly began to build up and some respect was lost; this may have been a major contributor to the lack of participation by the class. It's almost pretty sad how every day, half the class would faithfully arrive 15-30+ minutes late every single day. I don't blame them though. I would agree that Yogesh is very intelligent and sometimes has insightful tidbits of information to share/discuss with the class, but he is very ineffective when it comes to stimulating a meaningful class discussion that assists with your understanding of the text. He forms skewed and often times flawed perceptions of some of his students which are often times flawed and unprovoked. His condescending mannerism goes as far as to question your time, schedule, extra-curricular, and honor to the class. He has no problem accusing students of dishonest work, and you should also be weary of the "hints" he gives you in preparation of th…

Going into this course I was a little bit nervous. I had read some of the more scalding reviews below and was expecting the worst, but Chandrani's section of CC was the only one that worked for my schedule, so I had no other choice. Ultimately, though, I ended up staying in his class for both fall and spring semester, and I can safely say that he is a fine professor. He possesses a tremendous amount of historical and cultural knowledge on a wide variety of topics, text-related or otherwise, and he's also very up-to-date with current events. More importantly, his explanation and critical analysis of the texts was always enlightening and informative, if you show up awake enough to listen. Yogesh will generally open the class with a discussion. A reviewer below mentioned that, after a student speaks, he will often call on another student without responding to the first student's comments. This is true, but you shouldn't take it personally; he intentionally stays out of the class discussions as much as he can in order to let the students talk among themselves. As with any discussion in any CC course, this part of the class hinges upon many students show up prepared and awake. After the discussion proceeds for a while, he will then turn to his own notes and begin a more lecture-like phase of the seminar, where he does most of the talking. This is the most important part of the clas…

This was a great CC class, although I admittedly have none to compare it to. Discussions were either excellent or very dull, depending on how exhausted the students were (and how many of them fell asleep in class). Yogesh is also extremely intelligent and gives interesting lecture breaks in class. Grading was fair, exams and essays were pretty much straight out of class notes and discussion. As long as you do the readings and short, weekly response assignments you should get a lot out of the class. It is a good idea to write the responses with a purpose. It's a lot easier to talk in discussion if you already have an idea of what you want to say about the reading instead of coming up with stuff on the spot. The other reviewers are very mean and I'm not sure why.

I think the reviews for Professor Chandrani are being unfair. He may not come off as the most approachable professor, and he does tend to lecture, but he is an extremely intelligent man and I enjoyed the class as a whole. The workload is not especially heavy for a CC class. There are weekly one page write ups, but many other sections have to do this as well. As long as you participate in discussion, take notes, and keep up with (most) of the reading, your grade should be within the A range.

HORRIBLE CLASS!! GET OUT IF YOU CAN!! This class was by far the worst class that I have taken at Columbia. Chandrani is not a good professor AT ALL. The discussions were very forced 85% of the time. If you said something that he didn't agree with, then he just ignored your statement and looked to someone else to speak. There were times that everyone read the readings, but people were still confused because of his extremely difficult and confusing questions. This ended up in the class sitting in awkward silence for 5 minutes at a time. He also has this thing where he tells people to speak up because the room can't hear them, but then says that he is the only person who can speak at a low volume like he is some high ruler. His grading is ridiculous. For our response papers, he just put the grade at the bottom with no feedback, so you have zero knowledge as to what to fix or improve upon. Several of my friends in the class failed the midterm and it was open-note. After comparing answers, it turned out that they had the correct answers, but according to the professor, they didn't explain in enough detail. I can see that as getting a B- or maybe even a C+, but not an F. This professor is arrogant and hard. Do not take his class!

The WORST professor I have had EVER had ANYWHERE. In all of Columbia... all of high school... all of LIFE. This man is the lowest of the low, the scum of the earth. He is patronizing, condescending, and smug. He is probably taking out his frustration of being a failure in his academic circles (look him up, he's like 50 years old and has only published one book which he CO-AUTHORED... the laughing stock of the Anthropology department). This is why he needs to make himself feel better and smarter than all his students. What a jerk. If this is the only spot left when taking CC... postpone it until next year! Fake an illness and take a medical leave of absence! Go cry to another professor to let you into his/her class (Stamenka Antonova is an easy A). He made us go to class during the 2010 blizzard when they shut down all of Columbia for the first time is YEARS (maybe decades) because of the snow... and there we were in Hartley watching the snow grow by the minute outside the window (which is already underground as it is). He constantly tells you to, "Think!" as if you were the stupidest person in the world. I can't believe I didn't throw a book right at his repugnant face.

Absolutely and completely the WORST professor I have has in all of college. I am not exaggerating when I say that I still have traumatic flashbacks to this course. Professor Chandrani is very smart, but he is alao aggressive, egomaniacal, and vindictive. He will smugly patronize you while humiliatingly making you redo paper after paper. He is totally inaccessible and terrifying, and has absolutely no interest in hearing what his students have to say. For our final class, he read aloud his 100-page disseration for two hours. I hope this man is not still employed at Columbia.