St. Xavier's College, Mumbai
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Anahita Mukherji, The Times of India, May 14, 2015
Founded in
1869
Principals
The college always had a Jesuit priest as principal from 1869 to 2015.
2003-2015: Fr Frazer Mascarenhas
Fr Frazer Mascarenhas, during his stint, supported social activists Binayak Sen and Arun Ferreira, who were charged with Naxalism; he chastised his student, Shiv Sena's Aditya Thackeray, after the Sena's youth wing burned copies of a book that critiqued the party; and before the 2014 general elections wrote to his students cautioning them against voting for a model of development that he claimed privileged growth over social justice.
It was during his tenure that Xavier's became Mumbai's first autonomous college for arts and science. Autonomy allowed the college freedom to design its own syllabus and method of evaluation.
2015: Agnelo Menezes
June 2015: For the first time St Xavier's College as headed by a non-priest: Agnelo Menezes, a hugely popular economics professor at the institution. Menezes (born: 1957), is the son of a clerk who doubled as a carpenter at St Paul's Church in Dadar, Menezes grew up in the chawls of Parel in central Mumbai.
He worked his way out of poverty through a single-minded focus on his education.
Menezes is known to hold forth on an array of subjects in the college canteen.
Menezes was too shy to enter the canteen while in his first year as a student at St Xavier's. He credits poet and writer Eunice de Souza, a former teacher at the college, for having helped him develop self-confidence as a student.
After graduating from the college, he returned to the institution as a teacher. After five years, he took a break and joined the Jesuit order. However, he could not deal with the religious rigour it entailed and chose, instead, to return to teaching. He spent 19 years as an economics professor in Dr T K Tope Night College for underprivileged students.
