Update README.md

README.md

@@ -53,8 +53,7 @@ European vantage point, as a sameness. We may find and study great
 examples of institutions of learning in the African world before
 European conquest -- in Timbuktu, Cairo, Tunis, Alexandria -- but
 these did not shape the contemporary African university, whether
-colonial or post-colonial.^[Dahlia El-Tayeb M. Gubara, *Al Azhar and the Orders of Knowledge*,
-    PhD thesis, Columbia University, 2013] The decisive influence was the European
+colonial or post-colonial. The decisive influence was the European
 university.
 
 The African university began as a colonial project -- a top-down
@@ -89,9 +88,7 @@ Mazrui and Walter Rodney. Mazrui called for a university true to its
 classical vision, as the home of the scholar "fascinated by ideas";
 Rodney saw the university as the home of the public intellectual, a
 committed intellectual located in his or her time and place, and deeply
-engaged with the wider society.^[James N. Karioki, "African Scholars versus Ali Mazrui,"
-    *Transition*, No. 45, 1974. For Ali Mazrui's response, see, Ali
-    Mazrui, "Africa, my conscience and I," *Transition*, No. 46, 1974] One moral of the story I want to
+engaged with the wider society. One moral of the story I want to
 tell is that we resist the temptation to dismiss one side and embrace
 the other. However compelling, these contrasting visions were anchored
 in two equally one-sided notions of higher education: relevance and
@@ -129,20 +126,12 @@ edge of a critique of nationalist power.
 
 It is in this context that Rajat Neogy founded *Transition*, a cross
 between a journal and a magazine, one in which public intellectuals
-wrote for a public that included both the gown and the town.^[Rajat Neogy was jailed by Milton Obote on sedition charges in
-    1968. *Transition* was revived in Ghana in 1971, and its editorship
-    was taken over by Wole Soyinka in 1973. It folded in 1976 for
-    financial reasons, and was then revived in 1991 by Henry Louis
-    Gates, Jr., who brought it to the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for
-    African and African-American Research at Harvard University where it
-    continues to be based, dislocated both in terms of its vision as its
-    place.] Those who
+wrote for a public that included both the gown and the town. Those who
 wrote in it included writers like James Baldwin, Langston Hughes, Nadime
 Gordimer, and Chinua Achebe, and politicians like Mwalimu Nyerere and
 Tom Mboya. In the main, however, *Transition* made a possible a regional
 conversation. Paul Theroux wrote 'Tarzan was an expatriate', an
-understanding of Tarzan and Jane as the first expatriates.^[Paul Theroux, "Tarzan is an Expatriate," *Transition*, No. 32,
-    August-September 1967, Kampala.] Ali
+understanding of Tarzan and Jane as the first expatriates. Ali
 Mazrui wrote 'Nkrumah, The Leninist Czar,' an essay on authoritarianism
 with a socialist tilt and 'Tanzaphilia.' of which I will have more to
 say. In this latter essay, Mazrui contrasted an apparent 'ideological