Every autumn, politicians, university administrators, funding offices and countless students wait impatiently for the World University Rankings produced by Britain’s Times Higher Education(THE) magazine. A position in the upper echelons of the THEranking can influence policy-makers’ higher-education investments, determine which institutions attract the best researchers or students, and prompt universities to try to boost their ratings.
But academics and universities have long criticized what they describe as the outsized influence of the THE and other university rankings, saying that their methodology and data are problematic (see Nature447, 514–515; 2007). Many universities see wild swings in their rankings from year to year, for example, which cannot reflect real changes in quality; and many French universities’ ratings suffer because their researchers’ publications often list affiliations with national research agencies as well as the university itself, diluting the benefit for the university. Now, universities and other stakeholders are developing their own rankings to tackle these shortcomings.
“Rankings have outgrown the expectations of those who started them,” says Kazimierz Bilanow, managing director of the IREG Observatory on Academic Rankings and Excellence, a Warsaw-based ranking quality-assurance body created in October 2009. “What were often exercises intended to boost newspaper circulation have come to have enormous influence on policy-making and funding of institutions and governments.”
Young scientists at a Chinese genomics institute are foregoing conventional postgraduate training for the chance to be part of major scientific initiatives. Is this the way of the future?
The approach to extended postgraduate training varies from country to country. The United States and Europe, for example, have long believed that students need to finish a multiyear programme of postgraduate work before they can fully participate in the front rank of research, whether in industry or academia.
In Asia, scientific communities instead tend to value directed, practical research. In Japan, for example, industry accounts for a much higher proportion of the scientific budget than in the West, and managers there often say that they prefer university graduates who they can train in-house. As a result, relatively little emphasis is given to academic postgraduate training.
Perhaps the most extreme example of this approach is at the BGI in Shenzen, China — the genomic-sequencing juggernaut formerly known as the Beijing Genomics Institute …. Some 500 Chinese university students have already signed up to join the BGI after they graduate this summer. There they will help to piece together DNA data from an expanding set of sequences for microbes, plants and animals.
The European Union plans to publish a worldwide ranking of universities next year that it hopes will rival existing global league tables. The aim is to boost the place of European universities in the Shanghai Jiao Tong and Times Higher Education ranking systems, both dominated by US institutions.
In the last Shanghai Jiao Tong ranking, the whole of continental Europe had only 23 universities in the top 100. Yet Europe has some 4,000 universities and colleges that enrol more than 19 million students and employ1.5 million staff.
The new European rankings are being developed following acceptance early last year of a tender from a German, Dutch, Belgian and French consortium called CHERPA, a European network of leading institutions in this field.
CONCORD, N.H.—The president of the University of New Hampshire outlined a 10-year strategic plan Tuesday he says is necessary to keep the state’s flagship public university from eventually sinking.
If the current trend continues, the typical New Hampshire family will be paying 75 percent of its disposable income to send a child to UNH by 2020, compared to 40 percent in 1978 and 60 percent today, Mark Huddleston said in a speech in Durham. That’s unsustainable, he said, and it’s time to move beyond asking families to work more to pay tuition and asking faculty and staff to simply make do with less.
Public colleges and universities around the country have been cutting costs, laying off staff and passing on much of their state budget shortfalls to students through higher tuition. But the current paradigm of higher education isn’t equipped to withstand the turbulence created by economic, political and demographic forces, Huddleston said.
“Either we change the paradigm or we go out of business,” he said. “This is not simply another year-ahead worry about UNH’s budget. It is about our ability to remain viable in the face of a gap between cost and ability to pay that grows into a true chasm when one looks ahead more than a year or two.”
China and other Asian countries are responding to the global recession with massive public investment in higher education while Western nations cut university budgets, an international conference has heard.
Among the speeches at the World Universities Forum in Davos, Switzerland were two that highlighted contrasting government and public attitudes to higher education in China and the US.
Linda Katehi, chancellor of the University of California, Davis, looked at the future of the state’s publicly funded university system in the wake of a 20 per cent budget cut over the past year.
She warned that without increased federal and state investment, America’s public research universities faced the “shrunken, caste-bound future of the privatised university”.
David Strangway, who co-chaired the Task Force on Innovation and Environment for the China Council on International Co-operation on Environment and Development, presented a contrasting vision of higher education investment in China, particularly in the low-carbon economy.
From Andrew Trounson and Christian Kerr in The Australian
Australia is in denial on racially motivated attacks against international students and has failed to take action to deal with the issue, an internationally respected Australian academic has told a major conference in Switzerland.
Melbourne University professor Simon Marginson, delivering a keynote address to the World Universities Forum in Davos, said the Australian government was trying to spin itself out of crisis following this month’s murder of Indian accountancy graduate Nitin Garg in a west Melbourne park. “The Australian government is in denial,” Professor Marginson told the high-powered meeting of academics. “Racist targeting is involved (in the attacks). Indian students do have a special problem. And there isn’t enough official and civil concern about international student security in Australia.”
Garg’s unsolved murder has sparked diplomatic, government and public protests in India, further weakened one of Australia’s most important education export markets and prompted a defensive response from Australia’s political leaders and Victoria Police.
Near the University of Bologna—the world’s oldest, founded in 1088—is a medieval museum displaying carved memorial plaques that honor great professors of the past. “They all show the professor on the podium, with the students below,” says Thomas Forrest Kelly, Knafel professor of music. “Often the students are asleep, playing dice or cards, or fornicating.”
Much has changed since the Middle Ages, but one thing that persists is the lecture. The medieval university invented lecturing—the word comes from the Latin verb legere, to read—to cope with the scarcity of books: a lecturer would read the only available copy of a book to the gathering of students. “That was high technology in the thirteenth century,” says Kelly, “but not high technology for the twenty-first century!”
European universities have less ability to manage their own affairs than is generally realised and less than is desirable, according to a new survey by the European University Association. The report covers 33 countries and finds that genuine autonomy is lacking in several critical sectors, above all in that of finance.
This could have worrying consequences for the future of many institutions. The EAU said that at a time when the overall levels of public funding in education were stagnating and universities were increasingly being asked to look for alternative funding sources, the lack of autonomy was a real threat for the sustainability of Europe’s universities.
The report noted that many governments, the university sector itself and the European Commission had recognised increased autonomy for universities would be a crucial step towards modernisation in the 21st century. In practice, however, “public authorities still play too central a role in the regulation of the higher education system and, in a large number of countries, still exert direct control”.
Although a recent report applauded the fact that the number of foreign students attending American colleges and universities hit a new peak in 2008, a disaggregation of the data reveals worrisome underlying trends in undergraduate and graduate student numbers.
More than 670,000 foreign students enrolled in American colleges and universities in 2008-09, an 8% increase from the previous year, according to the Institute of International Education’s Open Doors 2009 report. Not only is this the largest percentage increase since 1980-81, it is the third consecutive year significant growth has occurred.
According to IIE president and CEO Allan E Goodman, “American higher education continues to be highly valued throughout the world. US campuses offer unparalleled opportunities for creativity, flexibility, and cultural exchange. Students from all over the world contribute substantially to their host campuses and to the US economy.”
A rapidly growing number of universities across the world are establishing branch campuses in other countries. In fact, the number has almost doubled to 162 in the past three years alone and has jumped eight-fold since 2002. Although the US continues to dominate with its offshore campuses scattered around the globe, more countries have become involved as hosts and providers.
A report by the Observatory on Borderless Higher Education* says that among the host countries, the United Arab Emirates is the clear leader, hosting a quarter of all international branch campuses in the world.
The report says that of the existing campuses, only 35 were operating before 1999. Since September 2006, at least 49 new campuses have been established - 30% of the current total - with three new ones to be opened soon. In the same period, five international branch campuses have closed.
Goodall … bases her work on analysis of the research records of those who have led top universities, and also on interviews with a number of presidents of top American and British universities.
Her book builds on research she has published previously in which she uses citation rankings (in which scholars are rated by the frequency with which their work is cited by others) as a proxy for academic quality of a scholar. While Goodall acknowledges that such measurements aren’t perfect, she said that they do give a sense of the impact of a given researcher. She has documented more movement to the top ranks (of national and international rankings, which she acknowledges as well are not perfect measures) — both of universities and business schools — at institutions that are led by presidents or deans with high citation rankings.
Ultimately, she says, research universities should be led by those who share a passion for what the institution is about — producing knowledge.
The 57 Islamic states have approved a plan to upgrade their universities as a means of achieving world-class status, as well as reforming them to become “functional developmental institutes” providing valuable resources for business, industry and society.
The plan was announced at a workshop, Achieving Excellence in Higher Education, in Ifrane in Morocco earlier this month. It was organised by the Islamic development bank of the 57 members of the Organisation of the Islamic Conference and Al-Akhawayn University. The conference consists of countries from the Middle East, Africa, Central Asia, Caucasus, Balkans, Southeast Asia and South Asia.
The aim of the plan is to build a critical mass of world-class scientists and technologists in targeted science and technology areas, while also promoting relevant research and development outcomes for the private sector.
Fifteen institutions, five from Africa, Asia and the Arab world, were identified to carry out the upgrades and reform, and to promote scientific research in agriculture, nanotechnology and information and communication technologies.
The institutions were selected using international and regional university rankings, as well as their readiness to meet the demands and their likely impact on the development of knowledge-based economy.
As a result of plagiarism and academic misconduct scandals associated with the country’s newly appointed Science Minister, Iranian professors in US-based universities and research centres have called on their peers at home to uphold high ethical standards, including safeguarding the integrity of the academy, curriculum, scholarly contributions and publications.
Despite questions being raised about his academic credentials, the Iranian parliament approved the nomination by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of 52-year-old space scientist Kamran Daneshjo as the country’s new Science, Research and Technology Minister.
Daneshjou, the former election chief who oversaw the disputed vote tally in June, is a professor at the Tehran-based school of mechanical engineering of the University of Science and Technology, the same institution from which Ahmadinejad graduated.
American universities again dominate the latest Shanghai Jiao Tong rankings as they have for the past six years. Released last Friday, almost a week earlier than expected, the rankings place US universities in all but three of the top 20 spots with Harvard, Stanford and the University of California at Berkeley in first, second and third spot, and the universities of Cambridge, Oxford and Tokyo the only outsiders at fourth, 10th and 20th respectively. The top 10 universities are unchanged this year from the rankings drawn up in 2008.
Of the top 50 universities, 36 are US institutions although University College, London, came in at 21, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology at 23, Japan’s Kyoto University at 24, Imperial College, London at 26, Toronto at 27, British Columbia at 36, Pierre and Marie Curie University - Paris 6 at 40, Manchester at 41, Copenhagen equal 43 with University of Paris Sud (Paris 11) and Sweden’s Karolinska Institute at number 50.
By Philip Fine, Wagdy Sawahel and Maya Jarjour University World News
Women outnumber men in worldwide university enrolments and graduation rates, according to Unesco’s 2009 Global Education Digest. The number of female students in tertiary education rose six-fold between 1970 and 2007compared with a quadrupling of male enrolments during the same period. In terms of graduation, women outnumber men in 75 of the 98 countries, the Digest reports.
Tertiary enrolment ratios of men and women reached parity around the year 2003. Since then, the average global participation of females has been exceeding that of males. In 1970, the male-to-female enrolment ratio was 1.6. In 2007, it flipped, with the female-to-male ratio becoming 1.08.
In North America and Europe, a third more women than men are on campus. Latin America, the Caribbean as well as Central Asia also show high rates of female enrolments. In a number of countries, at least two females graduate for every male.
By Fazal Rizvi, Bob Lingard Routledge Taylor & Francis Group
List Price: $45.95
ISBN: 978-0-415-41627-6
Binding: Paperback (also available in Hardback)
Published by: Routledge
Publication Date: 13/08/2009
Pages: 240
About the Book
Rizvi and Lingard’s account of the global politics of education is thoughtful, complex and compelling. It is the first really comprehensive discussion and analysis of global trends in education policy, their effects - structural and individual - and resistance to them. In the enormous body of writing on globalisation this book stands out and will become a basic text in education policy courses around the world.
- Stephen J Ball, Karl Mannheim Professor of Sociology of Education, Institute of Education, University of London, UK
In what ways have the processes of globalization reshaped the educational policy terrain?
How might we analyse education policies located within this new terrain, which is at once local, national, regional and global?
Over the past two decades, educational systems throughout the world have undergone significant changes as systems continue to interpret and respond to the ever-changing economic, social and political contexts within which education takes place. Educational policies have been deeply affected by these developments, as national governments have sought to re-align their educational priorities to what they perceive to be the imperatives of globalization.
In Globalizing Education Policy, the authors explore the key global drivers of policy change in education, and suggest that these do not operate in the same way in all nation-states. They examine the transformative effects of globalization on the discursive terrain within which educational policies are developed and enacted, arguing that this terrain is increasingly informed by a range of neo-liberal precepts which have fundamentally changed the ways in which we think about educational governance. They also suggest that whilst in some countries these precepts are resisted, to some extent, they have nonetheless become hegemonic, and provide an overview of some critical issues in educational policy to which this hegemonic view of globalization has given rise, including:
Abstract: In order to maximise researchers’ time, universities often offer scholarships to graduate or undergraduate students to undertake basic research tasks to assist the principal researcher to complete a project. Selection of these students often relies solely on academic grades. This paper will briefly outline how a principal researcher used other criteria as well as academic achievement when selecting a student to assist with a research project. The benefits to both university and student will be explained, and the case made for all universities to review selection criteria.
If you have read the paper you may wish to add a review.
Tristha Ramamurthy: The Prospective Teachers of India: Understanding their Motivation to Enter the Teaching Profession (to be published in the next issue)
Jan Petter Myklebust from University World News reports…
The Swedish Presidency of the European Union has organised a major conference starting this week and titled The Knowledge Triangle: Shaping the future of Europe. Ministers from Sweden, Finland and the UK, together with high-ranking EU Commission officers including two commissioners and 350 university presidents, researchers, students and policy-makers and some high level industry leaders will meet in the university town of Gothenburg.
The conference is a follow-up of the “Lund declaration” from the EU Presidency conference in July - New Worlds: New Solutions - which called for “grand challenges” in European research during the coming decade.
The Lund declaration has been a success with regard to agenda-setting for research concentration. But most observers are asking how the Swedes are going to implement their grand visions. More…
Chryssi Vitsilaki is Dean of the School of Humanities at the University of the Aegean. She has a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago and research interests in the sociology of education and gender studies. Her books include School and Work (Athens, 2002) and The All-Day School (Athens 2002). More…
Recently, the World Bank released a report by Jamil Salmi.
In September 2005, the new world ranking published by the Times Higher Education
Supplement was received like a bomb shell in Malaysia when it showed the country’s top
two universities slipping by almost 100 places compared to the previous year.
Notwithstanding the fact that the big drop was mostly due to a change in the ranking
methodology, the news was so traumatic that there were widespread calls for the
establishment of a Royal Commission of Inquiry to investigate the matter. This strong
reaction was not out of character in a nation whose current Ninth Development Plan aims
at shaping the transformation of the country into a knowledge-based economy with
emphasis on the important contribution of the university sector.
Preoccupations about university rankings reflect the general recognition that economic
growth and global competitiveness are increasingly driven by knowledge, and that
universities can play a key role in that context. Indeed, rapid advances in science and
technology across a wide range of areas from information and communication
technologies (ICTs) to biotechnology to new materials provide great potential for
countries to accelerate and strengthen their economic development. The application of
knowledge results in more efficient ways of producing goods and services and delivering
them more effectively and at lower costs to a greater number of people.
We have many optional tours that should be both exciting and fun. Please book and pay early. The Tours have limited availability and will be confirmed on a first paid basis.
For more information and bookings please see the Conference website.
The Conference Dinner, with its horse drawn sleigh ride and dinner in the Dischma valley, should provide you with a memorable experience. Not to be missed!
For more information and bookings please see the Conference website.
Changes to Australia’s immigration rules affecting foreign students who apply for permanent residency could cause a collapse in the booming export education market. The tighter restrictions are likely to have a profound impact on the number of students from India and China whose main purpose in coming to Australia is to obtain permanent residency. Take that lure away and the main reason why tens of thousands are prepared to outlay up to $20,000 (US$16,000) every year disappears.
Estimates by the Australian Bureau of Statistics suggest that foreign students contribute more than A$15 billion a year to the national economy. But this does not take account of the money students earn working in Australia and if that sum is deducted, the total is believed to be far less. More…
A €3.2 billion programme of research spending that will try to pull Europe out of recession and into a sustainable economic recovery has been launched by the European Commission. At a ceremony in Brussels witnessed by more than 800 senior researchers and industrialists, the commission put scientists on notice that millions of research euros would soon start to pour out of three private-public partnerships funding R&D projects across Europe.
They will last until 2013 and will cover three topics:
* Developing innovative manufacturing technologies, materials and processes to produce more while consuming fewer materials, less energy, and producing less waste.
* Creating more energy-efficient buildings, improving new construction design and greening existing buildings through new materials and construction techniques.
* Building greener cars and smarter transport systems, including the electrification of road and urban transport, and research into hybrid technologies. More…
Jonathan Jansen is Honorary Professor of Education at the University of the Witwatersrand and Visiting Fellow at the National Research Foundation. He is a recent Fulbright Scholar to Stanford University (2007-2008), former Dean of Education at the University of Pretoria (2001-2007), and Honorary Doctor of Education from the University of Edinburgh. He is a former high school Biology teacher and achieved his undergraduate education at UWC (BSc), his teaching credentials at UNISA (HED, BEd) and his postgraduate education in the USA (MS, Cornell; PhD, Stanford).He serves as Vice-President of the South African Academy of Science and from this vantage point currently leads three major studies on behalf of the Academy, including a inquiry on the role of the South African PhD in the global knowledge economy and another investigation on the future of the Humanities in South Africa. More…
Nigel Thrift, Vice-Chancellor, University of Warwick, Coventry, UK
Nigel Thrift Professor Nigel Thrift was educated at Aberystwyth where he graduated with a BA Hons in Geography in 1971. After Aberystwyth he went onto gain his PhD in Geography from the University of Bristol in 1979, his DSc from the University of Bristol in 1992, as well as being granted an MA (Oxon) in January 2004. He is an Emeritus Professor of the University of Bristol and a Visiting Professor at the University of Oxford.Nigel took up his role as the Vice-Chancellor of The University of Warwick in July 2006. He joined Warwick from the University of Oxford where he was Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Research. He was made Head of the Division of Life and Environmental Sciences at Oxford in 2003, prior to which he chaired the Research Committee at the University of Bristol (2001-2003) and also chaired Bristol’s Research Assessment Panel (1997-2001). More…
Jandhyala B. G. Tilak, Professor of Educational Finance, National University of Educationa Planning and Administration, New Delhi, India
Jandhyala B. G. Tilak Jandhyala B. G. Tilak is a professor of Educational Finance at the National University of Educationa Planning and Administration in India. He received his Ph.D. (Economics of Education) from the Delhi School of Economics; was on the research and teaching faculty of University of Delhi, Indian Institute of Education, University of Virginia and the Hiroshima University (Japan); was also on the research staff of the World Bank. He is also a Visiting Professor in Economics at the Sri Sathya Sai University; and has authored/edited ten books including Economics of Inequality in Education, Education for Development in Asia (both by Sage Publications), Educational Planning at Grassroots (Ashish), India Socio-Economic Database (Tulika) , Education, Society and Development (APH Publishers), Financing Education in India (Ravi Books), Women’s Education and Development (Garg Publishing) and Financing of Secondary Education in India (Shipra Publications), in addition to about 250 research papers published in reputed journals, and in the series of working papers of the World Bank, UNCRD, IIEP, State University of New York, NCAER. More…
Simon Marginson, Professor of Higher Education, Centre for the Study of Higher Education, University of Melbourne, Centre for the Study of Higher Education, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
Simon Marginson is a Professor of Higher Education located in the Centre for the Study of Higher Education at the University of Melbourne, Australia. His work is focused on globalization and the knowledge economy, international education and education policy, with some emphasis on the Asia-Pacific region, and he has completed three reports for the OECD in these areas. His most recent books are Prospects of Higher Education (Sense Publishers, 2007); Creativity in the Global Knowledge Economy (Peter Lang, 2009) and Global Creation: Space, mobility and synchrony in the age of the knowledge economy (Peter Lang, 2010), both co-authored with Peter Murphy and Michael Peters. Forthcoming is International Student Security, co-authored with Chris Nyland, Erlenawati Sawir and Helen Forbes-Mewett. More…
Eva Egron-Polak, Secretary-General, International Association of Universities, Paris, France
Eva Egron-Polak Eva Egron-Polak is Secretary-General of the International Association of Universities (IAU), an international non-governmental organisation based at UNESCO in Paris, France.Bringing together Higher Education Institutions and Associations from every region, the IAU is committed to strengthening higher education worldwide by providing a global forum for leaders, undertaking research and analysis, disseminating information and taking up advocacy positions in the interest of quality higher education being available to all. More…
Ulrichs is an authoritative knowledgebase of information about more than 300,000 serials of all types from around the world—academic and scholarly journals, peer-reviewed titles, online publications, newspapers and other resources. Bibliographic records provide details such as ISSN and title, publisher, online availability, language, subject area, abstracting & indexing coverage, searchable tables of contents, and full-text reviews.
Mark C. Taylor writes in the New York Times for 27 April 2009 about a sharply different organizational and procedural structure for the Academy in the present period of challenge and change. His op-ed piece is entitled End the University as We Know It.
After describing the current crisis, Taylor offers an alternative.
If American higher education is to thrive in the 21st century, colleges and universities, like Wall Street and Detroit, must be rigorously regulated and completely restructured. The long process to make higher learning more agile, adaptive and imaginative can begin with six major steps: 1. Restructure the curriculum … 2. Abolish permanent departments … 3. Increase collaboration among institutions … 4. Transform the traditional dissertation … 5. Expand the range of professional options for graduate students … 6. Impose mandatory retirement and abolish tenure ….
For many years, I have told students, “Do not do what I do; rather, take whatever I have to offer and do with it what I could never imagine doing and then come back and tell me about it.” My hope is that colleges and universities will be shaken out of their complacency and will open academia to a future we cannot conceive.
Graduate education is the Detroit of higher learning. Most graduate programs in American universities produce a product for which there is no market (candidates for teaching positions that do not exist) and develop skills for which there is diminishing demand (research in subfields within subfields and publication in journals read by no one other than a few like-minded colleagues), all at a rapidly rising cost (sometimes well over $100,000 in student loans).
Widespread hiring freezes and layoffs have brought these problems into sharp relief now. But our graduate system has been in crisis for decades, and the seeds of this crisis go as far back as the formation of modern universities. Kant, in his 1798 work “The Conflict of the Faculties,” wrote that universities should “handle the entire content of learning by mass production, so to speak, by a division of labor, so that for every branch of the sciences there would be a public teacher or professor appointed as its trustee.”
“With the broader economy in free fall and new indicators reported almost daily, the economic outlook for faculty members and higher education is anything but clear. ‘On the Brink: The Annual Report on the Economic Status of the Profession, 2008-09′provides the most up-to-date and comprehensive analysis available of faculty salaries at colleges and universities around the country. Even so, the data alone don’t tell the whole story. That’s why this year’s report encourages faculty members to take action now to ensure that cuts to higher education funding do not undermine the foundation upon which colleges and universities are built: their faculties. Wrong choices now, the report warns, could have negative consequences for years to come. . . .
When full-time faculty salary levels for this academic year were set in mid-2008, inflation was running at its highest rate in nearly twenty years. Average faculty salaries had been stagnant for most of the previous decade and were budgeted to stay that way—until the bottom fell out of the rest of the economy. Soon after the academic year was underway, consumer prices tumbled along with investment returns, and colleges and universities began announcing salary and hiring freezes, involuntary furloughs, and even layoffs. Labor economist Saranna Thornton, chair of the AAUP’s Committee on the Economic Status of the Profession and lead author of this year’s report, notes that ‘On paper, aggregate faculty salaries for this year look pretty good, since inflation is suddenly at its lowest level in half a century. But it won’t be until we have next year’s data that we can begin to assess the true consequences of the recession of 2008 on higher education.’ Given the dark clouds looming on the horizon, Thornton notes that it will be difficult for faculty members to focus on the silver lining of a low inflation rate.
Much of the recent news from private colleges and universities has focused on the loss of value in their endowment funds during the last year. Although institutional endowments have clearly declined, just as have individual retirement investments, colleges and universities vary in their reliance upon endowment income for general operating costs. This year’s report takes a look at some of that variation. . . .
Probably the most salient feature of the higher education landscape in the last three decades has been the increasing insecurity of faculty employment. More than half of all faculty members are now hired on a part-time basis, one course at a time, most often with no job security and no benefits. This year’s report documents the latest comprehensive figures on the expansion of contingent faculty appointments, both part-time and full-time, and provides a sampling of reports on how contingent faculty members are faring in the economic downturn.
This year’s report also adds to the AAUP’s ongoing analysis of gender equity in faculty employment with fresh data on trends in women’s advancement through the faculty ranks. Although many colleges and universities are approaching parity between men and women in entry-level assistant professor appointments, the report notes that progress in advancing women to senior professor ranks is slower. At universities granting doctoral degrees, there are still four men full professors for every woman holding that rank. The substantial remaining impediments to women’s advancement as faculty members reinforce the AAUP’s longstanding call for higher education to renew its commitment to complete equality of opportunity for women.” — AAUP Newsletter
“A small rise in funding for higher education in Wales has been announced, but some institutions will see a cut. Grants of £433.8m, up 1.66%, will be made by the Higher Education Funding Council for Wales (HEFCW) for 2009/10. Aberystwyth University will receive around £1.5m more, but Lampeter will have its grant cut by 9%.” - BBC
You can read more of this article on the BBC website here.
The question of grade inflation, and the conflict that often results, is nothing new to those who work in higher education (at least in the United States). A New York Times article discusses some possible reasons for why students expect such high grades: www.nytimes.com/2009/02/18/education/18college.html.
Welcome to the website of the World Universities Forum. In 2010, the conference will be held at the Congress Center Davos, Switzerland.
The Forum examines the role and future of the University in a changing world. The 2009 Forum follows our highly successful inaugural conference in Davos, Switzerland, in January 2008. It is ambitious in its intellectual and practical, agenda-setting scope, and broad in its themes.
The program for the World Universities Forum 2010 will be structured around five keynote sessions that will deal with the following topics:
Participants are also welcome to submit a presentation proposal either for a 30-minute paper, 60-minute workshop, a jointly presented 90-minute colloquium session or a virtual session. Parallel sessions are loosely grouped into streams reflecting different perspectives or disciplines. Each stream also has its own talking circle, a forum for focused discussion of issues.
Presenters may choose to submit written papers to the The Journal of the World Universities Forum, a fully refereed academic Journal. virtual participation also have the option to submit papers for consideration by the Journal. All registered Conference participants receive a complimentary online subscription to the Journal when registration is finalised. This subscription is valid until one year after the Conference end date.
If you would like to know more about this Conference, bookmark the World Universities Forum site and return for further information ? the site is regularly updated. You may also wish to subscribe to the Conference and Journal Newsletter.
Call for Papers
If you intend to present a paper at the conference, your participation begins with submission of a paper proposal. For information on proposals, presentation types and other options. Submit a proposal. Please note that if your proposal is accepted, you will then need to register for the conference.
Registration
Those who submit paper proposals should register following the acceptance of the proposal. Conference delegates who do not intend to present may register at any time. Register!
Creator Sites
All officially registered World Universities Forum delegates may make their own Creator Website. The first step is visiting the CGPublisher Creator page.
From Declan Butler in Nature:
From an editorial in Nature:
From 
Near the
A new book by 
