Monthly Archive for December, 2010

Announcing the Winner for the 2010 Award for Best Policy in Higher Education

Published on December 31, 2010 in Conference. 0 Comments

We are very pleased to announce that the University of the Free State, South Africa, is the 2010 recipient of the World Universities Forum Award for Best Practice in Higher Education. The Best Practice Award recognizes the most significant practices of the year and the University of the Free State’s implementation of ten interlocking innovations are certainly worthy of such recognition.

These innovations sought to transform the University in the face of “racial division, student failure and academic stagnation.”  The ten-point plan includes campus-wide racial integration among students, reinvigoration of academic culture through the hiring of new faculty, nurturing of the most promising young scholars, and sending

more than seventy first-year students to top American universities to assist their development into “non-racial” campus leaders.  The undergraduate curriculum was revised to promote a cross-disciplinarity approach to key societal problems; and both academic standards and support were raised.  Open access to campus leadership was facilitated through sessions with the vice-chancellor, providing opportunities for public discussion between senior leadership, staff and students.  The University extended this spirit of dialogue internationally through the inauguration of International Advisory Council of key thinkers and practitioners.  Perhaps the most innovate step was the identification of twenty of the most dysfunctional high schools in the province and build relationships with those schools. This university-school partnership is based on a strict contract of reciprocal commitments to increase the chances of black children attending university.

We feel that the University of the Free State’s ten innovations demonstrate the profound impact higher education practices can have when they are well conceived and implemented.  We applaud these innovations and the ways in which they promote racial harmony, student success and overall academic vitality.

The Best Practice Award will be announced formally at this year’s World Universities Forum, which will be held at the Hong Kong Institute of Education from 14-16 January 2011.  This marks the fourth year of the Forum, which was inaugurated in Davos, Switzerland in 2008 and was held in Mumbai, India in 2009, and again in Davos in 2010.  This year’s Hong Kong Forum will continue the discussion of the current role and future possibilities of the university, issues of especial concern in this era of dramatic change.  We are pleased that this discussion will include recognition of the University of the Free State and its tremendous efforts to address its own challenges.

Reversing into Trouble

Published on December 28, 2010 in News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

By Martin Cohen, in Times Higher Education

And lo, another great socialist shibboleth is cast off. Half a century after Lord Robbins proposed that university education in the UK should be free to anyone capable of benefiting from it, the descendants of John Stuart Mill and Adam Smith are back, applying free-market economics to education. But could their triumph also be their folly? Could today’s reformers have lost their liberalism and forgotten the principles of laissez-faire?

The government’s plan, simply put, is to withdraw almost all of the block grant that it awards to universities to support their teaching, about £4 billion a year. As Stefan Collini, professor of English literature and intellectual history at the University of Cambridge, wrote in the London Review of Books last month: “This is more than simply a ‘cut’, even a draconian one: it signals a redefinition of higher education and the retreat of the state from financial responsibility for it.”

To read more…

ASIA: ASEAN May Create Research Citation Index

Published on December 26, 2010 in News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

By Yojana Sharma, in University World News

Countries of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations have suggested setting up regional research journals, and have agreed in principle to explore an ASEAN citation index to increase the international visibility of research carried out by the region’s universities.

The number of times published research is cited by other researchers has become an important measure of research quality and impact, and of universities’ research productivity as well as a country’s performance in science. Research citations are also a leading measure used to rank universities by all the major international rankings organisations.

To read more…

Appetite for Education

Published on December 24, 2010 in News. 0 Comments

From John Morgan, in Times Higher Education

“Thirst”, “mania”, even “abnormal”: these are unusual words to describe a nation’s attitude to education. But people reach for extremes when discussing education’s hold on South Korea’s collective psyche and its shaping of society.

The statistics for higher education tell a remarkable story. At 53 per cent, South Korea has the highest proportion of graduates among 25- to 34-year-olds of any nation in the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, according to 2008 figures. That compares with 38 per cent for the UK and 42 per cent for the US. By 2025, about 80 per cent of South Korean 25- to 44-year-olds will have participated in higher education, the OECD forecasts, the highest rate in the world.

To read more…

US: Re-imagining California Higher Education

Published on December 22, 2010 in News. 0 Comments

From Sarah King Head, in University World News

A report from the Center for Studies in Higher Education at the University of California, Berkeley, has analysed the challenges faced by tertiary education in California and its relationship to economic growth – and proposes some radical solutions for rejuvenating a faltering public higher education system that was once the envy of the world.

California now ranks among the bottom 10 states in the US for access to higher education and in degree completion rates.

To read more…

Too Complex for the Jury?

Published on December 21, 2010 in News. 0 Comments

By Paul Jump, in Times Higher Education

When an interdisciplinary paper was published in the journal Science in October last year purporting to describe a way to identify all enzyme activity in a cell, critics were quick to cry foul.

Chemists in particular raced to the internet in numbers to point out the mistakes, with some even asserting that the technique, known as a reactome array, was impossible. The furore provoked Science to raise its own concerns. A subsequent investigation by the ethics committee of the Spanish National Research Council, which funds the institute employing one of the paper’s corresponding authors, Manuel Ferrer, found “clear indications of deviation from good scientific practices”. It recommended that the paper be retracted: last month, it was officially withdrawn.

To read more…

US: International Students Pay Nearly $19 Billion

Published on December 19, 2010 in News. 0 Comments

From Sarah King Head, in University World News

A study released last week by NAFSA: Association of International Educators estimated that international students and their families contributed an impressive $18.78 billion to the US economy during the 2008-09 academic year – an increase of $1 billion over the previous year.

The US economy actually grossed $25.5 billion from nearly 700,000 international students in 2008-09 through a combination of tuition and fees and living expenses for them and their dependants. But 28.3% of this total came from within the US in the form of institutional grants, government or private scholarships or fellowships, and other funding sources.

To read more…

International Student Security: Globalization, State, University

Published on December 6, 2010 in Uncategorized. 0 Comments

simon-marginson-photoSimon Marginson was a Plenary Speaker at the 2010 Conference.

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.

Professor Marginson’s paper International Student Security: Globalization, State, University has been published as part of the Journal of the World Universities Forum.

Abstract:

Recent issues of international student security in Australia, especially breaches of the personal safety of students from South Asia, raise far-reaching questions about the security of mobile persons in a world governed and regulated by bordered nation-states. States have a prima facie first obligation to their own citizens and are chronically unable to provide for universal humanism or even universalise protections for strangers. Given the growing number of mobile persons – whether students, economic travellers or refugees – it is increasingly apparent that a new multilateral or global regime is needed to provide for personal security.

Campus That Apartheid Ruled Faces a Policy Rift

Published on December 1, 2010 in News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

By Celia W. Dugger, in The New York Times

Cape Town – The University of Cape Town was once a citadel of white privilege on the majestic slopes of Devil’s Peak. At the height of apartheid, it admitted few black or mixed-race students, and they were barred from campus dormitories, even forbidden to attend medical school postmortems on white corpses.

South Africa’s finest university is now resplendently multiracial. But it is also engaged in a searching debate about just how far affirmative action should go to heal the wounds of an oppressive history, echoing similar conflicts in the United States, where half a dozen states have banned the use of racial preferences in admissions to public universities.

To read more…