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.

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.”

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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.

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“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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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.

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For the first time in decades, a student protest ended in violence on Wednesday night with missiles hurled at police and windows smashed at Conservative Party headquarters in London’s Westminster. At least 50 people were arrested and 14 taken to hospital including seven policemen.

The demonstration was called to protest against the coalition government’s plans to raise the cap on tuition fees by three-fold to £9,000 (US$12,350) and impose cuts of 40% on teaching budgets.

Prime Minister David Cameron condemned the violence and praised the bravery of the “thin blue line” of policemen while speaking on the eve of the G20 summit in Seoul.

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The California Supreme Court ruled unanimously this week that illegal immigrant students can continue to pay in-state tuition rates at public colleges and universities.

The controversial ruling makes higher education in California more affordable for students who don’t have legal status. Critics of the ruling say they are precisely the students who should not be in the United States in the first place.

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What you noticed first were the chairs. Behind the chained-shut glass
doors of the San Francisco State business school, students had piled and
zip-tied enough spindly metal chairs to block the hallways. Through the
windows you could see them rising up the building’s wide stairways.
There were hundreds, maybe a thousand?—?as many chairs as protesting
students. It was an overwhelming sight, symbolic of a student body sick
of taking things sitting down.

At noontime crowds encircled the entire business building, chanting
“Walk out, SF State! / Shut it down like ’68!,” but the late afternoon
grew quiet and fogbound. A few faint protest songs could still be heard
as anemic remnants of the crowd milled around, wary of the arriving
police cars. One student had taped a plank of wood to his shoe and
clumped along in a ludicrous march all his own. The scene regained some
life when representatives from the local hotel workers union arrived
with an experienced picket-line leader, who screamed classic chants
through his megaphone in a way the younger students never could.

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The request came in by e-mail around 2 in the afternoon. It was from a previous customer, and she had urgent business. I quote her message here verbatim (if I had to put up with it, so should you): “You did me business ethics propsal for me I need propsal got approved pls can you will write me paper?”

I’ve gotten pretty good at interpreting this kind of correspondence. The client had attached a document from her professor with details about the paper. She needed the first section in a week. Seventy-five pages.

I told her no problem.

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Refereed journals in science and medicine are the gatekeepers and repositories of knowledge in their respective fields. Research reported in peer-reviewed journals builds professional careers, determines which drugs and medical devices are licensed, influences what medical treatments become standards of care, and establishes the veracity of scientific theories. Maintaining the reliability, integrity, and objectivity of journal content is paramount, particularly in an era of increasingly common university-industry partnerships. Journal editors have become attentive to the need to preserve the credibility of their publications to colleagues within their disciplines and to the general public.

These relatively new university-industry partnerships, largely fostered by federal policies put in place in the early 1980s, have required government funding agencies and journal editors alike to rethink how to ensure publication integrity. Yet despite the best efforts of editors to set standards of research integrity, the escalation in conflicts of interest in academic science and medicine that has occurred over the past three decades has cast a shadow over many publications.

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Today, many people think the notion of diversity in higher education is under threat in Europe – that under the pressure of a pan-continental higher education area, the expansion of the English language as a means of instruction, and given the increasingly predominant view that the American research university model is some kind of apotheosis of modern knowledge production – some of what we value most about our institutions may disappear.

It is probably misleading to talk about systems becoming ‘more’ or ‘less’ diverse. Institutions and systems of higher education can be compared on a number of different axes, such as their missions, governance systems, their management systems, their financial independence, their degree structures, and so on.

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The numbers keep rising, the superlatives keep glowing. Each year, selective colleges promote their application totals, along with the virtues of their applicants.

For this fall’s freshman class, the statistics reached remarkable levels. Stanford received a record 32,022 applications from students it called “simply amazing,” and accepted 7 percent of them. Brown saw an unprecedented 30,135 applicants, who left the admissions staff “deeply impressed and at times awed.” Nine percent were admitted.

The biggest boast came from the University of California, Los Angeles. In a news release, U.C.L.A. said its accepted students had “demonstrated excellence in all aspects of their lives.” Citing its record 57,670 applications, the university proclaimed itself “the most popular campus in the nation.”

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Professor Tilak’s paper Universities: An Endangered Species? has been published as part of the Journal of the World Universities Forum.

This paper spells out the idea of a university, as defined in the ancient and medieval periods and traces its historical evolution. Universities are classified into five generations. After quickly reviewing the growth of five generations of universities, starting from the ancient period to those of the new millennium, it offers an extensive comment on the universities of the present generation. It is observed that the universities of the fourth and the fifth generations that belong to the 20th and 21st centuries have drastically changed the very concept, definition, nature, mission and functioning and almost every aspect of universities. The need to recover the idea of the university is highlighted.

Volume 3 of the Journal of the World Universities Forum is now complete.

The entire contents of the Journal can be accessed or individual issues may be browsed:

• Journal of the World Universities Forum Volume 3, Issue 1
• Journal of the World Universities Forum Volume 3, Issue 2
• Journal of the World Universities Forum Volume 3, Issue 3
• Journal of the World Universities Forum Volume 3, Issue 4
• Journal of the World Universities Forum Volume 3, Issue 5
• Journal of the World Universities Forum Volume 3, Issue 6

The coalition government is cutting the higher education budget by 40%. But science, technology, engineering and maths – the Stem subjects – will be protected, as will the budget for scientific research.

The budget will be reduced from £7.1 billion to £4.2 billion (US$11.2 billion to US$6.6 billion) by 2014-15.

Universities UK president Steve Smith (above) said the cuts would mean the biggest change in the sector for more than 40 years and state funding would be withdrawn for teaching in many subjects. The arts and humanities appear to be the most vulnerable and there would be serious repercussions for British universities in the overseas market.

To read more…