Monthly Archive for January, 2011

Apple U/ Cisco U/ Google U/ Microsoft U

Published on January 31, 2011 in News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

By Joshua Kim, in Inside Higher Ed

10 Ideas and Reasons for an Apple, Cisco, Google and Microsoft University:

1. Programs: Focus on high-end graduate degrees. Perhaps a “Strategic Executive MBA with a Technology Focus.” Or a PhD in “Organizational Behavior and Systems Design.” It may be that for accreditation the company will need to partner with an existing institution, but this should be possible. Start with a small cohort of professors and students. Build the program around what the company does best, and where the company wants to develop a talent and knowledge pipeline for recruitment and leadership development.

2. Delivery: The delivery method should be primarily online, with brief face-to-face sessions on the corporate campus. On-ground sessions should rotate internationally, with required sessions taking place at corporate offices in places like Brazil, China, India, Indonesia, etc. The global nature of the degree should be stressed.


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Defeated by Violence and Silence

Published on January 22, 2011 in News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

From Alastair Hudson, in Times Higher Education

Why has resistance to the government’s plans for universities failed? Alastair Hudson decries the state’s success in painting legitimate protest as riot.

Our universities are facing unprecedented public funding cuts, and yet there has been little defence of the sector in the public debate. The only meaningful resistance to the withdrawal of public funding for teaching has come from students. Yet the state has succeeded in marginalising these students by staging police actions that have transformed questions about higher education policy into questions about public order. Consequently, the protesters have been portrayed as anarchists.

Resistance is failing for two reasons. First, the supine failure of Universities UK to represent the sector in any meaningful way. Second, the success of the state in detaining student marchers unlawfully – by allowing the police to use the tactic of “kettling” to control crowds – while at the same time painting them as unprincipled anarchists, thus obscuring the point of their protests.

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Europe: Spending Cuts Hit University Budgets

Published on January 15, 2011 in News. 0 Comments

By Alan Osborn, in University World News

The familiar challenges of funding and mobility – particularly in research – will dominate the agenda for European higher education in 2011. But this year will probably be much worse as public sector spending cuts bite into higher education budgets across the region.

No major legislative proposals from Brussels are expected and the focus is likely to be on the work of the European Universities Association, beginning with the publication in February of a new report on the financial sustainability of European higher education institutions – looking in particular at the issue of income diversification.

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The Grim Threat to British Universities

Published on January 4, 2011 in News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

From Simon Head in The New York Review of Books:

The British universities, Oxford and Cambridge included, are under siege from a system of state control that is undermining the one thing upon which their worldwide reputation depends: the caliber of their scholarship. The theories and practices that are driving this assault are mostly American in origin, conceived in American business schools and management consulting firms. They are frequently embedded in intensive management systems that make use of information technology (IT) marketed by corporations such as IBM, Oracle, and SAP. They are then sold to clients such as the UK government and its bureaucracies, including the universities. This alliance between the public and private sector has become a threat to academic freedom in the UK, and a warning to the American academy about how its own freedoms can be threatened.

In the UK this system has been gathering strength for over twenty years, which helps explain why Oxford and Cambridge dons, and the British academy in general, have never taken a clear stand against it. Like much that is dysfunctional in contemporary Britain, the imposition of bureaucratic control on the academy goes back to the Thatcher era and its heroine.

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