Universities and higher education institutions in Greece that have not held elections for the composition of their new management councils are in grave and imminent danger of losing state financial support.

A severe ultimatum was issued by the Education Ministry to all universities and technology institutes that have not yet complied with the provisions of the law 4009/11 voted through parliament last September.

So far only two of more than 60 higher education institutions have completed the process and the ministry has announced that financial support will cease after 15 January.

Opposition to the law, regarded by the academic community as an attempt to privatise state higher education via the back door, was expressed by the majority of university rectors and they have vied to render it inoperative. More…

There is no shortage of entrepreneurs in southern California. But in a slumping economy, there is a lot of competition for the venture capital that fuels them.

So the Lloyd Greif Center for Entrepreneurial Studies at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, usually deserted on a weekend, overflowed with a crowd of 350 on its annual networking Saturday, when entrepreneurs had valuable access to potential investors and prospective customers. Most of the people who attended the event had two important things in common, in addition to a desire to do business and make money.

First, most were graduates of USC’s Marshall School of Business. And second, they were living examples of the new ways in which US universities are working to engage their alumni at a time when such support is crucial.

“There has been a huge shift towards providing career services and networking opportunities to alumni, not just opportunities to meet and talk socially,” says Rae Goldsmith, vice-president for advancement resources at the Council for Advancement and Support of Education, an international professional organisation for people who work in educational alumni relations and fundraising. More…

SEATTLE — The average humanities doctoral student takes nine years to earn a Ph.D. That fact was cited frequently here (and not with pride) at the annual meeting of the Modern Language Association. Richard E. Miller, an English professor at Rutgers University’s main campus in New Brunswick, said that the nine-year period means that those finishing dissertations today started them before Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Kindles, iPads or streaming video had been invented.

So much has changed, he said, but dissertation norms haven’t, to the detriment of English and other language programs. “Are we writing books for the 19th century or preparing people to work in the 21st?” he asked.

Leaders of the MLA — in several sessions and discussions here — indicated that they are afraid that too many dissertations are indeed governed by out-of-date conventions, leading to the production of “proto-books” that may do little to promote scholarship and may not even be advancing the careers of graduate students. During the process, the graduate students accumulate debt and frustrations. Russell A. Berman, a professor of comparative literature and German studies at Stanford University, used his presidential address at the MLA to call for departments to find ways to cut “time to degree” for doctorates in half. More…

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Not only are more students than ever before travelling abroad to realise their higher education ambitions, they are also increasingly gravitating away from traditional educational hotspots in order to do so – and this trend looks set to continue, with competition for international students growing worldwide.

Over the course of a decade, the number of tertiary students enrolled in programmes outside their home countries has almost doubled, from just over two million in 2000 to nearly four million in 2011.

This staggering increase may among other things be a testament to successful implementation of governmental higher education strategies and policies. But emerging patterns of distribution, belying general global economic and social trends, are perhaps even more worthy of note. More…

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M.I.T.'s Simmons Hall

For Wall Street Occupiers or other decriers of the “social injustice” of college tuition, here’s a curveball bound to scramble your worldview: a totally free college education regardless of your academic performance or background.  The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (M.I.T.) will announce on Monday that they intend to launch an online learning initiative called M.I.T.x,which will offer the online teaching of M.I.T. courses free of charge to anyone in the world.

The program will not allow students to earn an M.I.T. degree. Instead, those who are able to exhibit a mastery of the subjects taught on the platform will receive an official certificate of completion. The certificate will obviously not carry the weight of a traditional M.I.T. diploma, but it will provide an incentive to finish the online material. According to the New York Times, in order to prevent confusion, the certificate will be a credential bearing the distinct name of a new not-for-profit body that will be created within M.I.T.

The new online platform will look to build upon the decade-long success of the university’s original free online platform, OpenCourseWare (OCW), which has been used by over 100 million students and contains course material for roughly 2,100 classes. The new M.I.T.x online program will not compete with OCW in the number of courses that it offers. However, the program will offer students a greater interactive experience. More…

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A new university ranking seeks to use a sophisticated set of bibliometric indicators to rate scientific performance to establish the world’s top 500 research universities.

The Leiden Ranking 2011/2012 aims to provide highly accurate measurements of the scientific impact of universities and of universities’ involvement in scientific collaboration.

Of the top 20 universities, 18 are from the United States and two from Switzerland (École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne and ETH Zurich).

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology heads the table, followed by Princeton with Harvard in third place. Cambridge is the top UK university in 31st place, with the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology the highest placed university outside the US and Europe in 58th place.

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A keynote research paper showing that Middle Eastern Jews and Palestinians are genetically almost identical has been pulled from a leading journal.

Academics who have already received copies of Human Immunology have been urged to rip out the offending pages and throw them away.

Such a drastic act of self-censorship is unprecedented in research publishing and has created widespread disquiet, generating fears that it may involve the suppression of scientific work that questions Biblical dogma.

‘I have authored several hundred scientific papers, some for Nature and Science, and this has never happened to me before,’ said the article’s lead author, Spanish geneticist Professor Antonio Arnaiz-Villena, of Complutense University in Madrid. ‘I am stunned.’

British geneticist Sir Walter Bodmer added: ‘If the journal didn’t like the paper, they shouldn’t have published it in the first place. Why wait until it has appeared before acting like this?’

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Founded and directed by Professor Roy Ascott, the CAiiA – Planetary Collegium is a PhD research program located primarily in the School of Art and Media at Plymouth University (UK), with nodes at the Nuova Accademia de Belli Arte, Milan and Hochschule fuer Gestaltung und Kunst, Zurich. The Collegium brings together a geographically and professionally diverse group of people, including artists, scientists, theorists, architects, and scholars, for doctoral and post-doctoral learning and research.   Meeting on-line, and face-to-face in research sessions, conferences and symposia, members of the CAiiA – Planetary Collegium focus on the intersection of emerging forms of art and architecture, new media, and technology, science and consciousness. This collaborative — and syncretic — approach, one nominator explained, “opens the exchange of ideas, where discovery, creativity and personal and professional development can flourish, with the support of the exceptional Planetary Collegium’s academic faculty.”

The Best Practice Award will be announced formally at this year’s World Universities Forum, which will be held at the University of the Aegean, Rhodes, Greece from 8-10 January 2012.  This marks the fifth year of the Forum, which was inaugurated in Davos, Switzerland in 2008 and was held subsequently in Mumbai, India (2009), Davos, Switzerland (2010) and Hong Kong (2011). The 2012 Forum will continue the discussion of the current role and future possibilities of the university. We are pleased that this discussion will include recognition of the CAiiA – Planetary Collegium, Plymouth University, and the inspiration it provides for reinventing the ways in which universities develop degree programs and conduct research.

Sir Patrick Stewart, Chancellor of the University of Huddersfield

University chancellors are a mixed bag of rock stars and actors, politicians and entrepreneurs, but are they mere glad-handing figureheads or can they make a genuine difference to the institution over which they preside? Sarah Cunnane finds out.

To some, they are just “an archaism” and “powerless figureheads” without purpose; to others, they are “passionate champions” and influential lobbyists for universities at a time when such support is desperately needed. Sir Robin Biggam, former chairman of the now-defunct Independent Television Commission, maintains that a person is qualified to be one only if he or she has reached “at least” the age of 50, while the former Liberal Democrat leader Sir Menzies Campbell proclaims that they should be “seen often and heard rarely”.

The job of university chancellor, which is nearly 800 years old, is certainly peculiar. Partly it is about pomp and ceremony; as honorary head of the institution, chancellors are expected to dress – as the broadcaster and chancellor of the University of Roehampton John Simpson puts it – “in impossibly bright colours” in readiness to shake an astonishingly large number of hands on graduation day. Beyond that, the list of official duties is “laughably short”, says Matthew Moss, private secretary to the vice-chancellor of the University of Cambridge – and for that reason, the post is “what the incumbent makes of it”. But whatever one’s view of their importance or otherwise, the fact that 5,558 academics and graduates turned out to vote in this autumn’s election for the new Cambridge chancellor suggests that it is a role many care about.

From the former cricketer turned politician Imran Khan to actor Sheila Hancock, and the Archbishop of Canterbury to the musician Brian May, a quick scan of today’s university chancellors (see related file, right) reveals that they are a diverse group who are doing an assortment of things in the wider world. Among UK universities, around 18 per cent of ceremonial heads could be described as “celebrities”. Twenty-seven per cent come from the world of business, 26 per cent have a background in politics and 43 per cent are peers. Seven universities – including the University of London – are represented by royals. Ten honorary heads have a background in academia and 18 in the media.

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Image courtesy of the University of Huddersfield

Should it matter to students whether a business school has a strong research base? Andrew Pollen, a first-year MBA student at ESADE in Barcelona, thinks not

A COUPLE of weeks ago, my economics professor introduced a new case study for us to mull over. It was dense and packed with historical background. We were split into groups and most of the class had only just finished reading it when we reconvened to wrap up the session. The professor explained some fine points for the case and suggested which tactics we should employ. Then he said he was very disappointed in us.

“I wanted you to work on the case in groups,” he said, “and instead you read the case individually. If you had worked together, I think you would have noticed that the first 10 pages of the case were absolute nonsense that you do not need to answer the questions.”

It was a powerful pedagogic lesson in using teamwork to make the whole greater than the sum of the parts. I think ESADE emphasises the teaching ability of its faculty because it has never been a top research institution; faculty come from industry or consulting rather than academia. They view teaching as their motivation rather than an unpleasant side effect to their appointment. On the first day of my statistics class, the professor thanked the students and said, “Your being here allows me to do something that I love.” I felt that sentiment a lot less often during my time at a top American business school.

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• Laura Dahlstrom, Stephanie Miller and June LeDrew -  Influential Factors in University Collective Bargaining Leadership: One Woman’s Lived Experience as Chief Negotiator
• Nicolas Gachon - The Origins of the Higher Education Market: From Theories of Capitalism to an Extrapolation of Clark’s Triangle
• Khe Foon Hew and Wing Sum Cheung -  The Use of Peer Facilitation in University Asynchronous Online Discussion Environment
• Raju M. Mathew and Ranjit Raju Mathew - Knowmatics: A New Revolution in Higher Education–Mathew’s Theories of Knowledge Production and Consumption as the basis of Knowmatics
• Tatyana Putintseva -  Foreign EFL Instructors in Japan: Some Issues to Consider
• Paul Throssell and Yiyu Zhao -  Developing Motivation in ESL Learning in the Chinese Context
• Despina Varnava-Marouchou - Can Students’ Perceptions of Learning Influence Their Learning Outcomes?
• Fang Yang - Comparative Education: A Case Study of Chinese and Danish Systems
• Lisa Zamberlan - Border Duty 

The European Commission has proposed an historic adjustment to its research and innovation policies with a view to stimulating economic growth and shoring up the competitiveness of the European Union. The plans include a EUR30 billion (US$40 billion) increase in funding and a 16-fold rise in the number of higher education students being supported in their training.

Under the proposed Horizon 2020 programme for 2014-20, announced last week, Brussels has set out budgets totalling EUR80 billion (US$108 billion) to push forward the EU’s scientific and research strategies against the background of a difficult and dramatically changing economic environment.

The sums dwarf anything the EU has spent on research before, and may even challenge spending by the US, Japan and other research-oriented countries in some sectors. The current 2007-13 seventh framework programme is spending EUR50 billion.

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Congratulations to Rui Gonçalves, Ana Vitória Baptista, Catarina Lobão and António Melo the winners of the International Award for Excellence in the world universities field with their paper Evidence-Based Practice in Higher Education: Discussing its Value to Enhance Teaching and Learning.

Abstract: Nowadays, we observe that Academia is focusing a great importance on research in general and evidence-based practice (EBP) in particular. In fact, multidisciplinary, transdisciplinary and cross-cutting approaches within research are being increasingly emphasised. This knowledge and process may have a great relevance to improve several activities, namely the teaching and learning process in Higher Education (HE). In this paper, we assume that EBP may be defined as the use of conscious and explicit scientific evidence which will increase the efficiency and quality of the teaching and learning process at HE institutions. Even though there are several studies that prove the importance and success of this interactive pedagogical experience, they also point out the existence of several barriers within some scientific domains that make the implementation of this strategy somewhat difficult. Thus, we will reflect on some aspects mentioned in the literature regarding the implementation of EBP with the ultimate goal of better understanding the impact it may bring to teaching and learning in HE. In particular, we will reflect about the importance and impact this strategy has in what regards the promotion of students’ generic skills and competences. Along this paper we will emphasise the importance that research in general and EBP in particular may have in the development and enhancement of teaching and learning process.

This week marks the last sessions of my Yale law school class on law, liberalism and religion. In the course of the semester my students have learned how to read religion clause cases against the background of long-standing debates in philosophy and theology about the relationship between religious imperatives and the obligations of democratic citizenship. They have become adept at recognizing the arguments behind the arguments the justices are making explicitly. They can see how a case ostensibly about vouchers or school prayer or Christmas trees on courthouse steps is really about whether principle or history should inform a court’s decisions. They can see how a case about head coverings or beards in the military (a topic that has surfaced once again) turns on the distinctions set down in John Locke’s “Letter Concerning Toleration” (1689), a tract the justices may never have read. They can see how the majority and dissenting opinions in a free exercise case often reflect a tension between negative and positive liberty as these terms are defined by Isaiah Berlin, an author the justices will likely not have referenced. They can see how the entire history of religion-clause jurisprudence at once illustrates and is an extended critique of John Rawls’s attempt in “Political Liberalism” to devise a form of government that will be fair to religion while at the same time keeping it at arm’s length.

Fish goes on to say that skills and tricks of the trade should not be the point of advanced study but rather deep understanding of the nature of the game being played. In cultures dominated by cheerleading for entrepreneurial capitalism that commitment to depth of study must struggle hard to maintain itself against the tide favoring tricks for short-term success.

For the article…

International student enrolment at American colleges and universities has been growing steadily for the past five years, reaching a record high of 723,277 in 2010, according to a new report by the Institute of International Education. The annual Open Doors study found that the majority of international students came from China, with their number rising by 23% – the fourth consecutive year of double-digit increases.

The overall number of international students increased by 5% in 2010, while new international student enrolment grew by 6% percent to 214,490, a significant improvement from the paltry 1% increase in 2009.

Of the overall figure, graduate international students make up 293,885, continuing to outnumber undergraduate international students as they have been since 2001.

“It is positive news that our higher education institutions continue to excel in attracting students from all over the world, and in preparing American students to succeed in an increasingly global environment,” Allan Goodman, president and CEO of the Institute of International Education, said in a statement.

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Volume 4, Issue 3 contains:

• The Use of Peer Facilitation in University Asynchronous Online Discussion Environment by Khe Foon Hew and Wing Sum Cheung
• Evidence-Based Practice in Higher Education: Discussing its Value to Enhance Teaching and Learning by Rui Gonçalves, Ana Vitória Baptista, Catarina Lobão and António Melo
• Developing Motivation in ESL Learning in the Chinese Context by Paul Throssell and Yiyu Zhao
• The Intellectual Capital Interplay Instrument: Developing Research Instrumentation toward Understanding the Impact of Knowledge Resource Allocation upon Stakeholder Perspectives within Institutions of Higher Education by Roxanne Helm Stevens, Kneeland Brown and Julia Russell
• Educational Leadership with a Difference: A Case Study of Starehe Boys Centre and School, Kenya by Peter Otiato Ojiambo
• The Use of an Experiential Learning Model in English Teacher Training by Kittitouch Soontornwipast
• Foreign EFL Instructors in Japan: Some Issues to Consider by Tatyana Putintseva
• Influential Factors in University Collective Bargaining Leadership: One Woman’s Lived Experience as Chief Negotiator by Laura Dahlstrom, Stephanie Miller and June LeDrew

Killian Court in front of Building 10 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts, September 2002

By Anthony Grafton, New York Review of Books

American universities crowd the tops of many world rankings, and though these ratings are basically entertainment for university administrators and alumni, they do reflect certain facts. A number of American universities offer their faculty salaries and working conditions, laboratories and libraries that few institutions elsewhere can match. They spend more not only on their staff, but also on their graduate and undergraduate students, than their peers overseas. Though their fees seem enormous by European or Asian standards, they have worked hard in recent years to keep them from deterring poor students by offering more generous aid for undergraduates and by paying full fees for all doctoral students. At every level of the system, dedicated professors are setting students on fire with enthusiasm for everything from the structure of crystals to the structure of poems.

Yet American universities also attract ferocious criticism, much of it from professors and from journalists who know them well, and that’s entirely reasonable too. Every coin has its other side, every virtue its corresponding vice—and practically every university its festering sores. At the most prestigious medical schools, professors publish the work of paid flacks for pharmaceutical companies under their own names. At many state universities and more than a few private ones, head football and basketball coaches earn millions and their assistants hundreds of thousands for running semiprofessional teams. Few of these teams earn much money for the universities that sponsor them, and some brutally exploit their players.

At competitive private colleges and universities, admissions directors reserve places in each class for the children of alumni and potential donors; for athletes, many of whom will make less use of their academic opportunities than their classmates do; and simply for those who can pay. And at universities that boast of their commitment to undergraduate teaching, too many professors gabble through PowerPoint slides twice a week and entrust the face-to-face teaching of actual students to underpaid graduate students and Ph.D.s on short-term contracts, who do their best to impart basic skills in writing and quantitative analysis while earning only a few thousand dollars a course.

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Image:  Wolfgang Volz/laif/Redux via NYBooks.com

PLANS to create a French Ivy League are part of the biggest shake-up in French higher education since students threw cobbled stones in les évènements of 1968. Championed by President Nicolas Sarkozy, the idea is to spend €7.7 billion ($10.6 billion) to produce a handful of world-class universities which can compete with the best that North America and the rest of Europe have to offer. The proposed “Sorbonne League” will require the country’s highly selective business and engineering schools, or grandes écoles, to work with universities and independent research organisations in return for financial support. They will also be expected to get closer to the business community.

While state funded universities in the UK and North America look anxiously at their balance sheets, these financially flush new partnerships may help France to reverse its recent poor performance in the global university rankings. But some argue that Mr Sarkozy’s use of taxpayers’ money is more an exercise in academic vanity than a way to achieve commercial success. After all, business schools the world over have already come to understand the value of collaboration with other academic disciplines to create wealth and jobs. The collaboration between Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s management, engineering and science faculties, for example has created over 130 companies in the past 20 years with a market capitalisation of over $15 billion. In France itself, HEC Paris hasn’t waited for state handouts to partner with a prestigious engineering school, Ecole Polytechnique, to bring together business strategy and technological innovation. And beyond the fields of science and technology, Imperial College London has created an incubator with the Royal College of Arts to turn design ideas into viable business propositions.

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Image Courtesy of AP, via The Economist

Only the incomparable house journalist of The Poppletonian can capture the farcical combination of phoney science, flat obduracy and lethal money-grubbing that now passes for the language of academic policy. Even Laurie Taylor’s satire is, however, impotent before the facts of political life. For David Willetts, the universities and science minister, himself put parody in the shade with a gobbling and hapless effusion, which culminated in the complacent declaration to the London Review of Booksin July: “I plead guilty to believing in choice and competition.”

“Pleading guilty” like this is a familiar piece of class diction with which to dismiss subordinate insistence that one should fashion a rational argument. For what would happen if the choices made by half a million 16-year-olds for their preferred A levels led to the evisceration of, say, all engineering departments?

And what does it mean to claim that the universities of Cumbria and Gloucestershire – both in by no means trivial difficulties as to cash – are in “competition” with the London School of Economics, whose director resigned earlier this year because of the institution’s unfortunate propinquity to the chequebooks of the Gaddafi family?

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Image: James Fryer via Times Higher Ed

Although research efforts by universities and private organisations are increasing across the globe, most research remains highly concentrated in a small number of US universities, according to a just-published OECD study that uses a new measure of research impact. Across disciplines, however, “a more diverse picture emerges”.

The report, Science, Technology and Industry Scoreboard 2011: Innovation and growth in knowledge economies, uses what it says is a new indicator of research impact “measured by normalised citations to academic publications across all disciplines”.

Using this system, the report’s authors say 40 of the world top 50 research universities are located in America, with some excelling in a wide range of disciplines. “Stanford University features among the top 50 for all 16 subject areas, and 17 other US universities feature in the top 50 in at least 10 scientific fields,” the report states.

But it also notes that “a more diverse picture emerges on a subject-by-subject basis with the US accounting for less than 25 of the top 50 universities in social sciences”, a field in which the United Kingdom excels.

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