Global

What’s happening abroad—and how it affects U.S. colleges.

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Landslide Kills Montana State U. Professor Leading Study Trip in Nepal

Betsy Palmer, an associate professor of education at Montana State University at Bozeman, died on Monday as a result of injuries suffered in a landslide while leading a group of 16 students on a study trip in Nepal, university officials announced. No students were injured. The university said it was working with the U.S. Embassy, the office of U.S. Sen. Max Baucus, and officials in Nepal to expedite the students’ return to the United States.

Ms. Palmer had deep roots in Nepal. She spent the 2011-12 academic year conducting research there, and she had met her future husband there during a previous visit, in 2005. The study trip was part of a course offered through the University Honors Program on education and economic development in remote areas. It culminated in an extended trek to a remote village in the Arun River Valley, in the Himalayas.

Filed under: Study Abroad, The Profession

In France, a Bill to Allow More Instruction in English Ignites Passions

A bill in France’s parliament that would allow French universities to increase the number of courses taught in English is running into fierce opposition, the international news channel France 24 reports. Lawmakers have denounced the bill as a signal of France’s “waning influence,” a “humiliation to French speakers,” and a “suicidal project,” with criticism coming even from members of the party of the higher-education minister, Geneviève Fioraso, a Socialist, who introduced the measure.

The bill, offered as a way to raise the country’s profile in international higher education, would allow some university-level classes to be taught in English if they were part of an accord with a foreign institution, or if they had financial backing from the European Union.

Ms. Fioraso argues that more English-language instruction would allow French universities to compete better for the world’s brightest students, many of whom come from the English-speaking world. “India has one billion inhabitants, including 60 million computer scientists,” she recently told a group of students, but French universities enroll only 3,000 Indian students. “We look ridiculous,” she said.

A number of distinguished French academic leaders and scientists, including two Nobel laureates, recently argued in favor of the bill in a commentary in Le Monde. English is already the lingua franca that scientists use to communicate, the authors write, and the language of choice for most scientific conferences and publications. Allowing more English-language instruction would make France more attractive to foreign students and scholars, they argue, thus promoting the country’s position in the world.

Filed under: Global

AAUP Criticizes Group’s Vote to Support Boycott of Israeli Institutions

The American Association of University Professors on Friday said it was “disappointed” with the Association for Asian American Studies’ vote to support a boycott of Israeli academic institutions, in a statement that reiterates the AAUP’s opposition to academic boycotts.

The AAUP released its statement after the Association for Asian American Studies and the British physicist Stephen Hawking both recently expressed support for such a boycott. The statement lays out the AAUP’s position on academic boycotts, which it established in an earlier report, in 2005. The group noted that while its organization “neither supports nor opposes Israeli government or Palestinian policies,” it stands opposed to academic boycotts “as a matter of principle.”

The group said it recognized the right of individual scholars such as Mr. Hawking to act on their own views, but said it was “disappointed by the resolution of the Asian-American Studies Association and would instead urge that organization and its members to find other means to register their opposition to Israeli policies.”

Filed under: Global, The Profession, AAUP

U.S. Customs Is Ordered to Verify Student Visas

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security has ordered its border agents to verify that every international student who arrives in the United States has a valid student visa, “effective immediately,” according to an internal memorandum obtained by the Associated Press.

The order was circulated one day after the Obama administration acknowledged that Azamat Tazhayakov, a student from Kazakhstan who is accused of covering up evidence for one of the suspects in the Boston Marathon bombing, had been allowed to return to the United States without a valid student visa. Mr. Tazhayakov was a classmate of the suspect, Dzhokhar A. Tsarnaev, at the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth, but was suspended pending the outcome of an investigation. He was one of three additional suspects charged this week in connection with the investigation.

In the aftermath of the bombing, some lawmakers have raised concerns about the student-visa system, even though neither of the two suspected bombers was in the United States on a student visa. Sen. Rand Paul, a Republican of Kentucky, sent a letter to the Senate majority leader asking if the time had come to take a “hard look” at the student-visa program.

Filed under: Global, Government, Students

AAUP Criticizes NYU Over Treatment of Italian Campus’s Faculty

[Updated (5/3/2013, 2:11 p.m.) with NYU's official letter responding to the AAUP's criticism.]

The American Association of University Professors has sharply criticized New York University’s treatment of faculty members on its campus in Florence, Italy, declaring that adjunct professors there saw abrupt pay cuts and three longtime studio-arts professors were terminated, allegedly for trying to help form a faculty union.

The criticism, appearing in a letter addressed on Thursday to NYU officials in Florence and on its home campus, in New York City, asserts that the allegations, if true, would raise questions about NYU’s commitment to academic freedom and shared faculty governance, as required by both AAUP and international academic standards.

In a reply letter, Ellyn Toscano, executive director of the Florence campus, said that no staffing decisions had resulted from a faculty member’s support for unionization. Rather, the moves stemmed from changes last summer in Italian labor over the nature of the employment contracts that employers like the university could offer their staffs. “Far from sudden and drastic reductions and terminations,” the letter says, the university put faculty members on contracts that gave them a status comparable to tenure and enabled them to unionize, if they wished.

Moreover, the letter says, no faculty member saw a cut in compensation. Rather, “compensation was redistributed among benefits and take-home pay, in strict compliance with the law.” The letter also describes a “collaborative structure” of academic decision making that involves faculty members from both the Florence and New York campuses—not a system that violated AAUP or international standards of shared governance or academic freedom.

The changes on the Florence campus, according to NYU Local, a blog that covers the university, resulted from an effort to shift the campus’s emphasis from the arts to political science. As part of the changes, studio-arts classes were outsourced, and the affected faculty members apparently found out about the new direction suddenly, as they arrived for classes last fall.

In a response to NYU Local’s questions about the changes, Ms. Toscano said there was “no plan to eliminate the arts at NYU Florence” or to add social-science classes at the expense of the arts. John Beckman, an NYU spokesman in New York, told NYU Local that the abruptness of the announcement stemmed from a change in Italian labor law late last summer that affected the type of employment contracts the university could offer faculty members.

The AAUP’s letter appears to reflect the group’s increasing concern about whether American universities are respecting traditions of academic freedom and other faculty rights on the campuses they operate overseas. Thursday’s letter follows a similar message in December that questioned Yale University’s collaboration with the National University of Singapore to open a liberal-arts college in Singapore.

Filed under: Academic Labor, Global, Governance, International Education

U. of Indianapolis Will Close Its Campus in Greece

The University of Indianapolis announced on Wednesday that it would shut down its campus in Athens this year because economic conditions in Greece had made it difficult to uphold “the high standards of the university and the expectations of our accrediting agency.”

Students will no longer be admitted to all but one degree program, and classes will cease on August 31. The university will continue to offer an M.B.A. degree to students from Saudi Arabia on a contract basis. Current students on the Athens campus who have not completed their degree programs have several options, including transferring to the Indianapolis campus, transferring to another institution, or finishing their degree online.

The university drew criticism six years ago for its supervision of the Athens campus, but said this week’s decision stemmed from the impact on the campus of Greece’s worsening economy.

Filed under: Global

U.S. Senator Raises Concerns About Student Visas in Wake of Bombings

Sen. Rand Paul, a Republican of Kentucky, on Monday sent a letter to the Senate majority leader asking if the time had come to take a “hard look” at the student-visa system after last week’s bombings at the Boston Marathon that killed three people and injured scores of others. Mr. Paul’s questions were part of a broader letter discussing immigration reform in light of national-security concerns arising out of the Boston attacks.

Neither of the two suspects in the attacks, one of whom is a student at the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth, was in the United States on a student visa. They were born in Kyrgyzstan and came with family members to the United States about a decade ago. Mr. Paul raised concerns about the student-visa system anyway, asking, “Finally, do we need to take a hard look at student visas? Should we suspend student visas, or at least those from high-risk areas, pending an investigation into the national-security implications of this program?”

In his letter, Mr. Paul called for hearings to study the national-security issues surrounding the attack, “making sure that our current immigration system gives individuals from high-risk areas of the world heightened scrutiny.”

Filed under: Global, Government, Students

Scholarly Group Votes to Support a Boycott of Israeli Institutions

Members of the Association for Asian American Studies voted this weekend to support a boycott of Israeli academic institutions, making the group the first U.S.-based scholarly association to support such a measure, according to the U.S. Campaign for the Academic & Cultural Boycott of Israel.

The resolution says the boycott is “in protest of the illegal occupation of Palestine, the infringements of the right to education of Palestinian students, and the academic freedom of Palestinian scholars and students in the West Bank, Gaza, and Israel.”

It goes on to say that “Israeli academic institutions are deeply complicit in Israel’s violations of international law and human rights and in its denial of the right to education and academic freedom to Palestinians, in addition to their basic rights as guaranteed by international law.”

Filed under: Global, Research

London School of Economics Says BBC Put Students at Risk on North Korea Trip

The London School of Economics and Political Science is accusing the BBC of putting students at risk during a trip to North Korea in March by using them as cover for a reporting team that secretly filmed material there for a documentary, according to reports by the Associated Press and the British broadcasting company Sky News. It was unclear from those reports what the BBC’s role was in planning the trip. The London School says the trip was not organized by the university but by a student group known as the Grimshaw Club.

A BBC News official said on Sunday that the students had been given enough information before the trip to understand and consent to the increased risk of traveling with journalists who did not have authorization to work in North Korea. But the London School says the BBC told the students only that “a journalist” would accompany them and did not reveal that two others would be clandestinely shooting footage for a documentary.

A statement issued by the BBC on Saturday also mentions only a single journalist, saying: “The students were all explicitly warned about the potential risks of traveling to North Korea with the journalist as part of their group. This included a warning about the risk of arrest and detention and that they might not be allowed to return to North Korea in the future.”

The London School’s director, Craig Calhoun, told Sky News that, besides posing a risk to the students on the trip, the BBC’s actions had created “a serious future problem” for others interested in research or student travel in North Korea.

Filed under: Global, Study Abroad

Britain Lifts Ban on a University’s Enrollment of Foreign Students

Britain’s Home Office has reinstated London Metropolitan University’s license to enroll foreign students, which was revoked last summer over problems with the university’s sponsorship of such students. The decision to strip the university of its license was controversial and threw the status of many students into limbo.

The British government said on Monday that a series of recent inspections by the Home Office had “demonstrated that the university has made the necessary improvements to its systems and administration.” The university will be subject to probation and limits on the number of international students it may enroll.

In a written statement, the university said it was “delighted” to announced that it had regained the license, but noted that it was still pursuing a court case regarding last year’s revocation.

Filed under: Global, Britain