May 24, 2012, 12:57 pm
By Guest Writer
The following is a guest post by Susan Carvalho, associate provost for international programs at the University of Kentucky. The university has been home to a Confucius Institute since 2010.
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Students from a high school in Louisville, Ky., receive a Tai Chi lesson at the U. of Kentucky's Confucius Institute.
The U.S. State Department’s recent Guidance Directive 2012-06, regarding the use of exchange-visitor visas for Confucius Institute staff, offers yet another example of the ways that international initiatives across higher education are multiplying at a rate that creates challenges for regulatory agencies. As higher-education institutions’ goal of graduating world-ready students becomes not an option but an imperative, we…
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May 23, 2012, 10:00 pm
By Guest Writer
The following is a guest post from Mandy Reinig, director of international education at St. Mary’s College of Maryland.
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Studying abroad has become an increasingly important role within American higher education. The administrators who run study-abroad offices and faculty members hold a key responsibility in this process. However, there is often a divide in the understanding of the functions they play in the process of turning students into global citizens. This tension can be particularly pronounced between education-abroad professionals and professors since it crosses that ever-contentious faculty/staff divide.
This post addresses the misconceptions education-abroad (EA) professionals feel that faculty have about our role in the study-abroad process. I informally asked a variety of EA professionals about…
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May 21, 2012, 4:12 pm
By Guest Writer
The following is a guest post by Claudia Frittelli, a program officer at the Carnegie Corporation of New York who helps oversee its effort to strengthen African higher education. The grant maker has supported several of the organizations mentioned in the opinion article.
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Cloud computing—which in its most basic form is a virtual server available via the Internet—is growing rapidly as the next transformational stage of computing. Although most users may be unaware, everyday programs like Hotmail, Google Docs, and recently announced Google Drive, operate on the cloud principle of fully mobile, instantly accessible, and transferable data.
The educational and social implications for cloud computing in the developing world, particularly for the rapidly expanding education sector in Africa, are also…
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May 15, 2012, 3:28 pm
By Guest Writer
The following is a guest post by Ellen Hazelkorn, vice president for research and enterprise and head of the Higher Education Policy Research Unit at the Dublin Institute of Technology. She is the author of Rankings and the Reshaping of Higher Education: The Battle for World-Class Excellence (Palgrave Macmillan).
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The university rankings debate is heating up – again. Hopefully, this time it will be different and with better outcomes for everyone.
At a time when many nations are experiencing high levels of public and private debt and higher education is in great demand, university rankings have encouraged a preoccupation with the trials and tribulations of a handful of “world class” universities. This is having a profound–and perverse–effect on higher-education policy making, universities, and…
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May 7, 2012, 3:28 pm
By Guest Writer
The following is a guest post by Robert Quinn, executive director of the Scholars at Risk Network, which promotes academic freedom and advocates on behalf of threatened scholars worldwide. The nonprofit organization is based at New York University and has member institutions in 34 countries.
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Chinese activist Chen Guangcheng.
As the drama unfolded this month of Chinese activist Chen Guangcheng secreting himself out of house arrest in his village and making a daring trip to Beijing to seek the protection of embassy officials, many were asking the same question: Why the fuss over one man?
The answer lies in part in this extraordinary man, and in part in us. First Chen. Blind from birth and self-educated in law, he made himself an…
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April 25, 2012, 4:48 pm
By Guest Writer
The following is a guest post by Timothy M. Roberts, an assistant professor of history at Western Illinois University.
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Timothy M. Roberts (second from left) and his class in Istanbul.
American history has gone global in the last few decades as professors have responded to the complications of a post-____ world (fill in the blank) by showing the longue durée of our entanglements with others. “U.S. in the world” faculty positions appear increasingly in job postings. The most important tell-tale of the arrival of a “field” in history, glossy textbooks, now organize the American past (mind you, still in two volumes) by its global context, not its national narrative.
This year I developed a “U.S. in the world” course for the …
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April 4, 2012, 3:29 pm
By Guest Writer
The following is a guest post by John D. Holm, the former director of the Office of International Education and Partnerships at the University of Botswana and director of international programs at Cleveland State University.
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Universities in the United States appear eager to enroll more Africans in their graduate programs. Last month a group of administrators from American institutions, including Ohio University and University of Cincinnati, visited Botswana to explore partnerships, which could bring students from the sub-Saharan country to their campuses. In general, universities see African students as a way to diversify their classrooms and, at the same time, help fix Africa’s massive shortage of locals with graduate degrees.
While most Africans are too financially strapped to study abroad, a…
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March 28, 2012, 4:01 pm
By Guest Writer
The following is a guest post by Markus Laitinen, head of international affairs at the University of Helsinki.
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Imagine a university without an international office, internationalization strategy or a committee for internationalization; not really international, right? Not necessarily. For the past eight years the University of Helsinki has had no single office or entity bear the responsibility for internationalization. Today, this approach is sometimes called “mainstreamed” or “deep” internationalization, but I actually prefer “embedded.” From my perspective, sharing the responsibility for internationalization–an issue central to many universities worldwide–throughout a university, rather than charging it to a select few administrators, is the right path to take.
To illustrate the point, some…
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March 22, 2012, 4:43 pm
By Guest Writer
The following is a guest post by Thomas Glave, a 2012 Visiting Fellow at Cambridge University and a professor of English at SUNY Binghamton. He is the author of several books, most recently The Torturer’s Wife (City Lights).
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I am a fiction and nonfiction writer, and a Visiting Fellow this year at Cambridge University. This week, I participated in a silent protest attended by more than one hundred Cambridge students and several lecturers, in response to the University’s recent rustication [temporary expelling] of one of its Ph.D. students, Owen Holland. Last November, Holland, with a number of other students and some lecturers, committed the grave crime of expressing quite vocal but peaceful dissent during a visit to the University by Conservative Party politician and Minister of State for Universities and Science David Willetts.
The punishment that Cambridge has…
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March 19, 2012, 3:53 pm
By Guest Writer
The following is a guest post by Paul Hanstedt, a professor of English at Roanoke College and the author of General Education Essentials: A Guide for College Faculty, which will be published in May by Jossey-Bass/Wiley and the Association of American Colleges and Universities.
In 2009, Mr. Hanstedt received a Fulbright award to study the development of general education in Hong Kong. He is writing in response to The Chronicle’s special report on the growth of the liberal-arts education in Asia. A previous blog post by Mr. Hanstedt on the report can be viewed here.
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One of the most striking moments in Karin Fischer’s recent article on liberal education in Asia occurs when she quotes Sin-Ming Shaw, a native of Hong Kong who’s been a visiting professor at several top-notch Western…
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