May 7, 2013, 10:21 am
By Guest Writer
The following is a guest post by Peter McPherson, president of the Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities.
————————————————————————————————-
Peter McPherson, president of the Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities
U.S. higher education is uniquely positioned to contribute to the agriculture, health, and economic prosperity of developing countries. And the U.S. government plays an important role supporting such work. But that partnership between government and universities could be threatened as lawmakers look for places to cut federal spending— and with foreign aid an all-too-frequent target. As a former administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development and a former president of Michigan State University,…
Read More
March 6, 2013, 11:19 am
By Guest Writer
The following is a guest post by Khaled Fahmy, chairman of the history department at the American University in Cairo. He is a member of the advisory board of Al Fanar, an online publication on Arab higher education, where this commentary originally appeared.
Last week the publication canceled a conference in the United Arab Emirates, where the magazine was to be launched, because of concerns about academic freedom. (Note: David Wheeler, Al Fanar’s editor, is a former managing editor of The Chronicle.)
——————————————————————————————————
Map of the United Arab Emirates
When I received an invitation from David Wheeler to participate in the launch of Al Fanar, I was delighted. I believed that the Arab world desperately needs an incisive look a…
Read More
August 22, 2012, 11:58 am
By Guest Writer
The following is a guest post by Haleh Esfandiari, director of the Middle East Program at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and the author of My Prison, My Home: One Woman’s Story of Captivity in Iran (Ecco/HarperCollins Publishers). The commentary originally appeared on the Web site of the U.S. Institute of Peace.
——————————————————————————————
Students of Isfahan University of Technology, in Iran, at a 2010 graduation ceremony.
Why are 36 Iranian universities now barring women from 77 academic fields, including engineering, accounting, education, counseling, and chemistry?
Rather than announcing across the board restrictions on women in higher education, the government has cleverly left it to individual universities to…
Read More
July 31, 2012, 9:39 am
By Jason Lane and Kevin Kinser
A sign on Michigan State’s home campus.
In 2007, Michigan State University announced to great fanfare a new branch campus in Dubai. It was the first U.S. institution to do so, and it began an elaborate process to transform one of the central buildings at Dubai International Academic City into a foreign outpost. The school colors, green and white, guided the decorations of the space. There were classrooms, computer labs, study spaces, lounges, and a small library. During basketball season, televisions were brought in so the Spartans of the desert could cheer on the home team back in the United States. A photo of the president, Lou Anna Simon, even hung near those of Sheikh Khalifa said Sheik Mohammed, UAE’s leadership, in the atrium.
In 2010, though, MSU made a sudden and unexpected announcement: they were…
Read More
June 26, 2012, 11:47 am
By Jason Lane and Kevin Kinser
The administration building at Songdo Global University Campus in South Korea.
It is fashionable to be an educational hub these days. Countries are developing educational cities, villages, and zones designed to house prestigious foreign institutions, often seeming to rely on a
Field of Dreams mentality: If you build it they will come. But if everyone builds such a city, will there be enough institutions and students to make a game of it?
The international educational market is already pretty competitive. Universities want to attract foreign students, who often pay full fees, add to their institutional prestige, and boost their rankings. But the pursuit of becoming an educational hub represents a different educational market—one where governments and private investors are actively recruiting foreign…
Read More
April 5, 2012, 12:11 pm
By Jason Lane and Kevin Kinser
Two weeks ago, Jason and one of our graduate students, Christine Farrugia, were in the United Arab Emirates working on a survey of the country’s educational system. Jason’s been to the country several times over the past few years, and Christine has been there since January on a fellowship to study the legitimacy of branch-campus policies. For obvious reasons of wealth and an existing international reputation, Abu Dhabi and Dubai tend to capture most of the attention of those interested in the exciting developments in UAE education. However, those are only two of the seven emirates that comprise this small nation. In other regions of the country, things can look very different.
According to most estimates, 80 percent of the UAE’s population is expatriates. Some of these are wealthy westerners, but the vast majority represents lower socioeconomic classes from Africa and the Asian…
Read More
September 29, 2011, 4:53 pm
By Guest Writer
Jomana Shdefat, left, with Salah Khalil, a philanthropist who works in the Arab world.
The following is a guest post by Jomana Shdefat, of Al al-Bayt University, in Jordan. Ms. Shdefat recently attended her first international higher-education conference, in Denmark.
———————————————————-
A girl born into a Bedouin tribe in the Jordanian desert does not start life with her family expecting her to earn a Ph.D. My loving but traditional parents raised me to be a good girl so that I would someday be a good wife and a good mother. That was all they knew to do with a girl.
Thirty-three years later, I am still in the desert, but to the consternation of my family and tribe, I am neither a wife nor a mother. I am a Ph.D. and an assistant professor of education at Al…
Read More
September 16, 2011, 10:23 am
By David Wheeler
Jomana Shdefat works in the middle of the desert in Jordan at Al al-Bayt University, which is on a converted army base. The university has a swimming pool, but there is no water in it. The pool is used for storage.
Through a series of unusual circumstances Ms. Shdefat spoke on a panel I organized about what the unrest in the Arab world means for higher education. I set up the panel discussion with the help of the European Association for International Education, and the session took place at the group’s annual meeting in Copenhagen this week.
Ms. Shdefat lives with her family, and is not allowed to go to the souq, or market, alone. As in many Arab countries, women are not supposed to leave the home unaccompanied by a male relative. Ms. Shdefat can drive by herself to the university, where she teaches schoolteachers, since she is going to her job.
Although English is taught in …
Read More
April 20, 2011, 8:57 pm
By Jeff Selingo
Riyadh, Saudi Arabia—At a time when many universities around the world are strapped for cash from their governments, having a blank check might seem like a great problem to have. But even with all of its oil riches, Saudi Arabia is still trying to figure out how to build a national university system from scratch.
One reason to organize an international conference and exhibition on higher education is that you could attract some of the best thinkers in the industry from around the globe (especially when Ministry of Higher Education here is picking up the tab for the speakers). Having them in the same room to discuss issues that cross borders also gives government officials here in Riyadh a chance to get advice on their own system. Add to that group the dozens of other college leaders from countries wanting to do business with Saudi Arabia, and you have one of the best advisory panels…
Read More
April 20, 2011, 10:31 am
By Jeff Selingo
The Chronicle‘s editor, Jeffrey Selingo, is participating this week as moderator of a session at the 2nd Annual International Exhibition and Conference on Higher Education in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. He’ll be filing a few posts based on his impressions of the conference and the visit.
————————————————————————————————-
In the midst of protests sweeping across the Middle East this spring, and a worldwide economy that is still sputtering in many parts of the globe, hundreds of colleges from dozens of countries have flocked to Saudi Arabia’s capital city here this week for a college fair aimed at recruiting full-paying students from this country hungry to build its own higher-education system.
The main event of the 2nd International Exhibition and Conference on Higher Education is the fair, which covers more than 150,000…
Read More
Follow WorldWise through your favorite RSS reader.
