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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May 2, 2012, 2:50 pm
By Jason Lane and Kevin Kinser
International-education initiatives are commonly seen as institutional-level activities and they still are, mostly. But we have been seeing increasing interest in the centralization of some international education activities at the system level. This growing involvement of systems makes us pause to wonder the potential merits and challenges of such initiatives.
By “system” we are thinking about multiple higher-education institutions that are coordinated through common governance and financial structures, while retaining a high degree of institutional autonomy. Our own State University of New York is one example, with 64 campuses across the state coordinated through a central system office. Systems are common in the United States, with 40 out of the 50 states operating at least one (some states, such as California, have multiple public higher-education systems). Because most…
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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 23, 2012, 4:44 pm
By Nigel Thrift
What should the title of the leader of a university be? In some ways, it’s a trivial question. But in some ways not. The deeper you go into the issue, the more complicated it becomes as different academic cultures reveal themselves. I know this after traveling around various countries where it soon became clear that the term “vice chancellor,” understood as the chief executive officer of a university, was unknown or meant something quite different, as it does in the United States where a vice chancellor is usually the head of one campus of a larger university or simply a chief assistant to the chancellor.
In turn, I reflected on the sheer diversity of the names of heads of institutions around the world. Even in the U.K., the home of the vice chancellor, there are also heads of institutions who are called principals, provosts, rectors and, increasingly, presidents.
So what about…
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April 22, 2012, 4:54 pm
By Ben Wildavsky
Far be it from me to oppose the democratization of education. I’m a big fan of the idea, which in its most recent manifestation focuses heavily on the potential of technology to bring more educational opportunities to more people than ever before in history. But what do we really mean by the ubiquitous “democratization” phrase? How does aspirational talk about using technology to upend convention translate into concrete action? I’ve been mulling over two divergent strands in educational philosophy that seem to be emerging, each with quite different implications for how techno-reformers ought to proceed.
The first strand came into relief for me last month at the British Council’s Going Global 2012 conference in London, when I chaired a session on how technology is changing postsecondary education. There were six discussion tables, three led by Americans and three led by India…
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April 19, 2012, 3:16 pm
By Jason Lane and Kevin Kinser
Last fall, the Canadian government announced the creation of a new advisory panel to identify
ways to tie international education to the nation’s economic and trade policy. In Brazil, the government is providing 75,000 scholarships for students to study overseas in the next four years. Qatar has spent hundreds of millions of dollars on importing branch campuses from the United States and other western nations.
With all of this in mind, last week SUNY and OECD co-hosted a conference in New York City entitled “Internationalization for Job Creation and Economic Growth: Increasing Coherence of Government and System Policies at a Time of Global Crisis.” With more than 100 people from 17 nations in attendance, there were a variety of perspectives on this issue, but one common theme emerged: the economic impact of higher education’s international activities is attracting significant …
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April 12, 2012, 3:07 pm
By Nigel Thrift
The South Korean flag
Over the last week, I have been part of a U.K. higher-education delegation to South Korea, visiting universities like Seoul National University and the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (Kaist) and meeting senior representatives from many other South Korean universities. South Korean universities are pushing hard to make an even bigger impact in the world and, at least to judge by rankings, confidence levels and the state of their campuses, they are clearly succeeding. The South Korean higher-education system is in overdrive although it still has some problems, particularly a fall in tuition fee income, driven by electoral politics and a substantial demographic downturn which will have rapid impacts on the numbers of domestic students arriving at university….
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April 11, 2012, 1:35 pm
By Francisco Marmolejo
El vicerrector Pieter M. Kachelhoffer mostrando las instalaciones de la AIU a visitantes internacionales.
Muchos estudiosos de la educación superior han argumentado con razón que las universidades son altamente resistentes al cambio. Inclusive algunos más críticos, han anticipado que en la era de la información las universidades están condenadas a desaparecer o a ser obsoletas, al menos de la forma como funcionan en la actualidad. Ciertamente, cuando se trata de propiciar e implementar el cambio en las instituciones educativas, ésta puede ser una penosa tarea, como lo podrán atestiguar varios líderes institucionales que, por cierto, perdieron su empleo en el intento. Recuerdo haber escuchado hace cerca de 15 años al entonces Presidente de los Estados Unidos, Bill Clinton, cuando al dirigirse a …
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April 11, 2012, 12:28 pm
By Francisco Marmolejo
Visitors tour Malaysia's Albukhary International University with deputy vice chancellor, Pieter M. Kachelhoffer (left).
Many scholars have argued with reason that higher-education institutions around the world are highly resistant to change. Some are even more critical, predicting that in the information-based economy, universities are condemned to disappear or become obsolete, at least in the way they currently function. Certainly, fostering and implementing change in colleges and universities can be a daunting task, as witnessed by many institutional leaders who have lost their jobs trying to change the course of their organizations. This sense of frustration in trying to foster change was cogently expressed by President Clinton about 15 years ago at a gathering of higher-education leaders when he…
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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…
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