International News

United Kingdom: Age retirement suit

Cambridge University is facing new legal and internal challenges to its policy of forcing academics to retire at the age of 67. Around 120 current and former professors at the institution have signed a letter to the recently installed vice chancellor, Deborah Prentice, urging her to call a vote on abolishing the Employer Justified Retirement Age (EJRA) because of the risk of “brain drain”. The university has already instigated a wide-ranging review of the policy — which has been used since 2012 to ensure older professors are moved off the payroll and to open up opportunities for younger academics — after Oxford University, the only other English institution to enforce retirement, lost a legal case against four of its former staff members. Cambridge now also faces being sued over the EJRA itself for the first time after Ross Anderson, a computer science professor who was forced to retire in September, signalled his intention to launch a claim for unfair dismissal and discrimination. Although he continues to work for the university once a week, Prof Anderson, who will be represented by the law firm Doyle Clayton, says he feels he has been “cut off in his prime”. “I’m still fit, still on top of it, still producing research at the rate of a dozen good papers a year. There are many other academics who continue to contribute into their seventies and eighties,” he told Times Higher Education. Oxford lost its case last March after a judge ruled it had not shown the policy was a “proportionate means of achieving a legitimate aim”, partly because it lacked data on how many vacancies had been created due to the EJRA in the ten years it has operated. Describing EJRA “immoral, illegal, unfair, uneconomic and bad employment practice”, the letter claims it harms the institution’s ability to attract world-class scholars, forces senior academics to move elsewhere to continue their research and causes stress and poor mental health for those approaching the mandatory retirement age. Also read: Wasteful ageism

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Argentina: Chainsaw President

In the wake of his shock election victory in December, a video of new Argentinian president Javier Milei tearing the names of government departments off a whiteboard went viral on TikTok. It shows the right-winger — sporting a distinctive pair of huge sideburns — shouting “afuera” (get out) to ten of the country’s 18 ministries. The tally included the Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation — which, he tells the camera, belongs in the private sector — plus the Ministry of Education “and indoctrination”, quips Milei. The rapid rise of the chaotic, chainsaw-wielding libertarian politician in a country racked by economic uncertainty has stunned Argentina’s research community, with many fearing President Milei’s plans to dramatically slash public spending will decimate its universities and scientific infrastructure. On the campaign trail, Milei promised not only to close the science ministry, but also to shut or privatise the National Scientific and Technical Research Council (Conicet), one of Latin America’s most important science funders, and cut state funding for research and education to bare bones. “What he is proposing is very close to a dismantlement of the whole system, and it will be very hard to recover if that happens,” says Diego Golombek, a biology professor at the National University of Quilmes and a researcher at Conicet, who is “extremely worried” about the new regime. “We have a good science system: it needs more budget, it needs to go more federal and help regional economies, but it is there and it has worked well for many decades, so any kind of strong measures against it will be suicidal and it will be very difficult to build it again,” adds Golombek. Alberto Kornblihtt, a molecular biologist at the University of Buenos Aires, likens Milei’s agenda to the right-wing economic and political programme of the military dictatorships that ruled the country between 1976-1983, but this time with “massive popular support” and a democratic mandate, something that is “not good news” for science, universities, public health and education. “If he keeps his promises, not only will the budget cuts for research be huge, but also institutions like Conicet risk being dismantled, with the obvious consequence of brain drain,” he warns. The directors of Conicet’s 16 science and technology research centres — which fund about 12,000 researchers — spoke out against plans to close the organisation before the election, warning in a joint statement: “We still have many challenges, many issues to improve, but it is not by cancelling the state that a better country will be achieved.” President Milei has been less clear about his plans for the wider higher education system, but the national government’s control of universities’ finances makes them vulnerable. He has proposed a plan for schools that involves taking public money and giving it to families as “educational vouchers” that they can decide how to spend, and a similar system might be considered for the country’s currently free public universities. Gerardo Burton, an emeritus professor of chemistry at the University of Buenos Aires,…

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SAARC: Bleak future

Budget woes and internal divisions could prove fatal for a pan-Asian university backed by regional governments, scholars say. Based in New Delhi, the South Asian University (SAU) is supported by an intergovernmental partnership, the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC), with eight member nations — including India, Pakistan and Nepal — contributing funding. SAU has become a staging ground for annual clashes in recent years. Last November (2022), student protests over “significant” scholarship reductions escalated dramatically into hunger strikes, with a few students hospitalised and the police called to intervene. In July, hundreds of international faculty petitioned in support of SAU scholars who were suspended over accusations that they incited the protests. Now the university — which has grown to more than 700 scholars and seven departments after being established in 2010 — is facing “severely depleted” finances, lacking £9.5 million (Rs.100 crore) according to media reports. Geopolitical tensions haven’t helped. Pakistan reportedly hasn’t contributed money toward SAU’s operational costs since 2019. Other countries are said to be behind on their payments. Shahid Jameel, professor at the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies and former chief executive of the Wellcome Trust DBT India Alliance, says that underlying issues have plagued the university for years. “Student protests, faculty suspensions and so on are not the reason but the outcome of deeper malaise,” he says. “The situation is clearly not conducive to the initial lofty ideals of a world-class university supported by SAARC nations. There is a clear possibility of SAU closing down or reinventing itself.” Prof. Jameel says news of the institution’s financial woes don’t come as a surprise, given that the institution’s multilateral funding model — “hard to implement even in the best of times”, with the university at the “mercy of sovereign nations” — has left SAU’s future looking “bleak”. “There is no mechanism to enforce it and goodwill is out of fashion in the world, including south Asia. Look at the reality: two SAARC countries — Pakistan and Sri Lanka — which were supposed to contribute 20 percent of the SAU budget, are practically bankrupt,” says Jameel. Rafiq Dossani, director of the Center for Asia Pacific Policy and a senior economist at the US-based think tank the Rand Corporation, agrees that the “biggest problem” currently facing SAU is lack of finances. “With the exception of India and Bangladesh, the other participating countries are in extremely poor financial shape, particularly Pakistan and Sri Lanka. This leaves India carrying the burden,” he says. Also read: Delhi: South Asian University accused of ‘arbitrarily’ expelling two students

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LETTER FROM AMERICA: Promising revelation

Dr Larry Arnn, President, Hillsdale College, USA One of the best adventures I have had in many years is my first trip to India. I have long followed the affairs of India and regarded it as important to the world. I saw wonders there. I will describe some of them in my despatches in future. Begin with education. By attending the EducationWorld India School Rankings Awards event in October, and receiving an undeserved but much appreciated award there, I discerned a healthy spirit of love for learning and for children. I witnessed a vibrant private sector full of devoted people and eager students. I saw it helps students to grow. This was exciting and inspiring. Here in the United States, Hillsdale College has helped to found and manage over 100 schools, and the network is still growing. We have developed a detailed and carefully coordinated scope and sequence for education of the young from first grade (kindergarten) to graduation in grade XII or senior year. Our college operates at the highest academic level, and its faculty has deep knowledge of all things that are taught in America’s schools. It contributes continuously to our efforts in elementary and secondary education. We are invited by many to become involved in Indian education, and we are keen to do so. However we have to learn more about the history, literature, philosophy, and religions of India. We have set about that work and find it promising. I begin with the fact that in India and in the United States (and most of Europe), we speak languages of the ‘Indo-European’ group. This means our languages have descended over millennia from a common source. Different on surface, Hindi and English are related. But words flow from ideas. That means that from as far back as can be known, we have inherited not only words but ideas in common. It stands to reason, then, that philosophy, literature, and religion in our countries would have commonalities of ancient origin. We are exploring this and will be able, we hope, to teach these commonalities to American and Indian students. A vital commonality is that we both elect our governments. That is of first importance in civic life. If government works for the people, it will be of one kind. If it works for the few in power, it will be an entirely different and worse experience. Modern India is a young country built upon an ancient foundation. The glory of its modern history is this building and maintenance of a system of representative government. Students in America and India need to know that. The world of education in India, which is united to a considerable degree by this publication, is exciting and promising. India is a guardian of freedom and civilization for the world. It can maintain this position best, even only, through education. It is inspiring to watch education flourish in India. We hope to be of service. Also read: Lifetime Achievement in Education Leadership Award 2023-24: Dr.…

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Canada: India-Canada row fallout

The escalating diplomatic row between Ottawa and New Delhi has the potential to deter thousands of Indian undergraduates from studying in Canada, academics have warned. After Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau suggested that India might have been behind the assassination of a Sikh leader and Canadian national in British Columbia, New Delhi closed its visa-processing centre for Canadians, halting the issuing of new visas. Academics warn that if the rift continues to grow, it could have devastating consequences for student mobility. “If the Indians and/or the Canadians…cancel visa issuing, that’s a huge problem,” says Philip Altbach, professor of higher education at Boston College. Altbach says one doesn’t have to look far to see what happens when a country weaponises education, with the Trump-era attempts to stop issuing US visas to Muslim countries causing a large dip in student numbers from affected countries. Although the number of India-bound Canadian scholars and students is so small as to be a “non-issue”, traffic in the other direction is substantial, he said. More than 40 percent of the 800,000 international students in the country in 2022 were from India, making it the largest source country for overseas learners. Ratna Ghosh, professor emerita of education at McGill University, suggests that Indian students might choose to head elsewhere. “Since Covid, international student flows have taken a turn, and Indian students are going to other countries in Europe and Asia. With international universities opening branch campuses in India, many have the choice to get foreign degrees without the extra cost of going and living in Canada,” she says. Although scholars doubt that India could stop students from going to Canada, they say it could still wreak considerable damage. “They could discourage Indian students by many means,” says Roopa Trilokekar, an associate professor of education at York University, including warnings about security risks, or playing up instances of anti-immigrant sentiment.

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China: Universities hike tuition fees

Universities across China are raising their tuition fees as the academic year begins, in a move that some academics believe could signal a shift to a Western-style market system. After roughly a decade of stagnant fees, this year dozens of institutions have announced hikes — at some, charges have gone up by more than 50 percent compared with last year. Experts say such rises had been a long time coming, after years of relatively cheap education and growing financial pressures on institutions. At the East China University of Science and Technology, annual tuition fees for 2023-24 have climbed from RMB 5,000 (Rs.56,802) to RMB 7,700 (Rs.87,477) — a 54 percent rise. At Shanghai University of Electric Power, the standard tuition fee, previously capped at RMB 5,000, has been raised to RMB 7,000. A number of local educational authorities have also adjusted their guidance to universities, with Shanghai, Jilin and Sichuan among the provinces that have announced similar adjustments since January. China’s government had sought to hold fees low for many years in a bid to promote higher education’s expansion, ordering a five-year freeze in 2007 in response to universities’ increases. There was another round of hikes in 2014, but fees have remained largely stable since then. If such increases become widespread, they could bring China closer towards a Western-style higher education system, where the cost of study is tied more closely to demand, some scholars believe. “I think this sort of market mechanism…will eventually be the norm in Chinese universities, especially as they’re gearing up to be a world-class university system,” says James Chin, professor of Asian studies at the University of Tasmania. According to Chin, such a change might also help to prepare institutions to take in “a lot more” international students. “Right now, most of the international students studying in Chinese universities go to only the elite universities. I suspect they want the number to spread wider, with more…going to non-elite universities, especially the regional universities, places like Hunan, which is not widely known,” says Chin. Edward Vickers, who researches contemporary history of education in Chinese societies at Kyushu University, says there was “already an element” of the market system at play, with China’s elite public universities tending to charge less than private ones — and cost often having an “inverse relationship” with quality or prestige of universities. But he believes the recent fee changes has more to do with China’s economic stagnation. This policy shift is fundamentally related to growing concern in government circles over very high levels of unemployment among educated youth in China’s cities. “It is actively seeking to deter many young people from pursuing university education, because it fears the socially and politically destabilising effects of increasing graduate unemployment,” says Vickers. Other scholars are less convinced that China’s higher education system is heading towards marketisation. “The vast majority of students will not go to cheaper universities or not go to university because of tuition increases,” says Futao Huang, professor of higher education at Hiroshima University. Still, universities should…

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United states: Three-year bachelor’s degree pilot

The Biden administration is signalling its willingness to accept degree programmes with fewer than 120 credits, potentially triggering a rush of consolidations that could further weaken struggling campuses. The idea hit a milestone this summer with one of the six major US accrediting agencies, the Northwest Commission on Colleges and Universities, approving pilot three-year bachelor’s degree programmes at Brigham Young University-Idaho and Ensign College. The US Department of Education, after allowing prolonged uncertainty over the matter, has now made clear that it sees no basis for interfering with the decision. “The Department of Education does not regulate the length of a baccalaureate degree programme or set and approve credit hours,” the department told Times Higher Education in response to a query over its position on the matter. “Instead,” the department said, “our regulations rely heavily on accrediting agencies and institutions to determine that credit hours appropriately represent a student’s academic work, and expect that accrediting agencies ensure their standards and evaluation of credit hours are rigorous to allow the department to sufficiently evaluate institutional practices.” The norm of four years and 120 credits has a historical basis unrelated to academic merit. Those two numbers have, however, been long-accepted elements of a system through which the federal government recognises accrediting agencies such as the Northwest Commission, which in turn give institutions the approvals needed for benefits that include student aid eligibility. But with students confronting fast-rising levels of tuition fees and accumulated debt, US institutions have faced constant pressure to make the standard college experience cheaper and faster. With the Northwest Commission approving the pilot in which three-year degree programmes at BYU-Idaho and Ensign will require only 90 to 96 credits, and with the Biden administration indicating consent, a rush of other accreditors and institutions is likely to follow them, says Robert Kelchen, professor of higher education at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville. And while any net benefits to students may take time to assess, the nation’s many struggling colleges and universities — primarily the less-selective public and private campuses — are likely to suffer even more financially, says Prof. Kelchen. “You may get some more students in the door” by reducing their total time of enrolment, he says. “But enough to offset the loss of credit hours? Probably not.” The effect on students is less clear. The Northwest Commission agreed to try the idea, says its president Sonny Ramaswamy, with the understanding that BYU-Idaho and Ensign will show comparable student outcomes over time. As part of the pilot programme, which begins this coming April, the measures subject to comparison include course success rates and post-graduation outcomes such as career accomplishments and entry to graduate schools. Naming rights controversy Ideological conflict in US higher education is moving into the realm of naming rights, with activists on both the left and the right fighting upstart entrants on the grounds of protecting students from confusion. In the state of New Hampshire, a partisan producer of classroom instructional videos, Prager University has been accused by…

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Mexico: Textbooks rewriting anger

Textbooks often cause controversy. Parents object to what they teach children about sex. History can be ideologically charged. Maps sometimes provoke anger in neighbouring countries. But rarely have textbooks caused such an uproar as in Mexico, when the government issued new books for the start of the school year on August 28. The governors of several states refused to distribute them. Parents have burned them. Mexico is among the few countries in which the national government produces approved textbooks for all schools — public and private. Cuba, North Korea and Nicaragua, all dictatorships, are among the others. Mexico began its policy in 1959, saying that obliging schools to use the same books, and providing them free, would help reduce inequality in a stratified society. Most six- to 15-year-olds study in the public system: some 21.5 million compared with just 2.7 million in private schools. When the state writes textbooks, the government can impose its ideology on schools. That has been especially true since 1980, when the education ministry took over direct responsibility for writing the books from a semi-independent body (which now prints them). It is perhaps no surprise that Mexico’s populist president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, is taking full advantage of the opportunity. He sees himself as a transformational leader, and textbooks are a cheap way to bring about big changes. This year, the fifth of his six-year term, he has introduced a shake-up of the curriculum, textbooks included, that he calls the “New Mexican School”. Mexico needs education reform. It performs poorly on PISA, an international test of the reading, maths and science skills of 15-16-year-olds. But experts doubt that the New Mexican School is what the country needs. More contentiously, students will now be schooled in President Obrador’s ideology. The books denounce individualism, capitalism and ‘neoliberalism’, which allegedly “has eliminated worker gains”, says one. They extol the president’s pet building projects, including a museum and an airport in Mexico City. One of the officials who directed the textbooks’ composition is a Venezuelan who used to work for Hugo Chávez, that country’s late left-wing dictator. A guide for teachers urges them to ask themselves whether they are “oppressed or an oppressor”. The new textbooks are also full of mistakes. One suggests that herbal tea can treat Covid-19. Another puts a Mexican state in the wrong place on a map; another gets the birthdate of Benito Juárez, a 19th century president wrong. Teachers have received little training for the new content. That’s not surprising, since López Obrador has slashed the budget for teacher training, from 1,644 pesos ($88) per teacher per year in 2016 to just 85 pesos today. “I had to do a lot by myself and still have many questions,” says Vianney Narváez, a history teacher. The President has weakened education in other ways. On taking office in 2018, he reversed a reform by the previous government that curbed the power of the teachers’ union and introduced performance reviews. He disbanded a body that evaluated the quality…

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United States: Race admissions ban fallout

For more than 50 years, admissions officers at some of America’s swankiest universities have given a leg up to black, Hispanic and Native American students whose achievements in secondary school might not, on their own, have won them a place. On June 29, the Supreme Court declared this practice unconstitutional, ruling in a decision authored by Chief Justice John Roberts, that neither public nor private universities may use race as a factor when deciding which students to admit. The judgement by the conservative court could cause a swift, sharp drop in the number of students from these minority groups who go to America’s best campuses. But it could also spur changes that make university admissions more progressive. Since their birth in the 1960s, race-conscious admissions policies had survived a number of challenges at the Supreme Court. The ruling that has finally eliminated them arose from a pair of cases first brought in 2014 by Students for Fair Admissions, an organisation founded by Edward Blum, a long-time opponent of racial preferences, against Harvard University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. By a vote of 6-3, the court agreed that systematic considerations of race in admissions decisions violate the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment. What will now happen in other states — and in America’s highly selective private non-profit universities, which until now have not been affected by state bans — depends in part on whether universities concoct alternative ways to enroll underrepresented minorities. Many bright students say they value diversity on campus. Elite universities will probably start by redoubling efforts to get black, Hispanic and Native American students to apply in the first place. Low application volumes are the biggest direct obstacle to their enrolment. That these youngsters are less likely than white and Asian ones to have top grades is only part of the explanation: they also believe they have a smaller chance of getting in, and they are more likely to be put off by the eye-watering sticker prices of the elite universities. Public universities could also experiment with “top percent” schemes of the kind that legislators in Texas devised after banning race-conscious admissions in the 1990s. Its public universities began granting students who graduated in the top 10 percent of their high-school class automatic entry. The theory is that this can give bright kids who excel in underperforming schools, whatever their background, the same chance of going to a leading public university as children with more advantages. A third idea is to ramp up wealth-based affirmative action, which remains legal. Youngsters from the poorest fifth of households make up 17 percent of all high-school graduates but only 8 percent of entrants to the 200 or so most-selective colleges; those odds are as bad as for any racial group. Granting some degree of advantage to clever-but-impecunious applicants would boost diversity more than doing nothing, while also providing opportunity to the least privileged white and Asian youth.

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Britian: Contrarian trend

After 13 years of Conservative government, the country’s public services are in less than fine fettle. There is an exception. Under the Conservatives, England’s schools have improved. England is now the best in the West when it comes to reading at primary-school age, according to one ranking. When it comes to maths, English students of the same age have improved compared with their European peers (even if they lag Asian ones). Scotland, whose progressive education system is loathed by Tories, has dribbled down the table. Historically, England was a laggard; now it’s ahead. Smaller targets have been met, too. More students study sciences and maths, as the Tories wanted. Maths has become the most popular subject at A-level, the exams English students write at 18. Watered-down GES, the exams children write at 16, have been replaced by more rigorous versions. In 2010, 68 percent of schools were rated good or outstanding by inspectors. Now the figure is 88 percent. In a stint of government in which achievements are few, schools stand out. What went right? For starters, the Conservatives had a plan. Before winning the 2010 general election, they had spent five years in opposition mulling school reforms, diagnosing the problems the system faced. The original sin, according to Nick Gibb, the then-shadow and incumbent schools minister, was progressive education, which focused too much on teaching children how to think rather than teaching them what they should know. Then they worked out how they wanted to fix it. Curriculums would be overhauled. Reading, writing and maths would trump other topics. Policies such as ‘phonics’, which teaches children to read sounds rather than whole words, were expanded; schools would be tested on how well they taught it. When opposition to the proposals emerged, ministers did not wilt. Teachers and their unions loathed them. Michael Gove, the secretary of state, became unpopular. He welcomed the hatred and nicknamed opponents “the blob”, which has become a catch-all term to describe any official or institution that opposes Conservative policy. Schools also avoided another common problem in the British government: ever-changing ministers. Once a minister learns a brief, he or she tends to be moved on to another, starting from total ignorance. Gibb has been in situ for ten of its 13 years in power. By contrast, the Conservatives have had 15 housing ministers in the same period. It is no coincidence that housing policy has been chaotic in that time. When it comes to standards in schools, the Conservatives decided what they wanted to do and how they wanted to do it, and then stuck with it. It is a rare example of consistency. The reason why Britain has been poorly governed for 13 years is that the government has reversed course on fundamental questions so often. From 2010 to 2016, the Tories offered a vision of a small-state country inside the EU. After 2016, the party offered a flabby big-state vision with Britain out of the EU. In schools, however, the Conservatives have…

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Nigeria: New student loans legislation

Scholars have expressed hope that Nigeria’s introduction of tuition fees and student loans will end the underfunding of its universities. One of the first acts in office of new president Bola Tinubu in June was to sign into law a student loan bill, seven years after it was first introduced to the country’s parliament. Until now, higher education in Africa’s most populous country (218 million) has been funded by the state and has been free at the point of entry for students. But this was seen as driving the underfunding of the sector, which tried to shore up its losses by charging students levies and sundry payments. Ebenezer Obadare, Douglas Dillon senior fellow for Africa studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, says the bill “recognises the unsustainability of that model and takes a step towards shifting the burden of payment for education to the student and parents”. Every student will be eligible to apply for a loan if they have secured a university place and if her family’s income is below a threshold equivalent to about £850 (Rs.90,000) per year. Obadare notes that the bill had been welcomed by the National Association of Nigerian Students and predicts an influx of applications from prospective students once the government infrastructure, including an education bank, is in place. Moses Oketch, professor of international education policy and development at University College, London, says the reforms have the potential to address long-running funding problems in the higher education sector. “There are continuous strikes by faculty asking for better pay. By establishing the education bank and the loan scheme, universities in Nigeria will likely be winners. Students are winners, too, because, if this move ends up stabilising university finances, then perennial strikes will disappear, and students can be assured of graduating on time,” says Oketch. Repayment — which begins two years after graduation — comes in the form of a 10 percent salary deduction. “The good aspect of an interest-free loan is that it doesn’t saddle students with an ever-ballooning loan when they are not able to make repayment due to personal circumstances,” he says.

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Germany: Academic acquisitions

A for-profit billed as Germany’s largest university, majority owned by a private equity firm, has bought a London banking education provider with UK degree-awarding powers as well as a Canadian university, as it expands an online model that features an AI “teaching and learning assistant”. The sale of the London Institute of Banking and Finance (LIBF) to IU International University of Applied Sciences was completed on March 31, but announced in June, just after IU announced it had also bought a Canadian online institution, the University of Fredericton. IU, an online provider, describes itself as Germany’s “largest and fastest-growing university with more than 100,000 students”, and as “the first university worldwide to use ChatGPT-4 technology within its dialogue-based AI-powered teaching and learning assistant Syntea”. The deal would give IU appeal to “students who are looking for a UK-accredited degree”, and LIBF “has a very good fit for our vision to democratise education” given its strong focus on “career education”, says Sven Schuett, the IU Group chief executive. Asked whether IU is planning to shift the nature of LIBF’s course provision beyond finance, Dr. Schuett says: “We have already launched eight new degrees outside the relatively narrow focus of what LIBF has been doing.” New online courses at LIBF “are focused on data and computer science, artificial intelligence and international business management — critical skills needed in finance and business today”, according to a press release on the sale.

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Vietnam: Schooling Success Story

Ho Chi Minh, the founding-father of Vietnam, was clear about the route to development. “For the sake of ten years’ benefit, we must plant trees. For the sake of a hundred years’ benefit, we must cultivate the people,” was a statement he liked to repeat. Yet despite years of rapid economic growth, the country’s per capita GDP is still only $3,760, lower than in its regional peers, Malaysia and Thailand (higher than India’s $2,200) and barely enough to make the average Vietnamese feel well-nurtured. Still, Ho Chi Minh was alluding to a Chinese proverb extolling the benefits of education, and on that front Vietnam’s people can have few complaints. Vietnam’s children go through one of the best schooling systems in the world, a status reflected in outstanding performances in international assessments of reading, maths and science. The latest data from the World Bank show that, on aggregate learning scores, Vietnamese students outperform not only their counterparts in Malaysia and Thailand but also in Britain and Canada, countries more than six times richer. Even in Vietnam itself, student scores don’t reflect the scale of inequality so common elsewhere between the genders and different regions. A child’s propensity to learn is the result of several factors — many of which begin at home with parents and the environment they grow up in. But that is not enough to explain Vietnam’s stellar performance. Its distinctive secret lies in the classroom: its children learn more at school, especially in the early years. In a 2020 study, Abhijeet Singh of the Stockholm School of Economics gauged the greater productivity of Vietnam’s schools by examining data from identical tests taken by students in Ethiopia, India, Peru and Vietnam. He showed that between the ages of five and eight, Vietnamese children race ahead. One more year of education in Vietnam increases the probability that a child can solve a simple multiplication problem by 21 percentage points; in India the uplift is six points. The biggest reason is the calibre of its teachers. Not that they are necessarily better qualified; they are simply more effective at teaching. One study comparing Indian with Vietnamese students attributes much of the difference in scores in mathematical tests to a gulf in teaching quality. Vietnam’s teachers do their job well because they are well-managed. They receive frequent training and are given the freedom to make classes more engaging. To tackle regional inequality, those posted to remote areas are paid more. Most important, teacher assessment is based on the performance of their students. Those whose pupils do well are rewarded through prestigious “teacher excellence” titles. Besides such carrots, a big stick is the threat of running foul of the ruling Communist Party. The party apparatus is obsessed with education. This percolates down to school level, where many head teachers are party members. The obsession has other useful effects. Provinces are required to spend 20 percent of their budgets on education, which has helped regional equity. That the party pays such close and relentless…

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Norway: End of free for all era

Norwegian universities have a busy summer ahead as politicians argue over the finer details of international student fees, which will be charged to those from outside the European Economic Area (EEA) from this month. Overall support for the plans from the Norwegian parliament’s education committee on June 6 confirms the late summer deadline, despite warnings from the University and College Council and others that levying fees would create costs and that similar changes in Sweden were brought in with two years’ notice, rather than two months. Among the uncertainties are the exact scope of exemptions and a scholarship scheme promised by the government to ensure that some students from low-income countries can still come to Norway. Local media have reported that the University of Oslo, University of Stavanger and Norwegian University of Life Sciences have all collected fees from non-EEA applicants, with Oslo and Stavanger making their own decisions on exceptions for some. The Norwegian University of Science and Technology has said it hasn’t yet levied fees. Agnete Vabø, vice-dean at Oslo Metropolitan University, which has a particularly high share of international students, told Times Higher Education that her institution is among those waiting to hear from the ministry how fee exemptions would work. “These things have been postponed (while we) wait and see what will be decided. It’s so complicated to decide and there are various opinions about it,” she says. She is “very surprised” that left-wing parties had chosen to shape the proposal rather than oppose it. The introduction of international fees in one of Europe’s last free-for-all systems has faced opposition at home and abroad. Following the committee confirmation, Maika Marie Godal Dam, head of the Norwegian Student Organisation, says it was “a betrayal from many quarters” and “a sad day for students and for equal opportunities”.

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Hong Kong: Lifting foreign admission cap imminent

Hong Kong’s government has begun consulting universities about lifting its cap on international students, potentially bringing thousands more to the island in coming years, according to senior university officials. Legislators are looking to relax the official 20 percent limit on “non-local” undergraduate students — roughly half of whom come from mainland China — that the island’s eight government-funded universities are allowed to admit, sector leaders with knowledge of the issue told Times Higher Education. A rapidly falling population is compelling universities to think about admitting more overseas learners. Along with a low birth rate, the wave of emigration following the politically contentious National Security Law has driven demographic decline. Some 33,604 school-age students left the island in 2021-22. With the knock-on effect due to be felt by universities in coming years, internal discussions have started on how the numbers of non-local students could increase in coming years. “A number of people are saying it’s a question of ‘when’ and not ‘if’,” says Laurie Pearcey, associate vice-president for external engagement and outreach at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Other signs, such as recent initiatives to create new pathways for residency and attract highly educated workers, indicate that a re-evaluation of the policy could be on the way, he adds. The government is also working on permitting undergraduates to work part-time during their studies and making it easier for them to stay to work after getting their degrees. Admitting more international students is one way of supplementing lower numbers of local students, but the strategy is not without controversy. In recent years, some scholars have expressed concern that the growing intake of mainland students has changed the dynamics of Hong Kong institutions. Atmosphere aside, taking in more non-local students also raises questions of funding. Although more international students are ultimately needed to “sustain universities”, they are also seen as a sap on limited government resources, says Lewis Ting On Cheung, professor of social sciences at the Education University of Hong Kong (EdUHK). While outsiders pay higher fees than locals, they still receive government subsidies — and ultimately taxpayers’ money. Prof. Cheung believes it’s unfair for Hong Kongers to pay in part for overseas students’ education. Because of limited land on the island, finding enough accommodation for students is also a problem. Stephen Cheung, EdUHK’s president, says for decision-makers, the challenge is twofold: figuring out the “right percentage” of international students, and how much to charge so low-income students can still come. “I’d like to see the best students come, and also not at the cost of our local students,” he says. While Cheung declined to speculate on how much the cap should go up, he says that raising the international cap is “in general the direction we should move in”. (Excerpted and adapted from The Economist and Times Higher Education)

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S. Korea: University closures epidemic

The looming closure of dozens of insolvent universities in South Korea will change the distribution of students across the country, potentially furthering inequalities between its regions and capital city, say scholars. Korea’s rapid demographic decline has already resulted in university closures countrywide — and it is expected to get far worse. This year, the ministry of education identified 84 financially insolvent institutions that need to close. According to recent figures compiled by the Korean Council for University Education (KCUE), the representative association of four-year universities, in 2040, there will be approximately 280,000 students eligible to enter university — 39 percent down from 460,000 in 2020. Currently, universities are required by law to shut if a government audit finds they don’t serve enough students to justify their existence. Many hold on as long as possible, becoming “zombie universities”, with leaders keen to avoid giving up their remaining assets to the local or federal government upon closure, as required by law. Jun Yoo, a professor in the department of Korean language and literature at Yonsei University, says that unless the government incentivises struggling universities to close before they face insolvency, it will have no choice but to maintain its strict, numbers-based system for shuttering the institutions. “The government could pay them a certain amount of money to shut down. Otherwise, the only way is going down the draconian… quota route, but it will then create major inequalities as Seoul schools will see a surge of students, and the countryside could become ghost towns,” he says. Stuart Gietel-Basten, professor of social science and public policy at Khalifa University of Science and Technology and an expert in Asian demography, agrees that the moves would cause a redistribution of students countrywide. “It is pretty inevitable that we (will) see the rise and fall of the sector,” he says, noting that “place” will be a large factor in which universities remain standing. Federally and regionally-funded institutions would generally fare better than their non-subsidised counterparts, he predicts. “There will be a big difference between the private and public ones. The market will dictate how long the struggling private ones will last.” While most scholars Times Higher Education approached were reluctant to say that struggling institutions should throw in the towel early, Philip Altbach, research professor and distinguished fellow at the Center for International Higher Education, Boston College, says it seems like the best course of action in a difficult situation. “‘Assisted suicide’ might well be the best solution for surplus private universities — and authorities need to provide realistic plans,” he says. How Korea handles the oversupply of universities could be instructive for other sectors, Prof. Altbach adds, because other countries with falling populations and a large number of student seats will also need to devise a plan for closing universities. “Korea is of course not alone in facing these problems,” he says.her the information. Snobbery and a national obsession with old stone mean that it is still a struggle to see people in Palladian mansions as…

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United Kingdom: Boarding schools losing shine

The moment when his chemistry master pulled out a pistol, declared it loaded and waved it in the air was “probably”, says Justin Webb, a broadcaster, the worst point of his boarding-school career. Winston Churchill would recall the floggings, done until pupils “bled freely” and screamed loudly. George Orwell writes of being beaten so violently that his headmaster broke his riding crop and “reduced me to tears”. That British boarding schools are odd places is not news. For several centuries and for fat fees, they provided the English upper classes with a ripping blend of architectural beauty and physical discomfort; with neoclassical corridors and cold showers; with lashings of Latin and just plain lashings. The pupils they produced were an equally idiosyncratic mix of the sophisticated and the childlike, mingling precocious brilliance with speech that never quite left the classroom. It was a heady brew and Britain was intoxicated by it: of the 57 British prime ministers, 20 went to Eton. As Boris Johnson, one of their number, might say: “Crikey!” Boarding schools are not yet in trouble. Their pupil numbers are relatively constant — around 70,000 — owing partly to masses of boarders from abroad. But their charms may be becoming easier to resist. Elite private schools are a less secure route into the top universities than they were. In 2014, 99 pupils from Eton were accepted into Oxbridge; in the 2021-22 school year, it managed 47. Brampton Manor Academy, a state school in London, had 54. This raises hard questions about value for money. Annual fees for Eton were a mere £861 (Rs.90,327) a year in Mr. Johnson’s era. Today, its fees are £15,432 “each half” (which, as Eton’s website explains, means thrice yearly — £46,296 per year). For this, Etonians enjoy one pool; two chapels; three “theatre spaces”; a composer-in-residence; a filmmaker-in-residence; a pet pianist; and a director of “inclusive education”, who notes that to promote diversity at Eton, it is important “to enable people to talk about uncomfortable things”. Like, say, those fees. Perhaps the most profound threat to boarding schools is more fundamental. And that is the idea that to send a child as young as seven or eight away from home is not privilege but brutality. First XI cricket; scones for tea; huzzahs all round — it will still be very wrong. Older adolescents might well find the experience less cruel, perhaps even a relief. But as John Bowlby, a psychologist who was the father of attachment theory, put it: “I wouldn’t send a dog away to boarding school at age seven.” Richard Beard, a writer who lacerates private schools in his book, Sad Little Men, echoes the theme. The architectural beauty and bells and whistles of boarding schools, he says, are like the label on a dog-food tin which “isn’t for the dog; it’s for the person buying it”. Psychologists increasingly argue that posh care leads to bad outcomes. In 2011, the term “boarding-school syndrome” was coined by Joy Schaverien, a psychotherapist, to…

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Taiwan: A workable solution

In a first, Taiwan’s ministry of education has approved a so-called merger between a public and private institution — a policy initiative that scholars say could be a useful model for other universities also on the brink of closure. In late May, the National Taiwan University of Science and Technology (NTUST), a public institution, got the go-ahead to take over the assets of Hwa Hsia, a private technical university, that this year filled only 42 percent of its capacity. The island struggles with a declining population — also a growing problem in other neighbouring higher education sectors, including in Hong Kong and South Korea, where dozens of universities are flagged for closure due to under-enrolment. The Union of Private School Educators, Taiwan (Uprise) disputes the ministry’s description of the move as a “merger”, saying existing laws do not permit such manoeuvres. Scholars speaking with Times Higher Education voiced similar views. Angela Yung Chi Hou, professor and associate dean at the College of Education, National Chengchi University, in Taiwan, says the process is different in key aspects from a traditional merger. “(From) my understanding, if two universities merge, they shall have equal rights to discuss future development. The case indeed demonstrates that Hwa Hsia does not have any other choice but to close or dissolve the board of trustees,” she says. Even so, she believes the move, which she characterises as a takeover allowing NTUST to make use of Hwa Hsia’s infrastructure, is a good way forward — and potentially a solution for other struggling universities so they could avoid millions of pounds of infrastructure going unused. According to media reports, current Hwa Hsia students will be able to complete their degrees, although the university is not accepting new applicants.

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Iran: Educated unemployment problem

Teheran’s past policies of allowing Iran’s higher education sector to “blindly develop” to absorb students facing a tough jobs market have exacerbated current high rates of graduate unemployment. According to figures recently released by the Statistical Center of Iran, roughly one million university graduates in the country are currently unemployed, making up 37 percent of the total unemployed population at a time of soaring inflation. While academics expressed reservations about the accuracy of the official figures, they agreed the situation is concerning. Amin Mohseni-Cheraghlou, assistant professor of economics at American University, says job prospects have not been helped by the recent proliferation of higher education institutions. “The government has allowed for more and more private universities to come to existence to absorb more and more of the unemployed youth and delay their entrance into the labour market — basically kicking the can down the road,” he says. This has made the labour problem worse, he continues, with many graduates underemployed: not having enough paid work or taking a position that doesn’t make full use of their education — or both. The higher education policy has had “unintended consequences” for the government, which faces the more difficult task of satisfying university-educated youth with high aspirations than of accommodating high school graduates, he notes. Roohola Ramezani, a researcher in Iranian studies at the IFK International Research Center for Cultural Studies in Vienna, agrees. “Over certain periods in the past, higher education has been blindly developed to postpone the unemployment crisis. So the unemployment is partly transmitted from a less to a higher-educated population.” If the current trend continues, he says, it will lead to Iran’s “higher education bubble” bursting as more people realise that a university degree does not guarantee them a job. Women fare much worse than men in the current situation: about 70 percent of female graduates are unemployed, almost three times the rate of male graduates (25 percent), according to official statistics. Academics say this has been a long-lasting problem tied to traditional gender roles — with women tasked with more domestic duties and with families sometimes not permitting their daughters to work — and to discrimination in hiring. “With the new policies of (promoting) population (growth) and childbearing, I think the gender gap might get bigger,” says Dr. Ramezani.

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United States: UC Berkeley’s new college

The University of California at Berkeley is starting a new college of computer and data science, in what it expects might become a nationwide model for coping with the field’s surging and often unmet demand. UC Berkeley, like many US campuses, has been overpowered by the rapid rise in interest in computing in recent years, with huge increases in graduate numbers without sufficient staff and infrastructure to cope with demand. California’s flagship public institution sees creation of the College of Computing, Data Science, and Society — UC Berkeley’s first new college in more than 50 years — as a way of helping the campus cope by consolidating the deluge of demand and then better allocating it. A key step will be tackling the data-science element via partnerships with faculty in other fields, says John DeNero, associate dean of undergraduate studies at the new computing college. These scholars might not teach computer programming, but have enough expertise in the computer-related aspects of their own specialities to teach courses about data usage, he explains. “Data science fundamentally is more scalable on the Berkeley campus because it involves faculty from all over, instead of mostly faculty from one department,” adds DeNero. Overall, the challenge facing UC Berkeley and US universities looks imposing. The average number of students in computer science fields nationwide has increased by more than six times its 2006 level, according to the latest annual compilation by the Computing Research Association (CRA). UC Berkeley has nearly 2,000 graduates a year in computer science and data science, up from just 200 a decade ago, and now representing almost a quarter of the university’s total undergraduate degrees. Data science accounts for close to half of those 2,000 graduates, after holding almost no share just five years ago. CRA says that since this nationwide enrolment surge began 20 years ago, the number of US teaching faculty in computer science fields had grown at only about half the rate of the growth in the number of students, and the number of tenure-track faculty has grown by only one-tenth the rate of enrolment growth. “The undergraduate population continues to grow, but there’s a smaller growth in teaching resources,” says Elizabeth Bizot, a senior research associate at CRA. UC Berkeley sets norms often followed at other institutions, and consolidation of its computer-science fields into a new college is not the only step it is taking. After much internal debate, says DeNero, UC Berkeley is also changing the two main ways that students get admitted as computer-science majors. Those accepted into computer science as part of their admission to the university will now be guaranteed a space, starting this academic year, ending a system by which they had to meet a grade-point-average threshold during a set of initial courses. And for students who try to switch into the computer-science major after their acceptance to the university, the opportunity will be allowed only in the sophomore year, and the decision will be based on a “holistic” assessment rather than…

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United Kingdom: Post-study work visa debate

UK government departments have been asked to set out their position on student visa reforms. The Home Office is pressing for restrictions, with opposition to post-study work limitations said to be coming from an array of departments including the Treasury. The Times reports that Indian origin Suella Braverman, the home secretary, has proposed reducing the time that overseas students can stay in the UK after completing their courses under the graduate visa route from two years to six months, a plan “strongly opposed” by the Department for Education. Previous calls from Braverman for a student visa “crackdown”, aired in the press from autumn to Christmas last year, were regarded as “noise” — with no government machinery turning to implement such plans. However, Times Higher Education understands that on January 20, government departments were formally asked to outline their positions on visa policy options. It is thought that not just the Department for Education (DfE), but a range of departments including the Treasury, the Department for International Trade and the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy — fearing damage to the UK’s economic position — are opposed to the Home Office plan on reducing the time allowed under the graduate visa route. Opposition is said to be less strong to reform of the rules on overseas students’ rights to bring dependants into the UK — and sector sources are hopeful that change in this area will be the option 10 Downing Street chooses, rather than targeting the graduate visa route. No.10 is expected to make a decision soon. The Times reports that Indian origin prime minister Rishi Sunak asked the Home Office and the DfE to submit proposals for reducing the number of international students coming to the UK. It said there are concerns that the 2019 target to recruit 600,000 overseas students annually by 2030, met last year, has been “too successful”. Sunak and Braverman are alarmed by rising net migration figures, which include students. Figures published in November showed net migration had risen to 504,000 last year. On dependants, Braverman reportedly wants to change the rules so only overseas students studying in postgraduate programmes of at least two years can bring family with them. The proposal to reduce the number of additional family members entering the country comes after figures showed a tripling in visas issued to students’ dependants, with 70 percent of all dependants coming from Nigeria and India. Universities would be quite content to see another of the changes reportedly being sought by Braverman — barring students from switching to a work visa in the UK until they have finished their course — which they had long warned was a problem with the scheme.

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Nigeria: NewGlobe pedagogy revolution

“Good job you!” shouts Pauline Bika, as a group of schoolchildren completes the hokey-cokey. “Good job me!” choruses her class. Bika runs a small government primary school in Edo state, in southern Nigeria. It is reached by a mud track that starts not far outside Benin city, the state capital. Her school has 140 pupils, but only three teachers. For all that it lacks, Ms Bika’s school has one advantage. At the start of last year, the Edo state education ministry gave all her teachers a small (digital) tablet with a black-and-white touch screen. Every two weeks, they use it to download detailed scripts that guide every lesson they deliver. These scripts tell the teachers what to say, what to write on the blackboard, and even when to walk around the classroom. Ms Bika says this new way of working is saving teachers time that they used to spend scribbling their own lesson plans — and her pupils are reading better, too. The reforms in Edo began in 2018. Godwin Obaseki, the State governor, says poor schools are one reason youngsters leave the state for greener pastures (some fall victim to people-traffickers promising better lives in Europe). Since then, the government has provided tablets and training to over 15,000 teachers. They in turn have given the new lessons to more than 300,000 children, most of them in primary school. On any given day, pupils throughout the state receive identical lessons, as dictated by the tablet. The training and technology are provided by NewGlobe, an education company founded in 2007 by three Americans. NewGlobe developed its approach while running a chain of low-cost private schools, mostly in Kenya, under the brand Bridge International Academies. A study by academics including Michael Kremer, a development economist at the University of Chicago, found that, over two years, children who attended NewGlobe’s primary schools made gains equivalent to almost a whole year of extra schooling, compared with their peers in other schools. Though Edo was the first state in Nigeria to strike a deal with the firm, NewGlobe’s pedagogy has since also been applied in Lagos, the country’s biggest city. The firm is starting work in Manipur, a state in north-eastern India, and in Rwanda. Around a million children are now studying in classrooms that use NewGlobe’s model — far more than its private schools have ever been able to reach. Although it seems able to find plenty of clients, the company provokes ferocious arguments among educators. Its private schools have long faced energetic opposition from trade unions and some international NGOs, many of whom hate the idea of profit-seeking companies playing any role in education. Dennis Sinyolo of Education International, a global group of teachers’ unions, says scripted lessons “undermine teaching” and encourage “rote learning and exam drilling”. He says good lesson plans are written to match local contexts, and the needs of individual students. The freedom to change tack mid-lesson is invaluable if a lesson plan is not working. “There’s no one-size-fits-all in…

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Afghanistan: Varsities downing shutters

The majority of Afghanistan’s private universities face imminent closure, with their incomes having plunged following the Taliban’s decision to ban women from higher education. The country’s union of private universities said in December that the ban could force 35 out of 140 institutions with 70,000 female students on their rolls, to shutter doors. But academics say the actual number of closures is likely to be much higher, with some suggesting that the union may have come under pressure from the Taliban to provide a low estimate. Several researchers speaking with Times Higher Education believed that the recent ban on women in universities is likely to be the “last straw” for the majority of private institutions. Before the ban, women made up roughly 30 percent of Afghanistan’s university students, across public and private universities. But the number of female students at some private institutions was much higher. Already, there have been reports of several universities shutting down. The Moraa Educational Complex, which includes a female-only university in Kabul, has allegedly closed all but one of its faculties. At the Afghan Swiss University, the medical faculty is closed to all students, while the faculties of medicine at Dawat University and Khatam Al-Nabieen University — both have large numbers of women students — have informed their students that they will be forced to shutter if the situation continues. Although male students whose universities close may be able to continue their studies elsewhere in the country, no such option exists for Afghan women. They have been shut out of education and public life. Meanwhile, several Iranian universities across the border have offered to host Afghan women. Combined with an already established Afghan diaspora in the country, the offer of free higher education is “likely” to increase the flow of Afghan refugees into Iran, says Arshin Adib-Moghaddam, professor in global thought and comparative philosophies, at SOAS University of London and author of What Is Iran (2021).

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China: Online degree bans fallout

China has abruptly withdrawn its Covid-era endorsement of remotely delivered tertiary education. This order is likely to galvanise international enrolments in Western countries while straining university admissions services, visa processing and flight and housing availability. Beijing authorities have reversed a 2020 rule change that allowed for the local accreditation of degrees and higher education diplomas taught online by universities and colleges in other parts of the world. The new arrangements, revealed in a “special announcement” posted in late January on the Chinese Service Center for Scholarly Exchange (CSCSE) website, apply from the main autumn semester to institutions based in the southern hemisphere and affect both new and continuing enrolments. “Students should return to school as soon as possible,” advises an attached document. This gives Chinese students enrolled at Australian universities between two and four weeks to relocate Down Under in time to start or resume face-to-face classes. Phil Honeywood, chief executive of the International Education Association of Australia, says that while China has “never been comfortable with online learning”, educators had expected a transition period before reversion to usual arrangements. “Such a rapid pivot back to regulated face-to-face learning requirements will definitely create challenges for our education providers and our visa processing. Nonetheless, it will be welcomed by most stakeholders.” Federal government statistics say that as many as 40,000 of some 119,000 Chinese student visa holders were located outside Australia in mid-November. Chinese citizens account for the bulk of the 62,000 foreign higher ed students currently based elsewhere. Their ready embrace of online education surprised many, and it cushioned Covid’s impact on Australian universities’ bottom lines. Diplomats had warned that Beijing’s endorsement of online degrees wouldn’t last forever, but the rapid reversal reflects speedy dismantling of China’s pandemic regime. Australian universities have until mid-2023 to meet rules requiring them to deliver at least two-thirds of foreign students’ degrees conventionally. YTT programme failing China’s most prominent talent recruitment programme is still failing to lure ‘top’ global scientists back to the country, a study has found. Established in 2010 as a key pillar of Beijing’s Thousand Talents Programme, the Young Thousand Talents (YTT) initiative seeks to recruit science and technology experts from abroad, especially Chinese expatriates. In the West, the initiative has come under scrutiny from lawmakers, who fear espionage and intellectual property theft amid rising geopolitical tensions. But research suggests that YTT is not yet attracting cream of the crop. “Although designed to improve China’s prospect of becoming a global STEM leader, the programme’s effectiveness in attracting top talents and nurturing their productivity is unclear,” write academics in the journal Science. Yanbo Wang, an associate professor at the University of Hong Kong’s business school, and Dongbo Shi, assistant professor at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, examined researchers’ motives for turning down the invitation, which includes a one-off, tax-exempt income subsidy of 500,000 yuan (Rs.60 lakh) and start-up grants of 1 million yuan to 3 million yuan. Dr. Wang and his colleague surveyed more than 400 researchers who were approached for the programme’s…

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United States: Guns on campus controversy

American public universities are fighting new attempts to allow guns on campuses, with conservative state lawmakers undeterred by research data and clear opposition from institutional leaders. The most recent instance involves West Virginia, where the state senate voted 29-4 in favour of legislation to let people bring firearms on to college and university campuses, despite opposition from state university leaders. The Bill heads next to the state legislature’s other chamber, the House of Delegates, which is also overwhelmingly dominated by Republicans. The US already has about a dozen states that permit guns on college campuses, with lawmakers in several others already trying or expected to pursue the idea this year, according to the activist group Campaign to Keep Guns Off Campus. “The gun lobby is trying to find as many places as possible where people can carry,” says the organisation’s executive director Andy Pelosi. In West Virginia, the presidents of the state’s two largest higher education institutions — West Virginia University and Marshall University — wrote to lawmakers urging them not to pass the Bill. Governing boards “are best suited to decide whether guns should be permitted on campus”, Gordon Gee and Brad Smith told senators. West Virginia University’s faculty senate also approved a resolution opposing the Bill. States that already allow guns on the campuses of their public colleges and universities include Arkansas, Colorado, Georgia, Idaho, Kansas, Mississippi, Montana, Oregon, Tennessee, Texas, Utah and Wisconsin. New York lawmakers are being asked to join these states, despite the state’s Democratic majority, while more plausible campaigns appear possible this year in several other states, including Iowa, Kentucky, Nebraska, North Dakota, South Carolina and South Dakota. Idaho lawmakers are considering legislation that would stop colleges putting limits on where guns can be carried. The fatal shootings in May 2022 of 19 students and two teachers at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, seems to have sparked increased political interest in allowing guns (for self-defense) in educational settings, says Cheryl Jonson, associate professor of criminal justice at Ohio’s Xavier University. However, Andy Pelosi’s group and others argue that despite more than 40,000 gun deaths per year, university campuses are among the safest places to be. And there’s no clear evidence — despite West Virginia lawmakers pushing their Campus Self-Defense Act on the grounds that it will help women deter sexual violence — that guns make college campuses safer, says Pelosi. Women’s advocacy groups instead are among numerous campus constituencies especially opposed to such laws, he says, fearing that gun permissiveness will help arm their potential attackers. Also Read: Harvard University announces first black president Claudine Gay

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North America: edX sale fallout

Last year’s sale of the non-profit online course platform edX has left both parties short on value, with buyer 2U still hunting for paying customers, and vendors Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) still mulling how the proceeds will boost remote teaching. Scientists at the two universities created edX in 2012 as a means of making courses freely available on the internet, and for giving other institutions the software to create similar platforms. 2U, founded in 2008, is a private company that creates online courses for universities. It bought most of edX in July 2021 for $800 million (Rs.6,400 crore) in the hope that a fraction of its fee-free learners might find enough value to start paying for it. But 2U’s stock price has dropped nearly 70 percent this year, provoking extensive lay-offs and glum assessments by industry analysts who argue that the company was mistaken in betting so heavily on the prospect of profitably converting edX students. “The primary focus of the non-profit has been CEO search,” acknowledges Catie Smith, interim chief operating officer of the year-old organisation, which Harvard and MIT have named the Centre for Reimagining Learning, or tCRIL. As for how it will use the online course sharing software it has retained, tCRIL is still “laying the ground work towards a strategy” for accomplishing that. The transaction has drawn criticism from many in higher education who argue that edX had a founding mission to serve disadvantaged students around the world, and that the two elite universities have abandoned that commitment by selling edX to a private company charging high fees. But 2U is not alone in its struggles. Coursera — the online education platform created in 2012 by two Stanford Uni[1]versity computer science professors as a rival to edX — an[1]nounced its own sweeping payoffs in November. Coursera’s market value has fallen by nearly three-quarters from highs in early 2021.

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Lebanon:American University of Beirut bouncing back

Lebanon: AUB bouncing back

When an enormous explosion rocked central Beirut in August 2020, it wasn’t just the estate of Lebanon’s oldest university that was badly damaged. The blast — which was caused by vast amounts of ammonium nitrate dangerously stored in Beirut’s port and killed 215 people — was also a huge blow to staff morale and the already precarious finances of the American University of Beirut (AUB). Hundreds of international students cut their studies short or decided not to come altogether, says president Fadlo Khuri. “We lost about 375 students and another 600 potential students who might have accepted places,” says Prof. Khuri on the disaster that literally shook Lebanon (tremors were felt as far away as Europe). “We suffered about $7.5 million (Rs.61 crore) in damage — with the windows of the new glass-fronted teaching hospital blown in,” recalls the Boston-born, Beirut-raised cancer doctor. With three of Beirut’s hospitals knocked out by the blast, the university’s medical centre proved crucial in treating some of the 6,000 people injured by flying glass and masonry. “More than 750 people visited our emergency room in the first few hours, including many of our university community,” recalls the Yale- and Columbia-educated scientist. For many staff, however, the blast proved the final straw. In the face of Lebanon’s financial collapse in 2019, AUB had already been forced to slash staff wages “to save the university”. It was then forced to cut 850 jobs in July 2020 after its revenues crashed by 60 percent in 2020-21, as students struggled to afford tuition fees. A triple whammy was completed when it lost donations and scholarships it was expecting when the pandemic hit. Established in 1866 by Protestant missionaries, the private university became a key study destination in the Arab region, with 60 percent of its students from outside Lebanon by the mid-1970s, attracted by its US-style liberal arts teaching model. Things were tough during the civil war between 1975 and 1990 when professors and presidents were kidnapped: one president, Malcolm Kerr, an American Middle East scholar, was assassinated on campus by jihadists in 1984. But international students returned in the 1990s, and now account for 22 percent of the institution’s 8,000 students. However, with its faculty under financial strain, ambitious universities from nearby oil-rich states have poached staff. “We’ve raided them — particularly their administrators who are very good and understand the Arab context,” a senior leader from a Gulf state institution told THE. Lebanon needs a top-tier research university more than ever, insists Khuri. “The university has created a sense of sanity amid Lebanon’s meltdown — we need to be that anchor institution so that the country can continue to innovate, lead and thrive,” he says. There are positive signs that the university can bounce back. “We have recruited 77 new faculty over two years and seen a significant increase in student recruitment.” Prof. Khuri is upbeat about his institution’s future. “Rankings don’t keep me awake at night — graduate employability does, but thankfully our students measure…

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United Kingdom: Study visa restriction danger

London-based universities and post-92 institutions would be hit hardest if a crackdown on UK international student visas goes ahead. UK is more reliant on international student revenue now than it was the last time there were serious threats to overseas recruitment, during the prime ministership of Theresa May (2016-19). In 2020-21, tuition fees from non-European Union students aggregated about £7 billion (Rs.70,000 crore) to universities, roughly 17 percent of their total income — up from 16 percent the year before, and 13 percent in 2016-17. Following the openness of Boris Johnson’s government towards international students, his successor Rishi Sunak — and in particular the home secretary, Suella Braverman — have expressed concern about the impact of education visas on overall migration figures. But reports suggest that any clampdown on recruitment could be targeted, restricting international enrolment to ‘elite’ universities only. Analysis of Higher Education Statistics Agency figures indicates that institutions in the Top 200 of the Times Higher Education World University Rankings draw about a fifth of their income from international students. Should ministers decide to reduce international student numbers, they could follow a pattern they set last year when they introduced a visa scheme for graduates of universities in the Top 50 of major global rankings, and restrict enrolment to only that elite group. But non-EU students fees are also important for institutions outside the elite. Among post-92 universities, non-EU fees account for about 14 percent of income in 2020-21, up slightly from the year before. And there is significant variation in the proportion of total revenue that UK universities outside the top 200 draw from overseas recruitment. Two private institutions obtain a major share of their income from this source — Regent’s University London and Richmond, the American International University in London. Beyond these, the University of the Arts London received 43.5 percent of its earnings from international students in 2020-21. “Given that there is little evidence that these students overstay their visas in large numbers, and that international students are not high on the public’s list of concerns as far as immigration matters are concerned, the most straight forward solution would be to remove international students from net migration figures or at least to measure them in a more nuanced way,” says MillionPlus chief executive Rachel Hewitt. Across all UK institutions, London universities are most reliant on the international market, drawing a quarter of their income from non-EU students. In contrast, such students account for just 9 percent of revenue in Northern Ireland.

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Ukraine: Evocative daily grind reports

When the president of the Kyiv School of Economics (KSE) began posting photos of his daily life to social media in November, it was a gut reaction. A day earlier, Russian air strikes had hit Ukraine’s power grid, plunging the city into darkness. “I didn’t have a plan — I realised we had no heating and no water for a while, and somehow I felt it would be interesting for the world to know how people are trying to get through the war,” recalls Tymofiy Mylovanov. The professor’s tweets have resonated with readers around the world. Mylovanov has accumulated more than 39,000 followers and has become an in-demand commentator for Western news outlets, explaining the war’s toll in hard numbers and — even more importantly, he believes — providing a firsthand account of everyday life on the ground. Previously Ukraine’s minister of economic development under the Honcharuk government and an adviser to its president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Prof. Mylovanov knows the value of good press. But he insists that his decision to share his experiences is not an orchestrated PR mission. “I’m fighting my own battle, for the world to stay connected to Ukraine. I want people to feel that we’re human. It’s easier for people to connect with us when they see us in our daily lives,” he says. Observations on the everyday minutiae and life at a university, his tweets are simple and profound. On the second day of the Kyiv blackout, he posted a video of students doing their work from a shelter and queueing up at the university cafe. “But students are here, and classes are at full speed (8.30 a.m). Therefore we must have our fancy coffee at our cafe, which indeed is working,” he wrote. In another tweet, he poked fun at Russia’s foreign affairs minister Sergei Lavrov, simultaneously exposing the Kremlin’s barbarity. “Lavrov is shocked by unisex bathrooms and calls them inhumane. I am proud to report that all bathrooms at the Kyiv School of Economics are unisex… What’s that blue water tank in our bathroom? That’s water to flush toilets (when) Lavrov’s ‘humane’ country bombs us and our water pump system stops working.” An economist, Prof. Mylovanov is keenly aware of the link between people connecting emotionally with the conflict and supporting Ukraine financially. His posts often come with an appeal for donations. Already, they’ve had a sizeable impact. Recently, his followers donated £37,000 (Rs.37 lakh) to buy gifts for orphaned and refugee children in Ukraine after he posted videos of a KSE student-led fundraiser, noting that the only thing standing in the way of upscaling it was a lack of funding. These days, he has more serious concerns — chiefly, how Ukrainians will make it through a bitter winter. With Russian bombings leaving millions without heat or running water, daily life has become unpredictable and exhausting. Because of the war, KSE colleagues have had to put in many more hours, and Prof. Mylovanov worries about staff retention amid burnout. “It takes a…

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Australia & New Zealand: Student housing crisis

Boosting housing stocks could be Australian governments’ “biggest” contribution to alleviating ‘student poverty,’ a widely reported phenomenon Down Under. Eileen Baldry, deputy vice chancellor of UNSW Sydney, says that if government quarantines social housing for students, it would help them weather an accommodation squeeze and cost-of-living crisis. Students could face weekly rents of A$200 (Rs.11,400) instead of the A$500 typical of many Australian suburbs, or rents could be capped at 25 percent of income — as happens with other social housing schemes — leaving money to cover food, transport and education costs. While students are not specifically excluded from social housing, waiting periods often vastly exceed the time required to complete degrees. And while the federal government has committed to bankroll 40,000 new affordable dwellings through its Housing Accord and Housing Australia Future Fund, Baldry says this will merely scratch the surface. “It needs hundreds of thousands of new dwellings to come on to the market.” Students are facing an accommodation crunch point, with rental housing in short supply and priced beyond reach. Many purpose-built student accommodation blocks are nearing capacity as international students return to Australia in greater numbers and compete for rooms with their domestic peers. Current residents, who tend to move into less structured living arrangements after a year or so, are staying put because of the lack of rental accommodation. Universities are examining the feasibility of re-building their own accommodation, a year or so after many boosted their Covid-depleted finances by selling off-campus residential blocks that were short of tenants amid lockdowns and border closures. Also Read: Australia: Over 1 lakh Indian students to benefit from post-study work visa Australia: Nepalese inflow boom

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China: Internal brain drain

The Chinese government has ordered universities in the east of the country not to use talent funding to poach academics from the nation’s mid-west and north east, which is causing an internal brain drain. The ministries of education and finance sought to offer some encouragement to university autonomy in funding management in a notice, but said talent funding “must not be used by institutions in the east,” where cities such as Beijing and Shanghai are located, “to bring in talent from the mid-west and north east regions”. Previously, in the 2017 version of the notice, institutions were “not encouraged” to do so. The tone became stricter in a 2019 central government missive on promoting science, which aimed to “support the central and western regions to stabilise their talent building”. “It is difficult to really stop the mobility of talent, because most people want to work or live in ‘better’ cities or colleges and universities,” says Zhang Youliang, associate professor at the Institute of Higher Education at Beijing University of Technology. A 2018 study examined career mobility among 3,234 junior academics, based on data from the National Science Fund for Distinguished Young Scholars (DYS) between 1994 and 2014. It found that 405 academics proactively changed their workplaces. The provinces of Shanxi, Jilin, Gansu, Liaoning, Fujian and Anhui (mostly in the mid-west and north east) lost more DYS scholars than they brought in. The authors wrote that the “talent crisis” in the north-west and the north east is caused by a “serious talent deficit and insufficient attraction for high-level talent, rather than the scale of outflow”. They concluded that boosting resources for regions suffering outflow would be the best measure in response, and that “hindering” mobility “is not in accordance with the market logic and innovation”

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United States: Harvard’s first black woman president

In making one of the biggest professional and symbolic breakthroughs in all of US higher education — becoming the first black female president of Harvard University — Claudine Gay is getting some predictable help on identifying what comes next. Dr. (Prof.) Gay, to be clear, brings top academic credentials to the job. She earned an undergraduate degree in economics from Stanford University, winning the Anna Laura Myers Prize for best undergraduate thesis. She earned a doctorate in government from Harvard, winning the Toppan Prize for best dissertation in political science. She became a tenured faculty member at both institutions, before her promotions by Harvard to become dean of social science and then dean of the faculty of arts and sciences. And yet within moments of the announcement that she will head the nation’s oldest university, one of the predictable responses for a nation still steeped in racism — harsh political pushback — arrived. Fiercely conservative outlets began publishing critiques citing anonymous sources questioning Gay’s qualifications and suggesting that her career success, instead of marking achievement by black women, was built on unfair favouritism towards them. Amid a lifetime of navigating such experiences, Gay embraced the milestone with an introductory speech that celebrated her Haitian-born parents and their faith in the power of education and then gently reminded her fellow academics of the toxic political atmosphere surrounding them. Today’s high-tech world offers “endless access to information”, she told her colleagues in a jammed foyer of Harvard’s Smith Campus Center. “But it’s getting harder to know what to believe.” Some of the many advocates of equity who long stood behind Gay made it clear that they are overjoyed by Harvard’s decision and by its potentially transformative power over all of US higher education, and yet are fully aware of the long united states International News pathway to equity that still lies ahead. They include Gloria Blackwell, chief executive of the American Association of University Women, which awarded Prof. Gay a postdoctoral fellowship nearly 20 years ago at Stanford. Gay’s fellowship was one of 13,000 that the association has funded since its founding in 1881, and her career success “is quite gratifyng”, says Blackwell. “Harvard is the gold standard, obviously, for so many people, not just in their own country, but around the world.” Harvard seems to have taken a systematic and sustained approach in its pathway to placing Prof. Gay in its top post, says Andrea Silbert, president of the Eos Foundation, which funds work in areas of gender and racial diversity. The university says that it has chosen its new president after a five-month search process that assembled and considered 600 nominees. Yet, Silbert says the university also appears to have guided Gay into positions that would improve her readiness for the presidency. The dean of arts and sciences heads the university’s largest and most academically diverse collection of faculty, and Gay’s experiences in that job included handling several high-profile sexual harassment complaints against prominent Harvard professors, and overseeing revisions to…

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Brazil: Academia favours Lula

BRAZILIAN ACADEMICS HOPE THAT THE country’s upcoming final round of the presidential election on October 30 will bring an end to President Jair Bolsonaro’s “war on science”. But most admit that, even if the populist leader loses, his influence will be slow to fade. All polls ahead of the first round of voting on October 2 indicated that the divisive politician, who has led Brazil since 2019, was likely to lose to rival Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, the leftist former president — known as Lula — staging a comeback after corruption charges against him were dropped. Bolsonaro has indicated that he might contest the result, and there were fears he might try to stage a coup, but scientists who have been subjected to savage funding cuts and a campaign of intimidation are quietly hopeful that things are about to change. “This is a very important moment in Brazil, one of the most important elections we have had in years,” says Luiz Davidovich, a former president of the Brazilian Academy of Sciences. “Brazil has all the conditions to become a very powerful economic country, and we need a government that pays full attention to science, technology and innovation as the main instruments for developing this, and one that is committed to developing education at all levels.” Bolsonaro has overseen a reduction in funding for Brazil’s federal universities to levels not seen since 2005, with the ministry of science, technology and innovation’s budget cut by more than 50 percent since 2013. Prof. Davidovich, emeritus professor of physics at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, says the cuts have left universities in a “very bad situation,” struggling to pay for basic services such as electricity, water and the internet. “Some of them are now negotiating with utility companies to delay payments because they don’t have the money but don’t want the university to be closed. It is a very tragic situation,” he adds. Bolsonaro’s scepticism for science — shown most clearly by his response to the Covid-19 pandemic — has also served to undermine the scientific community in the eyes of the public, and Prof. Davidovich says he knows scientists subjected to death threats and having to hire security guards. “It has been a war against science. We have faced some very severe situations in Brazil, and I hope this is a lesson for others,” says Davidovich. Marcelo Knobel, professor of physics and former rector at the University of Campinas, says that constant attacks on universities as “nests of communists”, where lots of money is spent with no societal benefit, has left a lasting impression on Bolsonaro’s supporters that will be hard to overturn. Lula, a trade unionist who himself has little formal education, oversaw several initiatives to improve quality and access to Brazilian higher education during his last stint as president. But he faces a markedly different economic environment this time around if he does win the election. “He was lucky as at that time the economy was booming. He…

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China CPC: Control schools

COMMUNIST PARTY OF CHINA (CPC) congresses are rubber-stamp affairs. The 2,300 delegates of the 20th Congress that recently concluded in Beijing, had no chance of scuppering the decisions — already made in secret — that were unveiled at the event. Most of them had undergone training in a vast system of schools that the party uses to transmit skills and ideology to bureaucrats. In the run-up to the 20th Congress that concluded on October 22, several provinces reported that lessons were dispensed in these schools to congress delegates who have no official titles (model workers, farmers and the like). The classes focus on the need for loyalty to the party’s leader, Xi Jinping, and on instilling the principle that “whatever the party asks me to do, I will do”, as one account put it. Typically, the training lasts two days. Normally, however, the students are officials. In a recent paper, David Shambaugh of George Washington University wrote that nearly all of China’s roughly 50 million official functionaries, from Central government ministers down to township chiefs, have passed through the training system, usually for mid-career stints ranging from one week to two years. Shambaugh describes the system, comprising about 7,000 institutions, as a “critical cog in the machinery” of party control. Subjects taught range from Marxist theory to the nitty-gritty of public administration. Some even grant degrees, including MBAs. The most prominent are known as party schools. Before Xi Ping came to power, these schools sometimes encouraged innovative thinking. Students talked about how to make the party more democratic with freer elections for its leaders. Schools often invited foreign scholars to lecture, even on liberal democracy. At the Central Party School in Beijing, officials “might be discreet in talking to strangers or in public, but their internal discussion in class is unbounded”, China Daily, a state newspaper, enthused in 2011. But Charlotte Lee of Berkeley City College, who has written a book on the training system, says the schools are now under greater centralised control, enforced by inspection teams. What freedom party schools might have enjoyed “has faded”, she says. President Xi made this clear in a speech in 2015 at the Central Party School. “On the important principle of upholding the party’s leadership, we must be very clear-headed, bright-eyed and firm in our stance, and we must not have any ambiguity or wavering,” he said. Cai Xia, an exiled former teacher of the school, says that Xi showed “dictatorial” tendencies in 2009 when, as the school’s president but not yet the party’s boss, he warned the faculty against criticising party policies. The same trend is evident at schools that specialise in teaching management skills to bureaucrats. These were set up in the 1980s under Deng Xiaoping, who wanted to establish a professional civil service and (for a while) even encouraged efforts to create a wider gap between party committees and the government apparatus. Under Xi, cadres have been incessantly reminded that party committees hold absolute sway. For delegates prior to…

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South Pacific: Showpiece varsity’s dire straits

BITTER LEADERSHIP ROW AT THE WORLD’S most pan-national university has cost it almost half year’s revenue, in an escalation of the economically and politically fuelled funding insecurity that bedevils the institution. Staff at the University of the South Pacific (USP) say that the institution’s biggest contributor, the Fijian government, has withheld F$78 million (Rs.275 crore) of promised funding since its dispute with vice chancellor Pal Ahluwalia erupted in 2020. Fiji is the biggest of the 12 island nations that jointly own the university, contributing more than 75 percent of its staff and providing 55 percent of students. Its government now refuses to pay its share of operating expenses, normally about one-sixth of institutional revenue, until Prof. Ahluwalia is replaced. The government’s opponents are outraged. National Federation Party leader and former USP academic Biman Prasad has promised to reinstate Fiji as “a sound and reliable” USP member that “honours its promises” if he and running mate Sitiveni Rabuka, who heads the People’s Alliance party, win the general election due later this year. Premila Kumar, incumbent education minister, says grants to USP won’t be paid until the government’s allegations against Prof. Ahluwalia, which now include bullying and nepotism, are independently investigated. USP’s two staff unions counter that the allegations against Ahluwalia, who is now based in Samoa, have already been dismissed in five independent inquiries. They say that having failed to remove Prof. Ahluwalia for exposing financial mismanagement and misconduct by his predecessors, the government was taking it out on the “premier regional university” and its students. Economic difficulties in USP’s three biggest member countries — Fiji, the Solomon Islands and Vanuatu — have also curbed the supply of loans and allowances. In 2020, Fiji slashed funding for its tertiary education loan scheme (TELS) by more than one-third. As a result, the school mark threshold for loans eligibility was increased while the value of associated scholarships was reduced. Meanwhile, Solomons and Vanuatu students routinely face protracted delays in receiving government living allowances, leaving them vulnerable to “loan sharks” and unscrupulous landlords in Fiji, according to the Pacific Advocate. All this threatens what has become an increasingly important income stream for USP, with student fees contributing 39 percent of institutional revenue by 2018, up from 19 percent a decade earlier. Former USP law lecturer Tess Newton Cain said the university’s current financial crisis is a dramatic example of the challenges it faces routinely, as one or other of its member states fails to hand over its “stake”. “Solomon Islands had years of struggling to pay its way at USP because they just don’t have the wherewithal to keep up the payments,” says Dr. Newton Cain, who now heads the Pacific Hub at Griffith University’s Asia Institute. “If a country can’t afford to pay, then they can’t afford to pay.” But now the biggest member country is the defaulter, to the gall of other states that have long envied the economic benefits Fiji enjoys as host of the university’s headquarters and easily its biggest…

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Middle East: Arabic decline anguish

IT MIGHT HAVE BEEN A PARTY FOR WESTERNERS. Young men snogged in the corridor. Girls downed tumblers of wine. The real shock, though, was the hubbub of voices. Though this was a gathering of young Emiratis, almost everyone was chatting in English, nowadays the dominant tongue of Gulf countries. On paper, Arabic is one of the world’s most successful languages. Over 400 million people speak it. But Arabs speak a plethora of dialects. Poor education in Arabic is eroding its purity, as English spreads. Many primary-school children chatter in a hybrid of English and Arabic. “Within a century, it may be a dead language,” rues a British former diplomat and Arabic expert. The language’s decline reflects recent history. Civil wars have forced millions out of education. Baghdad and Damascus, once citadels of Arab nationalism and culture, have been ravaged by violence. “Language reflects how powerful you are,” says Ebtesam al-Ketbi, an Emirati scholar. “The Chinese, Japanese and Koreans have all kept their languages, we haven’t.” “People running our countries often don’t speak good Arabic anymore,” rues a Bahraini. English is the gravest threat. In 2017, the Arab Youth Survey, taken by a pollster in Dubai, found that UAE Arabs already use it more than Arabic. Saudi Arabia has become the most recent Gulf state to teach schoolchildren English from kindergarten. A large minority of Gulf citizens’ children go to private schools where English is the main language of tuition. Ms Kebti says “no one can stop” the spread of English. A World Bank study reported last year that by the time they are in their fourth year at school, many Arab children struggle to write a coherent sentence in Arabic. The fragmentation of Arabic is a feature of Arab disunity. An array of dialects with their different vocabularies, syntax and accents has infiltrated bastions of standard Arabic such as parliaments, television shows and publishing houses. To bolster circulation, publishers are printing more books in dialect. In 2019, Nadia Kamel won a top literary prize in Egypt for a novel in dialect. Television news channels still broadcast in standard Arabic, so many Arabs prefer to get their news from social media, often in dialects written in Latin characters. Disney now dubs its films in Egyptian dialect. Expressions of love are said to sound stilted in the official lingo. Champions of Arabic are trying to fight back. Arabic will, of course, remain the language of the holy Koran. “We think Arabic is more living than Latin because of its presence in the media, sermons and speeches,” says Hossam Abouzahr, founder of The Living Arabic Project, an online platform that strives to revive the language. “Latin survived in the churches for centuries despite having no native speakers,” he notes hopefully.

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The world university rankings: China science superpower

CHINESE UNIVERSITIES ARE CLOSING IN ON US global dominance of higher education, but internationalisation has proved to be a weak link for the Asian superpower, according to the latest edition of the Times Higher Education’s World University Rankings. The biggest global ranking to date reveals that the research supremacy of American universities is waning, in part because of a growing gap in output between elite universities and the rest. When it comes to research quality, as measured by citations, China is catching up. Over the past year, China’s average score for citations increased significantly, from 55.6 to 58.0; in the same period, the US score dropped slightly, from 70.0 to 69.4 (based on universities ranked in both years). Fudan University and Shanghai Jiao Tong University, the third and fourth highest-scoring universities in China, respectively, increased their overall score significantly this year, driven largely by robust performances on citations. The US has 34 universities in the Top 100, down from 38 last year (2021) and 41 five years ago. China, meanwhile, has boosted its representation with seven universities in the Top 100, up from six last year and three five years ago. The Chinese government has consistently invested in higher education and research and development for more than 20 years, with funding specifically targeted at developing world-class universities, training scholars at top institutions in the West and building capacity in China. Wei Zhang, associate professor at the University of Leicester and an expert on higher education in China, says the country is now “unequivocally” a science superpower. “The quality of research output sourced from China is catching up with the US and will continue the upward trend. China’s concerted efforts and actions have paved its way to transform the global publishing landscape,” she says. But the picture is not entirely rosy for the Asian powerhouse. The rankings data also reveal that internationalisation is proving a weak link, with all four measures of the activity reflecting a decline. China’s average score for international outlook dropped from 34.1 last year to 32.6, based on all Chinese universities ranked in 2022 and 2023; the country’s average score for international students slipped from 33.9 to 32.4, international co-authorship from 24.0 to 22.5, and international staff from 44.3 to 43.0. Simon Marginson, director of the Centre for Global Higher Education at Oxford University posits that as Chinese scientists and doctoral students have become less welcome in some countries than they used to be, “it is likely that sooner or later, higher education in China will (be) less welcoming to outsiders from at least those countries. That is the logic of international relations.” Stephen Toope, who stepped down in October as vice chancellor of the University of Cambridge, said China’s emerging role as a science power means Western universities should collaborate with their Chinese counterparts. “It’s a huge problem if we can’t collaborate, especially with China,” he says. “No single institution, no single country, even the biggest, has the capacity to do all of the work that’s…

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Russia: Draft Damocles sword

FEARS OF A BROADER DRAFT COULD BE USED to suppress opposition to the Ukraine war and further limit free speech on Russian campuses, giving universities a “powerful tool” to silence potential dissenters. To date, the Kremlin has said it is drafting only reservists to fight in Ukraine, with the presidential decree explicitly exempting students at public universities. But there’s anxiety that more young recruits — including those with no combat history — could soon be tapped as Russian losses mount. While university students are expected to remain exempt from Russia’s obligatory year-long military service, the war effort has increased the risk for students who step out of line, warn academics. “If you’re expelled, you go straight to the army… the universities now have an extremely powerful tool to pressure students indulging in social or political activities,” says Anna Lyubimtseva, coordinator of the Freedom Degree project, which fields queries from Russian students facing dismissal. Institutions could use the threat of conscription not only to stifle students’ criticism of the war, but also to maintain control over “basically everything which will make an impact on universities’ image”, she adds. Igor Chirikov, senior researcher at the Center for Studies in Higher Education at the University of California, Berkeley, says with an ongoing war, “the stakes are much higher” for young men. “The danger of being mobilised is still there for students, which is why a lot of them prefer to flee the country, despite assurances,” he says. Dr. Chirikov says that inside and between institutions, mobilisation has created rifts. Distance learners are not covered under the exemption for public university students, for example. More than 300,000 students at private universities are also not exempt under the September 21 order. But while Russia’s defence ministry agreed to broaden the scope of the exemption on October 1, saying that private institutions would also benefit from an exemption, their earlier exclusion sent a message, says Chirikov.

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Saudi Arabia: MBS’ showpiece varsity

A new university at the heart of Saudi Arabia’s planned megacity on the banks of the Red Sea could soon emerge as the country’s premier scientific institution with the backing of its powerful crown prince. Billed as the sustainable city of the future and covering an area the size of Belgium, the $500 billion (Rs.39 lakh crore) Neom project is set to boast improbable wonders such as ‘The Line’, a 177 km-long linear city housing 1 million people without conventional cars, and ‘Oxagon’, an eight-sided floating industrial city — as well as a flagship university, dubbed Neom U. The institution, which last month (June) appointed a founding president, Andreas Cangellaris, currently provost of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, intends to become a ‘pre-eminent knowledge institution’, attracting students from across Saudi Arabia and overseas, and offering on-site and online learning. It will initially focus on computer science, engineering and design, media, art and entertainment, and business studies. Christopher Davidson, an expert in Middle Eastern politics and fellow at the European Centre for International Affairs, says the new university will benefit from the patron age of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman — known as MBS. “Given Neom’s close association with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman… it is likely to emerge as Saudi Arabia’s premier and best-resourced research institution,” says Davidson, adding that, as a key component of the Vision 2030 strategy to reduce the country’s reliance on fossil fuel extraction and diversify its economy, the university is likely to “be well-funded, and heavily promoted, both domestically and internationally”. Significantly, beyond Prof. Cangellaris, many of the key players in the Neom U project are veterans who nurtured the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST), until now the beacon of transformation of Saudi Arabia’s research sector, boasting a massive $10 billion endowment, a mostly international student cohort, and the country’s first mixed-gender campus. Nadhmi Al-Nasr, chief executive of the Neom project, was KAUST’s interim president at its foundation and later served as executive vice-president for administration and finance. Neom’s international steering council for education and research is chaired by Jean-Lou Chameau, former president of the top-ranked California Institute of Technology (Cal Tech) who led KAUST between 2013-2017. Although KAUST is involved in the development of Neom, Dr. Davidson predicts that “though there will likely be cooperation and collaboration with…KAUST, the latter may eventually fall by the wayside”. “After all, KAUST was a King Abdullah-era project — with his name still buried in the acronym — and MBS is known to have harboured a strong dislike and distrust of King Abdullah’s sons and senior associates, with the most influential having been targeted by MBS’ anti-corruption campaign.” Simon Marginson, professor of higher education at Oxford University agrees that Neom U has the potential to join the top tier of global research institutions. “As KAUST shows, if we judge ‘world-class’ in universities by the quality of the infrastructure, and by quality and quantity of leading faculty and researchers hired, which is the most important…

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Russia: Re-Sovietisation directive

A new requirement for Russian institutions to appoint rectors for students’ moral development is being interpreted as another sign of a country reverting to Soviet-style thought control. Coined during the USSR era, the position of pro rector in charge of vospitatel’naya rabota — which roughly translates as ‘character-building’ — was once common in universities. Such individuals were tasked with benign activities, such as organising volunteering and student scholarships, as well as more insidious ones, viz, inculcating state propaganda in their young charges. The post still exists at many universities, but now, it will be mandatory for all of them. Announcing this measure, Russian’s deputy minister of education Petr Kucherenko emphasised the importance of developing students not only as specialists in their fields, but also as “fully-fledged citizens of Russian society”, according to state media. Scholars say this initiative recalls times when Communist Russia intervened heavily to shape young people’s worldview. “Given that the old system is gone, the Russian re-Sovietisers are looking for opportunities to recreate similar structures in their universities,” says Anatoly Oleksiyenko, a scholar of post-Soviet studies in higher education policies based at the University of Hong Kong. Dr. Oleksiyenko says that for now, it is uncertain whether Moscow will hand-pick candidates for the job, but tasking rectors with selection could be a shrewd political manoeuvre. “Most likely the Kremlin will give this responsibility to rectors, so that they also feel greater responsibility – and thus become extra cautious and anxious – in the processes of student admissions and development,” he says. Igor Chirikov, a senior researcher at the Center for Studies in Higher Education at the University of California, Berkeley, agrees that this initiative reflects a broader trend toward “re-Sovietisation of Russian universities”, with institutions “resurrecting or reinventing” Soviet rhetoric. “The Kremlin already has far-reaching influence,” agrees Maria Popova, associate professor in the department of political science at McGill University, Montreal, adding this is “a way to make the process of achieving political goals in the university setting more efficient and more centralised”.

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