29 Maret 2011

Why There Are Not More Women University Leaders

Su-Mei Thompson and Lisa Moore
Over the past half-century, women have made tremendous gains in the workplace all over the world. Hong Kong is a shining example of this. Since 1993, the number of women employed as managers and administrators has increased by 108% and the number of women employed as professionals has increased by 104%. However, despite more women being prevalent in the workplace than ever before, they are still under-represented in decision-making positions across industry sectors and professions. And despite the fact that academia would seem to be a natural profession where women should thrive, the statistics and studies reveal that the leadership potential of women remains untapped in academia as in so many other areas. On the surface, the academic world in Hong Kong is filled with women. Employment rates in universities are nearly equal - 55% men to 45% women. But in fact, this parity applies only in lower ranking positions. At the lowest level, that is supporting academic staff and supporting research staff, the number of men and women is almost level. Among junior academic staff, however, men outnumber women by two-to-one.
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Source: University World News, Issue No: 0164, 27 March 2011

23 Maret 2011

Academic Freedom Reports from Around the World

Noemi Bouet
After weeks of violence in Burkina Faso, in which at least six students died, the government has shut down all universities until further notice. The Yemini army has injured 98 students while attempting to halt protests on campuses. In Sudan, 100 students and youths have been arrested since January and many have reported severe mistreatment and torture. An Iranian history lecturer has been dismissed after publishing critical articles, and the Iranian Ministry of Education has announced new restrictions on students abroad. In Malawi, lecturers striking against interference in academic freedom have defied a presidential order to go back to work.
After weeks of violence and a major demonstration, the government has shut down all universities across Burkina Faso until further notice, the Washington Post reported on 14 March.
At least six students have died in clashes with the police over the last month. Damage to public offices in the northern city of Ouahigouya, and cuts to social services for students have also been reported.
The government closed universities in response to student protests related to the death of Justin Zongo, a student who died on 20 February while in police custody in Koudougou, west of the capital Ouagadougou.
The Yemeni army wounded 98 students during an attempt to stop protests taking place on university campuses, the Guardian reported on 9 March 2011.
The army violently attacked students who have been camping on campuses since mid-February to protest against President Ali Abdullah Saleh. Inspired by recent popular unrest in Tunisia and Egypt, students at Sana'a University are calling the president to step down.
The government's attempt to control and stop the protests ended with a violent confrontation between the army and the students.
Soldiers used rubber bullets and tears gas to break up the protest and wounded 98 students. According to health workers, a number of students are severely injured.
Seyed Hossein Javdani, a history lecturer at Payame Noor University in Mashad, has been dismissed after publishing critical articles, the International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran reported on 7 March.
Javdani was banned from teaching at Payame Noor University after the university security unit and security organisations requested the faculty not to assign him courses at the beginning of the new term. He said he had not been directly informed of his dismissal.
According to Javdani, who is also a member of the central council of Khorasan's Tahkim-e Vahdat Alumni Association (Advar) branch and former secretary of Tehran University's Islamic Association of Democracy Seeking Students, his activities outside the university are not in any measure related to his function and duties as a lecturer.
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Source: University World News, Issue No: 0163, 20 March 2011

What International Students Want to Study

Yojana Sharma
Predicting where future international students will come from and what subjects they go abroad to study has become a mini-industry in receiving countries such as Britain and Australia, where some courses are highly dependent on overseas student fees.
Delegates and experts at the British Council's Going Global conference, held in Hong Kong from 11-12 March, agreed that demand for overseas courses from Asian students will carry on rising.
"Overall demand for international education will continue to grow in the low single digits in the next decade," said Tony Pollock (pictured), Chief Executive of IDP Education, an international student placement service.
However, subject choices may be changing as sending countries like China and India become more affluent, students from Singapore prefer to study at their own excellent universities and Malaysia reduces the number of government scholarships for students on expensive overseas courses.
Medicine and related courses in the West have long been popular with students from India, Malaysia and Hong Kong, while business-related degrees and engineering have been the top choice for students from China, Taiwan and Vietnam.
This is according to a survey of 5,000 prospective international students in 14 countries by Hotcourses, a web-based company that advises students on course choice internationally.
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Source: University World News, Issue No: 0163, 20 March 2011

17 Maret 2011

Grade Point Average: A Need for Change

Kay Cheng Soh
Grade point average (GPA) is a historical mistake in two senses. First, it has had an impact on student assessment the world over from elementary school through to university, and in this sense it is historic. Second, it has a very long history, appearing two centuries before the birth of modern-day theories and technologies of quantitative educational assessment; in this sense, it is also historical.
Today, however, we know so much more about educational assessment than the academics of the 18th century, and that there is no reason for continued acceptance of the GPA.
Let's imagine what might have happened in the past. A professor had a pile of students' term papers to assess. He studied them one by one and labelled them as 'Excellent', 'Good', 'Fair', 'Borderline' or 'Poor' according to his expectations based on his academic experience.
From 'Excellent' to 'Poor' there was a decrease in quality, and it was more convenient to label them as grades A, B, C, D and F. These were not convenient either, and were coded as 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th and 5th classes to indicate the order of quality. As writing 'st', 'nd', 'rd', and 'th' was clumsy to a busy professor, they were now written as 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5.
Here we see several things taking place in the professor's mind in a short time: qualities were coded in labels; labels were replaced by grades; grades were translated into ordinals; and ordinals were, for convenience, written in shorthand and appeared as cardinal numbers.
In this process of quality>labels>grades>ordinals>cardinals transformation, the first four stages are fine and right; re-coding does not change the meanings or the nature of assessment. But the last stage of equating 'ordinals' (numeric used for ranking and grading) with 'cardinals' (numeric used for enumerating or counting) changes the meaning and nature of measurement.
This is where GPA went wrong. Because ordinals 5(th), 4(th), 3(rd), 2(nd) and 1(st) denoting ranks based on 'subjective qualitative judgement' look exactly like cardinals 5, 4, 3, 2 and 1 based on 'objective quantitative enumeration', they were mistaken as equivalents. In short, ranking on quality became counting of quantity.
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Source: University World News, Issue No: 0162, 13 March 2011

Caution with Offshore Campuses

Establishing a campus in another country requires a vast amount of work, absorbs a huge quantity of the time of senior academics and managers, takes even longer to get the campus up and running - and should only be tried if it meets with the university's long-term strategic plans. This was the view put by Monash University Vice-chancellor Professor Ed Byrne in his address to the 4th annual Australian Higher Education Congress. The Melbourne-based university has four overseas campuses - in India, Italy, Malaysia and South Africa; the first, Malaysia, was established 13 years ago and the latest in India in 2008.
"The first principle in creating an overseas campus is that it must be aligned with the university's strategic plan: it shouldn't be serendipitous or seized if an opportunity arises. It needs a clear, well thought-out, long-term international engagement plan," Byrne said.
The second principle was that "colonialism does not work". This was the model, more developed in the US than in Britain or Australia, where the campus was an "offshoot of the mother ship", a place for students to get some international experience in another country, notably in Europe.
Such a model was limited and, if a university tried to expand the offshoot into a broader university by flying in expatriate staff, it became a "colonial exercise" that would add little to the higher education environment in which it was established
"Overseas campuses should be partnerships with a local institution, the government or other local entities," Byrne said. "So you develop an offshore campus that will work and enhance the overseas country's university experience, rather than just as an offshoot that makes a return for the mothership at home."
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Source: University World News, Issue No: 0162, 13 March 2011

A Question of Ethics

Bruce Macfarlane
During the current turbulence in the Middle East, a storm of public criticism engulfed the London School of Economics after it was found to have accepted a £1.5 million (US$2.4 million) pledge from a charity run by a son of Libyan leader Colonel Muammar Gaddafi. LSE Director Howard Davies accepted responsibility and resigned.
Cambridge University's Deputy Vice-chancellor also came in for criticism for being part of a delegation to the Middle East that included representatives of British arms manufacturers. Other universities in France and the United States have been found to have trained Libyan diplomats.
But the LSE affair is only the latest in a long line of ethical controversies that have affected universities. Back in 2000, in what some saw as the ultimate irony in university corporate sponsorship, Nottingham University accepted £3.8 million from British American Tobacco to establish an International Centre for Corporate Social Responsibility.
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Source: University World News, Issue No: 0162, 13 March 2011

09 Maret 2011

Plan to Share Lecturers Earns Top Marks in Indonesia

Education experts have lauded a proposed plan by the government that would allow for the transfer of lecturers between universities in a bid to boost the institutions' standings and hence enrollment rates, writes Dessy Sagita for the Jakarta Globe.
Harry Iskandar, secretary at the National Education Ministry's Directorate General of Secondary and Higher Education, announced the plan to share lecturers last week.
"The basic idea is that lecturers who don't meet a set quota of teaching hours at a given university can be lent to another university that doesn't have enough lecturers," he said, adding that the purpose was to improve the educators' reach by allowing them to teach at more than one university.
Muslihar Kasim, chairman of the Indonesian University Rectors Council, said he was "very excited" about the plan. "I believe it will be able to boost Indonesia's poor university enrolment rate as well as improve the image of some universities that don't have enough educators," he said last week.
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Source: University World News, Issue No: 0161, 6 March 2011

Therapeutic Laughter in Higher Education

William C Andress
In 2000 a report came out of the University of California, Los Angeles, indicating that students feel more overwhelmed and stressed than just 15 years ago. The following year an American College Health Association survey suggested that 33% of students felt hopeless, with 22% suffering severe depression at least three times within the previous year.
Nor does the situation seem to be improving. Just last year, the director of campus student health services at Washington University in St Louis stated that "depression and suicide are the largest health issues facing students at this time".
In response to such dire findings, while an assistant professor at Oakland University, 64 kilometres north of Detroit, I submitted a proposal for a course in 'therapeutic laughter'. Its purpose was to use a novel approach to teach students lifelong stress management skills. Support for such a course was strengthened by the increased attention researchers were giving to the subject at such diverse universities as Indiana State, Raleigh Dickinson and Loma Linda.
Interest in laughter's therapeutic value stems from 1979 when Norman Cousins published a personal testimony, An Anatomy of an Illness as Perceived by the Patient. While editor-in-chief of the Saturday Review, Cousins contracted ankylosing spondylitis, a crippling inflammation of the vertebral column. This left him virtually immobile and in extreme pain with a one in 500 chance of recovery.
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Source: University World News, Issue No: 0161, 6 March 2011

Building Capacity for Higher Education Growth

The growth of higher education is increasingly impacting on the organisational structures and strategic direction of universities in the developed and developing world alike. The 50% increase in student enrolments across the world over the last decade has changed the face of the university sector, with increased institutional diversity, new forms of private higher education and so on.
The literature on higher education clearly demonstrates that middle managers, often drawn from the academic community, are crucial to the processes of development and change. As Professor Ron Barnett of the Institute of Education in London puts it: "Much more than capable management, across the world universities need creative, visionary and effective leadership with a global perspective that understands the capacities of universities in promoting the public good."
Higher education is seen as the key to increasing economic competitiveness with a wide range of strategies adopted by universities to achieve expansion with internationalisation. These include leading universities establishing overseas campuses, and a slew of collaborative ventures between universities within and across countries. Yet, for any country, particularly those gaining in presence on the world stage, the focus is more towards seeking to build world-class universities.
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Source: University World News, Issue No: 0161, 6 March 2011

Universities Respond to Social Media

Facebook has 500 million users and counting, Twitter generates 65 million tweets a day and the latest version of the free blog publishing platform Wordpress has been downloaded more than 32.5 million times. Students are more than ready for social media, said Rahul Choudaha, an international education specialist at World Education Services. "If we're doubting it, then it will be a mistake."
Social media has experienced rapid growth in a very short time. Tweets, blogs, status updates, IM and newsfeeds are just some of the terms that have entrenched themselves in everyday speech. Higher education institutions worldwide have been responding by creating Facebook pages, blogs, interactive web platforms and Twitter accounts.
Choudaha was speaking at the annual Association of International Education Administrators conference held in San Francisco late last month. Along with other digital media experts, he examined strategies to successfully implement web-based and social media initiatives in international higher education.
Social media is perhaps most critical in international education, and can be used to attract prospective students, manage students studying abroad and keep alumni connected after graduation.
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Source: University World News, Issue No: 0161, 6 March 2011

02 Maret 2011

Universities Need to Challenge Islamism

Universities around the world have failed to do enough to confront Islamism on campus when they are one of the prime targets for recruitment. GEORGE READINGS argues that universities need to ensure they treat Islamist intimidation of students as similar to racism or other forms of abuse.
When Umar Farouq Abdulmutallab attempted to detonate a bomb on board a flight to Detroit on Christmas Day 2009, attention was immediately focused on his time as a student in London. In particular, during his studies at University College London, he had posted fantasies about engaging in violent jihad to online discussion forums and, as president of the college's Islamic Society, invited a variety of radical speakers to take part in a 'War on Terror' week on campus.
Abdulmutallab's case is not exceptional. No fewer than 15 individuals implicated in terrorist plots and attacks have had some link to British universities.
Despite the increased awareness of the dangers of extremist activity on campuses in the months following Abdulmutallab's attempted attack, extraordinary events were taking place on another campus just across London, at City University.
Although no violence resulted, a handful of extremists were able to take control of the student Islamic Society and use it as a platform to spread violently intolerant views. They also intimidated gay, Jewish and Muslim students who disagreed with their views, undermining their basic rights and liberties. Members of the society even used its website to post messages supportive of the al-Qaeda linked preacher Anwar al-Awlaki.
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Source: University World News, Issue No: 0160, 27 February 2011