Virtual University to boost Islamic Science

Wagdy Sawahel
Two institutions and a prize, all aimed at boosting scientific research in the Muslim world, have been announced by the Organization of the Islamic Conference. The 57 member states agreed to establish the Islamic Virtual University, the Islamic Universities Business Network, and a prize for academic research papers.
The institutions were announced during the 5th session of the General Conference of the Federation of the Universities of the Islamic World (FUIW) held in Baku, Republic of Azerbaijan FROM 12-14 May.
The virtual university will offer higher education degrees in science and technology through partnerships among the federation's members and other leading universities. Besides developing training and educational programmes, it is hoped that the university will also catalyse educational reform and collaboration within the Islamic world.
The business network will focus on promoting the commercialisation of technology and on developing innovation-based businesses. It will offer training programmes and help better communicate science from university and research institutes to interested parties in the public and private sector.
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Source: University World News, Issue No: 0126, 30 May 2010

More Women Out-earning, Out-learning Husbands

Bringing home the bacon is less and less a man's job in the US these days, writes Nicole Santa Cruz for The Los Angeles Times. According to a Pew Research Center study released on Tuesday, a larger share of men are married to women whose education and income exceed their own. In 1970, 4% of husbands had wives who made more money than they did. In 2007, that share rose to 22%.
"As women have made these extraordinary gains in working and education, men have been able to share in these gains through marriage," said D'Vera Cohn, a senior writer with Pew and a co-author of the study. "With so many women working and achieving higher income, it's increasingly a way for men to achieve economic security."
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Source: University World News, Issue No: 0108 24 Januari 2010

Why Boys Can't Keep Up With Girls

Is the future female? asks Lee Elliot Major in The Guardian. Ten years ago I wrote an article for the New Statesman magazine predicting as much, on the back of figures showing women for the first time making up the majority of university admissions - a transformation from the exclusive preserve of white, middle- and upper-class males that made up academe as little as 50 years ago.
Last week, a report by the Higher Education Policy Institute once again documented the relentless rise of girls in the educational stakes. Females now outperform males on just about every higher education indicator, at every university in the land (with the exception of Oxbridge entry, where the sexes remain tied), and in most degree subjects.
The educational gender gap has emerged as a worrying trend. Female pupils outnumber males two-to-one, for example, on university summer schools, the week-long visits to encourage more non-privileged students to consider elite research universities. The annual surveys of 11- to 16-year-olds, meanwhile, show that boys consistently lag behind girls in their aspirations to go onto higher education.
Full report on The Guardian site
Source: University World News, Issue No: 0080 14 June 2009

The Business of Higher Education in US

Timothy McGettigan
Professor of Sociology at Colorado State University
In recent years, colleges and universities have encountered increasing pressure to operate like businesses. As the logic goes, businesses must survive in a cut-throat climate of unfettered competition and thus their organisations need to be leaner, more efficient and more responsive to the needs of their customers than not-for-profit organisations, such as colleges and universities.
In the unforgiving crucible of free market competition, only the fittest businesses (for example, those that deliver the highest quality products at fair market value), will survive. Of course, the seemingly endless government bail-outs following the 2008 financial crash cast a dubious light on the above claims, nevertheless, the notion that higher education should embrace a more business-like organizational philosophy remains deeply entrenched.
Full report on the University World News site
Source: University World News, Issue No: 0078 31 May 2009

Universities Socially Engineer Intakes

In a move that critics claim filters out middle class students, admission tutors at leading institutions are being told to give interviews and make offers to working class candidates who have attended low performing schools or who live in postcodes where few go on to higher education, writes Julie Henry in The Sunday Telegraph. It comes as more universities, including Suss ex, Worcester, Dundee and the University of East Anglia, have decided not to use the new A* grade at A-level in offers from 2010 amid fears that independent school pupils will win more places.
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Source: University World News, Issue No: 0066 08 March 2009

In Tough Times, The Humanities Must Justify Their Worth

One idea that elite universities like Yale, sprawling public systems like Wisconsin and smaller private colleges like Lewis and Clark have shared for generations is that a traditional liberal arts education is, by definition, not intended to prepare students for a specific vocation, writes Patricia Cohen in The New York Times. Rather, the critical thinking, civic and historical knowledge and ethical reasoning that the humanities develop have a different purpose: they are prerequisites for personal growth and participation in a free democracy, regardless of career choice. But in this new era of lengthening unemployment lines and shrinking university endowments, questions about the importance of the humanities in a complex and technologically demanding world have taken on new urgency.
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Source: University World News, Issue No: 0065 01 March 2009

Concern Grows Over Religious Conservatism

David Jardine
Concern is growing in Indonesia over the strength and influence of conservative and right-radical forms of Islam among university students. A debate is taking place against the background of increased local applications of elements of the Islamic sharia code and other perceived threats to the country’s constitutionally mandated religious pluralism.
Full report on the University World News site
Source: University World News, Issue No: 0057 14 December 2008

Keberdayaan Masyarakat Peternak dalam Perspektif Sosiologi Berparadigma Fakta Sosial

Nugraha Setiawan
Jurnal Sosiohumaniora, Vol.10, No.1, pp.58-67

Abstract.
The study is aimed at understanding of peasant community power phenomena in rural of Indonesia. The anlyzing used sosiological approach with “social facts” paradigm, what argued that its were external to, and coercive over, individuals, and then analyzed by the force relations phenomena of power theory of Foucault. The result of the study showed, peasant still has been powerless, because the dominating of urban community and institution of rural outsider. The conditions made peasant powerless more and more..
Keywords: power, peasant, rural, social fact.

Abstrak.
Tulisan ini bertujuan untuk memahami fenomena keberdayaan masyarakat peternak di wilayah pedesaan Indonesia melalui pendekatan sosiologis. Analisis dilakukan dengan memakai paradigma “fakta sosial” yang memandang masyarakat sebagai kenyataan atau fakta yang berdiri sendiri terpisah dari individu, namun mempengaruhi individu tersebut, kemudian dikaji lebih jauh melalui pemahaman mengenai force relations dengan memakai teori kekuasaan Foucault. Hasil studi menunjukkan, telah sejak lama bahkan hingga saat ini, masyarakat peternak di pedesaan masih menjadi objek dan sasaran kekuasaan dari masyarakat kota maupun pranata-pranata dari luar wilayah pedesaan. Keadaan tersebut menyebabkan mereka makin terkungkung dalam kondisi tidak berdaya dalam kehidupan sosial-ekonominya.
Kata Kunci: keberdayaan, peternak, pedesaan, fakta sosial.