… has been murdered, apparently by his mentally ill son. His 37-year-old daughter was also killed.
The NSW website announces his death here; subsequent pages about him on their site do not open, probably because they are overwhelmed with traffic.
Economist Achilleas Mitsos, one of Europe’s leading research policy-makers, has been tasked with a root and branch reform of the research system in his homeland, Greece.
Director general of the European Union’s research commission from 2000 to 2006, Mitsos has now been appointed general secretary for research in Greece’s new socialist government. He spoke to Nature about his ambitious plans to overhaul the research system of a country where money for science is scarce and cronyism is rife…
[Mitsos:] There is too little competition, too little evaluation of performance, and there is a lot of dead wood. Even scientists who do very little work continue to get a share of what little money there is for research. And most scientists are civil servants, so they are guaranteed employment until retirement.
… A large part of the academic community has always resisted the idea of quality control and evaluation, and in the past politicians have never insisted on it. Last year, the former [centre-right New Democracy] government did actually introduce a law that tried to address some of the problems, but it was overcomplicated and unworkable. [That wasn’t the problem. The problem was that in response to its introduction a zillion Greeks ran into the streets of Athens and started burning it down.]
… Greece is a small country, and we can’t expect to find evaluators and peer reviewers for all scientific areas within Greece who are both experts and free of conflict of interests. So we will have to involve foreign scientists. That means that all grant applications and research programmes will have to be written in English — I don’t see a problem with that. [Others certainly will.] …
… Austrian university students are striking to make sure that their higher education system remains lurid and open to all.
There’s not much coverage of events in the English-language press yet, but here’s a blog post with a video and some background.
… it’s a very bad idea to refuse to do so. It only makes people suspect you’ve been misbehaving. Take the case of Australia’s University of Newcastle.
The University of Newcastle has refused to reveal details of how much it is paying senior executives in bonuses and is ignoring a recommendation from the NSW Ombudsman who says there are no grounds for withholding the information.
In his latest report, the Ombudsman, Bruce Barbour, reveals the university refused to release the information sought under a freedom of information request even though it had legal advice it had few grounds to do so.
”Our investigation found that, as part of their internal review, the university had obtained legal advice that most of the FOI exemptions they relied on would be likely to be overturned by the Administrative Decisions Tribunal or questioned by us if reviewed,” he said. ”Despite this, they continued to maintain that the documents were exempt.”
… In an effort to get the information, the Ombudsman wrote to the Department of Premier and Cabinet proposing a change to the reporting regulations but had received no response despite a recommendation of an upper house inquiry into university governance this year that found “the disclosure of this information is in the public interest” .
Last year the Ombudsman again criticised some universities for ”contracting out” of disclosure requirements by including confidentiality clauses in salary packages paid to vice-chancellors to make disclosure of the details a breach of the contract.
After that, all universities apart from the University of NSW disclosed details…
And why doesn’t the University of New South Wales disclose?
Big ol’ scandal in a law school in the Czech Republic, where they’ve been selling degrees left and right.
Police began investigating the law faculty at Plzeň’s University of West Bohemia (Západočeská univerzita), which is suspected of running a bogus academic degree racket and of bestowing diplomas upon many prominent local politicians, who didn’t actually study for their degrees…
“I don’t remember who taught me law, who advised me on my diploma thesis or who authored the opponent’s opinion. And I’ve lost my transcripts,” Chomutov mayor… Ivana Řápková …, who graduated from Plzeň’s law school in 2005 and whose master’s thesis is missing from the school library, told reporters.
UD lives for quotations like that one, from Mayor Rapkova. It’s very close to perfect.
Perfect would be And my dog is dead. But it’s almost perfect.
The problem at the West Bohemian University’s (ZCU) Faculty of Law can be solved neither by its new acting dean Jiri Pospisil nor the accreditation commission for universities…
The problem is much broader as it stems from… the long-lasting and persisting love of academic titles by Czechs, as a result of which clumsy, picturesque abbreviations (for academic titles), unparalleled elsewhere in the world, mushroomed in the country in the communist period and have survived since…
An avid member of a Pakistani university’s Anti-Sex League has sent an email to the entire university condemning a student for having pecked her boyfriend on the cheek, an act the emailer witnessed.
The university has “promised to issue a code of conduct to ban PDAs.” (Says in the article this stands for Personal Displays of Affection; but shouldn’t it be Public?)
… The brouhaha at LUMS, Pakistan’s premier educational institution, points to the drastically different ideological directions in which youths across the country are being pulled, says Asif Akthar, the Lahore-based blogger who first reported the story and is now a research assistant at the university.
“I think [the debate over the kiss] signifies a conflict between different cultural identities and shows there is something unresolved there,” he says.
LUMS’s leafy campus, located in a heavily fortified compound in the posh Defence neighborhood of Lahore, has stood out in Pakistan as a place where students of all stripes seem to coexist. Dressed in everything from burqas and shalwar kameez to tank tops and skinny jeans, and drawn mostly from the upper-middle class, the student body goes on to hold top jobs in finance, industry, law, and software engineering. Many continue their studies in the West.
“At LUMS, you’ll find people of all ideological persuasions studying and living together easily. There’s a deeply secular community. There are religious ascetics who believe in a more tolerant form of Islam. There are Deobandis [an ultraconservative branch of Islam], and there are Marxists,” says Ammar Rashid, a recent graduate and now research assistant in social sciences.
LUMS has also been more open about men and women studying together – in contrast with some government-run universities, such as the University of the Punjab also in Lahore, where “free-mixing” between the sexes is frowned upon and in some instances violently opposed by the Islami Jamiat Talaba, an Islamist student group…
… [Some students have] responded [to the kiss controversy] with sarcasm: “I have sinned. I do not believe that there is a God because I can not see, feel, hear or touch Him/Her… During the holy month, instead of attending Koranic recitals in the mosque, I was listening to the demonic sounds of Pink Floyd,” wrote one junior…
As regular readers know, UD follows with great interest growing tensions on and off university campuses involving secularity and non-secularity.
These tensions exist on religious as well as secular campuses; there will always be disputes about how overt the religious character of a religious campus should be (recall the controversy at Boston College, which recently put Catholic icons — mainly crucifixes — in every classroom). But they can be particularly difficult in hybrid places like LUMS, where there’s an effort to be culturally open in the context of a culture increasingly dominated by radicals who refuse compromise.
From the Telegraph:
Sheikh Mohammed Tantawi was reportedly angered during a tour of a Cairo school when he saw a girl wearing a niqab, the full veil worn by some devout Muslim women which covers the entire body except for the eyes.
Sheikh Tantawi, regarded by many as Egypt’s Imam and Sunni Islam’s foremost spiritual authority, asked the teenage girl to remove her veil saying: “The niqab is a tradition, it has no connection with religion.”
The imam instructed the girl, a pupil at a secondary school in Cairo’s Madinet Nasr suburb, never to wear the niqab again and promised to issue a fatwa, or religious edict, against its use in schools. The ruling will not affect use of the hijab, the Islamic headscarf worn by most Muslim women in Egypt.
… Following the imam’s lead, Egypt’s minister of higher education is to ban female undergraduates from wearing the niqab [in] the country’s public universities, Cairo’s Al-Masri Al-Yom newspaper reported.
… Although the Koran does not require women to cover their faces, Sheikh Tantawi’s edict is likely to prove unpopular among fundamentalist Muslims. One popular Saudi cleric has already argued that the niqab is not conservative enough and has called on devout women to ensure they only reveal one eye in public…
Off they go, like it or not, once they hit 65. Them’s the rules at British universities.
Terry Eagleton, you may recall, likes it so little that he’s suing the University of Manchester for consigning his 65-year-old ass to the dustbin of history.
Now there’s Jan Åke Gustafsson, a Swedish professor recently awarded the “2009 Fernströms Great Nordic Prize, a one million kronor ($146,000) award, for ground-breaking research in the area of nuclear receptors.” Gustafsson’s mistake was turning 67, which is when you get canned if you’re Swedish.
“I can’t believe it,” he told the Svenska Dagbladet (SvD) newspaper.
“It feels as though I still have much more to give.”
Since January of this year, Gustafsson has devoted much of his time to establishing a new, $30 million research centre in the United States at the University of Houston in Texas.
And he doesn’t expect his advancing age to be an issue for his colleagues in the United States.
“During the whole decision making process in Houston, not a single person has asked how old I am,” he told SvD.
“It’s irrelevant there. The only thing that counts is competence.”
Reason #7,641 why European universities – with one or two exceptions – will never begin to approach American.
… Russian authorities have recently begun allowing universities to open up—even if that means greater exposure to outside ideas. Many Russian schools, for example, have started reviving academic exchanges with Western universities. Their motivation is simple: desperation. Last year, not a single Russian university made it into the top 100 of a world ranking put out by Quacquarelli Symonds, a U.S.-based compiler of international university standards. Even Moscow State University, the pride of Russia’s education system, slid from 97th place in 2007 to 180th in 2008.
To stop the rot, last year Prime Minister Vladimir Putin founded two new universities, bankrolling them to the tune of $300 million. More important, “education policymakers gave a signal to Russian universities to quickly embrace all the most innovative international programs, and now nothing is stopping them from inviting or hiring as many U.S. professors as they can,” says Andrei Volkov, an adviser to the minister of education and rector of Moscow’s Skolkovo School of Management. Accordingly, Moscow University recently signed a cooperation deal with the State University of New York to share students and award joint diplomas, and 65 U.S. visiting professors are working in Moscow this year. Another joint agreement with the University of Southern California is due to be inked this fall.
Greece will finally allow private colleges to operate this fall.
Or maybe not.
Greece’s terrific higher education sector isn’t happy about this, and may torch all the cities in response.
… rise up in Iran. Follow it on Andrew Sullivan.
… settles in for more years of state-sponsored locked-in syndrome with occasional violent twitches, the British system begins to show a little movement.
Britain’s elite universities should be allowed to privatise to form a US-style Ivy league, a senior vice-chancellor said today.
Sir Roy Anderson, rector of Imperial College, said institutions including his own, as well as Cambridge and Oxford universities, should be freed from state control to allow them to charge students more than the current £3,140 capped fees and recruit greater numbers of international students to boost their income.
… “The trouble is all, universities are too dependent on the government. You don’t want to be subject to the mores of government funding or changing educational structures.”…
France, Italy, and Greece remain the hopeless paralytics of European higher education, leaving the path clear for Germany and England and everybody else.
… but it could be much, much worse.
Politics at Manchester was ranked 2,064th in [a survey in which British students were asked to rank best and worst courses at various universities] but, despite this, there are plans to reduce teaching time.
Manchester University admitted there had been problems and said it was reviewing all its teaching.
“We have had instances of students saying they have not seen any academic for two years. That is not acceptable,” a spokesman said.
From the Associated Press:
France’s education minister says protesting students who have blocked universities for months will not get diplomas.
Xavier Darcos says just a handful of students protesting against a proposed university reform have succeeded in disrupting operations at several French universities. Those students will not be awarded their degrees, he told RTL radio on Monday.
The protests have disrupted or completely blocked universities across the country, delaying many exams, in recent weeks and months.
The government says the university reforms are aimed at freeing up universities to allow private sponsors and become more competitive. Students say the government is commercializing universities
The protesters’ tactics have been disgusting. People attempting to attend or teach class have been met with barricades and intimidation. University presidents have been held hostage.