“… [T]he deep structural failings of Italy — an inefficient public sector, a poor demographic outlook, lousy universities, a calamitously slow judicial system — will take years to put right.”
This blog has covered the lousy universities.
http://www.economist.com/node/21558237
Responding to a question about his summer plans, [Chief Justice] Roberts quipped that he thought his planned trip to Malta to teach a class was a “good idea.”
From the New York Times:
[T]he mild-mannered [dean of Tunisia’s Manouba University, Habib] Kazdaghli shows little inclination to back down. He is not about to give up one of his much needed classrooms so the students can have a prayer room, especially, he said, when such facilities exist nearby. Nor is he willing to allow female students to wear veils in class, as Salafists demand.
“How can you teach a student when you cannot see her face — or give an exam when you don’t know who it is?” he said.
… in Turkey. She has no idea why, but her referral log has lit up with tons of readers from there, all of them interested in her analysis of the Don DeLillo story, “Midnight in Dostoevsky.”
For years, in these pages, UD has followed the corruptions and absurdities of the Italian university system, nicely summarized at the end of the article from which I’ve drawn this post’s title:
Nepotism and closed-shop recruitment of staff have largely been blamed.
There are departments in some Italian universities where much of the faculty shares the same last name. They’re one big extended family. The department was founded, as it were, by Nonno Rossi, and he’s made sure since then that it provides income for all the Rossis.
Anyway, here’s an Italian university – the Politecnico in Milan – that has decided to switch the language of all of its courses to English. The rector explains that this will
“contribute to the growth of the country”. He said the strategy would attract brain power and yield the high-quality personnel that would “respond to the needs of businesses”.
Seyla Benhabib, author of a resolution, just passed by the Yale faculty, that notes the unimpressive “respect for civil and political rights” in contemporary Singapore, and urges a new Singapore/Yale university venture to uphold civil liberties on its campus, reflects on her victory.
Yale’s president objected to the “sense of moral superiority” in the resolution.
Funny how you find moral relativism not among faculty, but among administrators, eh?
… is a very bad response to international university rankings, as Andres Oppenheimer pointed out not long ago in the Miami Herald. He was lamenting Latin America’s decision to create its own ranking system, in response to the region’s poor showing in established global rankings. It is, he wrote, “the equivalent of withdrawing from the soccer World Cup to compete only within the neighborhood.”
And now Russia, with a similarly bad showing, is talking about doing the same thing.
Instead of spending its money to create a pretend world in which Russia gets to be a winner, that country would do better to fund anti-corruption initiatives in its universities.
Riding a wave of public disgust at graft, a new Czech travel agency has started tours highlighting sites linked to corruption, a social ill that has plagued the ex-communist country for decades.
The aptly-named CorruptTour agency touts the “best of the worst” trips to posh villas, a nonsensical funicular, an empty meadow hosting a non-existent Olympic stadium, even a big, boxy concrete mausoleum.
[The tour guide] points out a non-existent house which 589 companies have registered as their headquarters, and a university at which students obtain a degree in under a year — for the right price.
Yale’s opening a campus in Singapore, and the move has generated an important discussion among faculty, students, and administration about the viability of liberal arts colleges in semi-democratic regimes.
One irony in the Yale-at-Singapore endeavor is the excitement its founders express about bringing back the imperiled liberal arts —
At a time when many American universities seem to be turning away from the liberal arts, Yale is reasserting their value and enduring importance.
— even though their bastion of the resurgent liberal arts will be located in a state no one would mistake for a liberal democracy.
As a commenter on one of the many articles in the Yale Daily News on the subject writes:
Our values include free speech and the open exchange of ideas – most Yalies would probably agree that much of the value of a university comes from allowing people to pursue and publish their ideas regardless of whether those ideas violate some sort of political orthodoxy. If Singapore will not let us put those values into practice, we have no business being there.
Other opponents of the idea (which is no longer merely an idea – it’s been approved and will happen in a couple of years) point out that Yale going there lends respectability to the regime; that, given the repressive laws on Singapore’s books, faculty members might under certain circumstances be arrested; and that in any case Yale’s prior strong commitment to human rights as well as academic and other forms of freedom makes it look, in this case, like a rank hypocrite. As the YDN asks in an editorial today:
What values are essential to what Yale stands for, and how will those values have to be compromised in Singapore?
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No university is an island; yet what Yale proposes does sound rather like an island… Or maybe the right image – in line with the history of universities – is that of a monastery, walled from the compromised culture around it. UD will admit she can’t quite see how the thing will actually function day to day… She envisions a kind of West Berlin surrounded by East Germany (she knows that Singapore isn’t repressive in the East Germany way). But, I mean, for instance, all universities generate adjacent streets of bars, etc. What will the rules of discourse and behavior be there? Isn’t government surveillance likely to be especially intense around the free-thinking Yale campus?
The most destructive brain drain is of the young. Since 2008, ever more young people (mostly in their 20s) have gone, often to foreign universities. “When I left to study abroad in 2006 I was the odd man out,” says a young Greek lawyer. “Now I thank my lucky stars.” Greece’s archaic education system and strikes have held back those who pursued their education at home. Exams have been delayed or cancelled. Some students are a year or more behind in their studies.
Now they’re even worse.
In Venezuela, where the universities are significant sources of anti-Chavez sentiment, election day at the Central University in Caracas means a well-coordinated attack on the polling site by masked men with tear gas and guns.
The university’s concert hall is a rare enclave of architectural loveliness in Caracas: Alexander Calder designed a tremendous sculpture for its ceiling, and murals decorate the surrounding plaza. That prized plaza was damaged last Friday, when armed assailants attacked the university in an outburst of the peculiar violence that has come to define the Venezuelan capital.
The gunmen lit fires just outside the concert hall, attempted to force open its doors and cloaked the entryway in tear gas. Their intent, it appears, was to interrupt the tallying of votes from that day’s student-body government elections; the group destroyed machines used for counting and prevented students from delivering ballot boxes to the election committee. The academic departments in which votes were lost scheduled new elections for Wednesday, only to be stopped again with a second volley of tear gas.
The ant-Chavez candidates won anyway.
At the University of Bari in the southern region of Puglia, Lanfranco Massari, a professor of economics, has three sons and five grandchildren who are colleagues in the same department.
The Italian university system.
In an excellent article, Takis Pappas talks about the failed state of Greece.
Longtime readers know that, since the founding of this blog, UD has singled out the Greek university system as the very worst in Europe. Current events in Greece clarify the larger context of this scandal.
… San Raffaele Life-Health University, in Milan. It has it all – plaything of politicians, ripper-off of the health system, and currently under investigation for “fraudulent bankruptcy.”
Nor can it be a good sign that its administrator just shot himself to death in his office.
… has long been an object of fascination for University Diaries.
It’s hard to think of a writer who could do justice to it. Emmanouela Seiradaki tries.