September 5th, 2011
“There is no point in describing the mess our universities are in at the moment. Any reasonable person, with little experience as a student or professor in a foreign school, knows the truth about the matter: Greek universities have long relinquished their purpose.”

The shocking condition of Greece’s universities – a corrupt, violent, state tax collection system – has finally mobilized legislators. They’ve passed a strong reform bill, insisting on admissions standards, administrative autonomy and accountability, limits on the number of years people can be students, rational curricula, etc., etc.

As the opinion writer in my headline notes, the most staggering fact about Greek universities (scroll down for earlier posts about them) is their purposelessness. Of course in response to the legislation their complacent stakeholders have moved to shut them down, trash them, etc. But how to tell the difference between this and the status quo?

August 15th, 2011
Never get between a Russian and his rubles.

Admission to the Pirogov med school in Moscow has always been pretty straightforward: You give the head of the school thousands of rubles, and he lets you in.

The Russian government figured it had gotten around this system by instituting a standardized exam, and mandating that the university admit the highest scorers.

The head of the school sat down and scratched his head and came up with a solution.

Announce you’ve admitted a class of high scorers. Then a few weeks later announce that none of the high scorers has chosen to attend Pirogov, so you’ve admitted instead the traditional cohort.

Would have worked, too, except for some damn blogger who figured out the scheme.

June 30th, 2011
Troubled Czech Intuitions

There’s a kind of moral hierarchy when it comes to the legitimacy of your university’s advanced degrees.

At the very top you find degrees conferred by professors who have themselves earned advanced degrees as result of doing first-rate work at excellent universities. These professors have read your thesis.

This is the model that prevails, with exceptions, in the United States of America. Most of our professors graduated from legitimate schools; most take seriously the job of reading, critiquing, and grading theses. Sometimes they send theses back for revision before passing them. Sometimes they fail them.

Below this high point lie countries like Germany, where no doubt legit professors are too busy or important or whatever to read some of the theses they pass. Hence the big, ongoing scandal of German politicians found to have plagiarized their dissertations. (One of them seems to have earned a sabbatical.)

A notch further down is today’s news story: The Czech Republic.

The law faculty of the University of West Bohemia (ZČU) in Plzeň has made headlines in recent years for all the wrong reasons — accused of acting like a diploma mill for Czech politicians and entrepreneurs looking to advance their careers (or massage their egos) by obtaining academic titles without actually attending classes or doing any original research. Now, its recognition of degrees from Ukraine is drawing fire from the Supreme Prosecution Service (NSZ).

NSZ chief Pavel Zeman has revealed that the courts have annulled 25 decisions by the university to recognize degrees from the Carpathian State University of Ukraine…

Here you have a systemic practice of handing out (actually, probably selling) degrees to anyone who shows up.

Shocked by all of this naughtiness, the education ministry has been checking the status of “more than 315,000 people who graduated from Czech intuitions [sic].”

Somewhere way below this is Italy, with its nattering nabobs of nepotism.

When you get to the very bottom, you hit Pakistan, whose entire political class seems to have purchased their degrees from diploma mills.

June 13th, 2011
The President of Sunshon University…

… entangled in many corruption scandals, has killed himself.

The school’s webpage.

June 3rd, 2011
Update, Italian Universities

Emanuelle Degli Esposti in The New Statesman:

… Italy is the only Western European country where the number of intellectuals leaving the country so grossly outweighs those coming in. The fact that a wealthy, developed nation with such a rich cultural history is being slowly leeched of its talent is a highly troubling development.

Because the sad truth of the matter is that the system that has failed its own people also fails to attract new talent to its shores. High levels of corruption, low spending on academic research and a convoluted and frustrating bureaucratic system mean that foreign brains end up looking elsewhere.

May 14th, 2011
“Latin American universities’ poor showing in global rankings is a continental scandal, because there is no way that the region will be able to compete in the global knowledge-based economy without world-class universities.”

Andres Oppenheimer, in the Miami Herald, notes that none of the international university rankings lists a Latin American university among the top one hundred schools. Oppenheimer’s dismayed that Latin America’s response to this result has been to form its own ranking agency, just for its region.

[C]reating a regional ranking that will essentially help make the region’s universities look good is a mistake.

… [T]he region should use [the rankings] as a mobilizing factor to modernize and internationalize its schools, as is already happening in a few major universities in the region.

In China, the communist government has officially set the goal of “internationalizing” its higher education, and has embraced these global rankings with a passion. Latin America should do the same.

Doing the opposite will be the equivalent of withdrawing from the soccer World Cup to compete only within the neighborhood.

May 13th, 2011
A new book tells us what we already know about…

… the Spanish university system.

In Italy, it’s bloodlines; in Spain, cronies.

Either way, really lousy university systems.

April 13th, 2011
More on the KAIST Suicides.

In the aftermath of four student suicides, and, most recently, a professor’s suicide, at the extremely competitive Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, students and faculty are calling for changes. In particular, they want the punitive fee system (you pay a lot more if your GPA starts slipping) ended.

[T]hose who failed to get a grade point average better than 3.0 out of the total 4.3 faced up to 6 million won ($5,520) in fees from the second semester. For international students, the system was implemented from their third semester.

Of the total 7,805 students enrolled last year, 1,600 students, or 12.9 percent, paid an average of 2.45 million won. And the figure has been on the rise recently, with 4.9 percent in 2008 and 8 percent in 2009.

The school’s president isn’t handling things well – he seemed at one point to be accepting this and other reforms aimed at cooling the competitive intensity, but has changed his mind.

Meanwhile, John Rodgers, an English language teacher in Seoul, reviews the startlingly high suicide incidence in Korea generally, and suggests that the country take advantage of the attention being paid to the deaths at KAIST to begin reckoning with aspects of the culture that contribute to the problem.

April 11th, 2011
Greece: Hopelessly out of it on higher education…

… and stubborn as a damn mule about it. The country runs a disgraceful state university system, but won’t give equal rights to private universities because it knows a monopoly when it sees one.

Many of the private schools are better than the state schools.

This is not hard to accomplish.

“The way [the private schools] operate reveals to Greek parents the ills of universities,” [the head of a group of private colleges] said, referring to the crowded classes and lax monitoring of student attendance often complained about in the state sector.

… “No other public sector university environment in the E.U. is as self-centered as Greece’s,” said Jens Bastian, a senior fellow at the Hellenic Foundation for European and Foreign Policy.

He said lack of competition had hindered innovation and led to many outstanding students and academics continuing their careers abroad.

“When did you last hear of a stand-out Greek research paper?” he said.

The EU has had it. They just sent the Greeks a letter saying they’re going to sic the European Court of Justice on them if they don’t join the rest of the world.

March 23rd, 2011
Why is Ralf Hemmingsen still rector of the University of Copenhagen?

Milena Penkowa [scroll down for earlier posts] happened on his watch.

Actually, The Ratwoman didn’t just happen on his watch. Hemmingsen did a good deal to enable her vicious ways. And when caught out on his enabling, he lied about it.

The legal investigation into Hemmingsen’s management was sparked by suspicions that arose when he and the rest of the university’s management nominated Penkowa for a prestigious research award in 2008, even though they knew that she had been reported to the police on charges of embezzlement and forgery.

Hemmingsen initially said he didn’t know that Penkowa had been reported to the police, but later he admitted that he knew about it.

Earlier, in 2002, after a faculty committee, smelling a rat, rejected her thesis, “the university’s then dean of faculty Ralf Hemmingsen intervened and sought an external review of Penkowa’s thesis by two other researchers. They were critical of the committee’s decision, arguing that there was no clear evidence of research misconduct. Penkowa resubmitted her thesis to a different committee of researchers not based at the University of Copenhagen and passed…”

How do you get promoted from dean to rector at the University of Copenhagen? You do Milena Penkowa’s bidding.

Understandable, though. Penkowa was having “an intimate relationship with a Science Ministry official,” and you want to be sure to behave slavishly toward anyone shtupping a Science Ministry official…

Although the university’s board of directors says everything’s fine now that Penkowa’s been sentenced, nothing to see here, the new Science Minister, Charlotte Sahl-Madsen, has lost faith in the board and will “increase supervision” of the university.

************************

How do things like this happen?

They happen when your university is so provincial as to make Lower Slobbovia look like Paris.

March 3rd, 2011
Mr UD tells me that the head of the London School of Economics…

… has, in the wake of the Libya scandal, resigned. I’ll get some links in a moment.

Here you go. It’s actually got a tiny bit of good news in it. The LSE has – had – at least one faculty member in this game with integrity.

The Financial Times [has] obtained fresh details about opposition from one of the university’s experts on the Middle East to the LSE’s acceptance of £300,000 in donations from a charity run by Seif al-Islam Gaddafi, the Libyan dictator’s son and an alumnus of the university.

Fred Halliday, an emeritus professor of international relations who died last year, wrote to the LSE council in late 2009 to say that Libya had made “no significant progress in protecting the rights of citizens, or migrant workers and refugees, and remains a country run by a secretive, erratic and corrupt elite”.

January 21st, 2011
“The Scottish Liberal Democrats constitutional affairs spokesman, Robert Brown MSP, said he found it ‘absolutely astounding’ that both men thought they should only be questioned on evidence of their own choosing.”

Scottish professors: Wussies.

January 6th, 2011
Hugo Chavez might let up a bit…

… on Venezuela’s universities. His various attempts to take them over have generated immense student protest; and now, with opposition to his government growing, he’s decided to pull back on a law that would have handed control of the universities to his regime.

December 28th, 2010
“University students, normally a placid bunch, over the last weeks have blocked roads in protest of stipends amounting to $30 million a year for the eternal students of the kollels, which are seminaries for married men.”

The New York Times features a story UD‘s been covering for some time – the scandal of Israel’s subsidized, ignorant, ultra-orthodox.

In the haredi [school] system, secular subjects like math and English are barely taught. Many see this situation as unsustainable.

“We have a few years to get our act together,” warned Dan Ben-David, an economist and director of the Taub Center for Social Policy Studies in Israel, an independent research institute.

“If not, there will be a point of no return.”

Israel spends its education dollars on thousands of eternal students who learn little and teach their children just as little. Actual university students can suck it up.

December 13th, 2010
What’s doing in the Italian university system.

From Scotland’s The Herald.

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