The US government has cited Harvard University for ethical lapses in research experiments involving human subjects, including some in China and Tanzania. One-third of Harvard research projects investigated by the government turned out to have problems, involving a general failure to provide complete information to the people involved. One scientist began an experiment using human subjects without approval. While no one was hurt as a result, the lapses came despite intense scrutiny of human-subject research by US universities following several deaths.

A teenage research subject at the University of Pennsylvania died during a genetics experiment. Another died at Johns Hopkins University. And a healthy young woman committed suicide in February during clinical trials at Indiana University of a compound meant to treat depression.

The government is threatening disciplinary action against a clinical investigator at the University of California, San Francisco for failing to report several patient deaths associated with his studies of an experimental medical device. Harvard was accused two years ago of failing to protect patients during genetic research experiments in China. The University of Chicago faces a lawsuit alleging that doctors there failed to disclose all the risks of a clinical trial involving high-dose chemotherapy and experimental stem-cell transplants.

Investigators conducting a random audit of 25 experiments at Harvard over the past four years found that in six projects, patients were given confusing information about the risks of the experiments, but the work was allowed to proceed by the university’s institutional review board. One research study never went before the board, contrary to regulations.

The Harvard experiments included a study of depression in Shanghai, which was allowed to proceed even before researchers had shown how they would deal with pregnant women and people who might be at risk of committing suicide. In a study into the effects of HIV on villagers in Tanzania, the consent forms were written at a reading level the participants probably did not understand, according to the government investigators.

Russian schools are set to adopt a single standard set of school leaving exams in one of the biggest shakeups in education since the collapse of the Soviet Union. The unified state exam will sweep away decades of tradition — and, officials hope, corruption — through combining a bewildering array of school matriculation and university entrance exams into one secure universal test. The controversial new system — already trialled over the past four years by more than 900,000 students in 65 regions across Russia — was finally introduced in Moscow schools in May.

Individual university faculties currently set their own entrance exams. But education ministry officials say that despite widespread opposition from university rectors who fear the loss of lucrative cramming fees for their own tests, the unified state exam will be established across Russia within two years.

President Vladimir Putin has given his backing to the introduction of the new exam, while officials say it has been well received by students, teachers and parents. "This is not a question of if, but when," says Yevgeny Semchenko, deputy director of the department for quality and assessment of the unified state exam in the ministry. "The government will make a decision in the autumn on whether to extend the pilot period by a further year or move immediately to nationwide adoption and amend education legislation accordingly. A lot of university rectors complain about the new exam, but when challenged none of them can come up with concrete objections to it," he says.

Semchenko adds that Viktor Sadovichny, rector of Moscow State University is on record as saying that the exam provides a level playing field, allowing children from remote rural regions to enter the top universities. The new system, developed with the help of the British Council as part of measures to support reform in Russian education, will replace Soviet-style oral tests and regionally-set exams. These have been much criticised as too vulnerable to corruption.

UK e-university comes a cropper

UKe-University students: mismanagement victims

The episode is not just an embarrassment for the government, which hoped to emulate its earlier achievement of the Open University through online education on a global scale, but raises questions as to why the funding council failed to act sooner. Prof. Tim O’Shea, now principal of Edinburgh University, predicted that the e-univeristy could become the biggest in the world, with millions of students. It would need proper funding — of about £120 million (Rs.984 crore) — but he assumed much of the money would come from the private sector. In the event, the e-university had signed up only 900 students by the time Hefce pulled the plug, and it never attracted any private money.

Hefce set up a company — UKeU — to market online degrees from any British university and to sort out the technology. The company was overseen by a board chaired by Sir Anthony Cleaver and John Beaumont joined as chief executive. Beaumont had been a professor but he talked the language of business — referring to ‘end users’ rather than students.

The company’s strategy was to design an integrated service that would help universities develop online courses, to provide the technology to run and deliver e-learning to students around the world, and to market the courses abroad. To do this, Beaumont was convinced it needed a "world-beating" platform, developed with Sun Microsystems.

At first it looked as though the Open University and London University’s external degree programme, which would bring in 100,000 students between them, would use the new platform. At this point Slater, a former professor of computer studies at Kent, with considerable experience of large computer systems, urged a change of course to use an off-the-shelf system such as Blackboard or WebCT of the kind which universities were already using, or at least to prepare a back-up if, as turned out to be the case, Sun could not deliver a fully functioning platform in time. Including Blackboard as a fallback for the January 2003 launch of the first courses would make most of the universities very happy, he judged. However, Slater’s advice was ignored and within a couple of months he resigned.

Hefce called in consultants PA Consulting Group, whose report in December 2003 was damning about the "lack of focus" in management and about marketing based "more on optimism than market-led judgements". However, far from accepting criticism, Sir Anthony Cleaver asked Hefce for an additional £15 million (Rs.123 crore) and told its chief executive Sir Howard Newby: "We look forward to your continuing support."

Newby offered the support of the noose to a condemned man. In March the Hefce board announced that UkeU would be scrapped in its present form while discussions took place about how to salvage parts of the enterprise.

Since then, two aspects have been saved — Cambridge is taking over the e-China project, under which the two countries are sharing experience in the use of information and communication technologies, particularly the internet, and an e-learning research centre will be run by Manchester and Southampton with the new Higher Education Academy. The balance of the £62 million (Rs.508 crore) originally provided by the government will be used to support development of e-learning in universities and colleges.

History textbooks row

Hong kong’s new Chinese history textbooks have for the first time included the Tiananmen Square student protest in Beijing in 1989 but have failed to mention the violent army suppression of it and the fact that students were demonstrating for democracy. Politicians and educators accuse the publishers of distorting history.

None of the five government approved textbooks about to go on sale for the new senior secondary curriculum which covers Chinese history up to the end of the century mentions the bloody end to the protests or the word democracy. Estimates of how many died vary from several hundred to thousands. Cheung Man-kwong, legislator and representative of the Professional Teachers Union says "there is no mention of the use of force, that military tanks and machine guns were used to disperse the crowds".

One of the authors of Exploring China History, teacher Che Hon-sum, admitted to self-censorship. "I should have been more courageous in depicting the event. But as authors, we are all guessing the extent of control the government has over textbooks." He now says he will ask the publishers if he could add references to military crackdown.

Chief curriculum development officer Lee Chin-hung says the Education and Manpower Bureau sets no rules on what should be written in textbooks. "For sensitive political issues our guideline is they should be presented in a balanced, objective manner, and leave much room for students to form their own views. We cannot issue guidelines for every event in 5,000 years of Chinese history."

Cheung says the teachers union will issue its own Chinese history teaching material featuring video footage, the mainland government’s version of the event and that by Ding Zilin, founder of the Tiananmen Mothers advocacy group, whose son was killed.

Reduction of China flow fears

Chinese students in Oz: maturing markets

Increasing competition from Britain and Europe, a strong Australian dollar and changes in Chinese attitudes are believed to have prompted the decline.

This is the first time Australia has experienced such a drop in enrollments since the early 1980s when the then Labor government ordered a crackdown after claims that hundreds of Chinese were arriving with student visas, then disappearing into the system. Earlier this year, Amanda Vanstone, immigration minister, announced amendments to immigration law, making it more difficult for immigrants to obtain permanent residency.

The number of visas issued to Hong Kong students fell by almost 1,000 or 14 percent last year compared with 2002, while those issued to Taiwanese students were down by nearly 20 percent and those to students from Singapore by 10 percent.

David Shi, head of China operations for the universities-owned recruiting company IDP Education Australia, says he had warned universities last year to expect a correction. "I believe Australian education has become conceited and over-confident about China. People think the China market will expand indefinitely with more demand for places than supply can meet. Even last year, university managers were asking how they were going to cope with all the Chinese students flooding in. So I told them: ‘You don’t have to worry because the students won’t be coming.’" According to Shi, Australia is facing increasingly stiff competition from other countries — especially Britain and other major European nations.

Britain’s change in visa regulations permitting Chinese students to remain in the country and work for two years after graduating is having an immediate effect. "Apart from more competition and the stronger Australian dollar, the most important reason is that the market in China has become much more mature," says Chi. "Chinese students used to go overseas, get a degree, come back and earn lots of money. Now they return and find their friends who attended a local university are earning more than they can."

Role of universities debate

Europe can support only 30-50 top-rank universities,according to David Ward, president of the American Council of Education. "It takes 5 million taxpayers to support one world-class comprehensive research university," says Ward. "Europe could support between 30 and 50 top-rank comprehensive universities depending on tax levels. The rest will have to diversify their missions. It is unrealistic, for example, for all three universities in a country with 3 million people to aspire to world-class teaching and research in all fields. The trend in Europe is towards comprehensive universities aspiring to international prestige or technical schools aspiring to excellence in scientific fields. Many should instead strive for quality in satisfying other educational needs."

Ward was the keynote speaker at a European Universities Association (EUA)-Association of Commonwealth Universities conference in Turin recently. He said that since the proportion of school-leavers entering higher education had risen from 10 percent to 70-80 percent in a few decades, most students require higher education for general enrichment and as a basis for life-long learning.

Not everyone agrees with Dr.Ward’s analysis. Comments Eric Froment, the EUA president: "You cannot divorce universities from research: the quality of teaching inevitably falls. To transmit knowledge, you must be in touch with research. Even a university focusing on lifelong or vocational learning must have teachers involved in research. There is hope for everyone. Who can say that Oxford will remain world-class for ever? Who can say what the next field of historical progress will be? Of course, there are natural pressures on institutions to adopt a role that responds to social needs. Those responsible must realise that not every department in every university can be a world leader."

Adds Rex Nettleford, vice-chancellor of the University of the West Indies: "We must think of universities as a public good, encouraging upward social mobility. And smaller countries must think in terms of niches. In Jamaica, we have departments that are world leaders in tropical medicine, economics of developing countries and race relations. And there is a need for strategic alliances in specific fields among universities around the world."

Jean-Marc Rapp, president of the Swiss Rectors Conference, also disagreed with Ward. "Even world-class comprehensive universities such as Harvard have some departments that are better than others. The trend now is for rankings by department rather than by university."

Copycat child murders shock

Teachers, a pulp thriller, and internet chat are all being accused of contributing to the killing of an elementary schoolgirl by an 11-year-old classmate in Japan. Child A, who cannot be named under Japanese law, was taken into custody last week for cutting the throat of 12-year-old Satomi Mitarai with a craft knife which she carried in her pencil case. Confessions given to investigators have revealed a motive based on mildly venomous bickering via the school’s instant messaging board and a school-based horror novel as inspiration for the attack.

Battle Royale scene: influential violence

Child A also posted a short story on the site, based on an infamous novel, Battle Royale — Whisper, in which children in a junior high class are transported to a desert island and forced to kill each other until only one girl remains. The book was the basis for a gory cult thriller, Battle Royale, in 2000. Directed by the late Kinji Fukasaku, it attracted more than 1.8 million fans in Japan though its violence outraged teachers.

A worrying sign for schools worldwide is that charges were filed in early June in three other copycat cases of school murder plots in Japan, Sweden and the United States. They were based on either Battle Royale or the real-life Columbine high school massacre in which two pupils killed 12 classmates, one teacher and themselves in Colorado in 1999.

In the wake of press revelations, Okubu school officials are discussing ways to prevent a recurrence and reviewing student supervision guidelines. Superintendent of municipal education for Sasebo, Koichi Tsurusaki, told the Daily Yomiuri newspaper: "We must confirm whether schools have taught students about the dangers of violating the rights of others. We need to put together rules on communicating on the internet."

Teachers have been blamed in the past for being far less internet aware than their techno-savvy charges. Nearly every child in Japan carries an internet-enabled phone. Almost all schools have access to the web and government data shows that more than 60 percent of children aged between six and 12 use the internet.

Jordanian varsity applies for operational licence

A planned outpost of a Jordanian university in Israel will be the first Arab institution to be opened in the country, other than the Jordanian and Egyptian embassies and airline offices. The chosen president of the Israel branch of Jordan’s Al-Ahliyya University, Eytan Bentsur, a former director-general of Israel’s foreign ministry describes the plan as a revolutionary step with far-reaching consequences for regional peace. A request for a licence to operate in Israel was lodged with Israel’s Council for Higher Education (CHE) in end June.

Bentsur set up contacts between Jordanian entrepreneurs Nizar and Anan Darawshe and Israel’s education minister Limor Livnat. The Darawshe brothers already fund the studies of 400 Israelis of Arab and Druze backgrounds at Al-Ahliyya. Bentsur says the Darawshes had the aim of creating a "peace university, a university that would give the opportunity to students from the entire region to study in Israel on a purely academic level, but also that would include the notion of good neighbourly relations and all the values of peace".

When initial funding efforts for the university proved unsuccessful, Bentsur suggested the idea to Mahar Hourani, owner of the Al-Ahliyya branch in Amman and to the Darawshes. Despite opposition from some Arab countries, Hourani is determined to open the Israel branch of Al-Ahliyya which at the moment has 7,000 students overall.

"I am delighted at this special request and see it as a positive step towards strengthening the spirit of peace and our national interests," says Livnat.