While India’s pathetically cash-strapped colleges and universities are unable to raise tuition fees and ignorant of the ABCs of fund-raising from alumni and corporates, alumni of top US universities are being asked for billions of dollars in collective donations for new research facilities, and beefed-up endowments in the latest round of record-breaking fund-raising campaigns. Universities are also competing for foundation money and corporate donations. Two dozen universities aim to raise at least $1 billion (Rs.4,500 crore) apiece.

Some have set higher targets. Only days after Columbia University announced a $4 billion (Rs.18,000 crore) fund-raising campaign, Stanford University smashed the record by declaring it would seek $4.3 billion in donations. Harvard University is expected to raise $5 billion (Rs.22,500 crore) soon after it appoints a new president to succeed Lawrence Summers.

John Lippincott, president of the Council for the Advancement and Support of Education, says the overlapping campaigns are not surprising. "It’s interesting that we’re seeing this rapid-fire series of announcements. I don’t think it signals that we have suddenly entered a period where it’s really about one-upmanship, but I don’t want to totally dismiss that notion, either. There is certainly some value in the attention you get from having the biggest campaign out there. It signals that you have enormous aspirations," he says.

Columbia announced its $4 billion fund-raising campaign at simultaneous events in New York, London and Hong Kong. Of the total, $1.6 billion would go to the endowment, among the lowest of elite universities. Another $1 billion would go towards building and renovation and $1.4 billion towards supporting existing programmes.

"A core strength of Stanford is its ability to function as one university and not just a collection of separate schools and institutes," says Issac Stein, campaign co-chair in a veiled criticism of rival Harvard where various departments have notoriously resisted inter-disciplinary collaboration.

Harvard’s expected $5 billion fund-raising campaign will be ploughed into a new science campus. It is expected that half the money raised will come from alumni and the rest from foundation and corporate sources. The previous fund-raising record was held by the University of California, Los Angeles, which raised $3.05 billion.

University heads are public servants

Canadian University heads may be held accountable for their actions as elected officials after a Supreme Court ruling in favour of a student who claimed that he had been arbitrarily suspended. The court refused to strike down a lower tribunal’s decision that defined a university president as a public officer.

York University in Toronto appealed to the Supreme Court after the Ontario Court of Appeal ruled that student activist Daniel Freeman-Maloy could go ahead with a civil suit contending that York president Lorna Marsden misused her office. It declared he could bring a civil action for "misfeasance in public office".

In 2004, Dr. Marsden suspended Freeman-Maloy for three years without a tribunal appearance or an opportunity to appeal, for taking part in two unauthorised protests. Freeman-Maloy was eventually allowed to return to classes in September that year, after a court rescinded the suspension.

In the wake of the Supreme Court ruling, the university said that to define a president as a public officer puts academic freedom at stake. It pledged to fight against universities becoming "a branch of government". But the Canadian Association of University Teachers applauded the decision, saying that presidents and principals should not be immune from being held publicly accountable.

The protests centred around the activities of Solidarity for Palestinian Human Rights, which handed out pamphlets at a campus event hosted by a Zionist group to support the Israeli Defence Forces. A second demonstration featured mock checkpoints around the campus to dramatise Palestinian hardships.

UK primaries best worldwide

British primary schools are the most effective in the world, but still suffer from poor teacher-pupil ratios, according to figures released by the United Nations. Unesco, the UN education organisation, has found that Britain is the country closest to meeting the UN’s Education For All goals, set out in 2000. The latest available figures show Britain rising dramatically from 17th place to head the table. It ranks above countries such as Finland and Sweden which are renowned for their effective primary education. The previous top-ranking country, Barbados, has slipped to number 15 in the table. Caribbean schools have the best international rates of pupil enrollment.

The Education For All goals include universal primary enrollment, a 50 percent improvement in adult literacy, and gender equality in education, all by 2015. Countries in the survey were measured by these criteria, as well as by the percentage of pupils completing five classes in school.

Of the 125 countries surveyed in 2004, the UK had the best primary enrollment rate. Finland came up tops in adult literacy, Slovenia in gender equality while the Caribbean islands of Trinidad and Tobago had the best stay-on rate. The Central Asian republic of Kazakhstan, lampooned by comedian Sacha Baron-Cohen in his new film, Borat which portrays its inhabitants as unworldly buffoons, ranks fourth overall in the international table.

The UK is revealed to have one of the lowest pupil-teacher ratios at primary level, with an average of 18 pupils per teacher. This is outflanked only by France, which has 19 pupils per teacher. In Sweden, every 10 children have a teacher to themselves. In pre-primary education, pupils in Britain are forced to share one teacher among 19 classmates. Only Maltese toddlers fare worse. The report states that the single most important determinant of quality in early years’ education is: "Interaction between children and staff with a focus on the needs of the child. This requires reasonable working conditions such as low child/ staff ratios."

Ghost of Nazi past

Pupils in Germany forced a fellow student to parade around the playground holding a sign saying he was the "biggest pig" for befriending Jews. The incident at Parey secondary school, in the country’s impoverished eastern state of Saxony-Anhalt, followed a series of neo-Nazi attacks in the region. "Never in my long experience have I known such a terrible act against a teenager," says Armin Friedrichs, Parey’s police chief.

The 16-year-old boy, who cannot be identified, was threatened with violence by classmates unless he walked around the playground carrying the placard which read: "I am the biggest pig in this place because I hang around with Jews." The sign’s language was reminiscent of that used in the Nazi era when those who befriended Jews were humiliated.

Holger Hoevelmann, Saxony-Anhalt’s interior minister, called the incident repulsive. "People were humiliated in this manner by Nazi party storm troopers during their years in power. It is shattering to think such a thing could happen again to someone growing up now," he says.

The incident comes after racist attacks in eastern Germany threatened to blight the country’s hosting of the World Cup. Figures from Germany’s Office for the Protection of the Constitution show that people are 12 times as likely to be victims of racist attacks in Saxony-Anhalt than in the similar-sized state of Hessen in the west of the country. High unemployment in the east has been cited as a reason — over 20 percent in some places.

Exclusion compensation scheme

Venezuela has launched a scheme to encourage the country’s poor, who have been shut out of university because of a lack of places in public institutions, to enter higher education. The ministry of higher education argues that Venezuelan universities became highly exclusive between 1958 and 1998, educating the country’s elite while shutting out poor school pupils.

Since 1998, President Hugo Chavez has introduced a series of "social justice" programmes, the Bolivarian missions. Mision Sucre and Mision Ribas focus on education with the aim of compensating poor Venezuelans for the perceived exclusion of 40 years. The ministry has opened public universities such as the Bolivarian University of Venezuela, that follow Sucre guidelines and goals to provide free higher continuing education for adults who did not complete school.

Henry Suarez, director of strategic analysis at the ministry, says that in the past, 80 percent of high school graduates came from public schools, but made up only 30 percent of public university admissions, with private school graduates taking the remaining 70 percent.

Job Carrillo failed to get into the Central University of Venezuela. "Other people with lower scores got in, but I couldn’t afford it," he complains referring to a bribe he was asked to pay. When Jesus Cardenas took his entry exam, he found that the system gave preferential treatment to children of university employees. "I was told the four places in computer science were going to children of staff regardless of grades or scores," he says.

But the higher education access scheme has been in great demand, and the ministry has had problems keeping up. The pace of the scheme has been slowed down temporarily to take stock. "We are only gradually enrolling new students because we don’t have the infrastructure or enough professors to teach them, but we also need to plan ahead," says Suarez.

Business plan becomes big business

Two enterprising Melbourne students who love a good party have won a A$25,000 (Rs.8.65 lakh) business plan competition run by their university with their Kegs on Legs home-delivery beverage service. Campbell King and Valjean Boynton, students of the bachelor of business in entrepreneurship, devised the idea after studying business ventures in the first year of their degree at RMIT University in 2004.

Their thirst for business knowledge (and beer) led to a university project that could soon become a national operation. After devising the business plan, the students put the scheme into operation. They set up the business and now run it out of an inner-city warehouse delivering pub-quality kegs of beer to people’s doorsteps with little fuss and no waste.

"The idea took off after we started receiving a huge demand from our families and friends and then from people we didn’t even know," says King. "We realised that Melbourne lacked an easy, hassle-free way of enjoying the benefits of draught beer wherever, whenever."

Their original plan was one of more than 100 entries to the RMIT competition. It involved three rounds, beginning with an initial submission, followed by a fully operational business plan and finally a presentation before a judging panel.

According to Boynton running the business has taught them far more than they might have learnt sitting in a lecture theatre. It has shown them how to apply theory to the practical world of business. "We’ve learnt how to avoid mistakes the second time, to adapt and be flexible," he says.

Academic fallout of political failure

Zimbabwe is to establish an ‘intellectual desk’ at the ministry of higher and further education. It will target lecturers living abroad to help tackle the country’s growing skills gap. The government hopes that by offering short-term contracts, expatriate Zimbabweans will be tempted to return to offer their expertise in fields such as medicine, mining, education and engineering.

Says Washington Mbizvo, the education secretary, "We have recalled retired lecturers to come and lecture at universities on a yearly basis." Dr. Mbizvo explains that under the initiative, a website would go live this month carrying the message to Zimbabweans living abroad: "Come to Zimbabwe, the country is kicking and alive."

A government audit to establish how many people the country lost through the brain drain, is under way. Independent sources estimate that 3.5 million people have left since 2000, when the economy went into decline.

The Zimbabwean, an independent newspaper scoffed at the suggestion that the country was "kicking and alive" and argued that the government had failed to address the underlying problems that were driving people away. The paper’s editorial of October 12 claims: "Many Zimbabweans in the diaspora are desperate to go home. They will not even need an invitation. But there is no way they will consider returning to Zimbabwe as long as the country remains in its present state, under its present ruler."

Eric Bloch, an economic consultant and adviser to the Zimbabwean Reserve Bank, told South Africa’s Mail & Guardian: "I believe the efforts are doomed to failure even before they begin. We can’t even keep the skilled ones we have here. How can we attract more?"

Oxford-Saudi collaboration deal

Oxford University has been criticised for entering into an unprecedented academic collaboration agreement with Saudi Arabia’s Prince Sultan University following a £2 million (Rs.17 crore) donation. Critics told The Times Higher Education Supplement that the agreement, which has not been vetted or agreed by Oxford’s governing council or its congregation of academics, could raise questions about the fairness of the university’s admissions and lead Oxford into inappropriate academic collaborations as a simple quid pro quo for the donation.

A statement on the website of Prince Sultan University (PSU) which hails the historic deal, said the "academic co-operation agreement" with Oxford "identifies several specific actions in the fields of exchange of students and faculty members, research collaboration, course development and joint awards programmes."

An Oxford spokeswoman said this claim "may need a bit of clarification" and insisted that the deal did "not oblige anyone to enter into any form of collaboration unless they wish to." She insisted that all admissions would be absolutely fair and based on merit. However the university declined to show The Times Higher a copy of the full deal or explain in what way PSU’s published statements need to be "clarified".

Prince Sultan Bin Abdul Aziz Al-Saud, the Saudi deputy premier and defence minister, donated the £2 million to Oxford University in spring 2005 to support the Islamic Gallery at the Ashmolean Museum and to fund ten scholarships for "Saudi young men," according to PSU.

Comments one senior member of the Oxford staff who asked not to be named: "This is deeply problematical. There are hundreds of universities across the world, but this is not a particularly prestigious one. The academic case for this is entirely obscure. It looks like the partnership has been bought and signed for on behalf of the university by the development office, bypassing academic monitoring."

However the Oxford spokeswoman says that there is no suggestion whatsoever of preferential treatment of Saudi Arabian applicants for a place to study at Oxford, "and that there is no reason" to think that the scholarship is not open to women.

Row over phonics teaching order

Primary teachers are furious that ministers are making them teach pupils to read exclusively by a method where they put together their syllable sounds. Gilles de Robien, France’s education minister, is facing mounting protests from teachers, inspectors and parents over his insistence that they use the ‘syllabique’ method.

De Robien has demanded that all primary schools use the approach, which is essentially the same as synthetic phonics. He first announced that the global method, in which pupils recognise whole words, should no longer be used, in December last year. He claimed it was responsible for an "epidemic of dyslexia" resulting in 20 percent of pupils having reading difficulties when they enter lower secondary. In March, a new ministry circular uncontroversially laid down that "deciphering" of words — the syllabique method —should be included in reading lessons. But since then de Robien has gone further, ordering that teachers must use this method alone. He claims that neurosurgeons recommend it is best for children learning to read.

Teachers complain that the minister’s order contravenes their freedom to choose teaching methods and point out the global method on its own, is no longer used. A survey by French polling company IFOP found that 76 percent of teachers use syllabique teaching among a mixture of methods and that only 7 percent use it in isolation.

The row intensified in September with the dismissal of educationist Roland Goigoux from the college where he trained education inspectors. He had written a book on "learning to read at school" which his college principal said contradicts the minister’s orders. An education inspector, Pierre Frackowiak, is also facing disciplinary action for opposing de Robien’s instructions in a newspaper interview.

But de Robien is now looking increasingly isolated. Organisations representing teachers, parents and educationists have written an open letter and started a petition against the minister’s "authoritarianism". The primary teachers’ union SNUipp has also denounced the "simplistic and caricatural manner" in which he presented his case.