International News

[COLOR=purple]Britain[/COLOR] [SIZE=4][COLOR=green]Rising corporate social responsibility awareness[/COLOR] [/SIZE] British universities are experiencing a sharp rise in the number of students from business and government backgrounds choosing postgraduate courses in international development as part of their ongoing training. In the past, many students enrolling for these postgrad courses came from non-governmental organisations (NGOs), including charities. But this is changing as big business becomes increasingly aware of the need for greater social responsibility and as governments seek to work more effectively with NGOs across the globe. For big business the impetus to consider corporate social responsibility is a result of shareholder and media pressure, and the effectiveness of campaigning groups such as Friends of the Earth. It has now become an important part of business strategy. More than 170 international companies, for example, are now members of the advocacy group the World Business Council for Sustainable Development. The emphasis on corporate social responsibility means that students in international development courses may now include business managers and consultants who want to learn more about the issues surrounding international development and poverty reduction, as well as students who work for organisations such as the World Bank, or are employed by government. The University of Manchester’s institute for development policy and management offers an M.Sc in globalisation and development. The programme which started last year, is run by Jeffrey Henderson, professor of international economic sociology and programme director. Henderson says the course is suitable for people from business backgrounds who do not want to pursue an MBA programme but who want to extend themselves intellectually and consider issues of corporate social responsibility. One of the applicants for the international development course, for example, is a manager at Tesco, UK’s largest retailer and a member of the Ethical Trading Initiative. “The idea is to train and equip students with a more general take on the issues of development than they would usually get. The programme is intended to convey the global origins of development problems. It enables students to recognise that the problems in the East End of London or former industrial towns in the north-east of England are the other side of the coin from development problems in India and sub-Saharan Africa,” says Henderson. The course attracts students working for NGOs and is also suitable for people involved with development issues in global agencies such as the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank or the World Trade Organisation. [SIZE=4][COLOR=green]British Council hoists danger signal for UK varsities[/COLOR] [/SIZE] The British Council has warned that British universities and colleges are in danger of being squeezed out of the burgeoning multibillion pound overseas student recruitment market. Major competitors such as Australia and the US are threatening to eat into UK institutions’ significant share of the quality end of the market while new players in Europe and Asia are beginning to cherry-pick niche areas, according to a consultation document. img:33:Indian students in Britain: multi-million pound target The threat comes just as British institutions are planning to cash in on predicted exponential growth in demand for international education. A joint study by the British Council and its antipodean equivalent, IDP Australia, due to be published shortly, forecasts that the number of international higher education students in the UK could grow nine-fold over the next 20 years. But the British Council warns that the UK education system is not yet geared either to capitalise on the growing demand or even to protect its current stake in the market, estimated to be worth £1 billion (Rs.8,000 crore) a year to institutions and £ 8 billion (Rs.64,000 crore) a year to the country’s economy. Its report, Education UK warns this is bad news in the light of new multimillion pound marketing campaigns recently launched in Australia and the US targeting students interested in top-quality courses, traditionally the UK’s prime patch. The threat is “rising dramatically” from new entrants to the market offering courses delivered in English, including Germany, France, Finland, Japan, Singapore and Poland, says the report. [COLOR=purple] Canada[/COLOR] [SIZE=4][COLOR=green]University stipends for doctoral students[/COLOR] [/SIZE] A growing number of Canadian universities are offering postgraduates guaranteed funding to remain competitive with the US. The University of Alberta has joined a handful of other Canadian universities, including the University of Toronto, that pay stipends to doctoral students. The universities give several reasons for these payments, which average between C$ 12,000-22,000 (Rs.4.2-7.7 lakh) annually. They include the need for students to have the financial means to finish their doctorates without having to interrupt their studies to earn money, and the positive faculty recruitment message that a full cadre of doctoral students sends. However, the most important reason according to university administrators is the heated environment in the US, where colleges offer stipends and tuition waivers. It left them with no choice but to pay up or lose more Canadian students to the south. Alberta provost Carl Amrhein says that the university was losing potential doctoral recruits to US universities, a situation he had seen at Toronto, his former institution. Alberta estimates that the stipends will cost C$ 1.6 million (Rs.5 crore) a year. Not surprisingly the student community has welcomed this development. Comments Andrea Rounce, chair of the Canadian Federation of Students’ National Graduate Caucus: “We’re happy to see universities moving to acknowledge that students need this kind of support during their postgraduate work.” But Rounce adds that universities are showing their priorities are with doctoral students and that if masters students are not given better funding and if bachelor-degree tuition fees continue to rise unabated, the supply of Ph D students will continue to decline. “Students are self-selecting themselves out of graduate work,” she says. Meanwhile a Statistics Canada study has found that out of the respondents who have dropped out of higher education, 71.4 percent cite financial barriers as the primary reason. [COLOR=purple]Germany[/COLOR] [SIZE=4][COLOR=green]Drive to qualify more women professors[/COLOR] [/SIZE] Germany has revitalised an equal opportunity programme for female academics with an injection of $92 million (Rs. 400 crore) over the next three years. Wolf-Michael Catenhusen, state secretary of the federal education and research ministry, believes that German universities must put more women into professorships and executive positions. Three-quarters of the money will be spent on women qualifying to become professors through the “habilitation” (second dissertation), as well as to finance doctoral candidates. The rest will be devoted to promoting women’s and gender studies at German universities and increasing the number of women students taking science and technical degrees, many of which are offered by fachhochschulen (polytechnics) and universities of technology. Only 11 percent of German professors are women, compared with 18 percent in Finland and 17 percent in Portugal. The OECD (Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development) countries average for general professorships is about 10 percent. In Germany, women professors employed at the very top of the profession with the highest salaries and cast-iron tenure, total 8 percent. “Men compete more for professorial positions in Germany because they are so highly paid and prestigious, unlike Turkey and Spain where they have less social status, so there are more women doing the job,” says Brigitte Muhlenbruch, director of the ministry-funded Centre of Excellence Women and Science (CEWS) at the University of Bonn. “Germany really needs to catch up — we are spending so much money on promoting the advancement of women in tertiary education, but we are still behind other European countries. The ‘critical mass’ of women professors needs to be increased until it starts to regulate itself automatically — that means more women in the system will ensure less gender discrimination,” adds Muhlenbruch. [COLOR=purple]Iraq[/COLOR] [SIZE=4][COLOR=green]Educationist shipped home for religious gaffe[/COLOR] [/SIZE] The American firm spearheading reconstruction of Iraq’s schools has sent home its top representative in Baghdad after a complaint by the Iraqi education minister Ala’din Alwar that the official had asked for verses of the Koran to be removed from teaching materials paid for by the US government. Shannon Meehan of Creative Associates International Inc was recalled after uttering comments that were “out of bounds”, a company spokesman said. She appears to have been a casualty of simmering sensitivities to any hint of US interference in Iraqi schooling. Recruited as manager of field operations for her experience of Iraq and post-conflict Sierra Leone and Kosovo, Meehan had provoked controversy in November when she told the Financial Times that Creative Associates was under express orders from the US Agency for International Development (USAID) to fund only “neutral, apolitical and areligious” materials. She was reported as saying that “if there is a sentence such as ‘Praise be to God’ we simply change the sentence”. But Steve Horblitt, director of external relations, told The Times Education Supplement (TES) this “did not reflect Creative Associates’ approach to education”. Creative Associates was handed a $62.6 million (Rs.275.4 crore) one-year contract, dubbed RISE (Revitalisation of Iraqi Schools and Stabilisation of Education), last March to rebuild schools. img:43:r:Protesting youth in Iraq: cultural insensitivity approach According to Horblitt, Meehan’s comments were “not accurate in terms of what we carry out… All our staff are fully conversant with the cultural context.” But a source close to the contract says there “may have been a misunderstanding between Creative Associates and Iraq’s education ministry. These are very sensitive, cultural issues.” Under RISE, Creative Associates and its subcontractors will have helped to train 37,000 Iraqi teachers in “modern teaching methods” by the end of January. To date, 1.5 million student kits, including basic education supplies, have been distributed. [COLOR=purple]Japan[/COLOR] [SIZE=4][COLOR=green]Chinese students protest negative stereotyping[/COLOR] [/SIZE] A rapid growth in the number of foreign students in Japan has heightened concerns that many enter the country to work full time or to emigrate illegally rather than to study. There are also growing worries that some institutions have been boosting overseas admissions, even to the point of exceeding enrollment quotas, to receive state money. Immigration and education officials have asked institutions to make sure foreign students who have received visas are actually enrolled in and attending classes. A report by a subpanel of the Central Council for Education, which advises the education minister on improvements to policies on accepting students from abroad, is expected to be completed soon. Since the Chinese comprise the single largest group of international students, they often find themselves subject to negative stereotyping by their Japanese hosts. Many Chinese complain they are wrongly given a criminal image. This is because there have been widely reported cases of foreign students working in the underground economy, including prostitution. There are 70,814 Chinese studying in Japan, or 64.7 percent of the total number of foreign students, an increase of 21 percent from last year, helping Japan reach its two-decade-old target of hosting at least 100,000 foreign students. The second largest group is from South Korea, totalling 15,871 or 14.5 percent of foreign students, according to figures released by the ministry of education. The University of Tokyo reported the largest number of overseas students, with 2,070 enrolled, while Waseda University registered the second most, with 1,593 students. [COLOR=purple]Pakistan[/COLOR] [SIZE=4][COLOR=green]Musharraf orders modernisation of madrassa education[/COLOR] [/SIZE] Pakistan’s president gen. Pervez Musharraf has ordered widespread reform of the country’s madrassas — religious schools — to make pupils more employable and less likely to turn to extremism. The changes are being made due to a “dire need to enhance the quality and scope of madrassa education”. All pupils and teachers in Pakistan’s 20,000 plus madrassas will be centrally registered, an aspect of the reforms prompted when links were discovered between a small minority of the schools and Al Qaeda after September 11. The Education Sector Reform Assistance (ESRA) programme which co-ordinates efforts between the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and the Pakistani government, is providing training in new teaching methods for schools, including madrassas, in poor districts. Instead of rote learning, children will be taught critical thinking so that they can challenge ideas, and in the long term decide and defend their own positions in religion and politics. “What USAID is doing here is working with the government to promote the sort of educational change that would allow people to sift these ideas,” says ESRA head Brian Spicer. But Maulana Fazlur Rehman, head of the Jamiat Ulema-e-Islami, a religious opposition party which also runs hundreds of madrassas, says that Islamic schools strongly resent any external interference. “The madrassas want to retain their autonomy, their free position,” the cleric says. Moreover he denies any threat remains, and claims that “the interior ministry has declared formally that religious schools are clean from any activities of extremism or terrorism.” img:34:President Musharraf (right): madrassas crackdown As president of this Islamic nation, Musharraf is caught between the dual needs for extreme sensitivity over religion and co-operation in the US-led international coalition against terrorism. Substantial grants, debt relief and aid packages have flooded into Pakistan since it allied itself with the United States after September 11. During Musharraf’s state visit to Washington last June, president Bush announced a $3 billion (Rs.13,500 crore) package for Pakistan, $1 billion of debt cancellation and a further $120 million (Rs.54 crore) for education. Religion is too sensitive an issue here for the US to be seen to be interfering in the madrassas. Officially there are no strings attached to the money. But Musharraf is aware that Washington expects strict controls to be placed on the madrassas, which US defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld has called the front line in the “battle of ideas” since September 11. With this new allegiance proving lucrative enough to help stabilise the poverty-stricken nation’s economy, Pakistan is unlikely to bite the hand that feeds it, even at the risk of discord at home. [COLOR=purple]Turkey[/COLOR] [SIZE=4][COLOR=green]Tough times for anti-headscarves academic[/COLOR] [/SIZE] The rector of Istanbul University may lose his passport and faces huge fines in a row with the Turkish government over unpaid taxes relating to a former palace used for staff and alumni events. Kemal Alemdaroglu, a distinguished surgeon, and the rest of the university board are being held liable for taxes that may run to millions of dollars. The tax investigation is widely seen as the latest battle in a conflict between the university and the government. Istanbul, the largest university in the country, has been in the forefront of enforcing a ban on students and staff wearing religious headscarves. Prof. Alemdaroglu has strongly opposed the Islamic-oriented government’s attempts to relax the ban. The dispute centres on a former Ottoman palace on the Bosphorus that has been used for entertaining staff and alumni. The Istanbul tax authority claims the building was used for commercial functions and is seeking several million dollars in unpaid taxes. The authorities hold the university board and the rector personally liable for the debt. The building has been seized by finance minister Kemal Unakitan despite a legal challenge by Prof. Alemdaroglu. “It makes me angry that such a beautiful building is only used by university staff and former students. It should be open to everyone,” says Unakitan. In December, the Turkish Doctors’ Union honour committee barred Prof. Alemdaroglu from practicing as a surgeon for two months after allegations of plagiarism and also called for his dismissal as rector. After a three-year investigation, Alemdaroglu was found to have taken credit for a US-published book on surgery, New Methods in Laproscopy. According to the union, Alemdaroglu put his name, along with those of two other doctors, to a Turkish translation of the book. The name of the original author, Philippe Jean Quilici, was not published.