International News

Letter from London

Pay deadlock fallout

Campus news in the UK this month is dominated by theongoing university lecturers’ pay dispute, which has raised spring-time temperatures heightened by the beginning of the exam season.

The dispute over lecturers’ pay seems to have reached a deadlock, which raises the possibility that thousands of students may not be able to graduate this summer as lecturers boycott marking and assessment of exam and coursework papers. The two main lecturers’ unions are demanding a 23 percent pay rise over three years, claiming that the University and Colleges Employers Association has continuously broken promises to remedy the real decline in lecturers’ pay. They have turned down an offer of 12.6 percent over three years, insisting that their demand of a 23 percent pay increase must be met, or else.

The main impact of this industrial action, as it continues into the exam season, is that a significant number of students have no idea of the grades they have achieved, or whether they have graduated at all. At many universities coursework has not been marked since March, so students have no way of calculating the grades they need to qualify for award of the all-important degree. If the deadlock continues, degree award ceremonies this year may only be celebrations simpliciter rather than the solemn convocations they are usually.

University officials apprehend students resorting to legal action for breach of contract as rumours are rife that some students are considering suing for loss of earnings if they don’t receive their degrees on time. Students on the other hand are worried that employers may not regard the batch of 2006 as being of usual standard.

Academics are struggling to devise plans to combat this stalemate. Among the plans: allowing students to graduate but postponing the award of grades and degrees to a later date; allowing students to graduate with a full degree based only on their coursework. Simultaneously vice chancellors are threatening to dock pay if their staff refuse to set, invigilate or mark students’ coursework and exam papers. Education minister Alan Johnson too has joined the debate, calling on lecturers to accept the "very generous" deal on offer.

The pay dispute has, however, highlighted the growing economic value of the higher education sector. A recent report of Universities UK vice chancellors’ organisation indicates that the sector aggregated an income of £16.9 billion (Rs.144,326 crore) in 2003-04, gross export earnings of £3.6 billion, and employed 1.2 percent of the national workforce. "I welcome this report, which rightly sets higher education at the heart of the wider economy. I hope more employers will increasingly see all higher education providers as highly effective partners in creating long term prosperity," says Johnson.

Clearly he isn’t talking education, but big business.

Jacqueline Thomas is a London-based academic

Singapore

Lee broadside against Cambridge

Cambridge University suffered an embarrassing attack for its treatment of overseas students from Singapore’s founding prime minister, in early April. At a gala event in Hong Kong to promote the university’s £1 billion (Rs.7,700 crore) fundraising drive, Lee Kuan Yew, Singapore’s first premier and a graduate of Cambridge, launched a scathing attack on his alma mater in front of Alison Richard, Cambridge’s vice-chancellor.

Lee was a guest speaker at the event, which was held to celebrate the university’s 800th-anniversary fundraising campaign. He recounted the bad experience of a Singaporean student who received a terse offer letter from Cambridge that detailed conditions of entry. This, Lee said, contrasted sharply with the praise given by US universities in their offer letters.

He also added that the student said she had felt invisible during her time at Cambridge and she complained that after leaving the university, the only communications she received were demands for donations. The outburst will embarrass Cambridge fundraisers who are looking to generate significant income from alumni across the world.

The university’s campaign website says: "The success of the 800th Campaign is key to securing Cambridge’s future in the top rank of universities worldwide. Building on a long history of benefaction at Cambridge, the campaign aims to mobilise still greater... support from alumni and friends worldwide."

Lee, who was awarded a first-class degree in law by Cambridge in the late 1940s, urged the university to help students to feel a greater sense of belonging and to communicate better with alumni, following the example of US universities such as Yale, Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "It is really off-putting if the only communication an alumnus gets is a begging letter," he said.

Prof. Richard, who sat next to Lee at the dinner, told other alumni at the meeting: "I know we must do better at our communications with you." Later she said that in 20 years they would all remember the night when Lee "jumped all over Cambridge" before the university raised its first £1 billion, the target for the campaign that was launched in Cambridge last September.

However Prof. Richard says her goal is not to turn Cambridge into an American-style university. "I can’t imagine Cambridge ever writing letters like the ones we heard from US admissions offices. But yes, there is room for change," she says.

New ideas about higher education

Developing countries should accept that they cannot reverse the brain drain, South Africa’s education minister told Commonwealth vice-chancellors in April. Instead they should concentrate on making use of their academics in overseas universities, Naledi Pandor said in a speech to the Association of Commonwealth Universities at the University of Adelaide. Some emigrant professionals are making a significant contribution to their home states. "To have a meaningful developmental impact this contribution needs to be nurtured and sustained to the point that we will begin to speak of brain circulation and not about brain drain," added Pandor.

According to her, Africa has lost a third of its professionals to developed countries. There are said to be about 10,000 Nigerian academics employed in the US, for example, while Britain is saving $184,000 (Rs.83 lakh) for every South African doctor recruited into the National Health Service.

There is a movement for developed countries to reimburse those whose professionals are being poached, particularly in the health sector. But reimbursement isn’t the solution for academics in the diaspora. The establishment of virtual networks and visiting scholar programmes is a more practical alternative, said Pandor adding that a second challenge to developing nations is posed by foreign institutions, some of which have recognisable international names but run programmes "not worthy of the name higher education".

John Daniel, head of the Commonwealth of Learning, acknowledged that a minority of rogue operations exist. But he says that before long private providers will supply the majority of higher education places in the developing world as governments cannot keep pace with burgeoning demand.

Catering for the 4 billion people at the bottom of the "world economic pyramid" isn’t possible where governments persist with free provision provided entirely by the state, says Daniel. "No developing country, nor any rich one, can achieve modern participation rates on this model. Either tuition fees must be introduced or the private sector must be invited to contribute — most likely both," he says.

Njabulo Ndebele, vice-chancellor of the University of Cape Town, welcomed the proliferation of private institutions. The demand for higher education cannot be met otherwise. "The strong will survive and the weak will vanish," he said.

The ACU council agreed the next stage in its Vision 2013 programme of reforms will decentralise some of its activities to Commonwealth countries. The secretariat is developing programmes to be pursued in partnership with member institutions. Among the main initiatives will be a ten-year programme in association with G8 countries to "renew" African universities.

Disturbing new spring fever

Safety experts have warned of a worrying increase in student threats of gun massacres in American schools. The arrest of six Alaska pupils suspected of plotting a school shooting rampage, brought to four the number of alleged Columbine-style conspiracies foiled by authorities across America in just two weeks in April. Upto early May there have been 12 reported cases of students either plotting shootings or making threats against schools since March 1, according to Kenneth Trump, president of National School Safety and Security Services, a consultancy that tracks such incidents.

"It’s become this whole thing, ‘I’m going to pull a Columbine’," says Edward Ray, Denver Public School’s chief security officer and president of the National Association of School Safety and Law Enforcement Officers.

The six children, aged 12-14, who attended North Pole Middle School, just 125 miles below the Arctic circle, were arrested on April 22. The parent of a fellow pupil had alerted police about an alleged plan to cut the school’s power supply, shoot teachers and children, then flee.

The planned attack’s timing around the seventh anniversary of the massacre of Colorado’s Columbine high school on April 20, 1999, was coinci-dental, says police chief Lindhag. But Columbine, where two classmates aged 17 and 18 killed 12 students and a teacher before committing suicide, appeared to be the macabre inspiration for an alleged plot interrupted in Kansas on April 19.

The plot was foiled by a child in North Carolina who tipped off police after spotting details of it on MySpace.com, a pupil networking website with a cult following. Police found guns and rounds of ammunition in their homes. The students, who have been charged with "incitement to riot" and making a "criminal threat", planned to sabotage the school’s camera system before opening fire between 12 noon and 1 p.m on April 20.

US schools have come to expect a rise in violent threats in spring — prime testing season, during which many students feel increased academic pressure, and by which time social cliques have formed, increasing student conflict — but the recent spate has left many perplexed. "We normally see more incidents leading up to the Columbine anniversary and in spring generally, but this is an unusual cluster in a short period of time," says Trump.

Now a school safety expert, Bill Bond, is encouraged at least that the latest conspirators have been turned in by other pupils after making ominous comments or threats, breaking an informal code of silence among pupils. Such warning signs were often missed in previous shootings. "In 80 percent of shootings other students knew of the plots," he says, citing a US Secret Service study. "They are now aware that these things can actually happen and how tragic they can be."

Helping hand of Cara

A long, painful journey brought Nahro Zagros from classically trained violinst and lecturer in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq to playing gigs in Hull with a band called Yorkshire Kurd. Soon he is off on another journey to Armenia to study the music and culture of the semi-nomadic Yezidis. For, with help from the Council for Assisting Refugee Academics (Cara), Zagros is doing a Masters degree in ethnomusicology at York University, researching how music can display cultural identity.

The young Kurdish musician is one of about 60 currently being helped by Cara, an organisation set up in 1933 to help academic refugees from Hitler’s Germany. Over the decades the countries of origin have changed — South Africa in the 1960s, Iraq and Iran in the 1980s and 1990s — but the need has remained.

Indeed only a tiny fraction of refugee academics receive help. In March the president of New York University, John Sexton, was in London to launch the UK network of Scholars at Risk, set up in collaboration with Cara to try and reach more of them. He told a meeting at the British Academy that by helping academics under extreme threat, they were protecting their own academic freedom against less dramatic but real encroachments.

Zagros found himself among the extreme cases when he was a music lecturer at Iraq’s Institute of Fine Arts and conductor of an orchestra that toured in the Middle East and Europe. He worked for a television station owned by Uday Hussein and was pressured into becoming involved in events run by Uday.

Following a short visit to Kurdistan to see his relatives, he was imprisoned for nearly six months in 2000. He fled Iraq shortly afterwards. Without Cara, he says, he could not have researched the Yezidis, a group of Kurds from Turkey who took refuge in Armenia in the 1880s.

Cara has recently been given $875,000 (Rs.4 crore) over five years from the Lisbet Rausing charitable fund to help with grants to scholars. With the Scholars at Risk network, Cara is planning how universities could use their services in such areas as human resources, student services, language centres, accommodation, welfare, childcare and international activities to help.

Foreign student influx fallout

Immigrant families will be deported if they do not integrate into German society and their children do not fit into school, says the prime minister of Bavaria (a major state of the Federal Republic of Germany). Edmund Stoiber, the state’s Christian Democrat leader plans to introduce the drastic measure in his regional school reforms programme this autumn.

"Whoever cannot speak German will not be accepted into a regular German school. Whoever causes trouble in school will be thrown out of class. And whoever does not integrate on a permanent basis must leave Germany," he says.

His proposals have intensified a nationwide debate sparked by the crisis in a Berlin school whose teachers pleaded for it to be closed down because of uncontrollable pupil violence fuelled by inter-racial tension. Teachers at Ruetli secondary school say they have had desks thrown at them, fires started during lessons, personal possessions stolen from under their noses and are threatened daily. The head teacher can no longer work because of stress and the position of her deputy has been vacant for ten years. As a result the teachers council has asked that the school be closed down.

The school’s disintegration has been blamed on the large number of minority children enrolled there — an indication, says the liberal Free Democratic Party, that the former Social Democratic Green-led government’s "romance with a multicultural society has proved to be a complete flop". Some 83 percent of the pupils at Ruetli school come from non-native German families with Arabs making up the largest group.

Comments a former teacher: "The Arabs have the say around the school and suppress the Turks." She claims the school is a "breeding ground for criminals and terrorists".

Joerg Schoenbohm, Brandenburg’s interior minister, suggests arresting violent or criminal pupils. "Offenders who repeatedly cause trouble in school need to know where the legal boundaries are. We should suspend them for a few days and put them in a detention centre or youth prison," he says, adding that the high percentage of foreign children is one of the main problems.

But MP Gesine Loetzsch of the left-leaning Die Linke PDS party says threatening to lock up or expel immigrants is "stupid and dangerous". "It is not only schools with large numbers of minority pupils that have problems with violence and it is not only a migration problem, but a problem with the school system," she says.

Ruetli head Brigitte Pick, who gave up her job after falling ill, says: "The problems do not lie in the fact that a pupil is Arabic, Turkish or Serbian, but in the social background of the pupils and their lack of prospects. Last year, not one student received a training place after school."

Education cover for emigration

Indian students choose Australian universities less for their reputation and more because they aim to become permanent residents, according to new research. Writing in the Monash University journal People and Place, Michael Baas, honorary research fellow at Monash, says that three quarters of Indian students who completed courses in Australia in 2003 went on to obtain a visa that allowed them to remain in the country. "Even before coming to Australia, they will have figured out the easiest way to permanent residency and will base the course they enroll in on this," writes Baas. "Although they are students in name, in practice they are migrants."

Baas undertook fieldwork in India as part of his Ph D, where he found many students he met intended to go to Australia. Curious about their reasons, Baas continued his research in Melbourne. He interviewed Indian students and ex-students, migration agents, heads of education institutions, lecturers, student advisers, counsellors and immigration department officials.

Baas says that Indian students are often enrolled in courses such as IT, management and commerce (in particular accounting), engineering and related technologies courses, which directly correspond with Australian occupation shortages. "The institutions let the immigration department’s occupations-in-demand list influence what sort of courses they promote overseas and what courses will no longer be offered. Interviews with directors of programmes from institutions enrolling a high number of Indian students certainly acknowledged this," claims Baas. He says the directors freely admit that they keep close track of changes in the occupations list to predict which new courses would be in demand. Many Indian students want to stay on in Australia so they could help repay loans of upto A$55,000 (Rs.19.05 lakh), Baas notes.

Cuckoo clock war fallout

Switzerland’s federal government has decided to impose stricter controls on entry visas for Chinese students sparking protests from universities and cantonal governments. The clampdown comes after many young Chinese entered Switzerland with student visas and then disappeared, becoming illegal immigrants in Switzerland or neighbouring countries. According to the French-language tabloid 24 Heures the immigration scam is being run by "the Chinese mafia". On the other hand rumours are that the restrictions are Swiss retaliation for Chinese mass production of Swiss watches and cuckoo clocks.

Normally the concession of student visas is the responsibility of each canton. But now following complaints from France and Italy, the Berne government has announced that all visas for Chinese students must be vetted by the federal office for migrations. This has touched a nerve. In Switzerland, jurisdiction is divided between the federal government and the cantons, and between French-speaking Switzerland and the German speaking majority.

French-speaking cantons are particularly incensed by the change. Many educational institutions in these cantons have been doing booming trade with Chinese students in recent years. "The Geneva Council of State is opposed to this measure which stigmatises Chinese students," says Bernard Gut, secretary-general of Geneva’s department of institutions.

According to Pascal Garcin, spokesman for the University of Geneva, "All Switzerland rectors have decided to protest." Ivardo Nischi secretary-general of the Swiss University Conference laughingly dismisses the watch vendetta as urban legend. "As far as I know there is no truth in this," he says.

(Compiled from The Times Educational Supplement and The Times Higher Education Supplement and The Guardian)