Prominent Indian academics including Dr. Goverdhan Mehta, hitherto director of the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore are not exceptions. The Bush administration is under fire for a marked increase in the number of academics who have been denied visas to travel to the US, purportedly on national security grounds. A visa for a Bolivian hired to teach at the University of Nebraska is in limbo, and a group of 55 Cubans was recently denied permission to attend an international Latin American studies conference in Puerto Rico.

The bans follow the 2004 denial of a visa to Tariq Ramadan, a Swiss Muslim professor appointed to the faculty of the University of Notre Dame, and a bar on Cubans entering the country for an academic symposium in Las Vegas the same year. While the decisions have received comparatively little public attention in the US, they are eliciting heated criticism from academic institutions including the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Association of University Professors (AAUP). In addition, the American Civil Liberties Union has filed a law suit on Dr. Ramadan’s behalf. "We see a troubling pattern in which foreign scholars offered appointments at American universities or invited to attend academic conferences are prevented from entering the US because of their perceived political beliefs," Roger Bowen, AAUP general secretary, wrote to Condoleezza Rice, secretary of state, and Michael Chertoff, secretary of homeland security.

In the latest visa controversy, Waskar Ari, a Bolivian historian, has been waiting eight months for permission to take up his post to teach Latin American history at the University of Nebraska. The government has given no explanation for the delay. He was supposed to start his job last year.

Dr. Ari is an indigenous Aymara, as is Evo Morales, the newly elected Bolivian president who has opposed US-backed efforts to decrease coca cultivation in Bolivia. "As yet, I have seen no evidence that Prof. Ari represents a security risk," says Harvey Perlman, the university’s chancellor. "This country has benefited enormously from the free exchange of scholars with countries around the world. Unnecessary disruption of this process also jeopardises our national security," argues Perlman.

The American Historical Association asserts that Dr. Ari is "widely recognised as a voice of moderation" within Bolivia. The state department has declined to comment on the case.

Vocational education struggles for status

"We cannot afford to let intellectual snobbery leave us with a second-class, second-best vocational education system." Thus spoke Ruth Kelly, Britain’s education secretary, a year ago as she unveiled plans in a white paper on 14-19 education to "place the same emphasis on vocational education as we currently have on academic". But a recent Times Educational Supplement research study has revealed how far the government has to go in realising its dreams of equal status for academic and work-related learning.

One in five comprehensive schools reserves vocational courses for pupils with special educational needs, the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority (QCA) has discovered. Courses defined as vocational in this context include national vocational qualifications which are work-related, and general national vocational qualifications (GNVQs), a hybrid of academic and work-oriented study.

QCA’s findings are not unprecedented. Last November, after a survey of 140 secondaries, Ofsted (Office of Standards in Education) said some schools don’t see the relevance of work-related learning for high achievers. Schools have recently been given more scope to increase work-related learning. Since 2004, 14 to 16-year-olds have been allowed to drop subjects such as languages and design and technology to enable them to focus on vocational courses.

But the damning part of this statistic is the revelation that some schools are only offering these courses to laggard pupils. Those who might fare well on either an academic or a vocational route — some of them academic high-achievers — are given no choice by their schools but to go for GCSEs and A-levels. These schools do not believe vocational courses have value for any pupil who could do well on an academic route.

Concern about this seems near universal. John Wright, legal support worker for the Independent Panel for Special Educational Advice, says: "This is worrying. It makes a nonsense of the government’s pro-inclusion approach if, once they are in mainstream schools, SEN (special education needs) pupils are being herded together in particular courses. It suggests schools are perhaps just finding an easy way of coping with children with SEN, rather than providing them with full access to the curriculum."

Alison Wolf, professor of public sector management at King’s College, London who has been a persistent critic of vocational provision in British schools says that GNVQs, in particular, are not prized. "A 14-year-old who is capable of passing GCSEs well, should be passing GCSEs well, (rather than taking vocational exams) because otherwise they are cutting off their opportunities," she says.

This view is disputed by some schools. Jean Hickman, head of Walsall Academy says GNVQs are valued by employers, and pupils of all abilities at her school take them. Much vocational provision for 14 to 16-year-olds is offered through the Increased Flexibility Programme, which allows pupils to spend part of their school week in colleges.

The programme launched in 2002, now caters for 100,000 young people, and is widely seen as a success. Ofsted said last year that many schools are committed to a curriculum that meets all pupils’ needs. The QCA’s and Ofsted’s findings reveal that unless the diplomas are perceived to be very different from the courses they will replace, they will not have credibility in many schools.

Resurgent Taliban targets schools

Class is out at Sarkh Doz, a sleepy village near the sweeping Helmand river. A ghostly silence fills the school playground, the gate is bolted shut and the proud yellow classrooms have been reduced to a blackened shell of cinders. Taliban arsonists set the blaze, local people say. One night a car full of militants roared up, doused the building in petrol and struck a match. Then they continued to the next village, Mangalzai, and torched that school as well.

Now both buildings — recently built with American funding — are deserted, the teachers have fled and another body blow has been dealt to aid efforts in Helmand, the southern province of Afghanistan. "Terrible," says police chief Ahmed Samonwal, as he walks past the blackened schools. "This is the work of our enemies."

Playground has become battleground in the Afghan south, where the resurgent Taliban have launched a campaign of arson, intimidation and assassination that has closed 200 schools in recent months and left 100,000 students at home. Teachers are in the front line. In December assassins dragged a man who defied warnings to stop teaching girls from his classroom in Nad Ali, also in Helmand district, and shot him at the school gate. Four other teachers have been killed and hundreds threatened with ‘night letters’ — handwritten notices delivered in the dark, ordering them to stop teaching or die.

The campaign underscores the challenge that British troops face in securing a province ruled by terror as much as central government. "Our teachers are helpless because security is so weak," says the provincial education head, Hayat Allah Rafiqi. "By day the government rules, but by night it is in the hands of the Taliban." Sixty-six of Helmand’s 224 schools have closed, he says, and others have scaled back classes as parents move their children to the safety of the main towns. Even there protection is uncertain. Two days after the Nad Ali murder, gunmen burst into Karte Laghan secondary school in the provincial capital, Laskhar Gah, killing a watchman and a student.

While some of the province’s 1,500 teachers have buckled under the pressure, most are defying the threats. For some, it is a matter of patriotism; for others the security of a $49 monthly salary. "Of course, we are afraid," says Abdul Hakim, who teaches 12-year-old boys. "But this is our duty. For the sake of the next generation, our country and our children, we cannot quit our jobs."

Rising militancy meets teacher resistance

In the run-up to the spring graduation ceremonies, authorities, teachers and pupils are braced for more conflict over flying Japan’s national flag and singing its anthem at school events. Tokyo’s board of education has issued a new order to heads of metropolitan government-run junior and senior high schools to ensure that teachers "appropriately" instruct students to show respect for the Hinomaru flag — the familiar red sun on a white background — and sing the kimigayo anthem during school ceremonies.

The education board is planning to send large numbers of observers into schools to make sure that the flags are flying and the national anthem is sung to the satisfaction of the most ardent patriot. Of Japan’s 47 prefectures, Tokyo is by far the strictest about singing the national anthem at public school events, which was made compulsory nationally in 1999.

Shintaro Ishihara, the city’s far-right governor says he will not tolerate rebellion from pupils or teachers. Rather than face discipline or a showdown over what some teachers regard as either a matter of conscience or a violation of Japan’s constitution, many teachers report sick on school ceremony days.

Since 1999, more than 1,000 teachers have been punished, admonished or had their salaries docked for not standing, singing or failing to meet the requirements set down by the district. Some teachers have been sent to "re-education" classes. Many staff have appealed, but the Japanese courts have upheld all punishment meted out by local authorities to rebel teachers. In 1999, one school principal committed suicide after finding himself unable to resolve an issue over singing the kimigayo during a graduation.

The re-introduction of these practices is affecting teacher recruitment, according to Michio Nitta, professor of education at Tokyo University. "Generally speaking, the teachers who resist coercion are left-of-centre but are good teachers, so Tokyo may be losing good teachers because of Ishihara’s emotional politics. These rightist politicians are shooting themselves in the foot. This kind of outright coercion is damaging the real moral support to the national anthem, and flag," he says.

Feelings continue to run high over the use of what for many teachers are still potent symbols of the country’s militaristic past, and which are now a growing cause celebre for a newly emboldened, right-leaning government.

Academics play key role in Thaksin ouster

University lecturers in Thailand played a key role in undermining the popularity of Thaksin Shinawatra, the prime minister who resigned in mid April. Academics queued up to denounce the prime minister after his family’s mobile phone, satellite, television and airline business empire was sold to the Singapore state investment arm Temasek for a private profit of nearly $2 billion (Rs. 9,000 crore).

University politics and economics departments assailed the prime minister’s image as a selfless leader dedicated to lifting the country’s competitiveness so that even the poor benefit. Many claim that his political career has been a calculated exercise to promote his business interests at the expense of democratic institutions. "It’s just a marketing trick. The stink of corruption and personal gain is very strong," says Thammasat University’s Rangsan Thanapornpan, who published an open letter in February signed by many leading academics demanding Thaksin’s resignation.

The political science department of Bangkok’s most prestigious universities came out against Thaksin and in favour of reform of a "flawed" 1977 constitution that was designed to neuter old-style political barons but helped to create a leader often described as the Silvio Berlusconi of Asia. The prime minister called critics nobodies "jealous of my wealth".

But many academics allowed their dislike of the prime minister get in the way of their analysis, says Ji Ungpakorn, a political scientist at Chulalongkorn University and one of the few overtly left wing Thai dons. "He runs a tremendous marketing operation, but he has also done a lot to help the poor with free healthcare, village loans and support for entrepreneurs reminiscent of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal in the 1930s," he says.

Incremental initiatives in private education

Australia’s public universities face increased competition from a growing number of private institutions offering degree and diploma courses. Glyn Davis, chair of the Group of Eight research-intensive universities and head of Melbourne University describes the rise of the private sector as a "fundamental threat to public universities". Prof. Davis warns that if students prefer the private alternatives, then higher education would follow the same path as the nationwide shift to private schools.

Competition from local private colleges will soon include overseas institutions with the establishment of the first American campus in Adelaide and the likely registration of two foreign universities in Sydney. Carnegie Mellon, the private American university, begins offering Masters degree programmes this month, while the Washington Post-owned Kaplan University has made a A$ 55 million (Rs.132 crore) takeover bid for Tribeca Learning, a Sydney-based financial services education group.

Tribeca has signed an agreement with Heriot-Watt University for its Edinburgh Business School to offer online MBA degrees. Both the Kaplan and Heriot-Watt plans await government approval. Comments Mark Wessel, dean of Carnegie Mellon’s Business School: "Not only do we have applications from Australia and countries in the Asia-Pacific region, but also from the Middle East, Africa, Europe and the US."

Aided by the federal government’s new loan scheme, Fee Help, private colleges boosted enrollment in their higher education courses to a high of 45,000 last year. More than 30 private higher education institutions are now able to offer Fee-Help loans and are using their availability to promote their courses.

French students famous victory

From behind the makeshift barricade of tables, desks and chairs that sealed off the amphitheatre of the Sorbonne, a 21-year-old philosophy student crawled out and made his way down to the wall of riot police who kept watch outside one of France’s most respected faculties in early April.

Florian had been up all night leading angry debates among the 200 students holding the first "occupation" of the Sorbonne since student protestors took over the building in Paris’ Latin Quarter in 1968. On that occasion it was Vietnam and the antiquated rules of their superiors that spurred students to action. These days it is far closer to home: unemployment and a controversial government measure to try to combat it.

The prime minister, Dominique de Villepin has forced a measure through parliament designed to alleviate unemployment, paradoxically by making it easier to fire workers aged under 26. The measure would introduce a work contract, le contrat de premiere embauche (first employment contract) that gives employers the right to let employees go after two years. The hope is that it will spur employers to hire young people, safe in the knowledge that they are not obliged to retain them.

But the move has provoked a vigorous backlash. More than 400,000 people joined street demonstrations across France in early April and about half of the country’s 88 universities were shut down by student sit-ins. De Villepin’s popularity has plummeted and could dent his ambitions for next year’s presidential elections.

On the night of April 5, the cobbled streets around the Place de la Sorbonne rang out with muffled cries from the university’s main lecture theatre as students, enraged that the government was ignoring their street protests, overran the faculty and barricaded themselves in.

The three-day occupation ended at 4 a.m on April 8 when 80 riot police fired tear gas, stormed the Sorbonne and expelled the protesters. The university will be shut indefinitely.

For more than a decade France’s unemployment rate has hovered around 10 percent — one of the highest in western Europe. But it is the level of youth unemployment that sets the country apart. Nearly one in four young French people is out of work, and unemployment of under-25s has persisted above 20 percent for a generation. The brain drain is worsening with desperate young people — including many with good degrees — leaving for other EU countries.

Despite the protests, senators voted 178-127 in favour of the Bill. But since then President Jacques Chirac has refused to pass the measure conceding a famous victory to the striking students.

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