International News

First steps in university reform

"Why in France are there no campuses worthy of the name, no sports grounds, and another extraordinary thing: no libraries that open on Sundays?" Thus President Nicolas Sarkozy on his country’s sclerotic universities. For an ambitious president, these might seem modest goals. But it is a measure of the universities’ dire condition that they seem revolutionary. France has 82 universities, teaching 1.5 million students. All are public; none charges tuition fees; undergraduate enrollment charges are a tiny € 165 (Rs.9,000). All lecturers are civil servants. Universities cannot select students, who can apply only to ones near them.

The results speak for themselves. Not a single French university makes it into the world’s top 40, as ranked by Shanghai’s Jiao Tong University. The French elite opts instead for grandes ecoles such as the Ecole Nationale d’ Administration, which cater to a minuscule 4 percent of the student population. Little wonder that Sarkozy sees university reforms as urgent. Valerie Pecresse, the higher education minister, will soon put a law to parliament. Though it frees universities in some ways, it leaves their worst rigidities untouched.

Ms. Pecresse’s main idea is autonomy. Each university’s governing body will shrink from 60 to 20-30. University presidents will be allowed to spend their budgets as they wish, including higher pay to recruit or retain star professors. They will be able to offer jobs more quickly: the creaking central calendar now means it can take over a year to finalise an offer, by which time good candidates have gone abroad. Universities will be permitted to raise private money; students to enroll anywhere. For the first time, universities will own and manage their own property. In exchange, universities will share an extra € 5 billion (Rs.27,500 crore) over the five years to 2012.

"For the past 20 years, we’ve never succeeded in reforming universities," argues Pecresse. "These are revolutionary changes." Yet the reform leaves out two critical elements. First, tuition fees. To preserve equal access, there are no plans for them; universities will not even be able to raise enrollment fees. Given the strains on France’s public finances, and ambitious plans for better campus facilities, this looks unsustainable in the long run. The second gap is selection. An early version of Pecresse’s law allowed universities to select students at entry for Masters’ degrees. But this was considered so controversial that, at the first hint of resistance, it was quietly dropped. The more pressing issue of students selection at undergraduate entry was never even put on the table.

As things stand, the system relies mainly on selection through failure. Anybody who passes the school-leaving baccalaureate exam can enroll at university. Yet roughly half of those who do drop out later. Unsurprisingly, lecturers are half-hearted about teaching in overcrowded amphitheatres filled with half-motivated psychology and sociology students. It is a vast waste of time and resources.

Global vocational education initiative

A new research body intended to gather information about good skills training worldwide is being set up by City & Guilds, London. The City & Guilds Institute will launch in 2008, but is already carrying out a survey in nine countries for what it claims will be one of the most comprehensive studies of different vocational education systems ever compiled. In Australia, Canada, Denmark, Germany, Hungary, India, Malaysia, South Africa and the UK, the institute is using focus groups, face-to-face interviews and telephone surveys to understand global vocational education.

It represents a change of direction for this 129-year-old organisation, which is best known as the largest exam board for vocational qualifications: now City & Guilds also hopes to support vocational education, rather than simply accrediting it. The institute hopes it will become a repository of knowledge about skills training, a forum for sharing ideas between practitioners from Bangor to Bangalore. Another of its aims is to bring teachers and researchers together. Comments Keith Brooker, director of the institute: "We and other members of the skills community recognise the need for an independent research and development body that helps turn policy into practice. That need has become pressing as countries wake up to skills imbalances that have huge social and economic consequences."

Among the main concerns of the institute which will have a staff of about ten and will commission new research, will be the problems of ageing populations and migration in the developed world. It will also focus on how best to match skills training to employer needs. Brooker says the UK’s employer-led sector skills councils attracting interest from abroad is one possible solution.

And the institute hopes it can provide an insight into why vocational qualifications are not highly regarded, particularly in England. Traditionally, Germany is where vocational skills are most respected, although Brooker says that is changing as it becomes less dominated by manufacturing.

Meanwhile a report commissioned by the Learning and Skills Development Agency in 2005 challenges the value of international comparisons. Researchers from Edinburgh University say that institutions, policies and practices don’t travel well, and different cultural contexts mean copycat schemes rarely work as intended.

New Muslim-Jewish study centre

Cambridge University’s new Centre for the Study of Muslim-Jewish Relations (CMJR) will do more than further a field of study, says founding director Edward Kessler, "it will help to found one". "There are monographs and researchers here and there but no field as yet," he explains.

The CMJR which is the first centre of its kind anywhere, will embark on an ambitious plan of teaching, research and dialogue from September backed by a £1 million (Rs.8 crore) grant from the charitable Stone Ashdown Trust. It has just been given the go-ahead to award students a Cambridge University certificate of continuing education in Islam, Judaism and Muslim-Jewish Relations.

Dr. Kessler is probably the most prolific inter-faith figure in British academia. He was completing his Ph D in theology in 1998 when he established the Centre for Jewish-Christian Relations (CJCR), sister institution to the new centre.

The CJCR was founded on solid existing dialogue between the faiths, but the fact that this is not the case with Muslim-Jewish relations has not deterred Kessler. "Look at where Jewish-Christian relations were 100 years ago, when there was huge ignorance and suspicion," he says. "This has changed. And with the right initiatives Muslim-Jewish relations — which I believe are not as bad as Jewish-Christian relations were — can do the same."

Kessler and Amineh Ahmed-Hoti, the centre’s director hope the new centre will place Muslim-Jewish relations firmly on the academic agenda and exert a positive influence on relations between the two communities. "There are existing initiatives that bring the communities together, and academics should be getting involved in these, not staying away. Academia has always been a source of innovation and ideas, and it needs to make a contribution in Muslim-Jewish affairs," says Ahmed-Hoti.

The centre will teach communities and academia a much-needed lesson — that the more communities know about each other, the easier they will find it to identify common ground and discuss differences. Backers include Prince el-Hassan Bin Talal of Jordan who celebrated the launch by addressing an audience of Saudi and Israeli diplomats and foreign office officials in Westminister. Others are British Muslim leader Baron Hamed; the Chief Rabbi, Jonathan Sacks; and vice-president of the World Union of Progressive Judaism, Rabbi Jonathan Magonet.

La Maestra’s enduring power

A year ago Felipe Calderon won a desperately close election of Mexico’s presidency by a margin of barely 200,000 votes. While there were many factors behind his victory, one that may have tipped the balance was the support of Elba Esther Gordillo, the head of the National Education Workers’ Union, as the country’s teachers’ union is called. Ms. Gordillo is reckoned by many to be the most powerful woman in Mexico. Indeed, after Calderon she may be the second most powerful politician in the country.

Gordillo’s political power comes mainly from the union’s sheer size: with 1.4 million members teaching in primary and secondary schools, it is the largest labour union in Latin America. From that political base, Gordillo controls a significant block of deputies in the lower house of the federal Congress, as well as two senators. And while no state governor will say so openly, "none of them will go against her will," says Carlos Ornelas, an education specialist at Mexico City’s Metropolitian Autonomous University.

La Maestra ("the teacher"), as Gordillo is known, is widely reckoned to have reached an unwritten — and may be even implicit — agreement with Calderon, under which she has swapped her support in other matters for his acquiescence in her grip over the country’s schools. If so, that is a problem. Schooling in Mexico is poor. Mexican pupils ranked fourth from last in maths and third from last in reading in a ranking of 40 countries published in 2003 by the OECD, a Paris-based think-tank of mainly rich countries.

True, Mexico’s performance is on a par with that of other Latin American countries. But it’s not good enough if the country is to succeed in attracting the higher-tech businesses it needs. And it represents a poor return on relatively generous spending: in 2006 government spending on education aggregated 5.4 percent of GDP, including 26.8 percent of the federal discretionary budget. Adding private outlays, total education spending was 7.1 percent of GDP.

So it is hard to ascribe poor educational performance to lack of money. The problem is how the system is organised. Teachers, including school heads, are accountable to union leaders, not to the education ministry or parents. Teacher evaluation exists in name but not in practice. A significant slice of education spending goes straight to the union. Some 30,000 union officials are on the payroll as teachers; they never set foot in a classroom although there is a teacher shortage in some schools. In 2006, an election year, 750 million pesos ($70 million) was transferred from the ministry to the union, a threefold rise over the 250 million pesos in transfers in 2005, according to Aldo Munoz a political scientist at the Iberoamerican University.

A reform in 1992 formally devolved responsibility for schools to Mexico’s 32 states. This weakened the power of the ministry, a bloated bureaucracy, but not that of the union. Since she became the union’s boss with the support of Carlos Salinas in 1989, Gordillo has skillfully allied with each of Mexico’s presidents, even as power passed from the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) to the National Action Party (PAN) of Fox and Calderon in 2000. The PRI’s defeat completed a gradual transition to democracy. But the union remains a powerful holdover from the old, corporatist Mexico.

Supreme Court vetoes racial balancing

The White House-seeking missile that is Hillary Clinton has become embroiled in a row over school race quotas. The controversy was ignited by a recent Supreme Court ruling that has denied schools the power to select pupils by race.

It is one of several conservative decisions made by the court of late which has swung to the right, thanks to a series of high profile Republican appointments made by President George Bush. Earlier his pals Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito made headlines with their rightwing stances on abortion.

Responding to the court ruling, Clinton has said it would "erode core constitutional values". She was joined by fellow Democratic runner Barack Obama, who dismissed the judgement as "deeply wrong-headed".

The case centres on the voluntary racial diversity programmes adopted in Seattle and Louisville in Kentucky, aimed at preserving racial balance in schools. The first case was brought by the mother of a pupil who had been denied transfer to a different nursery because his existing nursery wanted to preserve its quota of white pupils. The second was brought by Seattle parents wishing to fight the city’s high school assignment plans.

Explaining the court’s decision, Chief Justice John Roberts said the state should be colour-blind. In the UK the idea of school race quotas has been mooted by the Conservatives, but has not yet been given serious consideration.

Schoolgirls ire over monks

Catholic schoolgirls have a reputation to live up to, and be assured that in Uganda they are not letting the side down. Pupils at St. Maria Gorreti girls secondary in the west of the country have been sent home after setting fire to three dormitories following a disagreement over boys.

The headteacher said it started after the girls attempted to smuggle in a group of trainee monks from the nearby St. Mary’s Seminary by dressing them up in girl’s uniforms. "When I learnt of the ruse, I called the police and several trainee priests were arrested," says Ma Rose Mary Kemigisa.

Comments a police spokesperson: "It was difficult to identify the boys from the girls as all had similar uniforms."

Thirty girls were sent home following the incident. Then the remaining miscreants started plotting a strike to protest against the expulsions and arrests. One thing lead to another and, before you knew it, the ringleaders had snuck out, bought petrol and set the dormitories alight during a free period.

No pupil was injured but the school has remained closed while police investigate. It is suspected some of the would-be monks helped plan the inferno.

Teachers fear internet harassment

How sexy are you? It is a question teachers in Germany can get answered by logging into www.spickmich.de. The website, a version of Rate My Teachers, allows pupils to vote on everything from a teacher’s looks to their sense of humour.

Like its English equivalent, it has been a subject of controversy in Germany, where a woman went to court to try to close it down. After winning her case on the grounds the site was an invasion of privacy, the decision was overturned when the site’s owners and three children appealed. Ruled Judge Margarete Reske: "A degree of criticism must be allowed in any profession."

Heinz Peter Meidinger, chair of the German Association of Grammar School Teachers, has echoed English unions by calling on the government to act. "Virtually every secondary school in the country appears to have harassed teachers with internet threats, at least to some extent," he says.

According to Meidinger, an increasing number of websites feature photo montages depicting teachers in sexual poses, fake execution sequences and violent computer games with unpopular teachers’ heads superimposed on to baddies.

European Union

Green light for European Institute of Technology

When the idea of creating a European Institute of Technology (EIT) was tabled by the European Commission last year, it provoked intense criticism among the European academic community. But 18 months after the first formal proposals were released, EIT looks likely to be established.

The European Union’s council of ministers has backed a draft regulation giving the EIT an initial € 308.7 million (Rs.17 crore) seed budget over six years from January 2008, which the commission wants expanded to € 2.4 billion (Rs.13,200 crore) from a range of sources.

Behind the scenes the European University Association (EUA) has been working with the commission and the Council to secure changes to the EIT blueprint. And so far its constructive agnosticism seems to have worked. Speaking to The Times Higher Education Supplement, EUA deputy secretary-general for research and innovation John Smith said: "This is a high political initiative and we had to ask whether we should oppose it or develop it in a way that is complementary to other institutions."

The EUA has targeted the nuts-and-bolts organisation of EIT. The organisation will be based on "knowledge and innovation communities". These will focus on priority research subject areas, with a distinct legal personality. They will be able to run courses, apply for research funds and form long-term relationships with industry.

Chavez caveat to private schools

It is a brave man who stands up to firebrand Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez. Nevertheless, private school heads in the South American country are none too pleased at his latest attack on the fee-paying sector. Chavez has taken the controversial step of freezing school fees for the coming year, despite inflation riding at 20 percent. Some private schools have closed as a result of the hard-nosed strategy, which has seen fee rises capped at 10 percent for the past two years.

Carlos Documet, the head of Antonio Jose de Sucre School in Los Teques, near Caracas, reports that renovations had been postponed and pupils are missing trips to the doctors as a result of the policy. But ministers have indicated they won’t budge. Adan Chavez, the president’s brother and education minister says there’s "no justification" for fee increases.

It is an unsurprising move from the left-wing president who rose to power on the shoulders of the slum-dwelling poor. The government claims it is protecting consumers, but headteachers argue that Chavez, a passionate believer in free education, is attempting to squeeze out the private sector. Private educators will try to annul the policy at the Supreme Justice Tribunal, the nation’s highest court.

Meanwhile Chavez has imposed similar price caps on milk and meat in an attempt to curb runaway inflation.

(Excerpted and adapted from Times Educational Supplement, Times Higher Education Supplement and The Economist)