The ‘Minerva’ Project: The Military Academic Complex in the US?

New concerns on the Pentagon initiative “the Minerva consortium” were raised recently by the American Anthropological Association.  Minerva is a DOD initiative that seeks to “involve universities in the global war on terror” (Wired news) .The anxiety of scholars about the use of social science research in unethical manner with the purpose of enforce military operations is justify and related with a history of past violations (e.g. The Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment,Human Radiation Experiments, etc) that led to the establishment of scholarly ethics codes of human research . This is a worrisome development that is generating heated debates. An overview of the Minerva initiative in a recent article at the Insider Higher Education address the responses to a recent letter by the president of the American Anthropological Research Association to the Bush administration and the Congress. The Chronicle of Higher Ed. News Blog indicate that in this letter, the association’s president, Setha M. Low, writes that,

“it is of paramount importance for anthropologists to study the roots of terrorism and other forms of violence.” But Ms. Low, who is a professor of environmental psychology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, argues that it would be better for such research to be financed by the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, and the National Endowment for the Humanities because, she says, those agencies are more familiar with anthropology and have established structures for peer review.

This however is not addressing the crucial questions that seem to linger behind the debate: what will be the purpose of social research funded by the Military in the current context? is this about the building of a ‘better public policy’ of conquest? will social research be use to harm the subjects of research?. Those are critical questions that cannot be avoided. Again, it is important to remember that there is a past and current history of governments using professional expertise to justify and/or support human rights abuses (e.g. torture and the medical profession). In a similar manner in a critical posting at the Open Anthropology blog is asked the following question:

Are American anthropologists being called upon to cure the pathologies of their own society, to reduce the toxic glorification of war and the malignant sanctification of brutes in uniform, or to provide practical advice on how to better control subject populations?

Finally, I wonder , following Sharon Weinberger posting at Wired news : “will Minerva go the way of theVietnam-era Project Camelot?”

 

News:India Seeks Help From Britain in Opening World-Class University

From The Chronicle of Higher Ed. News Blog posted by Andrew Mytelka May 28 2008:

New Delhi — India has asked Britain for help in setting up a world-class central university in what one local newspaper reported is the first such request for foreign assistance in almost 50 years. India has not asked for foreign help to establish a university since it sought assistance in the late 1950s and early 1960s from the Soviet Union, Britain, and West Germany to create some of the older Indian Institutes of Technology, the newspaper, The Telegraph, said.

Last year India’s prime minister announced that the country would set up 14 world-class central universities to compete with institutions like Harvard and Cambridge. The locations of the universities were announced in March.

“We want the help in the form of skill development, faculty support, and necessary training,” said D. Purandeswari, India’s junior higher-education minister, according to a statement issued after meetings this week with Bill Rammell, Britain’s higher-education minister.

Indian officials were looking to settle details of the collaboration as soon as possible because the new academic session in India starts in July, but Mr. Rammell did not commit to any timeline. Further talks to iron out the details are scheduled to be held in July in London. —Shailaja Neelakantan

 

Report: “Democracy at Risk: The Need for a New Federal Role in Education”

Last week Forum for Education and Democracy released a report entitle Democracy at Risk: The Need for a New Federal Role in Education,”

You can obtain a copy of the full report here.

Craig A. Cunningham writes at the Educational Policy blog a concise review indicating that this report:

…argues strenuously for a new approach to education at the Federal level.

……The report specifically attacks the No Child Left Behind approach that uses “compliance checklists” instead of true reform initiatives. “Rather than providing access to new programs, technologies, and supports that could dramatically change schools and communities, the law has been managed in ways that push schools back to out-of-date notions of learning and stifle the use of new technologies.”

[One example of the ways that NCLB stifles the use of new technologies is the ways in which it forces many schools--particularly those with high numbers of poor and minority children--to focus the curriculum exclusively on "drill" in so-called "basic skills," rather than the type of higher-order thinking tasks and inquiry-based problem solving that new technologies foster.]

The report cites statistics showing that reading improvement under NCLB has been slower than before the law was enacted, that high school graduation rates have started to decline again, that pverty rates among children in the US are the highest in the industrialized world, that the US ranking on international tests has plummeted, that “trust” and “community involvement” among people in the US is in rapid decline, and that increased expenditures on the prison system have far out-paced increases in spending on education.

(read full here)

 

News: Prime Minister Calls India’s Universities ‘Teaching Shops’

From the Chronicle of Higher Education News blog, April 26, 2008:

India’s prime minister, who last year described the country’s universities as dysfunctional, has again lashed out at them, calling them “teaching shops and degree-giving authorities” that have lost their tradition of research-oriented teaching.

“I say this as someone who has been a teacher,” Manmohan Singh said on Friday in a commencement address at Shri Mata Vaishno Devi University, in the state of Jammu and Kashmir. “I have often said that I have strayed into politics by accident but my preferred career was teaching. I recall that in the days I used to be a student and a teacher, universities placed great emphasis on doing research along with teaching.”

Since taking office in 2004, the prime minister has often criticized the state of India’s higher-education system. Last year, he lambasted the governance of state universities and described them as below average. “A dysfunctional education system can only produce dysfunctional future citizens,” he said then.

On Friday Mr. Singh said his government had spent more money on public education than any other recent administration. But “it is not enough to spend it on buildings and salaries alone,” he said.” Some of it should be earmarked for research … and for providing scholarships to promising students.” —Shailaja Neelakantan

 

Resources: Recolecta_ portal to Spanish OA

From Open Access News by Gavin Baker, April 10, 2008:

Recolecta is a new national portal to OA publications from Spain. From the DRIVER announcement, dated March 2008:

Recolecta is the national portal to Spanish open access scientific publications. The project is a joint collaboration between REBIUN (Network of academic and research libraries of Spain) and FECYT (Spanish Foundation for Science and Technology) to create a national search service of open access scientific publications, to stimulate open access initiatives in Spain, to stimulate and coordinate the creation of a national infrastructure of institutional repositories and to serve as a central point of information about all questions related with Open Access and new Scholarly communication issues.

As a scientific national search service RECOLECTA will only harvest scientific documents wherever they are (open access journals, institutional repositories, disciplinary repositories) as long as they are OAI compliant. “Cultural heritage” type of documents will not be included and neither will learning objects. For the moment, most of the documents are textual and all are open access.

RECOLECTA is currently in beta phase (pending further work on the graphical design). As soon as possible an English translation will be made available similar to the Sherpa/Romeo translation which has already been completed. Other services such as statistics and a national Thesis portal are also planned.

In April the first national meeting of Spanish OAI data providers will be held. It is planned to use this meeting to create a national repository managers group to coordinate the development of the Spanish national infrastructure in a standarized way following the DRIVER guidelines. For further information please contact info@driver-support.eu.

 

The World Food Crisis

The rise of food prices is now a global crisis, think about the consequences for hundred of millions of people around the world, and the link that this have with the ethanol production policies in the US.

“The demand for agricultural products has grown, though not as a result of population growth; instead as a result of increased demand for ethanol and other biofuels, and for food that requires more agricultural acreage to produce. Today, besides people and pigs eating corn, our motor vehicles “eat” corn that has been converted into ethanol.” ( Food Prices and Malthusian Economics–Richard Posner)

Read the entire piece here.

From PSD Blog - World Bank Group by Alan Pereira , April 10 2008:

Food prices haveincreased by an estimated 40 percentglobally since 2007. This increase has had a disproportionate effect on many developing nations, where families often spend more than half their income on food. The situation is particularly troublesome in countries such as Nigeria, Vietnam and Indonesia, where the percentage of income spent on food is respectively 73, 65 and 50 percent,as reported recently by the New York Times. As a resultriots have taken placein several countries as people protest the rising food prices.

TheIMF published a brief analysislast month predicting that the social implications in Sub-Saharan Africa may be severe. It also points to long term and temporary factors ??? including rising biofuels production and droughts ??? contributing to the current increase in food prices as well as guiding policy responses.

Oh, the Bob Marley tune that inspired the title of this blog post goes on to say that a “hungry mob is an angry mob.” How is that for a policy-guiding principle?

 

News: Judge’s Ruling in Copyright Case Lets College Off but Not Lecturer

Basically, this ruling has all sort of nasty implications. In other words, if I follow the instructions of my boss (the university), I am guilty because I could not be acting as an official agent of the university ( my boss, who has immunity under the law).

From the The Chronicle: Daily News Blog, April 16, 2008:

It’s a case that has some copyright scholars scratching their heads. A judge exonerates a university that is accused of infringing the copyright of a company’s research report. But the judge rules that an employee of the university might be culpable of the same activity.

The case is Marketing Information Masters, Inc. v. The Board of Trustees of the California State University System. In it, the market-research company accuses the California State University system and one of its lecturers, Robert A. Rauch, of duplicating the company’s work when he created a report analyzing the financial impact of a San Diego State University football game, the 2004 Pacific Life Holiday Bowl.

The university had asked Mr. Rauch, who also is director of the university’s Center for Hospitality and Tourism Research, to create the report. (For prior Holiday Bowls, the market-research company had provided the university with the reports.)

Judge John A. Houston, of the U.S. District Court in San Diego, sided with the university. In a ruling issued in February he stated that the university was immune from claims of infringement because as a state entity it is shielded from liability by sovereign immunity. The judge also said Mr. Rauch was immune from liability as a university official who created the report.

But here’s the kicker: Mr. Rauch could still be liable for infringement acting as an “individual” who created the report, the judge said. The marketing company’s rationale is that if Mr. Rauch violated the law, he could not be acting as an official agent of the university.

“Isn’t logic great?” Georgia K. Harper sarcastically posits on her blog, ©ollectanea. Ms. Harper, a copyright lawyer at the Center for Intellectual Property at University of Maryland University College, says Mr. Rauch seems to be taking the fall for the university.

“I guess I do feel rather badly about the result in this case,” she writes. “It would be one thing if the faculty member were sort of rogue, acting on his own. But the university hired him to do this and directed him to make his report like the earlier one.”

As a result of the judge’s ruling, the market-research company is moving ahead with its suit against Mr. Rauch. —Andrea L. Foster

 

First Latin American ad/venture for ‘for-profit’ globalising university, Apollo Global Inc.

From GlobalHigherEd posted April 13, 2008 by  Susan Robertson:

Last week the recently launched Apollo Global Inc., a subsidiary of the Apollo Group and private equity firm The Carlyle Group (specializing in buyouts, venture and growth capital, leveraging finance around the globe), announced that it had agreed to acquire Universidad de Artes, Ciencas y Communication (UNIACC), an accredited, private arts and communications university in Chile, as well as it related entities.

This is the first ad/venture for Apollo Global Inc. since it was created in 2007 - to drive forward global investment in higher education in those countries are seen to have attractive demographics, good levels of economic growth and a regulatory environment that does not inhibit FDI in the education sector. The country region to be given to ‘thumbs up’ by Apollo Global Inc. is Chile.

According to Apollo Global Inc. Chairman, Greg Cappelli:

We have been working diligently to identify opportunities that will create value for Apollo shareholders, and we believe UNIACC, coupled with Chile’s table economic environment, strong student enrollment trends, and openness to foreign investment, is an excellent fit.

What makes Chile a particularly attractive country to invest in, according to Apollo Global Inc., is that growth in the private higher education sector outpaces that of the public sector. This view is shared by industry analysts (see, for example, the excellent Observatory for Higher Education’s report in 2007 on Latin America by Sylvie Didou Aupetit and Lisa Jokivirta), who argue that is the massive growth in student enrolments in higher education systems in Latin America that has promoted the surge in the number and diversification of foreign providers operating in the region since the early 1990s.

In the main, language has been regarded as the main barrier to widening out the range of players in the field, beyond those that reflected old colonial histories – Spain and Portugal. However, it is also evident that the strong commitment to the idea of education as a public good in many Latin American countries has created a less than welcoming environment for foreign investors – particularly for-profit firms.

However that said, the 2008 foreign education landscape in Latin America, and Apollo Global Inc. first venture into Chile suggests that there are significant changes taking place. A range of European universities (aside from Spain), including those from Germany (U of Heidelberg), Italy (U of Bologna), France, Belgium, Canada and the USA have all made major investments in the Latin American region.

On the for-profit front, Apollo Global’s first big investment takes it into a geo-economic and political sphere that has, so far, been dominated by Laureate Education Inc. (previously Sylvan Learning System). Laureate’s Latin American operations are located in Central and South America. It first entered the Latin American market when in 2000 it acquired both the Universidada de las Americas (UDLA) in Chile (established in 198 and one of Mexico’s largest and more prestigious universities founded in 1960, the Universidad del Valle de Mexico (UVM). Since then Laureate has rapidly advanced its commercial interests in Latin America, acquiring not only more universities in Chile, but developing a presence in a range of other Latin American countries, including in Ecuador (2000), Costa Rica (2003), Peru (2004), and Panama (2004), Honduras (2005) and Brazil (2005).

So why should Apollo Global Inc. acquire UNIACC? For one thing, it is one of the leading arts and communications universities in Latin America. It was also, in 2004, the first Chilean university to teach a fully on-line undergraduate program. Since then, new on-line programs have been added.

The value for Apollo Global Inc. in buying up UNIACC, is to not only to secure the ‘local brand value’ of UNIACC (and hence keeping off the agenda for Apollo Global charges of imperialism and neo-colonialism), but also because UNIACCs recent capability to deliver on-line programs, potentially positions Apollo Global Inc. as a supplier of cross border services within the region.

Let’s see whether Apollo Global also learnt a lesson from one of its parent companies, who were recently charged with aggressive recruiting practices in the US.

Susan Robertson

 

News: LEO at the World Economic Forum on Latin America (OECD)

From OECD:

The Latin American Economic Outlook 2008 was presented at the World Economic Forum on Latin America in Cancún. This session, chaired by the Director of the OECD Development Center, Javier Santiso, commented on the challenges Latin American policymakers confront in carrying out necessary reforms. Discussants did not only discuss the four topics covered by the report, but they also shared their experience in terms of implementing reform and moving from theory into practice.

The presentation took place last 15, April, 11.00-12.00. Participants included OECD Development Centre Director, Javier Santiso, Harvard Professor Ricardo Hausmann, and Foreign Policy Magazine Editor-in-Chief, Moisés Naim.

Download the agenda of the OECD session (pdf)
Read a pre-WEF interview with Javier Santiso on China and Latin America

 

News: “Facing a Doctor Shortage, India Will Recognize Foreign Medical Degrees”

It is interesting to note that many Indian doctors end settle abroad, while the world is suffering shortage of health workers. Fifty-seven countries, most of them in Africa and Asia, face a severe health workforce crisis. WHO estimates that at least 2 360 000 health service providers and 1 890 000 management support workers, or a total of 4 250 000 health workers, are needed to fill the gap. Meantime, those countries better positioned to attract the flows of doctors continue to be advance industrial nations, like US and UK, but this may change. I wonder, what will happen then.

The Chronicle of Higher Education News Blog, March 28, 2008, by Shailaja Neelakantan:

To combat a severe shortage of doctors and in a move to attract back Indian doctors settled abroad, the Indian government has decided to recognize graduate medical degrees from Britain, the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, provided they are recognized in the respective countries.

Until now, doctors with an undergraduate degree from India but a graduate degree from another country were not allowed to practice in India. Indian doctors with graduate degrees from the approved countries will now be allowed to practice in India at any public or private hospital. They can also be recruited to teach undergraduates in any medical college, according to a statement issued by the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare.