Article:”Minerva Takes Flesh: Pentagon and Science Foundation Sign Social-Science Deal”

More news about the Minerva project. I mentioned in a previous post my deep skepticism on this direct involvement of the DOD in sponsoring social science research. This is related with the ethical problematic of instrumentalizating social research to follow military purposes. In a recent article at the Chronicle of Higher Education News Blog it is mention a essay which points out to one of the main criticisms on the Minerva initiative. In this essay , “David H. Price, an associate professor of anthropology and sociology at St. Martin’s University, warned that military-financed social science will crowd out other forms of academic inquiry”. I still believe that the participation of the NSF may not preclude some the inherent problems of this type of initiatives. For instances, Minerva final objectives may not be different from those found  in the 1960’s DOD project: Camelot.  Camelot was seen  as a component of a larger behavioral science project of social engineering whose contributions had very narrow instrumental purpose, oriented by a ‘conservative’ agenda of research,  of  finding effective instruments and knowledge to operationalize a notion of ‘order’ (e.g. anti-insurgency, etc) . The adverse reaction against Camelot in Latin America ended in a backlash against US scholars doing field research in Latin American countries.

From Chronicle of Higher Education News Blog, June 30, 2008 by David Glenn”

In a memorandum of understanding that was signed today, the Department of Defense and the National Science Foundation have agreed to work cooperatively to support social-science research on topics of interest to the Pentagon.

As widely expected, the NSF has agreed to help review proposals submitted to the Pentagon’s Minerva Research Initiative, a fledgling program that will offer grants to university-based scholars to study the Chinese military, the records of Saddam Hussein’s regime, and other specific topics.

The two agencies will soon — possibly within a week — release a joint request for Minerva-related proposals. Those proposals will be judged by the NSF’s typical merit-review panels, though the Pentagon has the right to nominate experts to serve on those panels. (The Pentagon is also accepting Minerva proposals through a separate pathway known as a broad agency announcement. Proposals that are submitted via this second track will reviewed through the Defense Department’s usual processes, not by NSF panels.)

But Monday’s agreement is broader than Minerva: It also creates a mechanism through which the Department of Defense can help to finance other national-security-related proposals submitted to the NSF. In such cases, scholars will have the option to decline the Pentagon’s money. (read full here)

The Pentagon as already started to invite universities to apply for grants of research for the Minerva initiative.

 

Report: ‘The Bologna process and the UK’s international student market’ (HEPI, May 2008)

The Higher Education Policy Institute (HEPI) as recently publish a report analyzing the impact of the bologna process ‘for the future of the UK as a destination for international students’. “The Bologna process and the UK’s international student market” indicates that ‘UK has been an active and influential participant in
European higher education reform’. A recent article at the Guardian, “UK universities at risk of losing foreign students“, offers an overview of the report an points out that the paper warns that UK could lose out lucrative international students as a result of the Bologna process. In short, “the Bologna process means that other European countries are providing the bachelors then masters degree structure that was unique to the UK” thus, this is resulting in an increasingly competitive market in a context that erodes some of the competitive advantages that UK universities had.

Links:

Report: “The Bologna process and the UK’s international student market” (HEPI), May 2008

Article: Lipsett, Anthea (May 22, 2008). “UK universities at risk of losing foreign students” The Guardian.

 

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?”

 

Report: “The Bologna Club: What U.S. Higher Education Can Learn From a Decade of European Reconstruction”

A new report written by Clifford Adelman at the Institute for Higher Education Policy indicates that the United States Higher Education System needs to adopt some of the features of the Bologna Process. Today, Scott Jaschik’s article at the Insider Higher Ed offers a compelling overview of the report and Adelman’s argument.

Adelman argues that Bologna may push colleges much further toward defining learning outcomes than the Spellings Commission ever tried. While the education secretary’s panel urged colleges to adopt systems to measure outcomes, the emphasis of Bologna — both in defining degrees and credits — is focused on specific outcomes. A bachelor’s degree in engineering should mean that a graduate possesses specific skills X, Y and Z, and so forth.

Link to report here

From the Chronicles of Higher Education News Blog, by Beth McMurtrie, Wed, May 21 2008:

A new report from the Institute for Higher Education Policy argues that the United States, in its quest for accountability in academe, could learn a lot from its neighbors in Europe.

The report, “The Bologna Club: What U.S. Higher Education Can Learn From a Decade of European Reconstruction,” examines in detail the efforts of 49 European nations to harmonize their higher-education systems. The report was written by Clifford Adelman, a former research analyst at the U.S. Department of Education who is now a senior associate at the institute.

Mr. Adelman argues that the Bologna Process, as this decade-long effort is known, offers some common-sense solutions to the struggle to define what students should be learning and to create a better pathway through the higher-education system.

 

Changing IMF Policies: Is the IMF responsible for the shortage of doctors, nurses and teachers in developing countries?

From Eldis:
Title: Changing IMF policies
Authors: R. Rowden
Publisher: IFIwatchnet, 2008

Full text of document

This paper highlights the shortage of doctors, nurses and teachers hired in developing countries. It critically addresses current International Monetary Fund (IMF) policies with a focus on the need to change its practices in order to improve the situation.

The authors argue that 57 countries, most of them in Africa and Asia, face a severe health workforce crisis. The World Health Organisation (WHO) estimates that at least 2.4 million health professionals and 1.9 million health workers, or a total of 4.3 million health workers, are needed to fill the gap. Without prompt action, the shortage will worsen. Mounting evidence suggests policies promoted and enforced by the IMF may be preventing developing countries from spending more in their national budgets. This has important consequences for health and education budgets being constrained at unnecessarily low levels when major increases are needed. Although rich countries have provided some debt cancellation, too little has been made available for too few countries in need.

The paper calls for four key courses of action:

• to demand that the IMF change and widely publicise revised macroeconomic restraint policies
• to demand that other policy options for increased public spending be fully vetted and explored
• to demand greater public stakeholder involvement in such explorations of alternative spending options
• to call on governments to raise this issue of changing IMF policies through the Executive Board of the IMF, which approves the IMF loan programs for borrowing countries.

 

Report: Graduate Education and the Public Good (CGS, 2008)

On April 24, 2008, CGS released a major new report, Graduate Education and the Public Good, at a legislative forum at the Library of Congress.

The report illustrates the value of graduate education to the U.S. economy and our quality of life by showcasing alumni of U.S. graduate schools and the significant contributions they have made to the nation and the world.

Excerpt and Executive Summary

Press Release

Full report available from the CGS Online Bookstore

From Chronicle of Higher Education News blog, April 24:

Universities may be labeled “ivory towers,” but many people find a master’s degree or a doctorate an important steppingstone to career advancement in the wider world as well. But how does all of that advanced education translate into the betterment of society at large? And, more important, do legislators, policy makers, and the average citizen know how much graduate education matters?

A new report released today by the Council of Graduate Schools argues that those advanced degrees not only make a tangible difference in people’s lives, but provide American society with a vital knowledge base, economic capital, and social cohesion.

The report, “Graduate Education and the Public Good,” cites knock-on effects from graduate education that extend past technological advances in medicine and other disciplines to include higher average salaries (which yield greater tax revenue) and replenishment of the nation’s teaching corps.

Furthermore, the report observes, “the new global competition for talent places increasing importance on maintaining a world-class graduate higher-education system.” —Richard Byrne

 

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

 

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?

 

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

 

Report:Beyond the ABCs: higher education and developing countries

From Eldis:

Title:Beyond the ABCs: higher education and developing countries
Authors: D. Kapur; M. Crowley
Publisher: Center for Global Development, USA, 2008

Full text of document

This paper analyses a relatively neglected facet of the complex debate regarding human capital – higher (or tertiary) education. It addresses five broad questions examining higher education in developing countries:

• are the economic effects of higher education on developing countries different from those in industrialised countries, with its links with labour markets of lesser importance than its impact on institutional development?
• how does the impact of higher education depend on the type of education and its beneficiaries?
• what should be the proper role of the state to ensure not just quality but also equity and access, as developing countries face growing demand pressures?
• how should countries rethink the provision of higher education in an “open economy” from seeking education abroad or encouraging foreign providers into the country or simply linking domestic institutions with foreign quality assurance mechanisms?
• do new technologies offer developing countries a new paradigm to expand the provision of high quality but low cost higher education?

The aim is not to provide categorical answers to these complex questions, but rather highlight the analytical and empirical gaps with regard to each of these questions.

Overall the paper argues that there are more old-fashioned robust reasons for developing countries to rethink and reform their higher education systems. Higher education is critical to build the human capital that in turn builds the very institutions that are regarded as an indispensible factor of development – the accountants, doctors, engineers, lawyers, teachers – that comprise the middle class.

The role of higher education, in both theoretical and policy terms lacks adequate empirical knowledge of what is happening within universities and to the students who spend a considerable part of their prime years in these institutions. While it is clear that there has been a substantial growth in higher education whether measured by the number of students or amounts spent, it is unclear just how meaningful this large growth is. Researchers have found it exceedingly difficult to get a good grip on two critical output measures – how to measure quality in higher education and how to determine the value added by higher education over and beyond the student’s innate abilities. Yet, even if the above argument is accepted, the policy implications are not clear.