University World News 0122- 3rd May 2010

SPECIAL REPORT: The Millennium Development Goals

Leaders of more than 120 universities from 35 countries, including 88 vice-chancellors, met in Cape Town last week for an Association of Commonwealth Universities' conference of executive heads.

Titled Universities and the Millennium Development Goals, the conference discussion centred on the progress made in reaching the goals, along with ways universities could contribute to achieving them. Vice-chancellors were urged to forge strategies and encourage activities that support the Millennium Development Goals and to give institutional backing to individuals who want to undertake work that helped achieve them, or to assist universities in post-conflict countries.

GLOBAL: Universities must drive development goals

Future national and global development goals should recognise the role of higher education, and universities in both developed and developing countries should draft clear strategies and share expertise more effectively to support the Millennium Development Goals, vice-chancellors from across the Commonwealth declared in Cape Town last Tuesday.
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GLOBAL: Universities must be citadels not silos
Karen MacGregor and Munyaradzi Makoni
Universities must be "citadels not silos", defending communities around them rather than being inward-looking, if they are to actively advance global development goals, the Association of Commonwealth Universities conference heard in Cape Town last week.
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GLOBAL: Higher education a driver of the MDGs
Karen MacGregor
Universities should use existing resources and capacities - however abundant or meagre - to orientate their activities more directly towards supporting UN Millennium Development Goals, the Association of Commonwealth Universities conference in Cape Town heard last week. Strategies should be more directly linked to government targets and international higher education MDG collaboration should be forged at the national and regional levels.
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CARIBBEAN: Active role for universities in development
Alison Moodie
Universities are playing an active role in helping to achieve Millennium Development Goals in the Caribbean, where targets have been raised to make the goals more regionally relevant. Rural campuses, advocacy for gender equality, HIV-Aids research and environmental sustainability programmes are just some of the ways in which universities are contributing.
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GLOBAL: Universities and sustainability
Alison Moodie
Universities are making sustainability a priority in their curricula. Food security, rapid urbanisation and climate change are just some of the complex issues that have hit societies across the world, making it imperative for universities to tackle these problems.
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SOUTH AFRICA: Universities and gender and the MDGs
Karen MacGregor
Equity and redress policies and constitutional provisions distinctive to South Africa have driven rapid changes in the gender profile of higher education, Professor Cheryl de la Rey, Vice-chancellor of the University of Pretoria, told the Commonwealth Association of Universities conference in Cape Town last week. But deep patterns of bias continued and policies needed to be sharpened.
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NORTHERN IRELAND: Coping with a post-conflict society
Alison Moodie
Northern Ireland is a country grappling with the challenges befitting a post-conflict society. After more than 10 years of relative peace since the signing of the Belfast 'Good Friday' Agreement in 1998, issues of identity, reconciliation and residual ethnic divides are rife. But the country's two leading universities - Queen's University Belfast and the University of Ulster - have taken an active role in the rehabilitation of the community at a policy as well as at a grassroots level.
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SOUTH AFRICA: Stellenbosch and the development goals
Alison Moodie
In 2000 the University of Stellenbosch, near Cape Town, drafted a strategy centred on five themes drawn from the Millennium Development Goals. It was based on Brazilian educator Paulo Freire's argument that "the needs of the wretched should take priority, which would ultimately benefit everyone, not just the poor," Vice-chancellor Russel Botman told the Association of Commonwealth Universities conference last week.
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AFRICA: Improved agriculture, better food security
Munyaradzi Makoni
Lack of funding and staff freezes, low academic pay and large classes, inappropriate courses and lack of collaboration have undermined agriculture faculties in African universities. As a result they have been unable to contribute sufficiently to the Millennium Development Goals, according to Dr Guy Poulter, director of the Natural Resources Institute at the University of Greenwich in London.
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NEWS: Our correspondents worldwide report

INDIA: Severe academic shortage hits elite institutes
Alya Mishra
India's élite institutes of technology and institutes of management, which train some of the country's top engineers and managers, are battling a severe faculty shortage that threatens the quality of education at these sought-after institutions.
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INDIA: G ay professor murdered at top university
Suchitra Behal
One of India's oldest universities is facing allegations of institutional homophobia following the mysterious death of a senior g ay professor in February. The incident comes amid reports of widespread homophobia on Indian campuses and although the courts have upheld g ay rights, homos exuality is frowned on.
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AUSTRALIA: Uncoupling education from migration
Geoff Maslen
The federal Labor government has largely decoupled education from migration selection and in the process removed a powerful incentive for foreign students to come to Australia. A new report says that for vocational education students who enrolled after 8 February, "the carrot of permanent residency" will largely be removed. For new university students, the permanent residency pathway will be far more difficult than it has been.
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SWEDEN: Protests against government reward system
Jan Petter Myklebust
Plans for a new system of evaluating quality which would allocate extra funding to universities according to their students' performance has generated an outcry from the University Chancellor of Sweden, rectors and student unions. But Higher Education Minister Tobias Krantz is standing firm and wants parliament's approval of his proposals before the summer.
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EU: Research Council slams bureaucracy
The work of the European Research Council, the body charged with boosting science in Europe, has been hampered by too much bureaucracy, its new president told a European Parliament Committee last month. Helga Nowotny wants the fledgling body to be an autonomous and permanent fixture in the EU's complex scientific landscape. She told the European Parliament's committee on industry and research that its original structure was deeply flawed.
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SCANDINAVIA: Nordic countries plan cooperative future
Jan Petter Myklebust
Nordic countries would be in a strong position if they presented a common profile in the European field of higher education and research based on their high quality and extensive monitoring, delegates were told at a conference in Denmark last month. But a Danish member of parliament criticised the ambitions of the European Union's 2020 plan for higher education and research as "hopelessly low".
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CZECH REPUBLIC: Higher education awaits reforms
Eugene Vorotnikov
Czech Minister of Education Miroslava Kopicová is planning higher education reforms, including introducing controversial secondary school leaving examinations, despite opposition from teachers and students. Kopicová said higher education quality was steadily declining and the government wanted radical changes.
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BUSINESS

GLOBAL: New biotechnology partnership
Leah Germain
The United Nations International Development Organisation has launched a partnership to jump-start the creation of new biotechnologies. The International Industrial Biotechnology Network will aid research institutes, industry and regulatory bodies to develop new innovations that can boost future sustainable industries.
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GLOBAL: Genetic research to improve meat quality
Cayley Dobie
Scientists at the University of West of England in the UK are working with eight other higher education institutions from seven countries to study the role genetics play in meat quality so improvements can be made to livestock breeding and products sourced from animals.
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UK: Funding to diversify global e-library
Leah Germain
Nature Education, an educational division of the London-based Nature Publishing Group, has recently received funding from global partners to develop its free online science library, Scitable. The support comes from the Switzerland-based Roche Applied Science, India's Tata Consultancy Services and the US-based Alnylam Pharmaceuticals and New England Biolabs.
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FEATURES

INDIA: Caste quotas fail the very poorest
Alya Mishra
Sitting in his spacious, colonial-era bungalow, recently white-washed and sparkling in the scorching sun, Ratan Lal, an assistant professor of history at Hindu College, seems a typical professor of the prestigious college of the University of Delhi. But it was not always so. When Lal came to Delhi in 1991, he says he was just "another village idiot".
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US: Imagining a world without lecturers
Bob Samuels*
For the past nine months, an ad hoc task force has been meeting to rethink the structure of the humanities division at the University of California, Los Angeles. All people interested in the future of higher education should be concerned with this report that makes several questionable recommendations. While the authors claim their main emphasis is not to slash the budgets of these programmes, it is clear their central focus is to reduce labour costs.
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UNI-LATERAL: Off-beat university stories

UK: Historian admits to savage reviews of rivals' work
UK historian Orlando Figes admitted recently that he was behind anonymous reviews savaging rival scholars' books which were posted on Amazon's website, writes Vicky Shaw for the Press Association. The finger of suspicion had been pointed in the direction of the Russian scholar's wife, law expert Stephanie Palmer, in a case that has drawn wide intrigue.
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US: Students addicted to the internet, says study
American college students are hooked on cell phones, social media and the internet and are showing symptoms similar to drug and alcohol addictions, according to a new study, reports Reuters.
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WORLD ROUND-UP

RUSSIA: Huge boost to university science
Despite increased funding in recent years, Russian science has not yet recovered from a near collapse in the 1990s and the consequent exodus of thousands of researchers to the West, writes Quirin Schiermeier for Nature News. In an attempt to counter the decline and to foster science-driven innovation, the government is betting on its universities, promising to invest an extra 90 billion roubles (US$3 billion) into higher education and market-oriented university research over the next decade, on top of an annual university research budget of about 20 billion roubles.
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US: Tribe wins DNA case against researchers
The cultural gap between the impoverished Havasupai Indians who view their blood as sacred and the Arizona State University researchers who helicoptered in to their Grand Canyon home to collect it was at the heart of a lawsuit over the scope of a genetic study that ended last week with a settlement for the tribe, writes Amy Harmon for The New York Times.
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US: Academic 'pork barrel' tops $2 billion
The continuing debate over whether to end the practice of congressional earmarking is anything but academic for higher education. Colleges, universities and other academic organisations received just shy of US$2 billion in grants directed to them by individual members of congress in the 2010 fiscal year, an Inside Higher Ed analysis shows, writes Doug Lederman.
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INDIA: University apologises for radioactive leak
Delhi University Vice-Chancellor Deepak Pental on Thursday accepted "moral responsibility" for a radioactive accident that killed one man and injured seven in a scrap market in the capital, reports India Edunews. The radioactive source was traced to the university's chemistry department laboratory.
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IRAN: Mousavi axed from Open University board
Iran's leader Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has removed Mir Hosein Mousavi from board of founders of the Open University and issued new statutes for the university, reports Radio Zamaneh. New regulations for the 400,000-student institution limit the responsibilities of the board of founders, board of trustees and the university president.
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IRAN: No probe into university attack
Jamshid Ansari, member of the minority faction of Iran's parliament, has announced that despite previous claims, parliament has not initiated a probe into the attack last June on a university dorm of Tehran University, reports Radio Zamaneh.
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THAILAND: University applications drop 20%
The number of students applying to sit this year's central university admissions exam has dropped by 20%, Sirikul Bunnag reports for The Bangkok Post. A university rector said this was possibly because of the economic crisis that may have led to job losses among parents, affecting their children's decisions over whether to further their studies.
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MALAYSIA: Universities must calculate worth of R&D
Public institutions of higher learning that have been recognised as research universities should come up with a mechanism to evaluate the true worth of the commerc ialisation of their research and development to Malaysia's economy, said Deputy Higher Education Minister Datuk Saifuddin Abdullah, reports the Bernama news agency.
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INDIA: Common entrance test for central universities
In a significant step, seven newly-created central universities have come together to hold a combined entrance examination from this year for admission of students into about 25 courses being offered by them, reports the Press Trust of India.
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KENYA: Poor HIV-Aids education for students
The majority of university students in Kenya are s exually active but less than half of them use c ondoms for protection against HIV-Aids infection, a new study has reported, writes Alex Ndirangu for The East African. The study found that 70% of students were s exually active and only 45% of that group used c ondoms.
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JAPAN: Top university to crack down on plagiarism
The University of Tokyo will overhaul its thesis examination process and throw the book at anyone found to have plagiarised other people's work, according to the university president, reports The Yomiuri Shimbun-Asia News Network.
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SOUTH AFRICA: Ring of steel for Cape Town students
An ambitious safety plan, which includes moving a police station, has been launched to protect University of Cape Town students, staff and neighbouring areas from violent crime, reports Murray Williams for Independent Online. The plan followed a series of murders of students and academics in recent years.
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UK: One-day strikes to hit four universities
Simultaneous one-day strikes are planned at four UK higher education institutions, as the University and College Union seeks to coordinate its response to a wave of redundancies in the sector, writes John Morgan for Times Higher Education.
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IRELAND: Universities financially unviable, say presidents
Student fees are back on the agenda, it seems, and this time they might just be back with a vengeance, writes Daniel OCarroll for the independent Cork Student News. Presidents of various Irish universities joined last weekend to criticise the Greens' move last year to block a re-introduction of higher education fees and warned the public that the quality of education on offer at universities is seriously suffering as a result.
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US: University must let Ayers speak - judge
Former Weather Underground militant Bill Ayers lectured at the University of Wyoming last week after a federal judge ruled he could not be barred from speaking on campus, reports CNN. US District Judge William Downes ordered on Tuesday that the university must take "all prudent steps" to guarantee Ayers' security at his lecture.
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